Michael Kimmel famously portrays in his eponymous 2017 , Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era., one year into the Trump presidency. Kimmel’s subjects are predominantly white men “who feel they have been screwed, betrayed by the country they love, [and] discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway. Theirs are the hands that built this country; theirs is the blood shed to defend it. And now, they feel, no one listens to them; they’ve been all but forgotten.” 

The Plight of the White Man

These characters (representatives of a real demographic) are the victims of globalization, deindustrialization, outsourcing, technological innovation, and, last but not least, the “.” Kimmel’s book focuses on this phenomenon’s occurrence within the United States. Ironically, Kimmel himself may be a contributor to the phenomenon, as he was in 2018 of sexual harassment and failure to compensate female assistants for their work. However, his analysis applies equally well to Western Europe where populist entrepreneurs, such as , have promoted themselves as the advocates of the structurally irrelevant and forgotten. 

Bolz’s grievances, however, do not stem from material deprivation or limited life opportunities. His grievances stem from a cultural malaise, reflected in the title of his book, Der alte weisse Mann – Sündenbock der Nation (in English, “the old white man, scapegoat of the nation”). White men, Bolz maintains in abrief of his book, are being held responsible for all the evils of the world. The white man “stands for colonialism, racism and sexism; he accounts for the poverty in the world, for the destruction of nature and, of course, for climate change.”

Bolz goes on to claim that “the old white man has become the central symbolic figure in a cultural civil war.”The foundations of the Western world, Bolz maintains, are grounded in fundamentally male values – rationality, domination of nature, assertiveness, and readiness to take risks. Today, all of these values have come under assault. They have been deconstructed and devalued, torn to pieces in the battles of the culture war that has engulfed much of Western society.

Political Theorists on the Future of the West

, a renowned German political theorist, famously reduced the political to the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy. Schmitt maintained that politics consist of groups that consider each other to be mutual enemies (for example, the Democrats and Republicans in US politics). He also claimed that, “all true political theorists base their views on a negative anthropology which holds that man is by nature, evil and licentious, and thus needs to be kept in check by a strong state capable of drawing a friend-enemy distinction if there is to be social order.” According to Schmitt, this crucial friend-enemy distinction cannot be achieved through secularism. He believed that a theological foundation beneath any political structure is essential to the prevention of anarchy. 

was an Italian Marxist and influential political theorist who maintained that political outcomes depend largely on winning the metapolitical struggle over cultural hegemony. Gramsci defines cultural hegemony as “the general hypothesis that a social class aims to achieve consensual domination for its rule by progressively expanding its leadership across society.” If a social class achieves cultural hegemony by garnering society’s consensual support of its ruling, then it will not have to resort to coercion via the military, policing units, or harsh lawmaking (except in extreme cases). 

Hardly surprising, both of these political concepts have made a spectacular comeback among academic analysts and figures on both sides of the political aisle. Arguably, the most important battleground in modern society regards “wokeism” and the notion of gender. 

French philosopher Michel Onfray, founder and co-president of the populist magazine Front Populaire,has wokeism as the ideology of a “tyrannical” minority that has become the majority. According to Onfray, wokeism is an ideology often represented by elites who use their control over the media to define what can and cannot be said. For Onfray, wokeism is one more expression of the general decadence that, in his view, pervades Western civilization. It is hardly surprising that Onfray is a cultural pessimist, as he is convinced that Western civilization is and on its way out. Like many other cultural pessimists, Onfray is certain that it is just a matter of time before the West comes crashing down. 

Onfray might have a point when it comes to the rise of . In the first round of France’s most recent presidential , candidate Éric Zemmour(who Kimmel would likely classify as an “angry white man”) garnered a measly 7% of the vote, a far cry from the 23% won by Marine Le Pen, another far-right candidate. As a candidate, Zemmour declared himself to be the voice of the nation, employing the campaign slogan, “France has not yet said its last word” (also the title of his most recent book, La France N’a Pas Dit Son Dernier Mot). French voters thought otherwise, sending Zemmour into the dustbin of history. At least for now.

Pauline Hanson is Australia’s most notorious radical right-wing populist politician, an icon in her own right, known for her determination to get back on her feet. In 1996, as a newly elected member of parliament Hanson that, “the most downtrodden person” was “the white Anglo-Saxon male” who, in her view, occupied “the bottom of the barrel.” 

More than two decades later, newly-elect Senator Pauline Hanson went even further, that white men were the “most demonized group” in Australian society. It is clear that Hanson and Bloz have a lot in common, not least a strong sense of male victimology, paired with the equally strong belief that traditional masculinity has seen its day. 

The crisis of masculinity and the decline of Western civilization are obviously related, one symptomatic of the other. This was one of the central messages of Zemmour’s 2014 grand opus,. While the focus of his musings is predominantly on the Grande Nation, the diagnosis is applicable to the West as well, particularly given the fact that French nationalists like Zemmour consider French culture the epitome, if not apogee, of Western civilization.

What, then, accounts for all this decline and decadence? According to promoters of male victimology, the answer is fairly simple – women’s emancipation and feminism. Feminism, Zemmour, is behind the “end of patriarchy, the death of the father (a of his writings), the end of marriage, the end of the family, the end of virility” and “the feminization of France and its general lack of energy.” 

Bolz, in his 2006 book, Die Helden der Familie (The Heroes of the Family), argued along the same lines. “The emancipation of women,” he wrote, “entails the devaluation of both masculinity and motherhood.” The narrative here is that feminism and masculinity are infinitely opposing forces. They cannot thrive simultaneously—the liberation of one gender can only be achieved at the expense of the other. 

Bolz even went as far to say that “the more educated the women, the more infertile a nation is. Women earn more and give birth to fewer children.” Career women,he argued, tend towards genetic impotence. “The higher they climb up the career ladder, the less likely that they will get married and have children.” 

In the process, men have become dispensable. The modern woman, as Jan Feddersen in his review of the Bolz’s book, no longer needs the man as breadwinner, as a heroic defender of hearth and home. He is this “castrated being” – thanks to feminism – “that no longer knows why he is on this earth.” In short, he has become superfluous, structurally irrelevant. 

Readers familiar with the actual situation of women in Western societies might find this kind of discourse outrageous and frantic, even outright crazy and therefore not to be taken seriously. But gender has once again found its way into the heart of politics, largely provoked by the populist right’s adoption of the question of gender as a core issue informing political mobilization. In fact, the question of gender encompasses a range of issues, each one of them highly contentious politically. 

Two of these issues appear most prominent. The first is the notion that gender is socially constructed and the question of gender-neutral language. French sociologist Éric Fassincoined the “sexual democracy,” and the “democratization of sexuality” to describe the trajectory of society in terms of gender. Sexual democracy refers to the “extension of the democratic domain, with the growing politicization of questions of gender and sexuality.” It involves the questioning of established norms regarding gender and sexuality in the name of liberty and equality. One of the pivotal points of this process is what Fassin calls the “denaturalization of gender and sexuality,” which calls into question the very existence of these norms and the way “they impose themselves on us.”

Thepopulist right – but also, to a degree, the populist left, particularly in Latin America – has designated the “ as a core issue to be combatted. This belief reflects a tacit and grudging acknowledgment of male privilege, hegemonic masculinity, and heteronormativity, which, largely uncontested, was the “normal” state of being for much of the postwar period in the West. 

Along with this acknowledgment of male privilege is the notion that it has been irretrievably lost, kept alive only in the nostalgic reveries of the Trumps, Putins and Erdogans of this world, who embody what it means to be a “real man.” Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was a project predicated on the reassertion of masculine virtues. 

A recent empirical shows that men and women who endorsed “hegemonic masculinity” values in both 2016 and 2020 were more likely to support Trump than those who did not. Trump’s loss of the 2020 presidential election indicates that his brand of toxic masculinity failed to resonate beyond the forsaken regions of America’s heartland. 

Anti-Feminist Women in Politics

Ironically enough, in Western Europe it is more often than not female politicians who have been most vocal in the radical populist right’s assault on gender. A prominent example is , who ranks at the very top of the right-wing political party known as “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). The primary pillar of AfD is defending the traditional family as the fundamental nucleus of society. The party is vehemently opposed to the recognition of homosexual unions as equal to heterosexual ones, and condemns the marginalization of “the natural differences” between men and women. 

Like Zemmour, the AfD is concerned about the dramatic increase of women refusing marriage and motherhood. As a highly-ranked leader of the AfD, Weidel has to subscribe to the party’s traditional conception of the family, even if she is the last one to conform to it. Openly lesbian, Weidel lives with her partner, a Swiss woman born in Sri Lanka, in an officially recognized union. As one commentator, it would be interesting to know how Weidel justifies to her partner how she can support a position that actively fights against the official recognition of her own same-sex relationship.

Weidel is hardly alone as a female proponent of Western Europe’s radical right ideology. A number of prominent female politicians have come out against various aspects of gender-related issues and policies, arguably nowhere more ferociously than in Spain. Until recently, Spain appeared relatively immune to radical right-wing populist contagion, the memory of decades of acting as a protective shield. However, since the end of the dictatorship in 1975, there has been a dramatic upsurge in support for the far-right , culminating into its domination of the 2018 in Andalusia. 

The breakthrough of the Vox party continued at the national level. Vox as an organization is notorious for its ambiguous stance on Francoism and its regressive position on gender. Once again, it is women who are at the forefront of Vox’s fight against gender equality. 

The most vocal promoter of Vox’s anti-gender equality has been Alicia Rubio, Vox’s chief ideologue on gender issues and author of the infamous , Cuando nos prohibieron ser mujeres … y nos persigueron por ser hombres (in English, “When they forbade us to be women … and persecuted us for being men”). The book (often referred to as the “”) landed Rubio a seat in the Madrid regional parliament alongside , another far-right female who serves as the head of Vox Madrid, where Rubio established herself as a fervent . 

One of the central tropes of this anti-feminist discourse is the notion that feminist demands have resulted in the discrimination of Spanish men. They are the true victims, threatened with being , as , a member of Vox’s executive committee and member of the Congress of Deputies, Spain’s lower house, has lamented.

In Switzerland, where women did not have the right to vote until 1971, this type of anti-feminist rhetoric has been met with open ears – at least in Switzerland’s most popular party, the (SVP). Patriarchy and male dominance have a long history in Switzerland, particularly within the ranks of the SVP.

Many attribute the rise of the SVP to , a wealthy entrepreneur turned politician. In his campaign for an “independent and neutral Switzerland,” Blocher single-handedly turned a traditional farmers’ party into a modern right-wing populist Wahlmaschine (vote getter). Blocher is the archetype of the grumpy old man (he was born in 1940), stubbornly defending the image of Switzerland as it once was, before immigrants and European Union (EU) bureaucrats destroyed the idyllic Swiss Insel der seligen (Island of the Blessed), a refuge shielded by neutrality against the vicissitudes of an evil outside world. These days, the siren calls of feminists represent yet another outside evil, one that is suddenly gaining ground in the country.

In order to tackle the problem at the roots, the SVP recently appointed a woman named to head its program commission. Her mission – the fight against “gender terror” and “woke insanity.” In herfirst , the new director charged that “woke culture” had “religious-fanatical traits.” It sought to impose its minority vision on the rest of society. With respect to the growing influence of gender-related issues, such as gender-neutral language, Friedli promised she would do whatever she could to ban its use, particularly in official documents. While she recognizes that some persons might have been born “in the wrong body,” she strongly objects to forcing children to confront questions of gender identity. Friedli continued on to say that she often feels constrained to ask herself whether or not she “as a heterosexual woman” is “still normal.”

What explains this pronounced hostility on the part of the radical populist right towards any advances in gender equality? Much of it can be attributed to the development of secular trends across the globe, which have gradually undermined the traditional status of men in Western societies. Reiterating the ideologies of the previously mentioned political theorist Carl Schmitt, many modern right-wing politicians feel that a religious foundation (with a strong sense of gender roles) is preferable to secularism and the separation of church and state.

According to the far-right, secularism and the overturning of gender roles leads to anarchy of all sorts. To name a few: the inexorable decline of manufacturing, which has deprived routine manual industrial workers of decent-paid jobs; the substantial gains women have made in accumulating cultural and social capital, reflected in the growing gender gap at secondary schools and universities; the growing number of women, particularly in urban areas, who choose to remain single and forego having children; and, last but not least, the growing public acceptance of lifestyles and official arrangements that do not conform to heteronormativity. All of these trends and developments, in one way or another, have engendered a devaluation of the position of men in society while, at the same time, have fundamentally challenged the role of the traditional family as the nucleus of society.

Gender in Latin American Politics

In Mexico, gendered violence has run rampant for decades. In 2021, the international human rights organization, Amnesty International, released a disturbing concerning “feminicide” in Mexico. Feminicide differs from homicide in that the murder must be “motivated for reasons of gender,” often determined by “signs of sexual violence or the fact that the victim’s body is exposed or exhibited in a public place.” The report found that in 2020, an average of 10 women were murdered in Mexico every day. However, many believe the numbers were actually much higher, due to the of the Mexican criminal justice system to investigate reports of missing women. In most cases, “the victims’ families are often left to investigate the murders due to police failings,” including, “lost evidence, inadequate investigations and a lack of understanding on gender perspective.”

Prominent feminist writer pointed out that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) apparently devotes more public money to the promotion of male teams than to the protection of women as victims of violence. As a reminder, AMLO won the presidential election of 2018 on a left-wing platform of fundamental change with the promise to advance gender equality. After four years in power, his feminist critics charge, it has become patently clear that he has failed to deliver on his promises.

However, politicians forsaking campaign promises is not a rare phenomenon. When Hugo Chavez embarked on his course to the top of Venezuelan politics, he raised high expectations regarding equal rights for women. As president, Chavez even incorporated legislation focused on gender equality into a new constitution. But, as they say in German, Papier ist geduldig (paper is patient). You can write legislation, but whether it will actually be implemented and enforced is an entirely different question. In the case of Venezuela, the gap between progressive rhetoric and the lived experience was enormous.

In fact, as sociologist Anais D. López Caldera has , with the passing of time, Venezuela witnessed the resurgence and establishment of a radicalized “” which extolled the traditional role of women as mothers and caregivers. Similarly, in Bolivia, during Evo Morales’s tenure as president, women’s rights significantly, but, in the end, the government was incapable of dismantling the country’s deeply-ingrained patriarchal mentalities and structures. 

In Ecuador, previous president Rafael Correastressed his to gender equality, but not “total equality” because of the undeniable biological differences” that exist between men and women. Correa’s emphasis on these biological differences supports his claim that the notion of gender as a social construct is “pure and simple ideology.”

Adamantly opposed to reproductive rights, Correa even legalizing abortion in the case of rape, even to step down as president if the law was successfully passed. Correa’s view of women has always been void of civility and respect. His weekly TV address to the people was laced with directed at women. 

Even more notorious was Correa’s of the Social-Christian candidate for the 2017 presidential election, . If he were an advisor to the candidate, Correa wrote that he “would recommend that she not talk about the economy, but about other topics, such as makeup.”&�Բ�����;

Chavez, Morales, Correa—all of them part of Latin America’s so-called “,” the term coined for the countries’ collective left-wing turn. This left-wing turn, however, appears to screech to a halt as soon as women begin to call for equalityPresident Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua—another supposedly left-wing populist regime—has also clearly the brutal repression of women’s rights over the past few years. Ortega’s solidarity with Vladimir Putin, the ultimate paragon of male privilege and white male supremacy, speaks volumes.

Failing Women on Both Sides of the Political Binary

Women seem to have a good sense of who is on their side and who’s not. In Mexico’s 2018 election, roughly 67% of men voted for AMLO compared to less than 50% of women. In Western Europe, the gender gap has been even more pronounced—with one important exception. In France, Marine Le Pen has managed to appeal to a growing part of the female electorate by portraying and promoting herself as a feminist. Whether or not this claim is justified is a different question. Her detractors would certainly disagree, citing, for instance, her long-held position on criminalizing abortion, as well as her close association with Putin—an association she shares with many populist leaders in Western Europe. 

Ironically enough, those who have expressed strong reservations with regard to Marine Le Pen, have simultaneously shown great admiration for the Latin American populist left. Spain’s left-wing populist party, known as the , is arguably the most prominent among them. Yet, ironically enough, when it comes to questions of gender, the gap between left and right considerably narrows. The defense of (white) male privilege and the subordination of women pervades the discourse of populism, both right and left.

This narrowing of the political spectrum when it comes to gender equality is the result of various factors. In order for any political party to successfully elect a candidate, it must appeal to certain segments of the male vote. The same is true when it comes to cornering the religious vote. It was hardly a fluke that evangelical women voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, despite his overt misogyny. Their pro-life stance when it came to abortion easily surpassed their concerns for gender equality. Therefore, it is no surprise that Trump’s promise to install an ultraconservative judge on the Supreme Court with the ultimate goal of Roe v. Wade was music to the ears of female evangelicals. 

These days, there is a strong sense that male dominance has come under heavy pressure, socioeconomically and socioculturally. While the claim that “men have become obsolete” is over exaggerating, it certainly holds truefor the status of , Donald Trump notwithstanding. 

Hardly surprisingly, the gradual loss of hegemonic status that men have suffered in recent years has provoked a strong backlash. In this new episode of the culture war that has been poisoning democracy for the past several decades, anything goes, no matter the damage. 

The stakes are high—for both sides. Unfortunately, as has usually been the case, those most affected by the epochal transformations confronting us today—both women and men—are likely to be no more than collateral damage in this war. The legitimate worries and concerns of the public will be ignored and dismissed, and lives will continue to deteriorate. 

The fact that this culture war is being intensified by polarizing political parties and candidates who claim to represent the grievances and concerns of their constituents is yet another unfortunate irony. Obviously, those constituents do not appear to include women in any sense.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Ironically, Moon appointed Yoon as prosecutor general of the country. As the top prosecutor, Yoon secured the conviction of two former conservative presidents for corruption. He also pressed charges against Samsung Chairman who was sentenced to prison in a bribery scandal. “Owing loyalty to nobody,” Yoon then went on to investigate members of the Moon administration, catapulting this star prosecutor into the national limelight and eventually making him the PPP candidate.

Yoon is an outsider.  He has no administrative experience and little access to Seoul’s political networks. He has not even served as a member of parliament. The fact that Yoon came out on top confirms that public popularity is now more important than party allegiance and political or administrative experience in the South Korean presidential system.

The election — although very close nationwide —  exposed South Korea’s regional division. In this country, political parties are not primarily divided by ideology or political platforms but rather by history and regional origins. In the southwestern Cholla provinces, more than 80% voted for Lee while the southeastern Kyongsang regions voted overwhelmingly for Yoon. 

A Terrible Housing Crisis and Gender Issues

The biggest surprise was that Yoon won the capital city of Seoul, a stronghold of the DP. This crucial victory helped him win the election. It hinged on the only political issue that mattered during the campaign: unaffordable housing prices. The Moon administration failed to address this burning issue, which hurt the DP. 

The overwhelming importance of this matter can only be understood in the context of the rental system in South Korea. Jeonse requires lump sum payments and directly links rents to real estate prices. In addition, rental contracts are limited to two years and there is almost no protection for tenants who are left to the whims, fancies and even tyranny of their landlords. The Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2021 observed that: “While regulations on homeowners and tenant protection have been slightly improved, they have failed to arrest the massive increases in housing costs in the urban centers.”

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In these elections, a gender divide emerged among younger voters. Only 34% of women in their 20s voted for Yoon in contrast to 59% of men in the same age group. This was by far the largest gender divide among different age groups ever recorded. In the past, younger voters have tended to vote for the DP. Yoon appealed to young men by opposing “feminism” and even promising to abolish the ministry of gender equality. Note that South Korea’s average gender pay gap is one of the largest in the world. Furthermore, South Korea’s labor-force participation rate among women is the fifth-lowest among the 29 EU and OECD countries as per a on Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI).  The authors of the report see a “continued prevalence of traditional ideas about family and gender roles.“ On a related note, Shim Sang-jeung, the highest-ranked female presidential candidate of the progressive Justice Party received only 2.4% of the vote as compared to 6.2% in 2017, exposing the crisis in which the political left now finds itself in South Korea. 

A Tricky Political Situation

Over the years, election campaigns have become almost completely personalized and devoid of political agendas. Negative campaigning now delves into character flaws of the candidates and even of their wives. Particularly shocking is how vital issues, such as the extreme environmental degradation in South Korea or how the country plans to combat climate change fail to feature in presidential debates. South Korea has the lowest share of renewable energy among the 41 countries examined by the SGI report. A later report takes the view that South Korea “is more focused on [its] growth aspect than on environmental protection.”

It is difficult to predict the direction the Yoon administration will take during its five-year tenure which begins on May 10. As a political and administrative novice, Yoon will rely on his party and the bureaucracy. When it comes to economic and social policies, Yoon – the son of a market-liberal economics professor – promised to reduce government interventions. However, he is likely to make little headway because his party does not have a majority in the parliament. The DP commands a strong majority with 172 out of 300 seats. It can shoot down Yoon’s economic policies even though it may not have the two-thirds majority needed to override presidential vetoes, amend the constitution, or impeach the president. 

While the South Korean president has strong constitutional powers and can rule by decrees, his ability to impose radical changes without proper legislation is limited. If the president ends up in a standoff with parliament, the country could end up in political gridlock. This might cause instability or, on a more positive note, inaugurate a new era of cooperation and compromises between the two camps or even a complete reorganization of political parties. Yoon’s election has upped the political ante for the country. Now, all parties are focused on the next parliamentary election in 2024.

Foreign Policy Ambitions 

If things seem rocky on the domestic front, they are better when it comes to foreign policy. For a long time, relations with North Korea, China, Japan and the US have been one of few ideological divisions between the two large parties. Moon’s presidency adopted the classic DP agenda of engaging North Korea to achieve an as-yet unfulfilled goal of signing a peace treaty or at least an end-of-war declaration. The PPP fiercely opposed the DP on this issue. Conflict with North Korea has long been a means for the conservative PPP to rally its supporters. Members of the PPP also fear that a peace treaty would undermine South Korea’s alliance with the US, risking the withdrawal of American troops. 

Yoon is likely to use the PPP’s excellent ties with the US to strengthen the US-South Korea alliance. His government is likely to repair relations with Japan. Japan-South Korea relations have deteriorated due to friction over Japanese reparations for its colonial atrocities in Korea. Closer ties to the US and Japan will give Yoon less leeway in dealing with China and Russia. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, Yoon is likely to put South Korea more firmly on the US side and against Russia. Under the new president, South Korea, Japan and the US are likely to come closer together to strengthen the rules-based international order in Asia.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It’s Time for #MeToo to Address Structural Racism

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The first official Women’s History Month was inaugurated in 1980 and has been celebrated every year since. There are indeed many milestones and accomplishments to celebrate, including the strides women have made in  and the , the increased  of women in government, and the hard-won legal and social equality. At the same time, white women have leveraged their relative racial privilege to make these gains at the expense of women of color.

Incomplete Picture

While it feels empowering to think of women as a collective group, this category is not a monolith. Failing to consider women and women’s history from an  perspective leaves out the range of experiences and needs of women who do not fit into the white middle-class mold. In short, when the broad range of women’s experiences is not acknowledged, the movement remains incomplete. 

Because historical and contemporary women’s movements have willfully and strategically omitted racial justice, there is a legacy of isolating racism from sexism. This ignores the lived experience of everyone except white women. It has ensured that white women see a competition between issues of racism and sexism, and feel that they lose if the conversation centers around the former. 

The made the deliberate decision to fight for the right of white — not all — women to vote, choosing not to collaborate with black female activists. More recently, the 2017 Women’s March organizers faced criticism for focusing primarily on white women’s issues. 

And in the peak of the #MeToo movement, celebrities like Alyssa Milano, who said that she  to be the vessel for the movement, and Rose McGowan, who  at not being credited with initiating the movement, have by and large been associated with the inception of #MeToo. In reality, , a black female activist and advocate, coined the phrase and spearheaded the movement to raise awareness of sexual violence against working-class women and women of color a whole decade earlier.

As sociologists and white women, we argue that the discomfort regarding engaging with racism in both the society in general as well as in women-centered movements stems from the idea that white people don’t have to talk about race and racism because they aren’t “our issues.” But, because we live in a , everyone has a racial identity.

Another way to think about this is by acknowledging that race is socially constructed, meaning that it carries a social, not biological categorization. However, the fact that it is socially constructed doesn’t mean it isn’t real. In a racist society, race has very real consequences for people.

Real Change

To avoid injury and to build a more equitable and just society, white women must become better at talking about race and racism, and recognize that while we experience sexism, we benefit from racial privilege in society. These benefits range from not having to  when dating to more frequent  in the workplace compared to minority women to extensive when a white woman goes missing, among others. 

Real change will mean giving up some of our comfort and power. Making these changes may not feel nice to us as individuals, but will have life-saving consequences for black people and other people of color. 

Second, we must recognize racism is a  that is embedded into the fabric of American society. Dismantling it will require supporting anti-racist policies and politicians, and advocating for laws such as the , which aims to “improve maternal health, particularly among racial and ethnic minority groups, veterans, and other vulnerable populations. It also addresses maternal health issues related to COVID-19.”&�Բ�����;

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To ensure that political leaders truly represent the American public, everyone must have a seat at the table. While there have been four women on the Supreme Court, this month, we have the opportunity to confirm , who would be the first black woman on the court. 

Finally, we cannot begin to address racism without a shared knowledge of the truth. Ideally, this means casting a wide net and engaging with people from different backgrounds. Black activists and authors can us the social world through their eyes. But even so, we can’t expect anyone to tell us what “good” white people we are. In the words of the late scholar and activist , there is no gold star for “challenging white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal values.”&�Բ�����;  

What’s more, since racism is structural, we will all say and do racist things at times. But if we care about making the world a better place, we must listen, learn, apologize and continue to improve. Of course, self-knowledge is not enough. As white women, we must simultaneously work to improve ourselves and engage in the difficult work of dismantling white supremacy. This won’t be easy work, but it’s work that is worth doing. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Over the past six months, Afghan women have continued to protest against the Taliban policies, provoking a brutal response. One of the detainees  AFINT: “Unfortunately, there is sexual harassment by the Taliban. The Taliban think that a woman who protests for her rights or has worked before they came to power is a prostitute. So, they consider these women as sex slaves.” While it may be impossible to change the Taliban’s mindset, international and regional pressure is key to helping Afghan women and holding the current regime accountable. 

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To deal with the international pressures, the Taliban turned the women’s rights issues into a bargaining chip against the international community to gain recognition and force engagement. The US, in particular, consistently calls on the Taliban to respect women’s rights. But does the US have enough leverage over the Taliban to force them to revise their treatment of women?

Power Is Everything 

Since the overthrow of the Afghan government last August, the US remained engaged with the Taliban, although Washington does not recognize the regime as legitimate. Although the Taliban views the US as the loser in this conflict, many within the group’s leadership believe that they have to interact with Washington to gain recognition. 

The Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai  in December: “If the US embassy reopens in Kabul, all European countries will be here in half an hour. We are working hard in this regard, and since I have been a member of the negotiating team with them (the Americans), I am sure from their morals and behavior that, God willing, they will be back soon.”&�Բ�����;

From the Taliban’s perspective, power is everything. As far as they can control the country, the US has to respect them and will have to recognize them. This assumption leads the group to not compromise on women’s rights. Instead of revising their policies, they detained women activists and then released some of them following pressure to do so during the  in January.

The US has profound concerns about the Taliban’s relations with other terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, but human rights, women’s rights and an inclusive government are all part of the US agenda in its interaction with the country’s new leadership. In his talk at the United States Institute of Peace, Thomas West, the US special representative for Afghanistan,  these values as crucial for the US-Taliban relationship. 

However, it is imperative to keep in mind that any compromise from the international community on women’s rights that suggests to the Taliban that their harsh policies may be accommodated will only exacerbate the situation for women in Afghanistan. 

International Commitment

For more than 20 years, the US and international community repeated their strong commitment to  in Afghanistan, creating the expectation that it should continue doing so after the Taliban takeover. However, many Afghan women saw the US agreement with the Taliban as a .

International pressure is the critical factor for holding the Taliban accountable. When the women activists disappeared without explanation, the Taliban denied its involvement for months. The United Nations and US diplomats repeatedly called on the Taliban to find the missing women.

In the end, the Taliban released several well-known women activists despite denying involvement in detaining them. The group also published videos of  by the activists. Totalitarian regimes use this tactic against human rights activities for propaganda and to mislead the public; exposing the Taliban’s double game will not be easy and will require international commitment and cooperation. 

There are several measures that can be helpful in holding the Taliban accountable, and the US can play a central role. First, the diplomatic contacts with the Taliban should not be interpreted as hope for recognition; rather, diplomacy should be used only for contact and assessing responsibilities.

Second, international consensus on women’s rights and supporting the idea of an inclusive and legitimate government in Afghanistan is key. This is significant for women’s rights and negotiation for building a broad-based government to reflect Afghan society, which is instrumental for avoiding another round of conflict. 

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Third, increasing the activities of international organizations in Afghanistan to support women and monitor their situation under the Taliban is necessary. Currently, there is no access to different corners of the country where crimes against women may be committed. Fourth, financial support to organizations championing women’s education and activities will be vital for women’s voices and Afghan social society to resist the Taliban’s fascist approach.

The US can exert pressure on behalf of Afghan women to demand that their rights to work and education are honored. Any degree of leniency toward the Taliban will make the situation worse for women. If the US shows a faltering resolve or sends a misleading message, the international consensus on human rights will disappear.  

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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FO° Live: Women Under the Taliban

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In response, the Taliban have deployed various oppressive measures. In September, they the Women’s Affairs Ministry with morality police, which enforces the armed group’s on the country. At the same time, while trying to confine women to their homes by forbidding them to work or study, the Taliban are using the threat of violence against women as a bargaining chip against the Western powers.

Violent Tactics

In September last year, the Taliban attacked the media to prevent them from covering the women’s protests in Kabul. Two journalists were . Etilaatroz is one of the leading Afghan newspapers and a critical voice mainly focused on investigative journalism. An attack on the newspaper was a clear signal for everyone covering the protests against the Taliban.

Since the armed group took control of the country, at least 318 media outlets in 33 of 34 provinces and, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 72% of those who are women.

But the Taliban quickly changed their tactics to tackle women’s protests through more intimidating methods, including nighttime house searches to locate those who dared raise their voice. Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, a member of the movement demanding rights to work and education, is just one of the women from their homes in Kabul in the middle of the night; her whereabouts . Some families report being contacted by detainees from Taliban prisons in undisclosed locations.

The Taliban deny capturing, detaining or killing women and other opponents. This tactic aims to mislead public opinion, the media and policymakers in Western countries. The situation may be even more critical in the provinces, beyond the eyes of the media. In September last year, the Taliban a former police officer with the ousted Afghan government in front of her family in Gor province; she was pregnant at the time of her murder.

There is no way to assess the true number of disappeared women across the country. Some of them are known by the media, such Mursal Ayar, Parwana Ibrahimkhel, Tamana Paryani, Zahra Mohammadi and Alia Azizi. Most of them belong to the protest movement against the Taliban’s policies. Azizi worked as a senior female prison official in Herat and went missing when the Taliban took control of the city. Amnesty International the Taliban to investigate the case and release her “immediately and unconditionally” if she is in their custody.

Last week, the UN repeated its and asked the Taliban to release the disappeared women activists and their relatives. The German Embassy, currently operating from Qatar, has called for an into the missing women. It is entirely possible that the Taliban will eventually release some of the captives, claiming that they were rescued from the clutches of the kidnappers, in order to portray themselves as a responsible government.

Gang rape is another tactic that the Taliban deploy against women in detention. The Independent that last September, bodies of eight detainees arrested during a protest in Mazar-e Sharif were discovered. According to reports, the girls were repeatedly gang-raped and tortured by the Taliban. Sexual assault is a many-sided weapon against women in a society based on strict honor codes. Some of those who survived the rapes were by their families.

In January, The Times that the staff in the government-run Mazar-e Sharif Regional Hospital claim that they receive around 15 bodies from Taliban fighters each month — mostly women with gunshot wounds to the head or chest.

Bargaining Chip

Violence has been the Taliban’s primary tool both in war and during negotiations with Western powers. Over the course of two decades of conflict, the Taliban used violence as a means to win recognition as a political force. During their talks with the US and the Afghan government, the Taliban escalated violence to enhance their position at the negotiating table. Now, they are pursuing the same strategy by trading repression for recognition.

Since the Taliban took control of the country, women’s rights are a constant subject of ongoing diplomatic discussions that have so far brought no result. The international community has failed to press the Taliban to form an inclusive government and respect women’s rights.

But the armed group wants the international community to recognize their government. In January, a Taliban delegation was invited to Oslo to talk with Western powers and representatives of Afghan women for the first time. At the meeting, Hoda Khamosh, a civil society activist, the Taliban delegation: “why are the Taliban imprisoning us in Kabul and now sitting here at the negotiating table with us in Oslo? What is the international community doing in the face of all this torture and repression?”

Since then, nothing has changed. The reality is that the Taliban used the talks in Oslo as an opportunity to make an international appearance to advertise their government. They are deploying precepts like women’s rights to force more international engagement. While Norway was for inviting the Taliban and offering them exposure, Switzerland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it invited the Taliban to talk about “the protection of humanitarian actors and respect for human rights.”

The Taliban is an ideological, zealot religious movement, and years of experience suggest that they are unlikely to revise their position on women’s rights and other fundamental issues, including human rights and political pluralism. Talking about women’s rights in Western capitals is just an opportunity for them to normalize their regime and travel abroad. Human rights violations, particularly violence against women, not only serve the Taliban’s ideological purposes but have turned into a convenient bargaining chip against the international community.

It is critical that Western powers support fundamental human rights in the country without providing the Taliban with opportunities for blackmail, implementig realistic measures to press the group to release activists and to respect women’s rights. First, it is important to maintain or escalate the current sanctions regime against the Taliban leadership. Second, making sure that there is no rush to recognize the Taliban regime mong foreign governments is another key leverage point.

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Third, there is a need to appoint a special rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation and document violations to hold the Taliban accountable. Fourth, it is important to extend and support the mandate of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan to help monitor the human rights situation in the country.

Finally, the international community can continue its humanitarian support through UN agencies and other organizations without recognizing the Taliban. Recognition of the group will not only increase human rights abuses but will send the wrong signal to other extremists in the region. All these measures will reduce the Taliban’s ability to use violence as a bargaining chip against the international community.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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First, the COVID-19 pandemic is obviously far from over. While global vaccine distribution continues to be spotty and a matter of economic and political privilege rather than equality and fairness, new variants of the virus such as Omicron continue to emerge and suggest that the largest global health crisis in at least a century is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

It is tragic that the shortsighted, irresponsible attitude to just and equitable global vaccine distribution has now become the root cause for a seemingly infinite loop of viral mutations and spread. Indeed, the policies that are adopted by some countries allow new variants to incubate where vaccines are scarce, only to soon boomerang back to nations that are hoarding doses and patents alike.

Water World: Is Climate Change Driving Our Future Out to Sea?  

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Second, the rapidly deteriorating situation, the stunning collapse of the status quo and public order, and the ongoing humanitarian and human rights crisis in Afghanistan remind us of the inherent vulnerability and fragility of the international order and its institutions. Afghanistan is but one example of a fundamental shift in global and regional geopolitics and balance of power that is now ubiquitous. The consequence is that human security and justice seem to become even more disposable than before.

Third, the 6^th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that the global climate crisis is not only real and impactful but certain to increase, perhaps exponentially, and become even much more destructive, disruptive and deadly than previously projected.

Keeping the Goal Alive

At the same time, the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow reinforced the widespread fear that it is increasingly unlikely that the 1.5˚C goal sealed in the Paris Agreement — perhaps even the 2˚C fallback position — can still be reached, meaning that unimaginable threats like mega heatwaves, floods, droughts, hurricanes and blizzards, food crises and famines, mass migration and violent conflicts are to be expected to rise throughout this century.

COP26, unfortunately, was more of the same: cynical delegations of certain industrialized countries, as well as ruthless fossil fuel lobbyists, coerced poor countries already hit hard by climate change into a defensive mode and dictated a watered-down compromise that is far from adequate. Despite some mitigation pundits — typically white, male and Western — praising COP26 for “keeping the 1.5-degree goal alive,” the point is not about what’s hypothetically feasible but is very much about what has been done and continues to be done to this world’s poor, marginalized, underdeveloped, disenfranchised and remote people?

Much of the Conference of Parties process carries the handwriting of neoliberalism and neocolonial rule. If those people in the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere count, then why has the 2009 promise of COP15 in Copenhagen to make $100 billion in support of adaptation needs available still not been met, even to 50%?

Why do the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters still refuse to pay a single penny for the loss and damage to developing nations that they are responsible for? How dare wealthy carbon-emitting countries refuse to commit to immediate and drastic emission reductions knowing that their selfishness will kill millions of people, wipe out entire species and make much of this planet uninhabitable?

See a pattern? What COVID-19, Afghanistan and climate policy as a global phenomenon have in common is the toxic mix of short-sightedness, selfishness and ruthlessness with which international solidarity, collective action and the noble cause of pursuing equality, dignity and justice in international relations are being sacrificed for short-term gain, dominance and privilege.

Forty years of largely unregulated capitalism, economic globalization and neoliberal rule have not furthered the spirit and goals of the UN Charter. They have ruined our planet, its ecosystems and habitats, and left humanity in a state of shock, turmoil and disintegration — closer to what Hobbes’ “Leviathan” described as the state of nature.

International Threat

By the way, climate change adds to other global risks and threats: It is intersectional, cross-cutting and compounding. , and therefore epidemics and pandemics, are on the rise also because of changing climates, temperatures, precipitation, humidity, biomes and expanding human habitats. Wars such as those in Sudan, Yemen and Syria have been precipitated by climate change, desertification, water shortage, crop failure and hunger — as is forced migration as a mass phenomenon. The list goes on.

We simply can no longer afford a business-as-usual approach or even a moderately progressive approach, let alone a backward approach. This century of complex crises requires a whole new type of global action and response unlike anything before it because peace, security, prosperity and statehood are at risk globally. New, innovative and disruptive legal, economic and political tools are needed, paired with technological advances, ethical and sustainable investments, social movements and large-scale behavioral change.

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Ultimately, the climate agenda — and with it, many other issues of global concern — is a matter of global justice and survival. Measures and instruments must be atoned to yield the safety and well-being of the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised and the underserved. The resilience of the weak will determine the fate of the whole. If that is the case, humanity — and alongside it, other species, ecosystems and the planet — will benefit as a whole. If it isn’t, today’s hubris, ignorance and selfishness will come back as a mighty boomerang, much like Omicron, to haunt many wealthy nations.

*[This article is submitted on behalf of the author by the HBKU Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the University’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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��������’s ethnic minorities endure double discrimination — from the ruling regime and from the Iranian human rights community. While the regime and human rights organizations both at home and abroad disagree on many issues, they share a disdain for ��������’s ethnic minorities, unwilling to see them gain national rights. Thus, the government and its mainstream opposition share a common cause that strengthens the regime’s ability to stay in power and prevent democracy from taking root in Iran.

Repression Is No Longer Enough to Stem the Anger of ��������’s Minorities

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��������’s undergo extreme discrimination beyond the restrictions imposed on all Iranians. They are not allowed to operate schools in their native language, are forced to use Persian in all formal settings, and are regularly subjected to mockery and ridicule in the official media and school textbooks. Ahwazi Arabs face suppression of any expression of their ethnic identity and culture as well as open anti-Arab racism.

Ahwazi Arabs, who number around 8 million, suffer from , environmental degradation, in employment, and high rates of poverty despite being the majority population in the oil and gas-rich . The Persian ruling class reaps the profits from these abundant natural resources while the local Ahwazi people suffer the from their production.

Shared Prejudice

Despite being formally committed to advancing democracy, Iranian human rights organizations share the regime’s prejudices and racism. These organizations rarely report on the distinct discrimination against ��������’s ethnic minorities, the specific goals of Ahwazi Arab protests or the political prisoners who have campaigned for the rights of ethnic minorities.

For instance, when listing the names of activists who have been abducted from their Western exiles by Iranian operatives, they neglect to mention , an Ahwazi activist and Swedish citizen kidnapped by the regime in Istanbul. Chaab is being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and is in imminent danger of execution.

I personally have experienced this double discrimination. As an Ahwazi Arab human rights activist, I was almost to death for supporting the right of Ahwazi children in Iran to learn their native language, Arabic. I was lucky to escape and settle in the US in 2015. My fellow activists were not so lucky — they were executed in 2014. The physical scars from that torture, which run from my sternum to my groin, will never leave me. Even after multiple operations, I will be on medication for the rest of my life.

Yet despite all the available evidence, I was shocked to discover that the Persian-dominated human rights organizations in the US opposed recognizing the rights of the Ahwazis and other minorities, co-opted our struggles and blocked reporting on our plight.

Social Media Wars

With ��������’s regime imposing a total media blackout on the Ahwazi issue, social media remains the only option for activists to raise awareness. But even here activists face constant abuse and threats not only from the regime, which deploys trolls and bots to mass-report activists’ accounts in an effort to shut them down, but also from Farsi-speaking Iranian dissidents. At one point, I had three Twitter bans in under 20 days. 

Due to this media war, most people in the West are not aware of Iran’s ethnic diversity, where Turkish, Ahwazi Arabs, Balochi, Kurdish and Caspian account for nearly 40% of ��������’s population. Most Iranian human rights organizations in exile focus on abuses against Persian dissidents while barely giving any coverage to the systemic racism against the ethnic minorities.

When our young men die for their rights in the streets of Ahwaz, the Persian-dominated groups report on these protests as anti-regime activity, intentionally disregarding the ethnic factor. This was the case in the widespread November 2019 protests and the recent wave of demonstrations this July, which were led by Ahwazi youth. Such co-opting of our activism adds insult to the injury of the brave sacrifices made by our young people.

Refused Recognition

The country’s Persian opposition is reluctant to recognize that Iran is a fundamentally diverse country and that its people have both a national identity and local sovereign claims. These Persian opposition groups have succumbed to the idea that providing support to the Ahwazi cause and recognizing its ethnic demands is a prelude to secessionism. Instead, they continue to turn a blind eye to the demands of ethnic minorities in their own regions in order to promote one nation, one centralized rule, one culture and one language — all Persian.

With this denial by Persian oppositions groups both at home and in exile, and with the regime continuing its brutally repressive, restrictive and racist rule, the outcome of subjugating the country’s ethnic minorities and disregarding their rights is predictable. The civil war that ravaged former Yugoslavia serves as a terrible warning of how states can fracture along ethnic lines. 

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To avert such a catastrophe, Iran must abandon its antiquated supremacist mindset and acknowledge its non-Persian minorities as equal stakeholders and partners who form a power base in their own right. The creation of a federalized democratic system would defuse tensions and mean the possibility of a fair, genuinely progressive, modern state.

Even without its regressive theocratic foundation, the current supremacist system in Iran is an inadequate and outdated relic reflecting a mindset based on 19^th-century colonialism. In reality, the Iranian state is a patchwork of ethnicities, faiths and doctrines. As a result, Iran can choose between creating a fair, stable, democratic and progressive 21^st-century state — which reflects this vibrant and diverse melting pot where each group can elect its representatives to share in an equal, fair and federalized system — and collapsing into factionalism and civil war.

This double oppression to which Ahwazis and other ethnic minorities are subjected and the refusal of the Persian Iranian opposition in exile to even acknowledge both the regime’s or its own deep-seated antagonism toward Ahwazis and other ethnic minorities ultimately only benefits the regime, which can easily thwart a splintered opposition. In the end, we can only dismantle oppression in Iran — and globally — through unity and mutual respect.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Financial Sector Needs to Address Whistleblower Retaliation

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An issue that is causing immediate concern amid the increasingly dictatorial reign of the Taliban is the country’s profound financial crisis. Cut off from international financial institutions and with nearly worth of assets frozen, Afghans can’t rely on humanitarian assistance as aid organizations try to navigate their way around the newly-imposed sanctions regime.

The local currency, the afghani, is in ; down nearly 20% since mid-2021, there doesn’t seem to be a stabilization point in the foreseeable future. Jobs have disappeared, and those lucky enough to be employed frequently are months behind in receiving their salaries. The United Nations fears that the Afghan banking system is on the .

Currency Alternatives

With limited funds remaining in the country, lengthy lines form at the banks and ATMs as Afghans seek access to what little is left — many being left with nothing. In addition to having severely constrained access to cash, purchasing power for the average Afghan is falling quickly, placing them in ever more dire straits. 

This perfect financial storm has led many Afghans to look to decentralized finance as an alternative, and has rapidly moved in to fill the void, just as it has done in other countries facing currency crises. Although crypto is still often highly volatile, Afghans see it as a legitimate source for much-needed cash flow and liquidity. They also increasingly view digital wallets as far more stable than their bank accounts.

Even if cryptocurrencies are not truly decentralized, it is possible that Afghans see cryptocurrency as an escape route from at least one aspect of life under an authoritarian regime. Further adding to crypto’s popularity is its ability to promote financial inclusion for people who often have difficulty gaining access to traditional financial services, like women, most of whom weren’t allowed or able to open a bank account in Afghanistan. 

Greater ease of opening accounts, lower documentation requirements and more affordable fee structures make cryptocurrency a viable and attractive alternative to brick-and-mortar banks and hard currency. Given that crypto financial services are intentionally mobile-friendly, they are much more accessible to the average Afghan than the failing internal banking system.

Connecting Scattered Families

According to the UN, as of last year, nearly 5.9 million Afghans , mostly in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. The number has been on the increase since the Taliban takeover as of new refugees seek asylum in countries across the globe. Migration often leaves families separated and in dire need of resources.

Well before the Taliban administration took power, it was common for Afghans living abroad to help support family members back home. According to the World Bank, in 2020, nearly $800 million, or roughly , streamed into the country in the form of remittances. 

As Afghan banks shut down or limited operations and international payment providers like Western Union suspended operations in Afghanistan due to international sanctions, intra-family transfers became increasingly difficult. Moreover, even those banks that remained open typically did not make simple payment systems like Venmo or Zelle available to their customers.

With cryptocurrency-based payment systems, family members have a solution for bypassing the internal financial problems in the country. The result is an acceleration of crypto use, placing Afghanistan among the in the world for adoption rate.

Links Between Crypto and Terrorism

Unfortunately, crypto’s ability to remain outside mainstream financial and regulatory structures has also made it attractive to terrorist organizations. A recent report from the US attorney general’s Cyber Digital Task Force between cryptocurrency and terrorist organizations: “While public data on terrorist use of cryptocurrency is limited, it is clear that terrorist networks have conducted fundraising operations through Internet-based crowdsource platforms in an attempt to evade stopgaps built into the international banking system.”&�Բ�����;

Well-known terrorist organizations from Hamas to the Islamic State use cryptocurrency to create funding networks and purchase supplies for their operations. It is remarkably simple for these groups to leverage extensive social media networks to back their fundraising drives.

Ongoing efforts to disrupt such activity have seen some limited success. For example, US anti-terrorism efforts in 2020 led to civil forfeiture cases and the seizure of more than 300 cryptocurrency accounts containing several million dollars.

Can Crypto Help the Taliban Circumvent Sanctions?

As crypto adoption rates skyrocket, concerns are building in the international community that the Taliban itself will turn to cryptocurrency to sidestep sanctions and cloud financial transparency. All of this raises the question of whether crypto adoption in Afghanistan poses a significant security threat for the rest of the world.   

The Taliban continues to seek international recognition and has stated that failure to do so will have significant consequences for the world. However, it does not appear that recognition is forthcoming. Indeed, the US is unlikely to ever officially recognize the Taliban government, with the group still on its list of .

Without formal recognition, the Taliban regime will continue to struggle to access its international accounts or generate international funding to help alleviate its economic woes. While cryptocurrency might seem like a reasonably effective option for the Taliban government, the complexity of the economic situation in the country precludes a single solution. With governments across the world beginning to introduce stricter regulations on cryptocurrency markets and actively working to prevent access by terrorist organizations, things may not be quite so simple for Afghanistan’s new leaders. 

At least one government has explicitly attempted to counteract US sanctions through cryptocurrency in the past. The embattled regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela had teamed with Russian banks to back Evrofinance Mosnarbank, the primary supporter of Venezuela’s proposed national cryptocurrency, the . Maduro claimed that the petro would help Venezuela obtain alternative sources of international financing, despite heavy US sanctions. However, the scheme has not been successful, a sign that similar attempts by the Taliban may be of limited use.

The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan represents an ongoing security threat far beyond its borders. Stability, both political and financial, is certainly in the best interests of the people of Afghanistan and everyone else, including cryptocurrency markets.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Fiji’s Women Are Living the Reality of Climate Change

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Climate change, as the skeptics like to remind us, does occur naturally. Analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  that temperatures during the last interglacial period, which began 130,000 years ago and lasted somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 years, were 0.5˚C and 1˚C warmer than in pre-industrial times and up to 2˚C or even 4˚C warmer during the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, around 3 million years ago. But while there are natural processes in place, the pace of climate change over the past century has demonstrated the devastating effect of anthropogenic activity on the delicate balance of life on Earth. 

The Seas Are Rising

What is significant about the IPCC assessment is that during the last interglacial period, sea levels were likely between 6 meters and 9 meters higher, possibly reaching 25 meters during the mid-Pliocene. That may sound farfetched, but modeling suggests a 2.3-meter rise per 1˚C of warming. Globally, the average sea level has already  by 0.2 meters since the late 19^th century, starting at a  of 1.4 millimeters a year from 1901 to 1990 and accelerating to 3.6 millimeters a year between 2006 and 2015.

This spells disaster for the coastal areas. A  published in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year suggests that, even with no net global emissions after 2020, “the carbon already in the atmosphere could sustain enough warming for global mean sea level to rise 1.9 (0–3.8) meters over the coming centuries,” meaning that currently, anywhere between 120 million and 650 million people — or a mean of 5.3% of the world’s population — live on land below the new tide lines. 

Even if warming is kept under the upper limit of the Paris Agreement of 2˚C above pre-industrial levels, multi-century sea level rise can reach 4.7 meters, threatening the livelihoods of double the number of people, the authors assess. In 2019, the IPCC estimated that this number could reach  by 2050. The panel predicts a rise of anywhere between 0.29 meters and 1.1 meters by 2100 relative to 1985-2005, depending on emission rates. A paper published in Nature concluded that if we stay on the current emissions course heading for 3˚C warming, we will reach a , with the Antarctic ice sheet alone adding 0.5 centimeters to global sea levels each year. 

According to the authors of a 2019 study on sea-level rise and migration, rising waters are  to be the “most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change, costing up to 4.5% of global gross domestic product.” A 2018  by C40, a network of mayors of nearly 100 global cities, estimated that a 2˚C rise could affect 800 million people in 570 urban centers by mid-century. As the authors of a 2021 study , “Although there is large variability in future sea level projections, due, for instance, to the uncertainty in anthropogenic emissions, there is consensus on the potentially catastrophic worldwide impact of SLR.”

A 2˚C rise puts land that houses over half the population of Vietnam and Bangladesh and over 80% of those living in the island nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Bahamas and the Marshall Islands . The , with 80% of its 1,200 atolls not even reaching 1 meter above sea level — the , with its highest elevation point of just 2.4 meters — is particularly at risk; there is literally nowhere to hide. In May, the minister for the environment, climate change and technology, Aminath Shauna,  CNBC that if current trends continue, the island nation “will not be here” by 2100. “We will not survive. … There’s no higher ground for us … it’s just us, it’s just our islands and the sea.”

Water, Water Everywhere

It is clear that Alisi Rabukawaqa, project liaison officer at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, she has given this a lot of thought. When I ask her about the reality of climate change in what many would consider to be a tropical paradise — her native Fiji — she doesn’t stop talking for nearly 10 minutes. She remembers a time when devastating cyclones were “lifetimes apart.” Now, category 5 storms are a regular, looming threat. 

“And if it’s not cyclones, it’s the drought. And if it’s not the drought, it’s the saltwater intrusion that’s impacting where people plant; and if it’s not that, it’s seeping into drinking sources and boreholes from outer islands,” she tells me from a Fiji so hot, everyone is bracing for another cyclone.

While for most communities affected by sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion relocation is still “further down the line,” traditional land ownership laws mean that you can’t just pack up and move anywhere you like, even if, unlike in the Maldives, there is higher ground. In 2017, the government’s  identified over 830 vulnerable communities, 48 of which were in urgent need of resettlement. The plan was developed a year after , which hit Fiji in February 2016, significantly affected around 350,000 people. That is a high number by any standard; here, it’s more than a third of the population. 

“Fiji is a small place relatively, so all those things combined, it’s made us more vulnerable,” Rabukawaqa says. “In the past, it was just the issue of development, thinking of proper development, like, How do we do this right? How do you ensure it’s sustainable? Reforestation. Those seem like simpler times.”

Saltwater intrusion is what is having a major impact on the coastal community of Barishal in Bangladesh, home to Kathak Biswas Joy, district coordinator with Youth Net for Climate Justice, member of the advisory team with Child Rights Connect and the founder of the non-profit Aranyak. It was his work on children’s rights that made him realize that “in Bangladesh, everything is related to climate change.” As it exacerbates existing inequalities,  from the countryside — where salinity and flooding are destroying farmland — to the coastal cities, child labor and child marriage become ever more commonplace. 

So does disease. Increased  has been linked to numerous problems during  and , hair loss and skin diseases, dysentery, hypertension, risk of miscarriage and changes in menstrual cycles as well as difficulty with maintaining hygiene. The deadly dengue fever, already the “fastest growing vector-borne viral disease in the world” as a result of a , has  Bangladesh alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country where water is everywhere, it seems to bring as little relief as it did to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient .

Rabukawaqa echoes this sentiment. In a nation that depends almost entirely on the ocean, the traditional and cultural relationship with it is turning from “a beautiful, loving, caring one … into one where the ocean is suddenly becoming our enemy. And we don’t want it to be that way.”

On Your Doorstep

If you think that Alisi Rabukawaqa’s and Kathak Biswas Joy’s problems are far from your world, think again. While  out of 10 top large countries at risk from sea-level rise are located in Asia, no place is safe. Many of the world’s most vibrant cities already face a considerable threat from flooding by as early as 2030 — less than a decade from now. , a nonprofit, has used data from “peer-reviewed science in leading journals” to map areas most at risk over the coming century. While the creators warn that the mapping is bound to include errors, its scope of doom is frightening. 

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If global warming is not halted, cities as diverse as Bangkok, New Orleans, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Yangon, Antwerp, Basra, Dhaka, New York and Dubai may see entire neighborhoods submerged. On average, coastal residents experience a sea-level rise of around 8 millimeters to 10 millimeters a year for every 3-millimeter rise in sea levels due to  — the slow sinking of land that occurs in river deltas that can be exacerbated by the extraction of resources like groundwater and oil. 

Tokyo, for example, sank by 4 meters over the course of last century, Shanghai, Bangkok and New Orleans by 2 meters. The Thai capital, built on what is known as “,” saw the water-logged areas it sits on drained to accommodate for agriculture and urban expansion, making flooding a recurring problem, exacerbated by a six-month-long rainy season. 

In Shanghai alone, China’s financial hub that sits in the Yangtze River estuary surrounded by lakes, nearly $1 trillion of assets are at risk as a result of rising waters, according to  by the Financial Times. The Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which  20% of China’s GDP and 3.8% of global wealth, is one of the areas most at risk of sea-level rise. In May, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment  that its coastal waters were 73 millimeters above “normal” average for the period between 1993 and 2011, with temperatures 0.7˚C above the 1981-2010 range.

In Venice, the aqua alta, or “high water,” usually occurs between autumn and spring caused a combination of tide peaks, sirocco winds and the lunar cycle. The city that encompasses some 100 lagoon islands has been threatened by water for centuries, but according to , Venice had experienced as many inundations over 1.1-meters aqua alta levels in the last two decades alone as over the whole of the previous century. The 2019 flood that  80% of the city, killing two and causing devastating damage to historical landmarks and $1 billion of losses, saw the second-highest water level in its history.

Mozambique, with one of the longest coastlines in Africa that spans 2,470 kilometers and is home to 60% of the population, is in danger of losing an estimated 4,850 square kilometers of land surface by 2040, according to an  by USAID. With 45% already living below the poverty line, 70% currently depend on  living conditions. According to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 20% of the population relies on fishing as the main income, contributing some 10% of the country’s GDP, alongside 5% brought in by tourism.

Coastal erosion and increasing extreme weather events like Cyclone Idai, the deadliest storm in the history of southern Africa, and Cyclone Kenneth, that hit Mozambique in 2019, threaten all of this — as well as the country’s fragile ecosystems like coral reefs. Idai and Kenneth caused ; at around 22% of the country’s GDP, that’s about half the annual budget. 

If the current projections are correct, 12 of  may be under 1 meter of water by the end of the century. Mumbai, the country’s economic capital, and Kolkata, India’s third-largest city built in the lower Ganges Delta, rely on drainage systems dating back to colonial times. Consequently, Mumbai experiences floods every year these days. According to IPCC assessment, Kolkata  more than any other studied city between 1950 and 2018, by 2.6˚C — ahead of  Tehran’s 2.3˚C and Moscow’s 1˚C — and may see its one-day maximum rainfall rise by 50% by 2100. 

While the United Kingdom is not exactly known for sunny climes, the Albion has been experiencing record-breaking rainfall, more frequent storms and flooding, at a cost of £1.4 billion a year in damages, or around £800 million per flood,  to government figures. With the temperature already a  than a century and a half ago, storms like Desmond, which caused £1.6 billion worth of devastation in 2015, may become . 

In the Thames floodplain,  like Tower Bridge, Hampton Court and the London Eye are at risk by 2050. Earlier this year, flooding in central London influenced Queen guitarist Brian May’s  to pack up and leave, one of the more high-profile climate refugees escaping the rising seas.

In its latest report published in September, the World Bank suggested that as many as 200 million people could be  as a result of climate change, an upgrade from its 2018 figure of 148 million. The Institute for Economics and Peace put the number of  at 1.2 billion. While it is difficult to predict how people will respond to the new circumstances over the coming decades,  by Brookings suggests that of the 68.5 million displaced in 2017, approximately one-third was on the move due to “’sudden onset’ weather events — flooding, forest fires after droughts, and intensified storms.”&�Բ�����;

Conflicting studies on migration flows demonstrate just how difficult it is to model human behavior in the face of crisis. But we are highly adaptable and can move relatively freely (in the absence of border restrictions). In the animal kingdom faced with loss of vital habitats and fragile ecosystems, up to a third of all the world’s species can go  as a result of climate change by 2070, or more than half under a less optimistic emissions scenario. It is a tragedy the scope of which merits its own elegy. 

A Drop in the Ocean

To quite literally stem the tide, many countries are adopting new technology in the hope to secure their future. China launched its “” initiative in 2015, with the aim to absorb and reuse 70% of rainwater by 2030; some 30 cities are taking part in the scheme, including Shanghai. Egypt’s historical city of , where landmarks like Cleopatra’s palace and the famed lighthouse are in danger of submersion, has opted for widening its canals and rehousing people living alongside them. 

The Netherlands, a  of which already lies below sea level, has been building flood defenses for , and now prides itself on one of the most advanced systems in the world, including the giant sea gate of Maeslantkering that protects the harbor of Rotterdam. Last year, Venice managed to  the waters for the first time in 1,200 years with the help of the €7-billion  that have been under construction for nearly two decades. 

Farmers in Bangladesh are turning to the centuries-old practice of , while Mumbai has been working to conserve its  that can help absorb the impacts of cyclones and dissipate flooding. 

The Maldives is planning to start the construction of the Dutch-designed  in 2022, a first of its kind, to complement the artificial island of  and its City of Hope, a reclamation project that is currently home to around . Miami is set to spend at least  over the next four decades to fund storm pumps and 6-foot-tall sea walls to protect against a once-in-five-years storm surge. 

The Thames Estuary 2100 Plan has been developed to “protect 1.4 million people, £320 billion worth of property and critical infrastructure from increasing tidal flood risk” as well as “enhance and restore ecosystems and maximise benefits of natural floods” and enhance “the social, economic and commercial benefits the river provides.”

This is all good and well, but if we don’t halt the warming of the planet, all this effort will be but a mere drop in the ocean in the long run. 

I ask Rabukawaqa how she feels about all these high-tech, high-cost efforts to keep back the waters. As a scientist, she thinks technology has a place, but says that in this instance, it’s not enough: “If we are going to look for and promote new technology that only results in us mining and extracting more from our lands and, in our case, most likely our oceans through deep-sea mining, it makes absolutely zero sense.” Across Fiji, there is widespread extraction of materials like sand and gravel, as well as copper and bauxite ore, which is only compounding the existing problems. “Maybe it’s not profitable, the way we are living and moving on this planet,” she says. “We need to move slower in this world.”

The Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow — home to the Industrial Revolution — was  as the “’last, best chance’ to keep 1.5˚C alive.” With much fanfare and squabbling over minutiae, the summit closed with its president, Alok Sharma, reduced to tears by India’s last-minute watering down of commitments on phasing out fossil fuels. On the same day, India’s capital  experienced levels of pollution that forced it into lockdown. While it is already one of the world’s most polluted cities, the symbolism of the timing is hard to dismiss. 

Just as it is most at risk to sea-level rise, Asia — including Australia — is the world’s biggest  of coal, accounting for three-quarters of the global total. With India setting its net-zero commitment to 2070, China to 2060 and the US announcing that it is unlikely to bolster its COP26 pledges to reach net-zero by 2050 in the coming year, it feels like a losing battle for low-emitters like Fiji and Bangladesh. Biswas Joy is disappointed that world leaders ended up blaming each other instead of coming up with a concrete plan for climate financing for developing nations. “It is not a relief — it is our needs,” he says. “We are not begging.”

“We deserve to continue to exist. But our existence really depends on everyone in the world coming to agree,” echoes Rabukawaqa. Both feel that their futures have been traded for profit margins. With just  Pacific Island leaders present in Glasgow vis-à-vis over 500  representatives, it is an unsurprising sentiment.

According to  (CAT), the Glasgow agreement has left a major credibility gap, with the planet still on course to produce twice as many emissions by 2030 as are necessary to keep the temperature rise below 1.5˚C. Without long-term target amendments, CAT calculates that we are on course for a 2.4˚C increase by the end of the century based on pledges alone. Projected warming under current policies is 2.7˚C. The most optimistic scenario, if all pledges are implemented, still has us on course for 1.8˚C by 2100. 

Does all this mean that our future is out at sea? Both Biswas Joy and Rabukawaqa are hopeful. There were good things that came out of COP26, like the deforestation pledge and the fact that decades of activism by small island nations — or large ocean states, as they like to call themselves, Rabukawaqa jokes — have finally moved the needle on fossil fuels. Biswas Joy plans to continue his activism — and vote, when he is finally old enough. “Tomorrow, we come in, we try again,” says Rabukawaqa. “It’s big work.” But for her, “Optimism is not a choice. We have to do this.” She laughs, contagiously.   

*[Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Cyclone Idai alone caused $3.2 billion worth of damage in Mozambique in 2019. This article was updated at 16:45 GMT on December 13, 2021.]

*[With thanks to  for his help with fact-checking the article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Uncertain Times in a World Without American Hegemony

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The of “The Limits to Growth,” the result of the work of an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that “The earth’s interlocking resources — the global system of nature in which we all live — probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology.”  

Common But Differentiated Responsibilities

Fast forward four decades, and nothing has fundamentally changed. Quite the contrary: The dramatic rise of China over the past 30 years is to a large extent owed to spectacular growth rates. According to Professor at the University of New South Wales, from the early 1980s to today, “China’s annual GDP has grown from US$361 billion to US$14,720 billion. That’s a nearly 41-fold increase, or a rate of 13.2% a year. Over the same period the US economy grew from US$5.96 trillion to $20.94 trillion, a growth rate of 4.3%.”

One of the most important consequences of economic growth has been a substantial reduction in the number of poor. In fact, comparative studies on inequality by and others show a significant decline in global and between-country inequality. This is to a large extent the result of the rise of China.

As the authors of a recently published study , the decline in global inequality “is mainly due to fast economic growth in China, which has progressively approached the global mean in income. This has narrowed inequalities between countries by significantly improving the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people.”

At the same time, however, poverty persists in many parts of the developing world. And if Jason Hickel, the noted author of “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions,” is , this is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future. Hickel’s assessment is rather disheartening. Taking living on $1.25 a day as an “aspirational target,” he concludes that it would take a century to eradicate poverty at current rates.

At a “more realistic — but still very low — $5 a day,” it would take “an epochal 207 years to eradicate it.” If this is not depressing enough, Hickel notes that reaching the $5 target would mean that “global GDP would have to increase 175 times.” So much for the limits to growth.

Hickel’s argument is all about inequality and the fundamental unfairness and injustice inherent in the international system. Nowhere is this most evident today than when it comes to climate change and global warming. In a 2020 , Hickel analyzes a wealth of data to quantify national “contributions” to cumulative CO2 emissions “in excess of the planetary boundary” defined as 350 ppm; last year, emissions stood at over .

The findings are striking. As of 2015, the global north was responsible for 92% of emissions. China certainly has a point when it insists on the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective responsibilities” enshrined in the UN Convention on Climate Change.

Hickel’s approach is grounded in the principle of “equal per capita access to the atmospheric commons.” This is one of the main principles behind the notion of climate justice. Climate justice concerns both the question of responsibility for climate change and its impact on different, particularly populations, such as the poor, the elderly and women. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has , “as is always the case, the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit.”

Treadmill of Production

This brings us back to The Limits of Growth. Its central idea is the recognition that the assumption of the limitless potential for economic growth, which informs both market liberalism and Marxist materialism, is a highly dangerous chimera that needs to be abandoned. Unfortunately, this idea never gained much traction — and that is putting it mildly. Instead, growth continues to be propagated as a panacea, nowadays in sustainability garbs.

Richard Holden’s article on the slowing down of China’s growth rate makes the point, noting the importance of the Chinese market for the country down under: “The more China’s per capita GDP grows, the greater its demand not just for iron ore and coal but also wine, lobsters, beef, education and overseas holidays.”

In a similar vein, a recent Bloomberg focusing on the repercussions of China’s falling birthrate stated: “To ensure economic growth doesn’t slow in line with the population drag, Beijing will need to undertake a challenging shift in its growth model, rapidly increasing spending on pensions and health care while maintaining a high-level of corporate and state investment in order to upgrade its vast industrial sector.” In this way, China would be able “to propel global demand for commodities in the coming decades, while its gray consumers become a vast market for multinationals, with a huge pool of pension savings targeted by global finance companies.”

This is what it means to be caught in what Dean Curran, from the University of Calgary, calls the “” — a state where the “constant search for economic growth leads to advanced economies being stuck on a ‘treadmill,’ where their well-being is not improved by economic growth, yet the impacts of this pursuit of growth causes massive, unsustainable environmental damages.” It follows the same logic that has informed the message propagated by advanced northern capitalist countries for decades, and which, these days, makes China an attractive model for a growing number of developing countries.

Yet, as , today, China is on the brink of surpassing its “fair share” boundary and is well on its way to becoming a net contributor to climate breakdown.

There is widespread agreement — at least among ecologically-minded scientists — that economic growth is among the major causes of global emissions and, consequently, climate change. In fact, in its 2014 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated as much when it noted that between 2000 and 2010, the of economic growth to CO2 emission had “risen sharply.” A from the same year put it rather laconically: “higher growth rates yield higher emissions.”

A Message No One Wants to Hear

This is, of course, a message nobody wants to hear if for no other reason than that it calls into question the whole development paradigm and, with it, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which, as Aisha and Partha Dasgupta have put it, are “in all likelihood unsustainable.”

The focus of the Gupta study is population growth, a second factor few are prepared to raise these days. And for good reasons. As has rightly charged, more often than not, what drives “overpopulation narratives” is nothing more than thinly disguised racism: “Most population control arguments focus on developing countries with negligible environmental impacts, rather than affluent white countries — which upholds white supremacy.”

While true, this argument fails to take into account the dynamics set in motion by the success of the Chinese model and its attraction in developing countries. This model, however, is unsustainable. A recent by Swiss Re, the world’s second-largest reinsurance company based in Zurich, makes the point. Business as usual, meaning no significant actions taken to drastically curb emissions, would mean that by the mid-century, China’s GDP would fall by a quarter, the US and Europe would see a 10% decline and global output would drop by 18% as a result of climate change.

Growth and development are to a large extent dependent on energy. Energy, in turn, comes to a large extent from fossil fuels, such as natural gas, oil and particularly coal. In China alone, since the beginning of the new millennium, coal production increased three-fold, reaching around 4 billion tons. In fact, this year, coal production is expected to reach a historic high, and it’s unlikely to reverse in the immediate future, resulting in a further increase in the country’s contribution to global warming.

In fact, between 1988 and 2015, emissions from the accounted for more than 14% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions. India, another developing country relying on coal for energy, accounted for less than 2% percent. No wonder India insisted at the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow on watering down the language on coal, changing from “phasing out” to “phasing down.”

Catching up requires growth; growth, in turn, adds to emissions. The case of African development provides a drastic illustration of the resulting dilemma. Projections are that by 2050, the population of sub-Saharan Africa will have doubled. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the dramatic increase in the size of the working-age population in the region “an opportunity for accelerated economic growth thanks to a favourable population age distribution. To benefit from this ‘demographic dividend’, governments should invest in education and health, especially for young people, and create conditions conducive to sustained economic growth.”

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On the basis of the projection of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa by 2100 — a 3-billion increase — the Dasgupta study illustrates what it would entail raising incomes there to the current global average income of 15,000 international dollars: “an increase in the region’s annual output from 3.5 to 60 trillion dollars.”

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 on the “tragedy of the commons,” or the conflict between the individual and the collective, is among the most cited in the social sciences. Hardin wrote that “it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite.” The immediate future is now. The lesson, however, has still not sunk in. Or, perhaps, it has — and it’s just too painful to digest.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The British Radical Right’s Connection to the Past

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Historian and broadcaster David Olusoga with force against the idea that decolonizing was simply about banning white authors, as the report suggested. True, deep decolonization of the curriculum is about representing the experiences of all people within the subjects offered and giving expression to those often rendered voiceless by traditional histories. But what place does this have in the study and history of the radical right in Britain?

Diverse Sources

Though many of the groups we study, especially those of the far and extreme right, are small and ultimately have very little impact on Britain as a whole, we should not underplay the harm that these organiztaions and their activity often inflict on the communities they target. This can be through the creation of a culture that is permissive of violence, as was argued by the made by Searchlight — an archive of materials documenting the activity of fascist and racist organizations — to the Macpherson Inquiry, or indeed in a more targeted fashion against those they felt in conflict with, as I’ve about previously. 

The actions of these groups, and the material they produce, not only speak to events in our broader sociopolitical history in Britain but also to the specific experiences of those groups targeted by the far right, such as the Jewish and black communities. While including these community experiences is an important first step, to truly answer David Olusoga’s call to give a voice to those previously marginalized, decolonization must also include the use of sources from both the radical right and its targets.

Of course, we must also be careful not to reduce community experiences to simply the opposition and hatred directed toward them. But we also must not ignore those experiences. Studying the radical right and the use of its material is one way we can engage with that.

Recently, at the University of Northampton, the team has been undertaking a funded exploration of how material related to radical activity can be used to not just teach our own undergraduates but to engage the wider public with this history. This culminated in a one-day workshop in December last year that brought together academics, archivists, librarians, digital resource providers and others to help explore best practices from a range of perspectives. A best practice guide will soon be made available based on the findings.

Not only did the workshop underline the importance of studying radical movements and their materials in terms of broader student engagement and attainment, but it also demonstrated the possibility to engage people from broader and more diverse backgrounds with history as a discipline. Examining the actions of the extreme right gives an opportunity to examine the responses from communities and activists, whose voices are often ignored or minimized due to their lack of scholarly standing.

These responses and the material, however, can be problematic given the circumstances of their creation. It is important that this material is used in a sensitive way, with the affected communities engaged in its curation.

Building the Next Generation

This engagement with the community can also have great benefits in the classroom. As the Runnymede Trust in 2015, although black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students make up around a quarter of all school-age children, they only represent 8.7% of those studying historical or philosophical subjects at an undergraduate level. This means there are few trainee teachers specializing in history who come from a BAME background.

One of the solutions proposed by Runnymede for the secondary curriculum is a better approach to teaching the history of migration in Britain and the impacts of colonialism. Part of this history is the reaction against migration and decolonization, driven by the radical right, and teaching it at the undergraduate level will help prepare the next generation of teachers to tackle these curriculum changes. 

More than that, however, it makes the history curriculum more attractive to BAME students when they see their experiences taught and valued as part of British history. A more diverse classroom, representing greater experiences, helps stimulate discussion and, in turn, peer learning. undertaken at Northampton has shown that engagement increased when material from the radical right was used in the courses. Engagement increases attainment and can also be a step to tackling the recognized in British universities between white British and other ethnic groups.

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In telling the stories of how the radical-right narrative against migration took hold and how it was opposed by anti-fascist movements and by community responses, the study of the radical right has an important part to play in decolonizing the curriculum. Through engagement with primary sources that reflect these experiences, we can deliver deep decolonization that allows for thoughtful conversation and impactful learning experiences.

We can help provide the opportunity for related subjects to recruit more diverse student populations and, in doing so, be part of generational change. As more diverse students go into teaching history, as well as into archive and heritage roles, they will be able to make the decisions on how history is preserved and presented.

If the decolonization of the curriculum were indeed a shallow and tokenistic effort that simply seeks to ban white authors as the Sewell Report seems to suggest, it would indeed have been at the very least a wasted opportunity, if not actively harmful. However, that is not what decolonizing the curriculum is. In studying the radical right, we have an opportunity to not only engage people with difficult histories but to do so using innovative sources and to engage outside of academia. That is an opportunity we must take.

 *[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On Sunday, he Congressman John Curtis, a Republican who uncharacteristically acknowledges the reality of climate change. If only other countries emulated the US, all would be well. Knowles politely challenges Curtis with this observation: “The Republican Party has been way behind when it comes to accepting the reality of climate change.”

COP26: Can People Power Save the World?

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Curtis jumps on the occasion to wax sentimental about a trip to the top of a mountain as a Boy Scout that left him with a “deep desire to leave this Earth better than we found it.”&�Բ�����;He concludes: “I actually think all conservatives, Republicans, have those same feelings — maybe some stronger than others.” In the US, feelings always trump action.

To close the interview, Knowles poses an even more obsequious rhetorical question to Curtis: “Should the U.S. be prepared to lead with new commitments in terms of reaching net-zero emissions?” This allows Curtis to have the last uncontested word as a cheerleader for the Republican Party, generously committed, as always, to responding to the world’s needs: “Republicans want all options and hands on deck to solve this problem.”

Knowles’ Tuesday article focused on the made by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He misleadingly quotes the New York representative as asserting that “America is back.” Knowles failed to mention what The New York Times’ Lisa Friedman , namely that the celebrated member of “The Squad” traveled to Glasgow as part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional delegation. It consisted of 20 Democrats making the trip under the banner of “America is back” slogan as a PR operation for the Biden administration and the still imperiled and largely insufficient Build Back Better bill.

Knowles’ article devoted to Ocasio-Cortez maintains to the very end that the US commitment to solving the climate crisis is already underway and is destined to succeed. In contrast, Friedman details the reasons why none of the legislation Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi are championing in Glasgow has been passed. She explains why it may not be passed, largely due to opposition by Democrats such as Joe Manchin to its cost. It goes without saying that Curtis’ Republicans will unanimously oppose the bill.

On Monday, Knowles produced an article based on an with Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. Among the various quotes, Power praised her boss in these terms: “President Biden is the first president to declare fighting corruption a national security imperative, and of course he considers the climate crisis a national security threat.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Fighting corruption:

A mission adopted by one type of regime whose policies are determined by moneyed interests against other types of regimes whose policies are determined by moneyed interests

Contextual Note

In a 2006 in “Third World Quarterly,” Alice Hills noted that the George W. Bush administration “broadened the remit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in such a way as to make it a quasi-security agency.” In other words, an agency presumably dedicated to helping the developing world become fully integrated into the security state and the military-industrial complex.

This was already the trend well before the Bush administration. As by France’s School of Economic Warfare, “the CIA nevertheless uses USAID to infiltrate certain political milieux, for example in Latin America, to destabilize socialist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.”

That is why Knowles can be accused of a certain lack of curiosity when he uncritically reports Power’s formulation of USAID’s mission with regard to the climate crisis: “We want to do more to help countries around the world, especially developing countries, accelerate their clean-energy transition, address pollution, and ensure the world we all must share a cleaner, safer, healthiest planet. And we have an obligation to help.”

Instead of challenging her on the operations USAID engages in and on its ambiguous role in geopolitics, he takes this statement as proof that “Power firmly believes that creating climate equity is a moral imperative.”

Power applauds President Joe Biden’s “pledge to donate $3 billion annually to help developing nations adapt to climate change.” But she “acknowledged that addressing rampant corruption in countries that will need those funds could prove challenging.” Having made such a complaint, one can only presume that Power is aware of how corruption works. But there may be good reasons to suspect some hypocrisy.

The idea she puts forward is that of a generous rich nation, the US, giving away money to small, struggling nations that are somehow afflicted with a cultural disease known as systemic corruption. This means that money made available by magnanimous benefactors is routinely stuffed into the pockets of self-interested local politicians. How regrettable that these backward people have retained such uncivilized and unproductive behavior.

Presumably, Power has, at some point, found the time to consult John Perkins’ , “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” who defined in his preface what the job he exercised when he worked for Chas T Main consultants consists of: “They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.” They “cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.”

Power presents things a little differently. The problem isn’t the operations conducted by global businesses working hand in hand with the CIA. Instead, it’s the fact that the poor countries of the world haven’t solved a problem that no longer exists in the US — corruption: “I think it’s really important for donor countries to do what the United States has done, which is to elevate the anti-corruption agenda and mainstream it across development financing.”

Historical Note

Although both Perkins and Power have conducted their professional lives in the same context, their views could not be more divergent. Is it possible that Power hasn’t had time to read Perkins’ book? Or does she believe that what he doesn’t exist? The real problem is that they have two different views not just of the political organization but of history and the notion of corruption.

Corruption has existed throughout history. It is a standard feature of human relations. At its simplest level, it is an exchange of favors between two people. It becomes more complex when those favors create a conflict with other interests, responsibilities and stated moral commitments.

The truly complicating factor is money, precisely because, unlike a lot of personal favors, it has no . The greatest contribution to the history of the shared Anglo-Saxon civilization initiated by England and perfected by the US was to put money at the core not only of all human activity but of morality itself. When financial success becomes the unique measure of social respectability and when personal interest is elevated above social responsibility, corruption becomes a way of life.

The greatest innovation came with globalization, an inevitable consequence of 500 years dedicated to colonial conquest. It enabled wealthy countries to create a sophisticated, indirect system of corruption that they could even call democracy while condemning the more primitive type of corruption that consists of granting direct favors. Democracy that depends on corporate financing of politicians’ electoral campaigns is an example of systematic, institutionalized corruption.

This is now considered moral. Political leaders of formerly colonized countries who skim money off from aid or loans offered by wealthy nations and corporations provide the example of traditional, “immoral” corruption.

In a series of decisions, the US Supreme Court formalized the distinction between the absolute domination of money over politics — now considered normal and moral — and immoral corruption. Conveniently, people like Joe Manchin are normal (i.e., not corrupt), but leaders of African countries who are manipulated by corporations and supported by the US security state can be critiqued as not living up to the high standards of American democracy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Syrian Women Find a New Life in Germany

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Most opted for the convenient and electable option of telling voters what they wanted to hear. In doing so, many made use of a new in-vogue and almost bipartisan that Germany must not see a repeat of what happened in 2015, invoking fear of uncontrolled immigration and a split society that supposedly followed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to grant entry to nearly six years ago.

But this framing oversimplifies, decontextualizes and exaggerates the events of that year. Most of all, it denies a shared responsibility for Afghanistan’s current predicament and the human stories behind the German-Afghan migration history that spans four decades.

A History of Afghan Migration

According to the UN Refugee Agency,  Afghan refugees lived in Germany in 2020, trailing only Pakistan and Iran as the largest receiving countries. At the same time, 1,592 live in the US and 9,351 in the UK. Afghan  to Germany dates back to the first half of the 20^th century, yet until the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, only 2,000 Afghans lived in Germany.

Historically, immigration to Germany varied vastly relative to the conflict phases in Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion in 1979, approximately 3,000 Afghans arrived in Germany each year from 1980 to 1982. The second phase of immigration followed from 1985 onward, when predominantly Afghan communists sought refuge in Germany.

The largest movement of Afghan refugees began with the end of Soviet occupation in 1989 and the start of the Afghan Civil War in 1992. Restrictions and expulsions imposed by the riparian states of Iran and Pakistan forced many Afghans to choose Germany as an alternative migration destination.

With the mujahedeen victory and the  of the Taliban, migration to Germany increased drastically until the mid-1990s before numbers declined steadily. Since 2010, with the resurgence of the Taliban, the number of Afghan refugees heading toward Germany has rebounded continuously. While 9,115 Afghans initially applied for asylum in 2014, this figure almost  to 127,012 in 2016.

Since then, the number of Afghan refugees significantly, from 16,423 in 2017 to 9,901 in 2020. The causes for this decrease can be found both on the European and national level, in policies enacted in response to the 2015 refugee crisis. In March 2016, as part of the , European Union member states provided financial support for Turkey to take back irregular migrants, mostly from Greece. In the same year, the EU concluded the Joint Way Forward with Afghanistan to ease “the return and readmission of irregular Afghan migrants from the EU to Afghanistan.”

On a national level, German information attempted to dissipate alleged rumors about lavish living conditions in Germany. Other measures, such as restrictions to family reunifications, might have also had an impact.

A New Phase of Immigration

After the fall of the government of Ashraf Ghani, a new phase of Afghan immigration is likely. Its extent will be subject to political will. Initially, Germany responded quickly to the Taliban takeover by adapting its asylum policies by halting deportations to Afghanistan. That represented a significant shift. Before, in a controversial attempt to appease the German population after support had waned for Merkel’s refugee policy, more Afghans were forced back to their home country as some areas were declared safe. 

But Germany has been timid in its response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. As of now, fewer than 3,000 Afghans have been to Germany. It seems that six years later, Merkel’s so-called “open door” approach still casts an overwhelming shadow over German politics and is a strong impetus for the tentative approach toward aiding Afghan refugees today.

The issue of migration has become a hot potato that German politicians were keen to avoid during the election campaign. If addressed, candidates were likely to try to outdo each other in using restrictive immigration rhetoric in an attempt not to alienate voters.

During the election campaign, the chairman of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and candidate for the chancellorship, Armin Laschet, tried to capitalize on an immigration-weary German society by that 2015 “must not be repeated.” While this phrase failed to inspire a successful campaign, as the election results show, it aptly reflects the public mood: According to a  published in June, 60% of Germans reject accepting more refugees.

This collective backtracking by Germany’s political class casts an unwarranted bad light on the decisions made in 2015. Essentially, it capitulates to the far right — particularly the Alternative for Germany — in its interpretation of that period. According to journalist Anna Thewalt in Der Tagesspiegel, “with a truncated reference to the year, the events of that time are decontextualized and exposed to myth-making.”

Margarete Stokowski, a correspondent for Der Spiegel, the cynicism and the lack of empathy in the shifting political climate against refugees: “2015 was the year in which civil society accomplished much of what politics could not or did not want to. … What must not be repeated is politicians treating fleeing people like nuclear waste they don’t know what to do with.”

To the relief of many German and European politicians, a scenario similar to 2015 is unlikely to materialize. Many Afghans already face barriers and restrictions in Pakistan and Iran, stymieing a journey to Europe. According to , a sociologist at Kiel University of Applied Sciences, 2015 “will not be repeated in Europe. Afghan refugees simply don’t make it to Europe because the borders are sealed. The border regime that was established during the so-called refugee crisis is working. Afghan refugees are a minority on all main routes to Europe.”

Migration as Misfortune

In light of the human tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the rhetoric in German politics that dismisses migration as  is not only lacking empathy, but avoids the responsibility for the country’s 21-year military involvement in a failed Afghanistan mission. German armed forces were part of the 2001 multinational International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mandate and initially helped to secure Kabul after the defeat of the Taliban.

From 2003 onward, German soldiers were largely deployed to the northern region of Kunduz to establish a secure environment and improve infrastructure. This mission came under severe criticism due to a military exercise on September 4, 2009, when a German commander ordered the bombing of two tankers, feared to be stolen by Taliban fighters, resulting in 142 casualties, most of them civilians.

Despite increasing public scrutiny and doubts about the purpose of Germany’s involvement, its armed forces remained in Afghanistan until 2021, participating in Operation Resolute Support to advise and train local armed forces after the ISAF mandate ended in 2014.

Not only does the anti-immigration rhetoric shut its eyes to the military involvement with loss of civilian life, but it also ignores the history of Afghan migration and the human stories behind it. The of 2015 demonizes refugees “who came to Germany … started a new life here under difficult circumstances and are now part of society. What are they supposed to think now when they hear this?” asks Anna Thewalt.

Particularly Afghan women, for whom fleeing to Germany was the path to freedom and self-determination, are struggling to reenact the rising anti-migration sentiment. One of them is Adela Yamini, who had fled from Kabul to Germany in 1994 to escape the mujahedeen. She now lives in the state of Hesse, in the Rhine-Main region near Frankfurt, to a large proportion of Afghans. During her 27 years in Germany, she has thrived and excelled as a teacher in a vocational school and a local party chairwoman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The recent developments in her homeland filled her with great concern and horror, as escape routes that were open to her many years ago are now closed to Afghan women. “I am overjoyed that as a woman I could flee Afghanistan and study and work in Germany. … It is terrible just to think that as a woman you have no way out and are locked up forever and ever. … When I see the pictures and hear from my relatives what they are going through, I am at a loss for words and I can’t find the language to comfort them, to reassure them,” she wrote in an email.

Yamini believes that the German government needs to face up to responsibility in light of its military involvement by supporting Afghan people “who are currently in acute danger to leave the country.” For that, “bureaucratic hurdles must be overcome and people without passports or visas should be taken out of the country.”

As of now, she sees the current German government as avoiding its duty to those who supported its mission in Afghanistan. According to Yamini, by trying not to “scare off voters,” this responsibility is foisted off to a “future government” due to the events of 2015 which were “not discussed appropriately.”

Since 2001, Germany has taken in more refugees from Afghanistan than many other countries that were capable or had a moral obligation to do so. Instead of building on that legacy, Germany is caving into false doom-and-gloom narratives around the events of 2015 that do not correspond with the realities on the ground today. According to , of the German Institute for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), “Germany would be much better prepared today to receive refugees — both at the level of civil society and in terms of improved accommodation capacities as well as integration measures.”

One pretext against further immigration is that Afghans find integration particularly hard. This is not reflected in reality as high employment of Afghan refugees in Germany exemplify. That is even more remarkable in light of government measures that had an inhibiting effect on the integration of Afghan refugees. According to , also of DeZIM, “German integration policy … has disadvantaged Afghan refugees for years in their access to integration-promoting measures because as a group they have not had so-called ‘good prospects of staying’ in recent years.”

As soon as the obstacles are lifted, Afghans prove their willingness to integrate into German society. When refugees were allowed to complete shortened apprenticeships in understaffed professions in , it was mostly Afghans who seized the opportunity. Already in 2016, from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees showed that Afghans in particular, who are often young and low-skilled, are seeking to complete school education and vocational training.

New Government, Same Inhibition

Following the results of the recent election, the end of the Merkel era is imminent. That era will not only be associated with the courageous decisions of 2015 but also the hasty, scowling renunciation of those policies. There won’t be another policy shift in the foreseeable future, even with the upcoming change of government.

That was indicated by Olaf Scholz, of the SPD, who is likely to take over the chancellorship by forming a coalition with the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats. During an election campaign appearance, he for Afghan refugees — as long as this takes place as far away from Germany’s front door as possible: “This time we will have to make sure that those who are also seeking protection in neighboring countries are not left alone, as was often the case in the past. Instead, we have to do everything in our power to ensure that there are prospects for integration, that they can stay there, that they can have a secure future there.”

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With this statement, Scholz conceded that an affirmative discourse on migration to Germany is a hornet’s nest. For the time being, Germany is preoccupied with its own problems. By describing the events of 2015 as catastrophic for the country, portraying migration as bad fortune and disparaging successful integration, Germany’s political class has succumbed to the narratives of the far right. As a result, this retoric has fed and reinforced the public’s negative attitudes toward migration. Meanwhile, the suffering in Afghanistan, particularly among its women, slips from public view.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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According to the , abortion was so dangerous that in 1965, roughly 17% of deaths relating to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortions. The shocking statistic is unsurprising given that in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of illegal procedures ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.

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Women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and women of color were disproportionately affected by strict regulations as many couldn’t afford to travel to places where they could obtain a legal abortion. The levels of morbidity and mortality among this demographic were astounding. While among white women as a result of abortion stood at one in four in New York City in the early 1960s, the number was one in two for nonwhite and Puerto Rican women.

Born out of this predicament was the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, also known as the , founded by Heather Booth as an underground service headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The main goal of the “Service,” as it became known, was to assist women in gaining access to safe and affordable abortions. Many women who were part of Jane were taught to perform abortions for others in need and did so successfully without a medical license. 

Laura Kaplan, a member of Jane and of “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” was not surprised when Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law one of the country’s strictest abortion rules, banning the procedure from as early as six weeks into pregnancy, but she was angry: “I am outraged by this, but even more than Texas, I am the most angry at the Supreme Court’s decision to let this blatantly unconstitutional ruling stand.”

The six-week mark stipulated by the new legislation means that many women will be barred from accessing abortion services before they even realize they are pregnant. The legislators went a step further by incentivizing private citizens to report and sue providers or anyone helping a woman get an abortion for $10,000.

Under the new law, the government doesn’t enforce the bill — the private citizens of Texas do. This provision was designed to make the law harder to contest in court, but lawsuits are expected. The US Department of Justice has already mounted a , positing that it stands “in open defiance of the Constitution.”

At the same time, several Latin American countries are loosening their restrictions on abortions. “Predominantly Catholic countries like Argentina and Mexico are making progress, while we are moving backwards,” says Kaplan. 

Could there be a return of Jane in Texas now that abortion rights are being curtailed? “Women are not going to let women suffer,” says Kaplan. “We didn’t back then.” Starting in 1969, Jane groups popped up all over the country, with women finding their way to one of the services when they were in need.

After New York state legalized abortion, it changed the landscape. White middle-class women could get on a plane and get to New York, but it meant that many young, poor and many women of color were left behind. Kaplan thinks history may repeat itself: “Women with the most need didn’t have access to abortion and that will happen again.”

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It’s important to note that after abortion was legalized, less than 0.3% of women, regardless of age, experienced serious complications post-procedure. If the real debate is about the preservation of life — and, indeed, the sanctity of life — we have to look beyond the life of the developing fetus and to the life of the mother as well. 

Any rational policy should look at promoting access to birth control and prioritizing the health of the mother by assuring that she has access to safe procedures. Outlawing abortion doesn’t work — the story of the Jane Collective has shown that. It won’t change people’s motivation to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

As a democratic society, we don’t want to throw ourselves back to an underworld that offers subpar care, creates a greater public health problem and endangers the health of women.

*[The Wider Lens provides commentary on trending stories in the world of health, covering a wide variety of topics in medicine and health care.]

The post Return of Jane: Would Stricter Rules Bring Back Illegal Abortion? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Pew survey  shows that while most Americans (59%) believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a sizeable minority (39%) still believe that it should not. More troubling, these trends have remained more or less stable over the last quarter of a century. In 1995, 60% of Americans supported the legalization of abortion while 38% didn’t; in 2009, only 47% supported its legalization while 44% did not.

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Compare these statistics with  on same-sex marriage. In 2002, 35% favored legalizing same-sex marriage, while 57% opposed it. Support has risen steadily over the years, with the tables now completely flipped, with 61% for and 31% against legalization. Why, then, has a controversial issue like legalizing same-sex marriage garnered so much public support, even among some conservatives, while abortion remains a source of profound division?

A Point of Division

Columnist  argues that although both issues are highly polarizing, their underlying values are fundamentally different. Unlike abortion, same-sex marriage strengthens an age-old conservative institution — matrimony. Thus, even though the institution of marriage is rooted in patriarchy, queer-erasure, racial inequality and exclusivism, most same-sex marriage proponents don’t advocate for its annihilation. Rather, they call for it to be more inclusive, welcoming and non-discriminatory.

The right of access to safe abortion, on the other hand, calls for a much more radical reclaiming of a woman’s bodily autonomy at the expense of the unborn child. Herein lies another crucial difference between the two issues. While opposition to same-sex marriage primarily stems from religious conservatives and moral crusaders, one could still argue that legalizing marriage for sexual minorities would in no way trample upon heterosexual people’s right to marry. This argument was explicitly laid out in .

The question of abortion rights, however, implies that any substantive extension of reproductive rights for women would effectively entail a concomitant curtailment of the rights of unborn children. This is an issue that irks not just conservatives and moralists, but many women as well. , the plaintiff in , is a prominent example of this.

While articulating his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that legalizing same-sex marriage was at odds with the US Constitution not only because of the way traditional marriage was strictly understood but because it was, in his opinion, not the court’s duty to reconstitute the meaning of marriage for a certain group of people who were never deprived of their liberty in the juridical sense.

More significantly, the court stated that although the First Amendment allowed people of faith to expressly oppose same-sex marriage if they so wished, faith alone could not be used to deny equal rights to same-sex couples.

The political and legal debates around abortion are far more complex. Not only is abortion  by a majority of white evangelical Protestants (77%) and by a sizeable group of Catholics (43%), most of them also uphold the extra-judicial rights of the unborn by cleverly deploying science to refute pro-choice arguments.

The Rights of the Unborn

In “Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice,” Francis J. Beckwith, professor of philosophy and jurisprudence at Baylor University, that the fetus must be considered a “full-fledged member of the human community,” meaning it was entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other living being.

Beckwith’s arguments are not theological. Rather, they are grounded in legal theory and philosophy. In a scathing critique of Roe v. Wade, he posits this critique: “What is it, then, about that vaginal passageway that changes the child’s nature in such a significant fashion that it may be killed without justification before exit but only with justification post-exit?”&�Բ�����;Indeed, this question continues to haunt pro-choice advocates.

Some of Beckwith’s postulates were by Dean Stretton, who argued that the unborn fetus could not be accorded the same rights as the living. However, popular opinion on this issue remains split, with influential young conservatives like  and  aggressively galvanizing support among women for the pro-life movement, effectively the notion that it is primarily men who are trying to control women’s bodies.

Indeed, to frame the abortion debate solely through the lens of women’s rights may not be completely correct given that 37% of American women continue to . A more appropriate framing, perhaps, could be to challenge the extra-judicial status of the unborn child and to argue against extending constitutional protections to embryos and fetuses.

Indeed, if judicial conservatives like Clarence Thomas truly see themselves as textualists, then surely even they would appreciate the fact that the intended meaning of the Constitution was never to extend protections to those who even its framers didn’t recognize as “people.”

Science and the Pro-Life Movement

For decades, sexual minorities in the United States and around the world were vilified by the scientific community for embodying an “” and “” sexual identity. In 1973, homosexuality was finally  as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association after years of advocacy. Today, almost all globally recognized and respected psychiatric bodies have followed suit.

Meanwhile, the  of homosexuality are being studied. While there exists little to no scientific consensus about whether sexual orientation is biologically determined or socially constructed,  for homosexual people has doubled in the past three decades, more so than for any other group over the same period in the United States. This is reflected in the increasing support for same-sex marriage over the years.

With abortion rights, however, not only is public opinion more divided, but there is ongoing discourse within the realms of science, religion and philosophy about what constitutes human consciousness and “being”— a key question at the heart of the abortion debate. While delivering the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun took the stand that even though a right to privacy was not explicitly enshrined in the US Constitution at the time, the appellant (Roe) was entitled to it while seeking an abortion. However, such a right could not be absolute and had to be curtailed by the state to protect potential life.

Furthermore, the court refrained from answering the question of when and where life began. Instead, the court saw itself as rightfully positioned to interfere with a woman’s pregnancy only at the point of viability, when the fetus would be able to survive outside the womb. This point was determined to be after the first trimester. In other words, even though the majority opinion upheld a woman’s right to abortion, the court also carefully balanced its decision to protect potential life.

In a later Supreme Court decision in , Roe v. Wade was upheld in a bitter 5-4 decision (as opposed to 7-2 in Roe), but new legislative standards were introduced to safeguard potential life. This decision also overruled Roe’s rigid trimester system, giving individual states the power to restrain a woman’s right to abortion even in the first trimester, subject to a number of restrictions.

Both pro-life and pro-choice activists were  by the Casey ruling because it was seen as an unholy compromise by both sides. On the one hand, Casey reaffirmed Roe, but, on the other, it wiped away the blanket first trimester abortion protection. The court also observed that because of scientific and medical advancements, the point of viability could no longer be biologically fixed at the first trimester.

Overturning Roe

The  on the US Supreme Court is set to hear , which directly challenges Roe v. Wade, later this year. Given the lack of ethical, moral, spiritual and scientific consensus on what constitutes conscious existence, it is plausible that the court may either overturn its landmark ruling or water it down by expanding the constitutional protections of the unborn and reassessing the constitutional meaning of potential life and viability. 

Abortion rights activists are right to worry — the Supreme Court has its own judgments in the past. Moreover, in her confirmation hearing, Judge Amy Coney Barrett underscored that she did not view Roe v. Wade as a , meaning that if she and her conservative-leaning colleagues on the court deemed it appropriate, they could collectively overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case.

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According to the , all jurisdictions in North America and Western Europe have at present decriminalized abortion in some form. In an unexpected twist,  struck down a restrictive abortion law in the northern state of Coahuila just a few days after the neighboring US state of Texas passed its . The Department of Justice has sued the state of Texas over the new legislation, but the measure is migrants in Texas to consider returning to Mexico to access safe abortion.

As the US Supreme Court reconvenes to hear the Dobbs case, it will be interesting to observe how this new bench defines personhood. Remember, the judges in Roe v. Wade defined a person strictly in the postnatal sense. If personhood is indeed extended to include the unborn, then women in America could face anything from a near-total to complete abortion ban similar to the kind currently in force in Texas.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The key to success is linking the two bills together, thus avoiding that one might be passed and the other rejected. Various Democrats deemed “moderate” have promised to torpedo the effort, creating serious suspense in Washington this week.

Though not known for being progressive herself, Pelosi has the marketing sense to understand that the one positively attractive feature of Biden’s successful presidential campaign was his promise to be the Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the 21^st century. He promised to transform the economy and the political culture as FDR did in the 1930s, ushering the US out of the Great Depression.

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With that in mind, Pelosi recently boasted to Los Angeles Times’ Washington columnist Doyle McManus that Biden’s $3.5-trillion bill is “transformational.” As a serious journalist seeking to achieve “balance” (while pleasing his editors), McManus decided to interview someone more credible than an aging professional politician. Knowing where to seek the truth, the journalist contacted Democratic data scientist, political consultant and Obama loyalist, David Shor.

Asked about Pelosi’s characterization of the bill as transformational, Shor in the way true establishment Democrats have been trained to respond: “I would ban that word. Most people don’t want bold, inspirational change. They want bite-size things.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Bite-size:

The largest amount of knowledge or political thought that Democratic strategists, certain of their own elite status, believe the benighted class of consumers called voters are capable of digesting at any given time  

Contextual Note

The failure of the Democrats to learn any lessons from recent history seems mind-boggling at times. Could Shor have failed to notice that after Hillary Clinton referred to ordinary Americans tempted to vote for a candidate other than herself as “deplorables,” she lost the election to Donald Trump? Trump was judged at the time to be the most unlikeable, unelectable presidential candidate in the history of American politics.

Despite the party’s faith in the wisdom of data scientists like Shor, Clinton still managed to fail. Data analysts famously isolate particular issues for polling and collate all the individual responses. They separate reality into the bite-sized chunks they themselves feel comfortable with and then compare the results using sophisticated algorithms. Unfortunately, individual preferences analyzed in isolation do not always correlate with broader trends and collective social reality. 

Shor believes that politicians must choose between transformation and bite-sized reforms. Observers less influenced by raw data noticed that Trump, instead of choosing, managed to do two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. He offered his voters a few bite-size things — slogans instead of ideas — but he also projected the will to be radically transformational in an attack on political orthodoxy.

What this reveals, not just about the Democratic Party and the Los Angeles Times but also about the media sympathetic to the Democrats, is less their belief that people want only the slightest incremental change than their ingrained allergy to anything that claims to upset the status quo. They supported Biden because he wasn’t the transformational Bernie Sanders. They never assumed he would try to deliver on his own transformational promise.

Shor believes change consists of proposing a marginal advantage on specific issues, such as lower prescription drug prices. But that cannot be called change. It’s recalibration. It aims at a minor adjustment in a system of governing that the public increasingly perceives as a dangerously faulty, if not failed system.

As a data scientist working in the political sphere at the core of the American consumer society, Shor focuses not on what society needs but on what the narrowly defined data shows individuals want. After the “bite-sized things,” he mentions the benefits of promoting “easy-to-describe things that people like.” This underscores the basic fact that has come to define almost all political action in the US. It has lost all interest in defining and addressing the needs of a complex society subjected to multiple crises. 

Instead, modern political science focuses exclusively on devising strategies to win — rather than earn — the votes of individual consumers. Voters are thus seen as mindless consumers of political discourse rather than partners in a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Winning elections is the only goal political actors can be focused on for any length of time. Emphasizing bite-sized ideas makes both the data analysts’ and their jobs easier.

After citing the fact that the party of an incumbent president “almost invariably loses seats two years after a presidential election,” the article builds to a conclusion, offered as the LA Times’ own distilled wisdom. “Their best chance to defy those odds,” McManus writes, “probably lies in passing a much slimmer budget plan — one that focuses, as Shor advises, on measures with broad public support.”

Historical Note

Following the Second World War, US political culture underwent a radical change. Before Pearl Harbor, the culture of isolationism dominated among the political class. Even though since the late 19^th century the US had used its military to stretch its influence across Latin America and the Pacific, its participation in the European and Pacific theaters of war clearly demonstrated the advantages of building an economy around the idea of an aggressively offensive interpretation of defense.

The experience of having an ideological enemy, Nazi Germany, led the strategists in Washington to welcome the opportunity to focus a new phase of economic development around a largely fantasized ideological battle with Soviet communism.

Since that time, the US economy has been literally addicted to a well-funded, deeply militarized economy. It includes fostering an attitude of worship of the military and celebration of the technology spawned by the military-industrial complex. Dwight Eisenhower was the first — and also the last — president to acknowledge and describe this reality.

The military-industrial complex has only expanded since his famous 1961 speech. The fact that no president since Eisenhower has dared to evoke its name indicates how unbalanced its influence has become. This has produced a culture in which spending on the military is always justified while responding to public needs is seen as an unjustified extravagance.

Business Insider features an by Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, in which she compares the actual cost of the war on terror with the transformations that could have been accomplished with only a part of that money. “Twenty years after 9/11,” she writes, “our thoroughly militarized foreign and domestic policies have come at a cost of $21 trillion over the last two decades, according to new research my coauthors and I published at the Institute for Policy Studies.”

The claims that if the money spent on the military had been allocated to other questions, the clearly transformational results would mean that Americans, but also many other earthlings, would now be living in a more human world.

According to Koshgarian, “$4.5 trillion could ,” “$2.3 trillion could create 5 million $15 per hour jobs with benefits and cost-of-living adjustments for 10 years,” “$1.7 trillion could ,” “$449 billion could for another 10 years,” “$200 billion could for every 3-and-4-year old for 10 years, and raise teacher pay,” and “$25 billion could for the population of low-income countries.”

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Had the money been spent that way, the US would still boast the most powerful military force in the history of the world and remain in the uncontested leader in terms of military power. But America’s consistently declining moral standing in the world, due essentially to its foreign policy, would exist on a totally different plane. In the light of these figures, Shor’s recommending a plan “half the size of the $3.5 trillion” Biden and Pelosi are pushing seems not only not transformational but risky for the future of a nation that continues to deny its own most pressing needs.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In July, for the second time now, a group of around a hundred protesters had gathered on the square right in front of the pharmacy to “Against Racism and Colonial Language.” They had followed a by the United Colors Of Change initiative to voice their disapproval at the name,  — Court Pharmacy at the Moor’s.

Remembering Germany’s Dark Colonial History

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This particular pharmacy is representative of more than a  with the word “Mohren” in their name across the country. They are at the center of the heated and unrelenting debate around systemic and structural racism, and the question of how to deal with Germany’s colonial past. It isn’t just pharmacies that bear this particular designation; it also appears in names of streets, restaurants, food and drinks.

Interpretational Sovereignty

The German word “Mohr”&�Բ�����; both from the Greek “Moros,” meaning foolish but also stupid, and from the Latin term “,” meaning black and dark, which the Romans used to describe the inhabitants of the empire’s province of Mauritania.

For critics like the protesters in Friedberg, the use of this term not only represents the use of language with colonialist connotations; they regard it as an expression of underlying, structural racism that legitimizes and perpetuates historically established balances of power and inequalities in the present.

Calling for a change of name, their purpose is to overturn racist inequalities inherent in the German language. Yet first and foremost, they plead for an awareness that recognizes the in the first place because “language creates reality and serves to establish and maintain social relations and systems and is the most important medium in people’s interactions with one another.” 

In this dispute over etymological sovereignty of interpretation, numerous renowned experts jumped to the protesters’ defense. According to , professor of English and Anglophone literature at Bayreuth University, the racist provenance of the M-word resembles the N-word. Both are often used synonymously and influenced by the idea “that people can be divided by race [and] skin color or … that there are supposedly two races that have mixed.”

Anatol Stefanowitsch, professor at the Institute of English Language and Literature at the Free University Berlin, the term a problematic foreign designation since Africans never called themselves that way. It stems from a time “in which there was — to put it kindly — a great ignorance as far as the various tribes in Africa are concerned.”

Only a handful of the affected pharmacies in Germany reacted to the criticism by changing their names. The Hof-Apotheke Zum Mohren in Friedberg is not one of them. The owner of the pharmacy refers back to an alternative  of the use of the term “Mohren” as a tribute to the Moors, who modern, advanced pharmacology from the Middle East to Europe.

Helmut Glück, a former professor of linguistics at Bamberg University, is one of the few linguists to undergird this positive interpretation. to Glück, the presumptions held by other linguists and the demonstrators are “based on ignorance of the linguistic and cultural-historical background.” He warns against an alleged Jacobean terror of virtue: “Moor is an old word. It is not used today to insult black people.” Yet a denial that the word is an “expression of coloniality” and has always been used as a foreign designation is nowhere to be found.

As to the dispute over the name of the Friedberg pharmacy, positions are more entrenched than ever and neither side is ready to give in. Debate and the sentiments around this particular Apotheke can serve as a blueprint for popular opinion in the whole country. Indeed, the owner’s to change the name “for traditional and emotional reasons“ has broad support among Friedberg’s citizens. More than 25,700 have signed a petition launched in 2018 to oppose the renaming. A countervailing petition advocating the renaming of the pharmacy only counts about 1,200 signatures to date.

Ignoring Colonial History

Protesters, however, consider a mere reference to tradition insufficient. Their aim is to shift the public perceptions of people and minorities affected by racism. It also is an act of solidarity with those suffering from  who shy away from exposing themselves and their experiences of racism for fear of being subjected to more abuse and prejudice.

These fears are not unfounded. The hatred that these protesters face casts a light on the smoldering xenophobia in Germany. According to Ousman Conteh, the organizer of the demonstrations, abuse and obscene gestures from passers-by are a regular occurrence. 

What’s in a Name? Rebranding Racist Legacies

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Comments in the anonymous space of the internet surpass real-life incidents, he told : “From hatred to incitement of the people … everything was there.” In an email, he recalls very personal, racist slurs directed at him. One of these comments that “stuck in his mind” read: “If we are talking about changing his name, maybe he should start with himself. He bears the name of an entire terrorist group — Osman.”

This was not only a strikingly offensive but also a blatantly incorrect statement that underlines the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding the debate. This atmosphere was stoked and exploited by far-right politicians: “Even an AfD [Alternative for Germany] member of parliament commented that we should go back to Africa,” Conteh added.

Resistance to change the names of companies, institutions or products and recognizing structural racism is hardly unique to Germany. Nevertheless, the use of language is both a of a society’s values and of how it deals with history. Indeed, in English-speaking countries, Germany is often regarded as a  of how to approach a difficult past, especially when it comes to the Third Reich. Nevertheless, this positive assessment of coming to terms with national socialism should be seen against the backdrop of a half-hearted denazification. 

Colonial history before the Nazi era in Germany has largely been ignored. For example, 117 years had to pass before Germany officially recognized the 1904 genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia.  of looted art is proceeding hesitantly. There is no central memorial for the victims of German colonialism.

The lack of urgency and sensitivity toward Germany’s colonial past is also aided by the fact that the German colonial era is not addressed at all, or only sparsely, in school history curricula. Alice Hasters, a 32-year-old journalist and author of the much-discussed , “What White People Don’t Want to Hear About Racism But Should Know Anyway,” Deutschlandfunk that during her school years, terms such as “colonial times” and “race theory” were hardly mentioned.

In her opinion, this hasn’t improved up to date: “In the meantime, I’ve been back to a few schools and I don’t have the feeling that so much has changed … The curriculum is based on a white German standard. Anything that deviates from that is ignored.”

Attention Shift

Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs of change. Protests and public denunciations of racist names of colonial origin are just one indication of this. As it seems, they might have propelled Germany’s political parties to start addressing the country’s colonial legacy. The program of the coalition government led by Angela Merkel : “No future without remembrance — the basic democratic consensus in Germany includes coming to terms with the Nazi reign of terror and the SED dictatorship, as well as Germany’s colonial history.“ 

A closer look at the election programs of Germany’s six main parties, days away from the general election on September 26, shows the increasing importance of the issue. Compared to the election programs for the 2017 general election, the word “colonialism” is mentioned more frequently, advocating a postcolonial culture of remembrance. The Social Democrats went from one mention of colonialism in 2017 to five mentions in 2021, the Greens from zero to 18, the Left party from four to 14, and the Christian Democratic Union from zero to a modest one.

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While the Liberal Democrats fail to mention colonialism both in 2017 and 2021, the far-right AfD is the only party to take an opposing stance. While it did not thematize colonialism in its 2017 election program, its 2021 manifesto : “The debate about an allegedly necessary ‘decolonization’ of our culture, which goes hand in hand with a demonization of the ‘white man,’ calls into question the self-image of our cultural identity as a whole. The AfD is the only political force opposing this dismantling of our historical-cultural identity.”

Yet there is still disagreement among those who want to achieve greater sensitivity about the path and strategy for publicly addressing systemic, structural racism. Leila Slimani, a French-Moroccan journalist and author who writes about the conflict between France and the protectorate of Morocco in her most recent novel, “The Country of Others,” urges a preoccupation with the colonial past. She against removing monuments and erasing traces of colonial history: “We have to preserve the traces, otherwise we won’t be able to make our children understand this later.”

Nevertheless, traces such as the “Mohren” pharmacies have always been there in Germany, and debates about structural racism and colonialism only arose due to demands for the name change. At the same time, it seems fair to question whether equating words with monuments underestimates the real power of language. Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, in a 1947 treatise on the language of the Third Reich: “Words can be like tiny arsenic doses. They are swallowed unnoticed, they seem to have no effect, and yet after some time, the poisonous effect is there.”&�Բ�����;

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post German Pharmacies at the Heart of an Anti-Racism Debate appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Do we start with the 1967 conflict that resulted in Israel occupying Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula? Or do we go back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War — what the Israelis call the War of Independence and the Palestinians the Nakba, or catastrophe? Or do we need to rewind further back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a British of intent for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”? Or do we go all the way to the First Zionist Congress, convened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 amidst a wave of anti-Semitism rising across Europe?

The debate about the origins of the conflict goes on to this day. Regardless of the debate, the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has become unsustainable.

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Israel continues its crippling blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Palestinians see as the capital of their future state. When Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls Gaza, fires rockets into Israel, the Israelis retaliate with what has been described by many as a “” use of force. The human rights abuses perpetrated against Palestinians living under Israeli control have led to accusations of apartheid by organizations like and .

The construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, which is considered under international law, has made a Palestinian state effectively impossible. At the same time, an estimated half of the Palestinian population lives Palestine. Millions of refugees and their descendants — most of whom were exiled in 1948 — are stuck stateless in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The wider Palestinian diaspora is scattered around the world.

With the peace process at a stalemate following years of failure, the end to this conflict is nowhere in sight.

In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Avi Shlaim, professor emeritus of international relations at the University of Oxford and author of “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.” He explains what lies at the core of the conflict, the problem with the peace process, apartheid, US support for Israel and more.

Abul-Hasanat Siddique: At some media outlets, there is often a lack of historical context when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Some readers may think that the conflict began in 2021 with the recent clashes or in 1967 with the Six-Day War. If you had to explain the origin of the conflict, what would you say? Where do the roots lie?

Avi Shlaim: The core and the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. This conflict has been going on for over a century. There was one land and two national movements: the Palestinian national movement and the Jewish national movement, or the Zionist movement. Two peoples, two nations and one land. This is what the conflict is about.

In the late 1930s, the neighboring Arab states intervened in this conflict on the side of the Palestinians. They remained engaged in varying degrees until President Sadat of Egypt visited Jerusalem in 1977, signed a peace treaty with Israel and led the trend towards Arab disengagement from the conflict. So, there are two levels to this conflict, two dimensions: the local one, the Jewish-Palestinian, and the interstate level of the conflict.

The great turning point of the conflict was 1948, which Israelis call the “War of Independence” and Palestinians call the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The outcome of this war was that three-quarters of a million Palestinians — more than half of the population — became refugees and Palestine was wiped off the map. These are the real roots of the conflict.

The next turning point was the Six-Day War in June 1967. In the course of that war, Israel trebled its territory. It captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. From now on, the Arab states had a direct stake in this conflict. They wanted to recover their occupied territories. In 1979, Israel gave back the Sinai Peninsula as the price for the peace treaty with Egypt. In 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel signed the Oslo Accord. The Oslo Accord did three things: the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, Israel recognized the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people, and the two sides agreed to resolve all their outstanding differences by peaceful means.

Edward Said was the first Palestinian to launch an all-out attack on the Oslo Accord. The reason for this was that the Oslo Accord addressed the 1967 file but not the 1948 file. It was an agreement between Israel and the PLO  about the Palestinian territories captured by Israel in 1967. It did not deal with the roots of the conflict: the rights of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and the collective right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination.

Siddique: There is a long-running debate over whether the solution lies in two states — one Jewish, one Arab — or one democratic state for both peoples. I know your view has changed over time from a two-state to a one-state solution. What led to that?

Shlaim: For most of my adult years, I supported the two-state solution. The two-state solution did not offer the Palestinians absolute justice, but in world affairs, it is very rare to get absolute justice. It offered them relative justice or the most minimal national rights. It took the 1967 borders as the basis for a settlement between Israel, on the one hand, and an independent Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank, with the capital city in East Jerusalem. This would have left Israel with 78% of Mandatory Palestine and the Palestinians would have only 22%. So, by signing the Oslo Accord, the PLO made a far-reaching concession and agreed to settle the conflict in return for a very small state alongside Israel.

There has always been, and there still is today, broad international support for a two-state solution. But that doesn’t take account of Israeli actions since 1967.  Israel did not stand still after the victory. Since July 1967, Israel has been building settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. It withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, but it continues to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank even as we speak. If Israel had been serious about a two-state solution, at the very least it would have imposed a freeze on settlements to give negotiations a chance. But Israel continued to expand settlements. Settlements are about land-grabbing. Land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together — it’s one or the other. By its actions since 1967, Israel indicated clearly its preference for land over peace with the Palestinians.

Another problem is that the Israeli so-called security barrier on the West Bank. The wall is not complete yet, but it’s already 650 kilometers long. The Palestinians call it the apartheid wall. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the wall is illegal. Israel would have been perfectly within its rights to build the wall on its side of the 1967 border, but most of this wall is on the Palestinian side. They say that good fences make good neighbors, but not when the fence goes down the middle of your neighbor’s garden! The wall annexes between 8% and 10% of West Bank territory to Israel and the wall goes around East Jerusalem and cuts it off from the West Bank. East Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel. The Palestinians in East Jerusalem don’t have citizenship, they have permanent residence, which is fragile and vulnerable and can be terminated at any moment by Israel.

To sum up, there is no longer the physical and geographical possibility of a viable Palestinian state. All that is left is an archipelago of Palestinian enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases. In other words, Israel, by its actions on the ground, has killed the two-state solution, which was the solution that I used to favor.

Since Israel eliminated this option, what is the alternative? The best alternative I can think of is one democratic state, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of religion, gender or ethnicity. I do not regret the shift towards the one-state solution. What is wrong with a one-state solution with equal rights? It is a democratic solution. And what could be a nobler vision than a state that does not discriminate against any group and in which all citizens enjoy the same rights?

Siddique: Marwan Bishara, the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, has spoken of whether the Palestinians need a Nelson Mandela-like figure. In such a scenario, an Israeli leader would also need to extend an arm. Yet this view doesn’t take into account the friction and opposition in both Israeli and Palestinian societies, nor does it address the influence of US politics and lobby groups. What would need to change for there to even be talk of a one-state solution — a democratic state for Arabs and Jews?

Shlaim: Palestinian leadership has always been a problem. Abu Mazen is a very weak leader: inarticulate, lacking in charisma, and lacking in legitimacy. So, he’s not a very convincing proponent of Palestinian national rights. Sadly, throughout their history, the Palestinians have had poor leadership, starting with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, then Yasser Arafat and then Abu Mazen. So, that is a problem: poor leadership on the Palestinian side.

But that is not the principal problem, because Abu Mazen is a moderate and the great majority of Palestinians are for a two-state solution — or at least they used to be. After the Oslo Accord was signed, roughly 70% of Palestinians and 70% of Israelis supported a two-state solution. But Oslo failed the Palestinians. The situation now is worse for the Palestinians than it was before Oslo.

What is the obstacle to one, democratic state? The main obstacle is the Israeli government: the Likud and parties further right than the Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Under American pressure, in the Bar-Ilan speech in 2009, Netanyahu said he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israeli. Since then, he has gone back on it and he has stated repeatedly that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch — he will oppose a Palestinian state all the way. More importantly, the Likud platform rejects a Palestinian state. The Likud has never accepted the need for a Palestinian state.

Further to the right is Naftali Bennett, the leader of Yamina, who replaced Netanyahu as prime minister in June 2021 at the head of a hybrid coalition. Bennett used to be the head of Yesha, the settlers’ council. He’s a religious-nationalist who fiercely opposes an independent Palestinian state in any shape or form. He used to advocate the outright annexation of Area C, which is 60% of the West Bank. 

In the present Knesset, 72 out of 120 members are right-wingers. This reflects a long-term trend. Israeli society has been moving steadily towards the right ever since the Second Intifada in 2000. Today, not just the government, not just the political elite, but Israeli society in general are strongly opposed to a one-state.

Siddique: You talked about Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, which leads me on to my next question. In 2013, you wrote that Netanyahu is “the double-faced prime minister who pretends to negotiate the partition of the pizza while continuing to gobble it up.” You have talked today about the problems with Oslo, including Edward Said and his criticism of the accord. Since the failure of Oslo, has Israel ever been interested in a peace deal, or has it been focused on eating that pizza and making a Palestinian state impossible?

Shlaim: Netanyahu never concealed his deep hostility to the Oslo Accords. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Likud came back to power in 1996 under the leadership of Netanyahu, who set about dismantling, freezing and subverting the Oslo Accord and building more settlements and strengthening Israel’s military power in order to continue to subdue the Palestinians indefinitely. In the last few years, Netanyahu’s message to the Israeli public has been that Palestinian nationalism has been effectively contained and neutralized and that the Palestinians are powerless, divided — with Hamas in charge of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in charge of the West Bank — and therefore, there is no need to trade land for peace with them. His formula is peace for peace: to offer the Arabs peace in return for peace, without paying any territorial price.

With the help of Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — who is very close to Netanyahu — Netanyahu was able to implement this policy and it took the form of the Abraham Accords: peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. These were great foreign policy triumphs for Netanyahu, and he said to the Israeli public: You see, I don’t have to pay any price — there is nothing the Palestinians can do and we are achieving normalization with the Arab world.

But with the escalation of violence in Israel and Gaza in May, this whole conception of peace has collapsed. The Palestinians did not remain passive. They put up robust resistance to the Israeli provocations in Al-Aqsa and the ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, the Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

These provocations eventually led Hamas to respond with rocket attacks. The last round of fighting was not confined to Gaza. There was a sense of outrage by Palestinians everywhere. There were also protests on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in Gaza, in the diaspora and, most importantly, within Israel itself.

Since 1948, an Arab minority remained inside Israel. Today, they constitute 20% of Israel’s population. These Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote, but they are treated as second-class citizens. In the past, violent clashes only occurred in the occupied territories. Now, for the first time, clashes occurred inside Israel, particularly in the mixed cities of Jews and Arabs like Lydda. This is a kind of incipient civil war. As a result of Israel’s provocations, we got something like a unity intifada in which all Palestinians, wherever they are, are united in the determination to resist Israel’s occupation.

Siddique: Considering that clashes took place inside Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza was the main focal point, does that mean the peace-for-peace policy is unsustainable?

Shlaim: When he was prime minister, Netanyahu didn’t have a peace policy. Netanyahu does not believe in a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He has never believed in a peaceful settlement. He is the proponent of permanent conflict and he is a unilateralist. He thinks that Israel has to remain militarily strong, Israel has to retain the full support of the United States, and then the Palestinians would be impotent to do anything; the international community can criticize Israel as much as it likes, but there will be no practical consequences — no price for the occupation.

That’s his view. He doesn’t have an endgame, he doesn’t have a solution. His solution is Jewish supremacy based on Jewish military force. This is apartheid, because between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there is one regime: the Israeli regime, which is all-powerful. And one ethnic group dominates the other. This is not a democracy; it’s an ethnocracy. Another word for ethnocracy is apartheid.

So, that is the position today. Both ��’T�������, the Israeli human rights NGO, and Human Rights Watch issued reports recently with that conclusion: that Israel is an apartheid state. To my mind, apartheid in the 21^st century is not sustainable. The focus in world politics has shifted from borders and sovereignty to human rights. That’s what people feel strongly about. If Israel continues to violate on a daily basis the human rights of the Palestinians, and to oppress them, it will gradually lose international support. This is already happening and it’s been happening for some time.

Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza in May was a real turning point. It provoked protests around the world against the Israeli occupation and it has led to popular public reframing of the conflict. Before it was seen as a dispute between two parties over territory. Now it is seen as a case of racial injustice. The Palestinian cause became strongly linked to Black Lives Matter. In the demonstrations, people carried banners that said, “Palestinian Lives Matter.” There were posters that said, “Palestine Cannot Breathe.” Americans are beginning to see this conflict as similar to the racial injustice at home, where white policemen shoot and kill black people. That’s the way more and more people see the situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

There is also BDS — the boycott, divestment and sanctions — a global, grassroots, nonviolent movement against the Israeli occupation, which has been gathering more and more support and gaining more traction. Israel is really afraid of BDS and it has led a campaign to discredit BDS and its supporters as anti-Semites, which is rubbish. It is important to stress that BDS is a nonviolent movement and that all its main demands are ground in international law: an end to the occupation, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Far from being an anti-Semitic movement, BDS is an anti-racist movement that espouses universal values of freedom and equality.

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I have been talking so far about the tide of popular opinion that is turning rapidly against Israel. But the position of Western governments has not changed. The position of the United States, Canada and the European Union is still completely biased in favor of Israel. The European Union, in particular, is really hypocritical because, officially, it supports a two-state solution and is committed to Palestinian rights, but in practice, it gives Israel all sorts of trading privileges and advantages. It does nothing to sanction Israel for its illegal settlements or its abuse of Palestinian human rights.

The policies of these Western governments are not going to change in the near future. Twelve European parliaments have recognized Palestine as a state but only one government, that of Sweden. The Irish parliament recently passed a resolution condemning Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank. The Irish foreign minister stated that the de facto annexation is just as bad and just as illegal as formal annexation. Ireland may well end up proposing EU sanctions against Israel. Let me point out this: Ireland was the first country to impose sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Today, Ireland is ahead of most other Western governments in its support for Palestinian rights. Today, the Irish flag is flying in Ramallah.

I believe that eventually, governments would follow their publics and modify their attitude towards Israel. America, in particular, may come to reassess its blind and unconditional support for Israel.

Siddique: Can all of these factors — Black Lives Matter, looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case of racial injustice, the apartheid label, the BDS movement, international public support, the public reframing of the conflict and political shifts like with Ireland — have an impact for Palestinian self-determination?

Shlaim: Growing popular support worldwide is not going to enable Palestinians to achieve independence and statehood. It is governments who make the decisions and the United Nations, which has overall responsibility for resolving international conflicts. But the actor that counts most in this conflict is the United States. Unless America shows real commitment to Palestinian statehood, it is not going to come about.

Since 1967, the Americans have arrogated to themselves a monopoly over the so-called peace process. They have excluded the Soviet Union and then Russia, the EU and the United Nations. They arrogated to themselves a monopoly over peacemaking. But they never delivered peace, they never pushed Israel into a settlement. The so-called peace process was all process and no peace, yielding no concrete results. It was a charade. In fact, it was worse than a charade because peace talks gave Israel just the cover it needs to continue to pursue its aggressive colonial project in the West Bank.

Americans like to think of themselves as honest brokers, but they are dishonest brokers. They are Israel’s lawyer, and you can’t be both Israel’s lawyer and a mediator. More than this, America is the enabler of the Israeli occupation. Without American support, American money, American military hardware, Israel would not be able to sustain the occupation. America gives Israel money, arms and diplomatic support. In the last 40 years, America has used the veto on the Security Council 42 times to defeat resolutions that are not to Israel’s liking. In effect, Israel has the power of veto on the Security Council. It doesn’t exercise it directly but through a proxy, its little friend, the United States of America. The Palestinians are not going to achieve statehood unless America moves from words about the two-state solution to deeds, to condition its support to Israel on real Israeli moves towards a settlement.

Siddique: Is it time for other nations, such as Arab and European, to join those efforts — so as to not give the United States a monopoly? Would they have an impact if they were part of the talks?

Shlaim: The European Union should be a player in bringing about a settlement, because the EU has real leverage with both parties. The EU is the main source of foreign aid for the Palestinian Authority, and Israel does 35% of its trade with the European Union. Last year alone, the total amount of trade between Israel and the EU was £31 billion [$42.7 billion].

The EU undoubtedly has this leverage with Israel, but it has never exercised it because it is not a unitary actor. It has 27 member countries, some of them are very pro-Israeli like Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. These countries would most probably veto any resolution to impose sanctions on Israel. The EU has been ineffectual both because of its internal structure and because America has sidelined it. For the foreseeable future, it is likely to remain a payer, not a player.

The Arab world should be an important actor in all this because it has a direct stake in what happens in Palestine. Arab states also have a religious stake because Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But the Arab states have been pretty passive and totally ineffective when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

In fairness to the Arab states, it has to be pointed out that they have got a clear and unified position on the Palestine question. It was formulated in the Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002, when a Saudi proposal was adopted unanimously and became the Arab Peace Initiative. The Arab Peace Initiative offered Israel formal peace and full normalization with all 22 member states of the Arab League, in return for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory and the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem. This was the real deal of the century, not Trump’s phony deal. It gave Israel everything it had previously asked for, but Israel had to pay with land for peace. Israel completely ignored the Arab Peace Initiative.

Yet the Arab consensus on the Palestinian issue did not hold. There used to be a pretty general commitment to the Palestinian cause, but since the Oslo Accord when the Palestinians acted independently and signed a peace accord with Israel, the Arab states feel less bound to support the Palestinians. Particularly in the last four years, during the presidency of Donald Trump, the Arabs came under pressure to abandon the Palestinians. Trump’s idea was to have a united front of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Iran. The price that the Gulf Arabs were expected to pay America in return for support against Iran was to ditch the Palestinians. This is what the countries that signed the Abraham Accords have done. They did bilateral deals with Israel, which was a stab in the back to the Palestinians.

Siddique: Have the Abraham Accords killed the Arab Peace Initiative indefinitely — even a tweaked version of it?

Shlaim: No, definitely not. The Abraham Accords have not killed and not modified in any way the Arab Peace Initiative. It remains on the table and the big prize is Saudi Arabia. Israel and President Trump hoped that Saudi Arabia would sign a peace accord with Israel, and that would have effectively been the end of the Arab Peace Initiative. Saudi Arabia, however, did not pronounce on the peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. It did not support it publicly nor did it follow suit. The Saudi foreign minister stated that Saudi Arabia remains committed to the Arab Peace Initiative and support for the Palestinians. And the Arab Peace Initiative is still the official position of the Arab League.

Siddique: You didn’t have much faith in Donald Trump’s ability to mediate a peace agreement. The Biden administration has faced criticism over its response to the latest conflict. Progressive politicians in the United States, such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have spoken out. Do you see hope that Joe Biden’s team would get the Palestinians and Israelis to talk, which they haven’t in many years?

Shlaim: I don’t have much hope in Biden breaking away from the traditional mold of American foreign policy, which is pro-Israeli. The default position of American administrations is to appease Israel. Biden has had a very long career in American politics, and he is one the strongest and most consistent supporters of Israel. He once stated that if Israel didn’t exist, America would help to invent it. He also said, on another occasion, that if he were a Jew, he would be a Zionist. He then corrected himself and said, “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. I am a Zionist.” It is even worse than that because he is, by his own account, an unconditional Zionist.

Biden was vice-president for eight years under Barack Obama, which gave Israel a huge amount of aid. Particularly at the end of the administration, they signed a military aid deal worth $38 billion over 10 years. This annual grant of $3.8 billion in military aid is unconditional. Biden was one of the people who always refused to tie American aid to Israel to Israel’s respect for Palestinian human rights and international norms. That is still his position: his support for Israel is unconditional.

One recent manifestation of this was International Criminal Court’s decision to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. Trump had imposed sanctions on the ICC judges because they threatened to investigate Israel. Biden has lifted the sanctions, but he’s still strongly opposed to any investigation of Israel by the ICC. The most disturbing manifestation of Biden’s bias in favor of Israel happened during the May crisis. Two things happened.

First, the Security Council, on three occasions, tried to issue a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire. Biden vetoed all three attempts. All three attempts were supported by the 14 other members of the Security Council. America alone stopped a declaration, a statement in favor of an immediate ceasefire. That tells you a lot. It tells you that Biden looked to Netanyahu, and Netanyahu wanted more time to do even more damage in Gaza. Biden gave him that extra time to do his worst.

Secondly, Biden authorized — without consulting Congress — when the fighting was going on, arms sales to Israel worth nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars, mostly precision munitions to fire on Gaza. In this instance, Biden paralyzed UN diplomacy and empowered Israeli militarism against the Palestinians.

Israel’s latest assault on the people of Gaza, like all its previous wars, inflicted death and devastation on Gaza but left the underlying problems completely unsolved. The use of military force does nothing to resolve what is essentially a political problem. If America takes the lead in resuming peace talks, which is not at all certain, Biden is unlikely to come up with any new ideas.

Biden is no longer representative even of his own party. Progressive members of the Democratic Party are critical of him and his conduct. The congresswomen that you mentioned and Bernie Sanders are now calling for an American arms embargo on Israel. This is unprecedented.

There is another factor at play in America: young, progressive Jews are increasingly disenchanted, even disgusted with Israel. Peter Beinart, who is the leading expert on this, estimates that AIPAC represents maybe 30% of American Jews and J Street roughly 70%. A growing number of young, American Jews are openly critical of Israel, critical of its human rights abuses, critical of the occupation, and they support a two-state solution. So, not only the American public has been turning against Israel, but Jewish opinion in America is also turning against Israel. Eventually, if not immediately, Biden would have to adjust to the new reality at home.

We have to remember that in America, Israel is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a domestic politics issue. The fact that there is such strong support for Israel throughout America, especially among Christian Evangelists, explains why America has been so biased in favor of Israel. But if the landscape in America continues to shift against Israel and in support of the Palestinians, official American foreign policy may eventually follow.

Siddique: That’s an interesting point you mention about Israel being a domestic issue, not a foreign policy issue. One final question for you, professor. For our readers who are interested in learning more about the conflict, which books and/or authors would you recommend?

Shlaim: I warmly recommend Ian Black’s “Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017” and Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.” At the risk of sounding immodest, I would mention my own book, “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World,” a critique of Israeli policy towards the Arab world since 1948. But I should warn your readers that it is 900 pages long! In 1995, I published a Penguin book, a short paperback called, “War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History.” This is an easy introduction to the international politics of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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The best book I know on America and the Arab-Israeli conflict is by William B. Quandt and it is called, “Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967.” On the Arab world in general, I warmly recommend a book by Fawaz A. Gerges: “Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East.” This book was published by Princeton University Press in 2018, and it deals with the two main trends in Arab politics: Arab nationalism represented by Gamal Abdel Nasser and political Islam represented by Sayyid Qutb.

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Addressing the Fragile Limits of Female Autonomy

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As written, the law allows private individuals to pursue legal action against anyone suspected of assisting an abortion past when a is detectable, which is generally agreed to be around the sixth week of pregnancy. According to the , prior to the enforcement of Texas’ new anti-abortion law, while there were barriers to dissuade or prevent women from having abortions, no state directly forbade the procedure before the 20-week mark.

However, the lack of judicial deterrence against the new Texas law indicated trends moving forward that will severely curtail women’s bodily autonomy and ability to make personal health decisions.

Six Weeks

Globally, 36% of countries allow abortions upon request, including the United States. The most common across these countries is 12 weeks — far less than US national regulations and the typical viability of a pregnancy but twice the allowance for women under the new Texas law.

In Texas, it is estimated that between who obtain abortions are at least six weeks into their pregnancies, meaning that the new law will effectively nullify the vast majority of abortions in the state. As Texas is the second-largest US state after California, its more than making up approximately 8.8% of the total US population as of 2020, around 7 million Texans are directly affected by the new legislation.

Additionally, due to the implementation of S.B. 8, the distance for a woman who is over six weeks pregnant to find abortion services has increased from . While clinics that provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood, remain open, they are preemptively turning away patients that are over the six-week mark in order to protect themselves from lawsuits.

One bright spot amid Texas’ new “sue thy neighbor” law was the temporary issued by a local Texas District Court that prevents the organization Texas Right to Life and its associates from suing abortion providers and health care workers.

While S.B. 8 doesn’t criminalize abortion, upcoming laws, including that is due to take effect on November 1, will. As currently written, the Oklahoma law would make any person who performs or induces an abortion on a pregnant woman without first testing for embryotic cardiac activity guilty of homicide.

This bears a passing resemblance to the strict anti-abortion of the Revised Penal Code of the Philippines, which allow for the imprisonment of women and anyone who would assist them in conducting an abortion. These laws have lead a World Health Organization study to declare the reduction of safe abortion options as one of three key challenges for women’s health, accounting for up to 20% of

If legal abortion in the US is further restricted, Americans should expect to see upticks in death rates of women and people who can become pregnant, particularly among the most vulnerable and poor populations in areas that severely restrict abortion.

In comparison to a wave of anti-abortion laws in the United States and , other nations have been working to decriminalize abortion. After a decades-long struggle, abortion was decriminalized in on January 1 this year. Most recently, on September 7, has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish abortion as a crime, which will provide a path for the legalization of the procedure across the country.

However, in both countries laws to facilitate abortion procedural processes remain nebulous, and Mexico is likely to face future internal resistance as only three states and Mexico City previously allowed abortions on request.

Long-Term Impacts

By failing to halt the implementation of S.B. 8, the Texas government and the Supreme Court have paved the way for further restrictions on abortions and the oppression of women. While the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, it would protect women who seek abortions under the new Texan law and the state on September 9, the immediate increase in fear, repression and the inevitable long-term negative impacts among both patients and health care providers cannot be understated.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear several other anti-abortion laws in the upcoming year, most critically the of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi, which is attempting to ban all abortions beyond 15 weeks. If the Supreme Court decides in favor of the law, as it is expected to, experts like believe it will lead to the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the dissolution of the right to abortion in the United States.

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In turn, this could dismantle the national right to abortion, and activists fear there will be no protection against further disenfranchisement of the rights and bodily autonomy of all pregnant individuals.

In opposing this, abortion rights advocates like Kathryn Kolbert of the Center for Reproductive Rights emphasize the need to turn to the legislative process, win elections and develop long-term strategies. However, the polarized nature of the American state and the parallel advance of restrictive voting laws means that the future of women’s rights and bodily autonomy in the US remains dim.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It may require more patience than the legacy media is capable of to understand what direction the Taliban’s policies will take. In the meantime, multiple interests, both inside and outside Afghanistan, will be seeking to influence its future orientations. In the short term, the media will continue to speculate on two levels. The first consists of seizing upon specific incidents deemed to demonstrate what the “real” intentions of the government will be. The second is to assume that the Taliban will simply repeat their policies that preceded the US-NATO invasion 20 years ago.

After Afghanistan, How Probable Is Peace?

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The safest prediction today consists of affirming that there will be a significant period of confusion. At its extreme, it could evolve, as General Milley seems to believe, into civil war. In all cases, the persistence of instability will lead to further uncertainty among the experts themselves about what might finally emerge over the next three to five years.

The easiest solution for the media in the West is to highlight the issue of women’s rights or simply the Taliban’s treatment of women. It has consistently provided the issue at the core in the West’s propaganda campaign in favor of a permanent military campaign against the Taliban. Once US President Joe Biden made the decision to act definitively on putting an end to the US military presence in Afghanistan, it has emerged once again to encourage those who want the US to return to the battlefield.

Some non-mainstream commentators have pointed to the fact that, back in 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s administration initiated the CIA’s campaign to mobilize Muslim fundamentalism in opposition to Afghanistan’s elected socialist government. That government had enshrined women’s rights in its constitution, but due to its socialist leanings, it appeared too dangerously close to Russia’s influence for the comfort of the Beltway’s strategists.

The clandestine operations were designed to destabilize that government. This had the effect of drawing the Soviets in to restabilize it. That prompted the CIA to accelerate its support for a mujahadeen revolt against the regime. This in turn laid the groundwork for the Taliban takeover in 1996. In the meantime, the Soviet Union had collapsed, which meant that the US could stop worrying about both Afghanistan and its women. This allowed the Clinton administration to concentrate instead on reestablishing order in Yugoslavia and keeping Saddam Hussein under control via devastating sanctions.

Amidst the near absolute uncertainty that reigns today in Kabul, a small number of activist women, knowing how responsive Western media is likely to be, have dared to challenge the government. They are certainly right to make their voice heard in an effort to remind the new government of its promise to respect women’s rights. But does it really make sense to present it as a protest movement before there are any practices to protest against? Protesting against policies of the past could backfire on the women in the present. The Taliban may feel that “the lady doth protest too much.” What better way for the Taliban to brand them as hysterical and unworthy of playing a partnership role in governing?

Western media is predictably tuned into this drama and reports every small detail. “Recent weeks have seen the Taliban send mixed signals about the place of women in Afghan ���dz�����ٲ�,” Al Jazeera’s Ali M. Latifi. After vowing a commitment “to the rights of women within the framework of Sharia [Islamic law],” the tune seemed to change. Later in the same month “the group’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said women who work with the government should stay at home until they can ensure their safety on the streets and in offices.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Mixed signals:

A synonym for political discourse by every type of political regime

Contextual Note

How contradictory are the two positions that appear to be “mixed signals”? To justify the request that women return to their homes, the spokesman explained their concern that “our forces who are new and have not been yet trained very well may mistreat women … We don’t want our forces, God forbid, to harm or harass women.”&�Բ�����;

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Is this hypocrisy or brutal honesty? Until a government is formed and its policies put into practice, no one can tell. On the face of it, it should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as a dodge or a lie. Today, there is no stable authority that can effectively contain the fanatical and vengeful individuals within the Taliban movement, which has existed for the past 20 years as an insurgency thriving on resentment toward the foreign invaders.

In a with the title, “The Taliban invited The Telegraph to tea,” Jennifer Aldrich quotes a young Taliban fighter who claims that the protesting “women are Westernised and they want a Western government and they are against Islamic law. In Islam there’s great respect for women. I wonder why they are protesting.”

Was Kipling right when he proclaimed that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”? Afghanistan is the latest illustration of another principle: that when the West actively seeks to meet the East — as it has been doing for centuries — it is generally armed with sophisticated technology and an exasperating lack of empathy or even curiosity about Eastern cultures. This is uniformly followed by a defeat or a humiliating retreat, with little learned along the way.

Historical Note

Why have the themes of Western feminism come to dominate the debate over Afghanistan’s future? Wars in the past were never fought over such narrow cultural goals. In retrospect, the Second World War has been framed around the idea that Western democracies were committed to rescuing the Jews from Hitler’s persecution. In reality, that motive played no significant role in the Allied decision to go to war with Germany.

The case of the Civil War in the US is similar. The abolition of slavery was a consequence of the war. Slavery itself was not directly the issue that sparked the conflict. Had the South not sought to expand a slave-based economy westward, Abraham Lincoln, even though he may have personally disapproved of slavery, would have been happy to continue a peaceful co-existence with the South.

The West is focusing on the plight of Afghan women for two reasons. First, it is a story that plays well in Western media. It sounds moral and virtuous. It flatters Westerners by highlighting the superiority of their civilization. But it also correlates with the need felt in the highest levels of government and business to keep the economy focused on defense and national security. It highlights stark cultural contrasts that can be presented as a threat to “our way of life.” What better justification for excessive military preparedness, including the capacity to conduct preemptive strikes and invade backward nations?

French President Emmanuel Macron has criticized the US withdrawal, to “standing with those who fight for freedom and women’s rights.” In one curious twist of logic, the argument has come back to bite him. As Libyan psychiatrist Ahmed Sewehli , “This place where women are ordered what to wear and if they don’t conform they can’t study or work and can even be arrested…is called France.”

Of course, the last time women had Western-style rights in Afghanistan, written into the 1964 constitution, was under a government that the US worked to overthrow by stoking fundamentalism. British journalist Matt Kennard has a confidential memo of the UK Embassy in Kabul in 1980 that reveals the true strategy of the Western powers. It encourages clandestine military support for the mujahadeen and even seeks to glamorize them in this observation: “The picture of Islamic freedom fighters is much more acceptable to world public opinion than that of stubborn reactionaries determined to maintain a system of feudal antiquity.”

It has always been about optics, not about rights.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

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Harry and Meghan: In Pursuit of Wealth and Luxury

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The epoch-defining “The Oprah Winfrey Show” ran for 25 years, during which the host used her growing reputation not so much to change people’s lives but to instruct them to change their own lives. Like a preacher using a parable to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, Oprah drew on her own experiences and opened herself up to inspection, encouraging her followers to accept responsibility for themselves and to self-actualize — fulfill their own talent and potential.

It was a very different message to that preached by civil rights leaders earlier in the 20^th century. Oprah relied less on the solidarity and potency of collective effort, and more on individual determination and enterprise.

Philosophy of Individualism

Oprah’s philosophy of individualism chimed well with the changing times. Her show arrived at the start of the third decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and the less portentous 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting. The first post-civil rights decade had been tumultuous, with riots in many major cities serving notice that the technical abolition of racism had done little to extirpate it from American society. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 catalyzed further unrest.

Well into the 1970s, the dust seemed to settle, and conspicuously successful black figures emerged as if living evidence that it was possible to overcome what once seemed insurmountable obstacles. Bill Cosby featured in the country’s most popular sitcom, “The Cosby Show.” Eddie Murphy’s 1984 “Beverly Hills Cop” established him as one of the world’s most bankable film stars. Michael Jackson was arguably the leading entertainer in the world. Two months after Oprah’s show launched, Mike Tyson won boxing’s heavyweight world championship to become probably the most heralded athlete since Muhammad Ali. Michael Jordan was on his way toward his cultural apogee.

Black celebrities of the 1980s were perfect emblems of the Reagan era, a period associated with low taxes, laissez-faire markets, entrepreneurial initiative and individualism. Oprah and the other glittering African Americans were conspicuous reminders of the success of black Americans, who had persevered and refused to allow the country’s enduring racism to derail their destinies. Oprah was, as one writer sarcastically , “an Horatio Alger for our times,” referring to the 19^th-century novelist whose tales imparted the message that hard work can triumph over poverty.

This didn’t mean Oprah avoided the problem of racism. Within months of going national, Oprah ventured into dangerous territory by featuring residents of . There had been no black residents in Forsyth since 1912, when three black men — all of whom were subsequently hanged — allegedly raped a white teenager, prompting whites to burn down black churches and schools. Oprah asked questions of white people who openly refused to welcome black people into the. “We have a right to have a white community,” said one woman. Unwaveringly, Oprah persisted with her questioning.

Mischief and Provocation

Oprah had few equals when it came to mischief and provocation. No social or personal issue was off-limits: as well as racism, she tackled homophobia, addiction, infidelity and child abuse — sometimes drawing on her own experience as a victim. It was a new type of show. She took aim at figures from entertainment, but from politics too and from big business. No one was spared.

Yet her partisanship never clashed with her fundamental idea that people should help themselves. If they grumbled and complained about the world, they would get nowhere. If they relied on others, they would end up where they started. In this sense, she aligned herself with the conservative writer who believed that, by the end of the 1980s, racism in America was not so much a raging lion that needed to be slain but more an annoying bee that could be swatted.

It made sense to Steele — and perhaps Oprah — not to waste energy on the collective effort fighting a beast that had already been tamed. Instead, African Americans should focus on their own progress as individuals. For many, Oprah was and is a guru, her mantra being “Live Your Best Life.” Somehow, 35 years ago, she scented that this type of individualist ethos was filtering into the zeitgeist.

Oprah leveraged her influence to publish “O, The Oprah Magazine,” initiate a book club, play in film adaptations of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and not so much endorse Obama’s bid for the presidency as authenticate it. In fact, research indicated that 30% of voters in the 2008 election said they would be influenced by Winfrey, with half of those more likely to cast votes for the candidate she endorsed; coined it as the “Oprah factor.”

In 2008, Oprah announced plans to launch an eponymous television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN. Twenty years ago, the first university course based on her was launched at the University of Illinois: “Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon” was the first of several to use Oprah “as a prism to get at the intersection of race, class and gender in the post-civil rights era,” as one tutor put it.

No one ever queried her sincerity. When she conducted interviews, there was emotional immediacy, but with open and honest mischief. Many of her interviews disclosed hitherto unknown aspects of her subject’s character. The in 2005 revealed the actor as a frenzied, perhaps hysterical figure. Michael Jackson in 1993 divulged experiences in his childhood that made audiences wonder how much effect they were having on his bizarre behavior later in life. More recently, in her interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Oprah, perhaps inadvertently, dragged into the light allegations of racism at the heart of the British monarchy.

Help Thyself

History will be kinder to Oprah than it has been to several other African Americans who were once admired but later reviled. The groundbreaking Bill Cosby was disgraced after sexual assault charges were brought against him (his conviction was overturned earlier this year.) Mike Tyson was imprisoned for rape in 1992 and served three of his 10-year sentence. Michael Jackson died in 1999 but was posthumously denounced after two men claimed to have been sexually abused by him as children. At 67, Oprah has taken criticism but emerged basically intact. She was even seriously discussed as a presidential candidate for a while after dropping hints in 2018 that she might run for office.

Oprah was once an entertainer. But she became a mogul, so her story is one of spectacular success. While she is emblematic, Oprah is hardly typical: Black women remain underrepresented in positions of power in both private and public sectors on either of the While Oprah herself might explain this as the result of a lack of confidence, ambition, self-esteem and support from peers, others might identify experiences of discrimination, stereotyping and more structural factors, such as disparities in the education system and the job market that have persisted over the decades. Oprah’s approach tends to downplay the impact of institutional barriers.

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Oprah hasn’t tried to change society. She hasn’t even tried to change human beings. She’s tried and succeeded in making people change themselves. Her gift was and is that she is neither a firebrand nor a demagogue. There is nothing other-worldly about her. She just insinuates herself into people’s lives by speaking plainly and truthfully without bombast or sham virtuousness. It has enabled her to change countless lives in ways even she probably doesn’t realize.

It’s doubtful if there has been anyone quite like her, recognized the world over just by her first name. Her power is all-pervasive; its effects are felt everywhere. If you think I exaggerate, think of someone, good or bad — a politician, a religious leader, an entertainer — who has influenced so many people and whose sway will surely extend beyond her lifetime.

*[Ellis Cashmore is the of “Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century.”]

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Understanding Racism in All Its Forms

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This demonization of an academic theory is supported by virulent media discourses. says that the teachers’ unions support CRT and will push it on your schools at a cost of $127,600. takes it further, suggesting that CRT is going to set up “a dictatorship of the anti-racists.” On Twitter, opponents compare CRT to and the far-right conspiracy of .

Undoing Racism

So what is critical race theory? Is it a radical anti-racist Marxist program bent on overturning power structures for an amount equivalent to what Tucker Carlson in a week? Scholars say CRT is in fact a from critical legal studies emphasizing not the social construction of race but the reality of racism, in particular racism’s deep roots in American history and its perpetuation in legal and social structures. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, emphasizes that it is an ongoing scholarly practice of .

Is it being taught in your schools? Nobody is teaching CRT to kindergarteners. Critical race theory has become part of , one of many frameworks influencing researchers and instuctors who want a framework for understanding, and undoing, racism in education. Some link CRT in schools to launched by The New York Times that seeks to center black history and slavery in the story of America’s founding.

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So why does your uncle who spends too much time on the internet think this is a ? The over CRT is the brainchild of Chris Rufo, who began using the term to refer to a catch-all, nefarious force behind all kinds of social change, from Joe Biden’s weak liberalism to Black Lives Matter. Conservatives link CRT to trans rights and communism, the compares it to Marxist critical theory. The Trump administration launched a counter to The 1619 Project, the, to elevate whiteness and fight “critical race theorists” and “anti-American historical revisionism.”

Moral panics one idea, process, identity or group as evil, a threat to public order, values and morality, but they align institutional power with popular discourses to enforce the social positions and identities behind them. As of July, 22 states have proposed against teaching critical race theory and five have signed them into law. These bills ban teaching CRT, which they insist makes white students uncomfortable and introduces “divisive concepts.” For the right, the vision of US history is one that teaches color-blind unity and pride in being American. Of course, it also that the KKK was OK.

Anti-Anti-Racist Panic

This is far from the first moral panic over education. Historian Adam Laats the fight against CRT to the fight against the evolution of teaching. This first moral panic led to widespread distrust in public schools. More recent moral panics also led to divestment in social institutions. In the 1980s, a panic about satanic kindergartens in the US led to the reinforcement of dominant gender and racial power structures, but also to the withdrawal of and early childhood education.

Panics over sex education, from to , called for defunding these programs, shrinking already limited school budgets while increasing conservative opposition to public education. In the UK, the Conservative Party wants to ban teaching white privilege because it hurts working-class boys — while at the same time dismantling the .

What will the effects of this anti-anti-racist panic be? Will they curb the freedom of teachers to share the truths of history or push them to teach a still more nationalist version of the American story? Will history classes explicitly celebrate white masculinity, full of heroic founders fulfilling a holy promise for freedom and capital? Or might it also serve as another push to demonize public schools, painting them not as (unequally funded) shared democratic institutions but as anti-American indoctrination centers?

Even if the bills do not reshape education standards, the dramatic language around CRT and white genocide continues the longstanding push to defund and privatize public schools. As education scholar notes, the right’s education reform has long linked neoliberal privatization with neoconservative curriculums, something that continues with the opposition to CRT.

Breitbart Utah’s Say No to Indoctrination Act that will “keep taxpayer dollars from funding discriminatory practices and divisive worldviews,” linking cost and curriculum. It is not a coincidence that conservative media mention the price of anti-racist interventions and the dog whistle of “taxpayer dollars.” Fighting CRT might mean bills to change curriculum standards, but it could equally mean a push to cut funding for public schools reframed as cutting funding for CRT — as Senate candidate J.D. Vance on Twitter — or a call for greater support for private, religious and home education.

Both increased nationalism and privatization of education were for the right. Donald Trump’s 2020 education platform’s was to teach American exceptionalism; his second was to have school choice. With this panic over critical race theory, far-right drama serves to reinforce the more banal nationalism of capital and conservatism. Painting schools as cultural-Marxist madrassas makes it a lot easier to stop paying for them.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

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Germany’s Greens Are Within Earshot of Power

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In May, showed that 43% of the German population perceived Baerbock as a suitable successor for Merkel, leading over her two main contenders; at the end of August, this figure was down to 22%. Targeted online campaigns have been busy exploiting Baerbock’s missteps and stoking fears of political change among voters. These attacks have laid bare how modern political campaigns in the age of social media flush sexist attitudes that persist in both politics and the wider society to the surface. 

Belittled and Patronized

Before Merkel rose to become one of the world’s most powerful female politicians, she was underestimated and belittled throughout the 1990s as a woman from East Germany by a male-dominated West German political class. Despite prevailing in intra-party struggles by often adapting to male behavior, she still had to face gender-based headwinds during her first general election campaign in 2005 as the front runner of her party.

The Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) began the campaign polling at 48%, only to plummet to a sobering 35.2% on election day, securing a knife-edge victory over the incumbent, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Even back then, when social media was still a negligible factor, Merkel had to face partly overt, partly subliminal gender-discriminatory reporting. German media dissected Merkel’s outward appearance, starting with the corners of her mouth and her hairstyle and ending with her now-famous pantsuits.

According to , president of the German Bundestag from 1988 to 1998, at times, “there was more discussion about hairstyle, outer appearance, facial expression, hands, etc. than there was debate about the content. And how often did the question come up: Can the girl do it?”

Her competence was called into doubt, as stereotypical headlines from the time show: “Angela Merkel — an angel of understanding kindness,” “A power woman … corpses pave her way.” In 2004, the Austrian newspaper Die Presse came to the following conclusion to the question of why Merkel had to face such inappropriate media scrutiny: “Because she is a woman and comes from the East. And that is not the stuff of political fantasies that make West German men’s clubs ecstatic.”

Even Merkel’s nickname, “Mutti” (mommy), used affectionately by most Germans now, was originally a  epithet. The slow reinterpretation of this nickname is emblematic of how difficult it is for women in politics to break away from antiquated role models.

Since then, Merkel has emerged victorious in four consecutive elections, at the moment the country’s after Helmut Kohl. She is one of the countless global role models who have proven women to be apt leaders. In light of this overwhelming evidence of women’s political prowess, the levels of sexism and disinformation launched against Baerbock are astonishing. 

Targeted From Day One

When the Green Party chose Baerbock as its front runner in April, it did so with confidence that after 16 years of Angela Merkel, voters had shed their misgivings about aspiring female politicians. If anything, the Greens expected a young, energetic woman to embody political change and provide an appealing contrast to the stodgy, veteran, male candidates like Armin Laschet of the CDU and Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). But soon after the announcement of her candidacy, voices emerged online questioning whether a  would be suitable for the chancellorship. However, it’s not just her status as a mother that made Baerbock an ideal target, especially for conservatives and far-right populists on the internet: Unlike Merkel, she is young, politically more inexperienced, .

Adding to that, Baerbock exposed herself to criticism by making unforced mistakes. False statements in her CV, delayed declarations of supplementary income and alleged plagiarism in her published in June provided further ammunition to her adversaries. Her book’s title, “Now. How We Renew Our Country,” and the criticism she faces mirror the Greens’ current dilemma. Before Baerbock could even communicate a new, innovative policy approach with climate protection at its center to the voters, public attention had already diverted to her shortcomings.

While part of the blame rests with Baerbock herself, a lack of proportionality of criticisms toward her as opposed to other contestants in this election is apparent. For more than a year now, accusations loom around her contender for the post of chancellor, Olaf Scholz. As finance minister and chairman of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, he is accused of failing to prevent the  in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany surrounding Wirecard AG, a payment processor and financial services provider. Luckily for Scholz, still-unanswered questions concerning the scandal receive scarce media attention, partly due to the complexity of the issue at hand making it harder to distill into bite-size news. 

Armin Laschet, the CDU‘s candidate for chancellorship and minister president of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, had to navigate rough waters during the COVID-19 crisis. The state government used opaque procedures to award a contract for protective gowns worth €38.5 million ($45.6 million) to the luxury fashion manufacturer , a company linked to Laschet’s son. Laschet also received criticism for a good-humored appearance during a visit to areas affected by floods that killed at least 189 in July. In addition, he too was accused of plagiarism due to suspicious passages in a book published in 2009.

Even though Scholz’s, and especially Laschet’s missteps have not gone unnoticed by the media, the public and political opponents, Lothar Probst, a researcher at the University of Bremen, recognizes a systematic character in the criticism faced by Baerbock. In an with the German Press Agency, he surmised: “Her credibility, respectability, and authority are undermined, she is portrayed as sloppy. … A young, urban smart woman [is] once again tackled harder than her competitors.”

Even before Baerbock’s gaffes were in the spotlight, she found herself in the firing line. Conspiracy theories surfaced, suggesting that Baerbock was a puppet of  and an advocate of the “great reset” conspiracy. Disinformation about Baerbock was also gender-based. Collages of quickly circulated, including deepfake photographs disseminated via the messenger Telegram.

Such disinformation originated significantly from far-right circles. In 2019, according to the , 77% of registered hate posts were attributable to the center-right and far-right political spectrum. According to political scientist , from Trier University, female politicians from green parties are primary targets for right-wing attacks and disinformation because topics such as climate protection and emancipation inflame passions and mobilize the political right.

Worldwide Concern

Baerbock’s political opponents and critics deny disproportionate criticism, insisting that she should have known what she had signed up for; after all, election campaigns are not for the faint-hearted, especially when entering the race as the front-runner. Yet statistics prove that in Germany, hatred toward female politicians is an everyday occurrence. A survey by  showed that 87% of the female politicians interviewed encountered hate and threats on an almost daily basis; 57% of these were sexist attacks.

These results are in line with international studies. In a 2019 “#ShePersisted. Women, Politics & Power in the New Media World,” conducted by Lucina di Meco and Kristina Wilfore, 88 global female leaders were interviewed, were “concerned about the pervasiveness of gender-based abuse.” The study that “A new wave of authoritarian leaders and illiberal actors around the world use gendered disinformation and online abuse to push back against the progress made on women’s and minority rights.”

A recent from January, “Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online,” by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, also shows that 12 of the 13 surveyed female politicians suffered gendered abuse online. Nine of them were at the receiving end of gendered disinformation, containing racist, transphobic and sexual narratives, with the latter being the most common.

Sixteen years have passed between Angela Merkel‘s and Annalena Baerbock’s first campaigns for the chancellorship. Today, women striving for power still have to deal with mistrust and gender-discriminatory prejudice. Merkel had to hold her own in a male-dominated environment where she was underestimated and often treated disparagingly. But compared to Merkel, the campaign against Baerbock has reached a new,  dimension. Merkel, who is childless, outwardly inconspicuous and politically more conservative, offered less of a target to conservative, male adversaries than the young, modern and progressive Baerbock.

Besides, Baerbock’s opponents in 2021 have more effective tools for spreading gendered disinformation on social media. While disinformation targets both male and female politicians, women are more affected. It aims to  women’s credibility and their chances of electoral success and discourage future generations of women from pursuing political careers. Germany’s female politicians must keep in mind that such disinformation is spread by distorted, unrepresentative groups that don’t reflect the social progress made over the years.

At this particular moment, it appears unlikely that Baerbock will move into the chancellor’s office as Merkel did in 2005 by the narrowest of margins. Yet the race is far from over, with nearly a month until election day. Baerbock’s recent performance in the first of three TV debates proves that she is not ready to abandon the field to (online) campaigners spreading gender-based prejudice and disinformation. Despite polls declaring Scholz as the debate’s winner, narrowly ahead of Baerbock, she presented herself as a modern and socioecological alternative to both her contenders and reverted attention to policy away from her persona and gender.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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India’s COVID-19 Vaccination Drive Is Failing the Transgender Community

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The late 1990s were a time when between Indian queers for non-sexual purposes was largely unimaginable, possibly because homosexuality itself was still a crime back then. Moreover, public attitudes toward homosexuals were fiercely negative, even among liberals. “When I was active in the women’s movement in Delhi from 1978 to 1990 as founding co-editor of Manushi, India’s first feminist journal, homosexuality was rarely if ever discussed in left-wing, civil rights, or women’s movements, or at Delhi University, where I taught,” recounts historian .

Globalization of Gay Rights

With time, things began to change. The of globalization, liberalization and privatization of the late 1990s opened up sections of the Indian economy to the world market in novel ways. These policies, which were a of India’s overall structural adjustment program, marked a tectonic shift from old dirigiste ways of working and heralded a new era of sweeping economic reforms.

A chief consequence of these changes was the of the 1990s. Starting in the 1970s, it eventually led the way for the proliferation of new technologies on the Indian market throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. These included Nokia smartphones, desktop computers like the famed , black-and-white television sets and so on. Over the years, not only did these technologies evolve, but so did their ownership patterns. In 2012, reported that the number of smartphone users in urban India was approximately 27 million. That number to 76 million in 2013 for urban and rural India, and has been rising steadily ever since. By 2025, India is to have approximately 974 million smartphone users.

These economic changes, however, weren’t merely restricted to urban areas. A 2019 by the Internet & Mobile Association of India and Nielsen found that with 227 million active internet users, rural India had already surpassed urban India’s 205 million users. With 504 million active internet users over five years of age in 2019, India was the second-largest internet-user market in the world, just behind China with its 850 million users. The United States, by comparison, has 280-300 million users.

What did the changing contours of the digital landscape in India mean for queer people? The late 1990s were a time when the Indian government finally allowed certain sectors of the economy like IT and telecommunications to engage private investment. As the strangleholds of the erstwhile began to loosen, queer activism also witnessed a of sorts. In 1994, AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) filed the first-ever in the country’s history against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, an infamous British-era law that criminalized homosexuality in postcolonial India.

Various also emerged during this time in response to by Hindu right-wing groups that displayed violent disdain over the screening of Deepa Mehta’s lesbian romance film, “Fire.”

These changes were intimately related to the economic transformations of the time the transnational circulation of capital, ideas, people and funding that helped give the queer movement the impetus it needed to thrive and survive. The advent of gay rights mobilization in India, for instance, arose as a consequence of international funding for HIV/AIDS prevention in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The easing of certain regulations in the Indian economy and the greater flow of capital and people from abroad also paved the way, directly and indirectly, for the eventual scrapping of Section 377. As succinctly put it, “queer politics in India has come to be embroiled in the politics of globalization, and many believe that this history of queer politics is inseparable from the rise of neoliberal agendas in the Indian sub continent.”

Queering Cyberspace

A lot has changed over the years. Most notably, in 2014, India’s Supreme Court recognized the third gender in its landmark . In 2018, the same court homosexuality. By constitutionally recognizing these hitherto delegitimized subjects, the very shape and form of queer politics had radically transformed. Today, queer identification in urban pockets is more common than ever before. Corporations have also joined the queer bandwagon by placating sentiments under the of LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

With the COVID-19 pandemic having haltered in-person queer events around the world, much of queer organizing, dating, socializing and networking has now shifted online. This is a space that continues to boom.

On the one hand, online spaces can be liberating for those who can access them. These spaces promise queer people the possibility of digitally connecting with others with a mere click of a button. This is why the IT boom was so significant: It paved the way for greater internet access and made it possible for marginalized and discreet queer people to explore their identities in ways their geographic locations wouldn’t otherwise allow.

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While no official government data on queer populations exist (for obvious reasons), and despite the police and the state actively harassing queer people over the years — even after decriminalization, they — technology has ushered in what are calling a “sexual revolution in India.” The technological boom has ignited and kindled a new generation of young Indians’ desires for sex, romance, intimacy, and even sex work in unimaginable ways.

These desires and aspirations are being facilitated through chat rooms, instant messaging applications like WhatsApp and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Indeed, these have “teased the imagination of a young India, expanding her horizons and aspirations with the click of the button.”

However, such spaces also feature as sites of discrimination, bullying and violence. Take, for instance, Rohit Dasgupta’s assertion in his 2017 book, “Digital Queer Cultures in India,” that “The concept of being ‘too transgressive’ is a growing issue within queer representations in India.” Thus, only certain queer bodies and identities are typically seen as normative in queer spaces; for example, gay men who pass as straight. Those who transgress cis-normative and heteronormative ideals — like effeminate gay men — are typically shunned by queer people (mostly gay men).

Caste Supremacy

It has been argued that even though the 1991 reforms had a on India’s economic performance, their uneven implementation exacerbated existing socio-cultural inequalities. We see these inequalities manifest in queer cyberspace today, where certain privileged queer voices (mostly dominant caste, urbanized and Westernized gay men) dominate, while others (mostly queer women, and queer people from marginalized castes and classes) are systematically silenced by those in power.

On the issue of caste, for example, there is a among queer activists in India to even acknowledge the presence of caste inequalities within the movement. This should come as no surprise because most queer activists in India (including the author of this article) belong to oppressor castes. Because of this, the issues, concerns and traumas of queer people from marginalized castes such as those from Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities are sidelined.

While most of this marginalization is implicit, some of it also happens explicitly. Take, for example, writer-director Aroh Akunth’s account of how caste intimately desires on gay dating platforms. Thus, “attractiveness,” skin color and a “good background” become ideas projected onto a caste, while politics of “respectability” becomes a politics of caste supremacy.

Another pressing issue in queer cyberspace is the growing popularity of aspirations. It should be noted that this problem plagued the queer movement long before the pandemic pushed everyone online. It’s just that these groups, like many others, have adapted to the new normal by moving online. They fashion themselves as advocates for queer rights while simultaneously peddling jingoism, Islamophobia anti-Black Lives Matter/Dalit Lives Matter propaganda as well as casteism.

Take for instance, “hindu_lgbt,” an Instagram handle that affiliates itself with the right-wing Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which the decriminalization of homosexuality in India but not the legalization of same-sex marriage. As an , Hindu nationalism is premised on the political and cultural construction of citizen-state relationships and subjectivities that are homogenized and in synch with orthodox notions of the Hindu faith, sometimes referred to as Hindutva philosophy.

It should be noted that there are many social formations in India that support this ideology. The protests against Deepa Mehta’s film “Fire,” for instance, were by the Mahila Aghadi of Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and others, while resistance to decriminalize homosexuality in India came, in part, from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and RSS .

However, of gay rights have drastically changed over the years — perhaps more so than the views of orthodox Christian and Muslim organizations — partly due to the ruling BJP Hindu nationalist government’s relative silence on the issue, and partly because the RSS is itself trying to grapple with the ongoing social changes in India. In order to as an upholder of “inclusive” traditional family values, the RSS approach seems, on the one hand, to respect the Supreme Court’s judgment on Section 377 while, on the other hand, refuse to support any further legislation, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, that might radically challenge existing family structures in India.

Web Citizenship

With the expected to hit India in the coming months, online spaces will, in all likelihood, continue to facilitate queer networking for the foreseeable future. But with greater smartphone access and the increased democratization of content creation — what some scholars have called the rise of “” — queer advocacy in contemporary India faces newer challenges.

The first is an issue of privacy. In its 2017 , the Supreme Court of India recognized sexual orientation as an intrinsic part of privacy but was silent about its applicability in the online realm, where catfishing and identity theft are rampant. The second is an issue of legality. Digital spaces transcend the boundaries of nation-states, thereby calling into question the juridical purview of national privacy and security laws. How do queer people facing harassment, bullying and extortion from international actors report such crimes to the police in India?

A contemporary example of this was the infamous , as detailed in a UK-based investigation by VICE. This expose sent shockwaves through sections of the queer circles both in India and abroad, bringing to the fore the inadequacy of Indian laws, which, unlike those in the UK, neither recognize gay marriage nor extortion that specifically targets queer populations.

The queer movement in India is currently at a crossroads. On the one hand, it has to tackle the increasing popularity of right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiments; on the other, manage the tensions and contradictions associated with Indian law.

Indeed, the challenges are many and the means to address them are few. One way of effecting change is by pursuing the law and lobbying lawmakers like Dr. Shashi Tharoor of the Indian National Congress, Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party and Tejasvi Surya of the ruling BJP, all of whom have expressed support for queer rights in India. While some scholars are skeptical of using the law as a vehicle for bringing about social change in India, others, like , are less skeptical. To date, this dispute remains unsettled — as does the inclusion of the BJP into this discussion.

The other way of effecting change is by radically reimagining queer spaces as zones where people of all identities can be made to feel safer. This exercise is perhaps harder to carry out because it has no prescriptions and is contingent on the ability of privileged queers to self-reflect. Thus, would dominant-caste queer men be willing to cede space to marginalized-caste queer women and transgender people? We should hope so. All in all, queer cyberspace in India is both a stuffy and an expansive zone. Its contradictions and contestations make it an exciting site for further scholarship into queer mobilization in India.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Are Online Spaces Safe for Queer People in India? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Unfortunately, transgender people are still being “othered.” Most recently, the on the official COVID-19 vaccine portal of the government of India has three gender categories: male, female and others. “It sounds discriminating and demeaning,” Dhananjay Chauhan, a leading transgender activist from Punjab, told me over the phone.

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What came as an even greater disappointment was the fact that participation data for transgender persons have been removed from the of the CoWIN online vaccine registration portal. The infographic now reflects only the data for males and females under the vaccination category, delineated in blue and pink respectively.

The figure for “others” can’t even be determined by calculating the difference between the total number of vaccinated and the vaccinated males and females added together because the dashboard lists the overall number of doses administered to date, which includes both the first and second shots. This erasure becomes a journey from “othering” toward rendering the “others” invisible, revealing just how problematic the transgender community’s situation in India really is.

No, I Haven’t Been Vaccinated

On January 16, India began its vaccination drive. However, data show that by May 16, only of “others” have received at least one shot, just 0.013% of the overall number of vaccinated. With the third wave of infections ravaging through the country, the third-gender population is still waiting for vials to get allotted for their vaccination camps. Pushpa Mai, a leading trans activist from Rajasthan, says: “So far, we have been able to vaccinate only 50 transgender persons in Jaipur and we are waiting for our another camp date. As soon as we are sanctioned the vials, we shall proceed further. Till then, what else is in hand than to wait — such is the situation everywhere.”

Simran, from Rajasthan, was coughing during the phone call. She was out of the town to participate in a kinnar sammelan, the community congregation. When asked about getting vaccinated, she snapped: “Didi, why do you keep on asking the same question every time you call? Don’t you know the state already? I HAVEN’T been vaccinated. Would you arrange it for me? Can you?” She said that none of her dera (community house) friends were vaccinated, which has caused a lot of problems.

Sometimes, transgender people who live in deras, those who prefer to call themselves kinnars or hijra and are engaged in traditional community-specific roles, often keep a distance from the transgender people running NGOs and community-based organizations (CBOs). Simran relies on badhai for her livelihood, a practice where the hijra or kinnars — who are said to be bestowed with a divine gift — go door to door on festive occasions asking for presents and alms in return for blessings. During the pandemic, this source of income has largely dried up, leaving many helpless and reliant on begging and worse. A vaccination certificate would go a long way to help them return to their traditional way of life.

According to Mai, pooling in NGOs and CBOs is not enough because there are districts and villages that don’t have educated transgender representation to be able to organize such camps or even know whom to approach. With large parts of the transgender population lacking education and tech literacy, many are unable to register online, which is the only option to get in touch with vaccination centers. There is a need to raise awareness through television, newspapers and other media to get transgender people to get vaccinated and convince their friends to do so as well. Mai’s proposal is that besides the approach of looping in NGOs and CBOs, local chief medical health officers should take initiative to get the transgender population vaccinated in their respective areas.

Another roadblock to registering for vaccination is a lack of identity documents. Due to the stigma surrounding them, many transgender people have abandoned their parental homes at a young age or have dropped out of school due to discrimination and outright assault. This means that the majority are left with either no proof of identity at all or only with one that states the gender they were assigned at birth, which they no longer identify with. The provisions of providing them with transgender identity cards are still being discussed out by the government, which couldn’t come soon enough at this critical time.

Vaccine Hesitancy

Alisha (not her real name), from Chandani Chowk, had to resort to prostitution in order to survive during lockdown and is now exposed to a higher risk of catching the virus through her clients. “Initially, I was scared to death of getting this vaccination,” she tells me. “But then I decided that anyhow I am going to die, better take a chance by getting vaccinated; probably I might survive. And I contacted an NGO and got vaccinated through their vaccination ��������.”

This initial vaccine hesitancy Alisha describes has deep roots and is among the factors affecting the low uptake rates among the community. Transgender people often report discrimination at hospitals and public places because of their non-conformity. In colonial times, transgender people, then commonly known as eunuchs, were categorized as habitual offenders or natural-born criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and were punished for their cross-dressing practice. Historic persecution not only rendered transgender people invisible in the public sphere but also laid the foundations of a transphobic society.  

To this day, transgender people are seen as a matter of curiosity. “There are various layers of discrimination in health care access in this country. The doctors are curious about the transgender identity, and so exploit them in the process,” Shuvojit Moulik, founder of Civilian Welfare Foundation, a Kolkata-based NGO, LiveMint. During my research, many reported that doctors and medical professionals would examine their genitals even when the only complaint is a cold or a cough. Many report . It is hardly a surprise that transgender people try to evade these discriminating and transphobic spaces, preferring to rely on traditional medicine or local quacks for treatment.

Shreya Reddy, who identifies as a transwoman and works as a clinic manager at a transgender health center in Hyderabad, points out the irony that even those transgender volunteers running the vaccination camps aren’t taking the jabs. This often creates further skepticism among those who come to the vaccine camps.

Exposure to hormone therapies, HIV and complex sex reassignment surgeries leave transgender people immunocompromised and thus more vulnerable, and understandably more skeptical about the side effects of a new vaccine. According to , “communities that are underrepresented in medical trials, including those for vaccines, have developed considerable mistrust in the overall effect certain medicines and products will have on their health.” This is compounded by the fact that the scarcity of doctors who specialize in gender reassignment has resulted in many transgender people reporting being treated like subjects of an experiment by plastic surgeons who lack the necessary expertise.

Reddy shares her own experience of vaccine hesitancy. She says that there is no information regarding the possible side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, like fatigue, fever and body pain. Because of this, the severity of post-vaccination symptoms made many like herself who have undergone gender reaffirmation surgery believe that they were going to die. She herself felt pain and dizziness for two days after receiving a shot, thinking that something has gone wrong. Despite being a health worker, Reddy had no one to assuage her fears.

A Time for Recognition

Following criticism of the low vaccine uptake among the community, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment issued to states and union territories to facilitate unhindered and indiscriminate vaccination for transgender persons. The states invited community organizations to act as a bridge to get the transgender population vaccinated. But since transphobia has them to live on the margins of society, unidentified, local authorities don’t even have proper records of the transgender population and need the community to help them reach this most vulnerable group.  

The complete erasure of vaccination data on a site like CoWin deals a further blow to representation and equality. It is high time that the Indian government and society acknowledge that if transgender persons are being “othered” or neglected in something as seemingly innocuous as writing, this will inevitably translate to deadly neglect in real-life terms. Thus, the primary need here is to impart their transgender identity on registration forms and certificates and abandon the anonymous and dismissing “others” classification. There must be the inclusion of the transgender population in other sets of government data to address their needs and demands. Only then will there be a realistic hope for the emancipation of this long-marginalized community.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post India’s COVID-19 Vaccination Drive Is Failing the Transgender Community appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Do Americans Really Need a Roof Over Their Heads?

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Yet according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2021 , a full-time minimum wage worker, whether at the $7.25 federal wage or higher state minimum wages, could afford a one-bedroom rental at market rate in only 7% of US counties. The report estimates that workers will need to make $20 an hour to earn a one-bedroom housing wage.  

With debates around the issue ongoing, how sensitive is the American public to a minimum wage increase? President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats’ proposal for a $15 minimum wage may be popular among workers, but fear of the consequences complicate its passage.

To Raise or Not to Raise?

Businesses with razor-thin margins face a threat of closure if wages increase. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that a $15 minimum wage would result in a likely loss of 1.4 million jobs. Likewise, the national deficit was also predicted to increase by $54 billion over the next decade if the wage were raised. Opponents argue that a new minimum wage will create more problems than it solves, fail to and transfer the extra to firms on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In contrast, Republican senators have floated ncreasing the minimum wage to in exchange for policy concessions on immigration.

Proponents of the $15 minimum wage assert that it will bring earnings closer to the rising cost of living expenses. A report by the Economic Policy Institute that essential and frontline workers constitute 60% of those who would benefit from the higher wage. A National Low Income Housing Coalition states that with a $15 minimum wage, some inland states would approach full-time wages that support modest rent at 30% of one’s income. The estimates that 900,000 Americans would be brought out of poverty with a $15 minimum wage. The raise would also decrease .

A by the Pew Research Center showed that 62% of Americans supported an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15, with only 10% opposed to any level of increase, with clear partisan differences: 72% of Republicans expressed opposition to a $15 minimum wage while 87% of Democrats were in favor.

In 2013, a showed that small business owners were divided on increasing the minimum wage to $9.50, juxtaposed to 76% of the public supporting an increase to $9. In 2014, by CBS News found that people were less supportive of raising the minimum wage if they thought it would lead to job losses. The issue of how raising the minimum wage will affect small businesses is a crucial component of how willing people are to support an increase.

We conducted a national web survey using quota sampling and recruited 625 American respondents via Qualtrics on June 22-24. Rather than just ask about support for the minimum wage in the abstract, we randomly assigned respondents to one of four questions to evaluate on a five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree). Targeted formulation of the statements allowed us to directly test whether support differs between $15 as the Democrats have proposed versus the $10 endorsed by some Republican senators. The methodology would also show whether support declines if primed to think about the potential negative impacts to small businesses.

With no mention of businesses closing, increasing the minimum wage to $10 was more popular than the $15 option (64.31% vs. 57.21%), reflecting that opponents of a $15 minimum wage favor a more modest increase as found by previous survey work. When primed to consider that some small businesses may close due to increased employment costs, support for both a $10 and $15 wage declined (53.13% vs. 55.77%). Regression analysis finds statistically significant drops in support for increasing the minimum wage when the increase was listed as $15 instead of $10 and when businesses closing was mentioned. The pattern endures when controlling for demographic factors.

Political Divide

Surprisingly, a majority of Republicans agreed with raising the minimum wage to either $10 or $15 when we did not reference small businesses. This deviates from past survey work showing strong Republican opposition to increases in the minimum wage, signaling that conservatives may be more open to increasing the minimum wage than they have been in recent years. Additionally, non-white Republicans were more willing to support an increase than white Republicans, consistent with trends among racial minorities being more willing to support an increase than white Americans.

Unsurprisingly, a majority of Democrats supported raising the minimum wage to $15 both when businesses closing was mentioned or not. However, the inclusion of small businesses closing had a larger effect on declining support than specifying a $15 wage versus a $10 wage. This indicates that Democrats are not immune to concerns about small businesses failing from an increased minimum wage but have largely accepted a $15 over a $10 minimum wage as the path forward. Providing protections for small businesses such as a gradual increase of the minimum wage or government financial support for businesses could garner more support for the wage hike among Democrats, making the proposed increase more feasible. 

To help move the issue forward, reporting on how raising the minimum wage could help small businesses would be a meaningful way to combat concerns. The Center for American Progress that higher wages will increase demand for goods, increase worker productivity and ultimately benefit small businesses in the long run with the correct support from the government. Politicians and media outlets supportive of increases could use this framing to solidify support for Democrats and perhaps strengthen support from Republicans as well.

Proponents argue that increases are necessary to make the federal minimum wage a livable one, as the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage in 1968. An increase to $15 would only partially address the impact of inflation and the rise in , the latter that has increased by nearly 30% since the last minimum wage hike. However, if small businesses close due to higher payouts, workers may not be any better off. Our survey findings suggest public sensitivity to broader impacts of a minimum wage increase, suggesting that of raising the minimum wage or policies that can minimize the burden on small businesses could expand bipartisan support.

*[Funding for this survey work was provided by the Mahurin Honors College at Western Kentucky University.]

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is America Ready to Raise the Minimum Wage? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

India’s Health-Care System Is in Shambles

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This issue is of particular significance in India, where the pandemic has steeply, and perhaps irreversibly, increased education inequality. Over 1.5 million schools have , 6 million children of basic education. The government has been preoccupied with issues such as the pandemic, the migrant crisis, the farmer protests and state elections. It has failed to focus on education.

Exacerbated Negatives

Even as capitalist a country as the United States provides its populace with free public schooling. In contrast, a supposedly socialist India is unable to educate its children. India, currently in its youth-bulge phase, has citizens under the age of 25. The education of these young people can and should be India’s catalyst for economic, social and political growth. 

The socioeconomic benefits of education outweigh its costs. For example, the pervasiveness of among girls with no education is 30.8% versus 2.4% for girls who have received higher education. Bearing in mind the fact that more than one out of four Indian child brides become teenage mothers, providing girls with education could help solve the problem of child marriage, which would subsequently combat teenage pregnancy and high infant mortality rates. Education could also reduce the rampancy of child labor while also reducing rates of preventable diseases. 

Unfortunately, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 () and India’s new education have no provision for dealing with the current crisis. Its Constitution declares India to be a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.” Many politicians claim to be socialists. Yet the pandemic has proven that socialism is merely an empty slogan in India. Health and education are highly privatized. Citizens have to pay for basic treatments and for half-decent schools.

The education system had many issues long before COVID-19 made matters worse. The pandemic has only exacerbated the negatives. The RTE had noble intentions but mixed results. India needs a modern education system that expands both the minds of the young and the arc of their opportunities. The pandemic has been terrible for students, but it provides a great opportunity for reform. It remains to be seen if the government will grasp the opportunity.

Legislating Education

Under the current legislation, both the central government in Delhi and the state governments individually can pass laws concerning education. Generally, schools are administered by the state departments of education, while the central government dictates overall guidelines and policy. The Ministry of Human Resource Development oversees the education and literacy of the entire country, conducted in three types of schools: private unaided, private aided, and government-funded and government-run public schools. According to data from the Indian Education Ministry, 75% of all schools are , responsible for the education of 65% of all school students, or 113 million, across 20 states.  

According to Oxfam India, 80% of students in have received no education since the pandemic began. Furthermore, despite the government broadcasting certain classes on television, many students have been unable to access them because they lack basic infrastructure at home. Over 200 million Indians a television, phone or radio. Additionally, this method of teaching and learning is not interactive, with students finding it difficult to grasp the material.

While poor government schools remain closed, private schools have adapted to virtual learning. However, only 23% of all Indian households have . This figure drops to only 4% among the . Rural areas in particular are struggling with the fallout from the pandemic such as the migrant crisis and rampant unemployment, so education ranks low on local governments’ priority lists.

To make matters worse, the closing of schools in early 2020 translated to the effective cancellation of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme that 116 million schoolchildren with hot meals. The central government has drafted guidelines for states and union territories to supply cooked meals or food-security allowances to schoolchildren. However, it is clear that various municipalities have failed to implement these guidelines. For instance, took 44.6 million tons of grains from the central government in 2019 to feed schoolchildren; in 2020, this figure dropped to zero. Children are not only missing out on education but also on nutrients. This is reversing years of progress that India had made in combating malnutrition. It is well known that malnutrition hinders intellectual development and can lead to performance, disease and even death. Children in poor families now face an increased risk of malnutrition as the gap between them and their more prosperous counterparts increases by the day.

But even children from more affluent families are struggling to cope with online learning. are on the rise. In India, board examinations — the final set of tests for students graduating from high school — have been canceled. This has left millions of students worrying about their future. 

Misguided Provisions

One of the key problems with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act is that it is poorly drafted. It is unclear and repetitive. According to the District Information System of Education, as of 2016, only 13% of all Indian schools achieved with RTE norms. As a national act, the RTE establishes certain parameters, procedures and standards for both private and public schools to follow. It places a primary emphasis on the idea of education for all by dictating that every child between the ages of six and 14 must be eligible to receive free education. However, Indian children are still struggling to obtain the education promised to them.

The most adversely affected are the children living in who make up 73% of Indian youth. About 90% of the facilities in these districts are that struggle with untrained teachers and poor infrastructure, failing to meet the standards set by the RTE. Schools that do not follow these standards are forced to shut down. In many cases, these schools are the only option available.

According to the published by Centre for Civil Society in India, between April 2015 to March 2018, 2,469 schools were closed in 14 states due to RTE non-compliance, while 4,482 were threatened with closure and a further 13,546 were served closure notices. In line with Luis Miranda’s for Forbes India, if we assume an average of 200 students per institution in Punjab, the closure of 1,170 schools there as of August 2015 amounted to 234,000 students being unable to attend a school of their choice or to receive an education at all in just one state.

For several states, data on the extent of school closures remain . As of 2016, in public schools was only 1% higher for elementary schools and 2% higher for secondary schools compared to 2000. Data from 2016 that enrolment decreased in states such as Madhya Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal.

The RTE has misguided provisions that may be well-meaning but are highly damaging. The act mandates a 25% quota to be reserved at the entry-level of educational institutions for students from economically weaker sections and disadvantaged groups. The law states that the central government must reimburse schools for the costs incurred due to the quota by either paying schools’ per-child expenses or the fees charged, whichever is lower.

However, this provision has been implemented unevenly. In , Madhya Pradesh filled 88.2% of the 25% quota and Rajasthan filled 69.3%, while states like Uttar Pradesh managed only 3.62% and Andhra Pradesh just 0.21%. Furthermore, corruption under the quota provision is also rampant. Parents often issue fraudulent to qualify under the quota, and schools do not oppose bribery as they favor students from affluent families. When wealthy private schools try to integrate economically weaker students, existing students often withdraw their admission due to a broad physical, infrastructural and cultural chasm between the classes. In India, there is still a stigma around studying with someone from a vastly differing economic background. 

Adding Insult to Injury

There is another problem with the quota system for economically underprivileged children. The central government is supposed to reimburse state governments who fund schools for filling their quota. Unfortunately, there is no methodology for this. The central government decides on an ad hoc basis what any state is supposed to get. For example, in India’s most populous state of , expenditure per child per year is 3,064 rupees, or approximately $41. However, the central government gives this state of 236 million people only 450 rupees, or around $6, for every poor child. Naturally, schools have little incentive to fill their quota for economically underprivileged children, meaning that a mere 3.62% of the seats are filled. 

More significantly, the RTE has failed to address the fundamental issue of the lack of quality in Indian education. According to the 2018 “,” 55% of fifth graders in public schools could not read a second-grade textbook. The quality of teachers tends to be poor. Their pedagogies are almost invariably outdated. Teachers often lack motivation and training. In 2015-16, 512,000 teachers — or one in six — in elementary government schools were .

One nationwide survey revealed a teacher of 23.6% in rural areas. In states like Uttar Pradesh, teachers are hired by paying . Often, they are barely literate. When teachers are qualified, they often run private coaching businesses instead of teaching in the schools. 

To add insult to injury, untrained teachers use curricula that have little relevance to the lives of poor schoolchildren. They champion rote-based learning and, more often than not, destroy creativity. Many schools lack proper buildings, decent roofs and proper toilet facilities, especially for girls. Blackboards, basic learning aids and even chalk can run short. In 2018-19, only 28% of all government schools had and only 12% had an . Despite the government campaigning for a digital India, it has done little to provide computers and internet connectivity to schools across the country.

Time for Reform

As of 2020, India just 3.1% of its GDP on education. Importantly, every national policy since 1968 has recommended a figure of 6%. Other developing countries such as and spend 6.5% and 6.3% respectively. The government of India could start with emulating its BRICS counterparts in increasing the amount it spends on rearing the next generation.

Even the little amount India spends on education often does not reach schoolchildren, the intended beneficiaries of the system. Like all aspects of Indian life, corruption causes much harm to the most vulnerable of the country’s citizens. The upper and middle classes almost invariably send their children to private schools, as do officials in charge of drafting India’s education policy. It is only the children of the poor who end up in government education, with parents having little knowledge or influence to demand either accountability or quality.

Officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) preside over all ministries in India from finance and industry to culture and education. These IAS officers have little if any experience in education. These officers often spend their time trying to get postings to departments with more power and greater opportunities for corruption. They have little incentive to reform the broken system either at the level of the state or national government. Politicians see little gain from focusing on education either. They are always too busy with the next election.

India’s citizens have to demand better use of their taxpayer money. The best use of that money in the long term is investment in education, not only in as funding but also good policymaking. Politicians must entrust this policy to educationists, not IAS officers. In the past, India’s great institutions were set up by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, not faceless bureaucrats.

India needs educational reform now more than ever. The pandemic has been devastating for hundreds of millions of students. If the government fails to act now, India will become an even more unequal and divided nation than it is today. Without high-quality mass education, the country will never have the skill or the knowledge base to be a truly dynamic economy. India’s government schools need to be good enough for the children of top politicians, not just for its poor downtrodden masses. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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During the war, soon to enter its second decade, women were able to break into male-dominated professions — a development well known from other conflicts. However, this progress did not stem from social emancipation but rather due to the dwindling numbers of working-age men as a result of death, imprisonment, displacement and flight. Women’s new responsibilities came with multiple burdens of unequal pay coupled with housework, parenting and increased domestic violence as some men struggled to come to terms with their wives’ new roles.

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A 2017 survey among women living in Syria and abroad identified that 81% thought that the in Syria “truly impede women’s success.” Indeed, many Syrian women living in other countries experience new social conditions that allow them to break free from traditional gender roles. 

Newfound Freedom

Since 2014, Syrians have been the largest group of in Germany. As of December 2019, about 790,000 had fled to Germany, starting in 2010, and the proportion of women among Syrians seeking protection has increased over the years. Many  from Muslim-majority countries have little or no work experience. In numerous cases, they take their first steps to pursue a career in the country where they settle, with nearly 80% of female refugees expressing a desire to be gainfully employed.

A similar picture applies to Syrian women in Germany. According to a , 60% of them “definitely” want to work, and 25% are tending toward doing so, yet only 40% have any work experience. Most Syrian female refugees in Germany belonged to the upper social classes back home. They are well educated and already harbored values closer to those of their new home country. Hence, many of them are more inclined to embrace new freedoms and opportunities.

While the issues facing Syrian refugees may be underrepresented in German media, some have shared their experiences. Mai Zehna, who fled to Germany at the end of 2012 from Syria, where she already worked as an art teacher, Deutschlandfunk Kultur: “I grew up in an open family and was raised the same way as my brother. … Where I was born and raised … women look European. Of course, there are women with headscarves, but many are also unveiled.” Yet according to Zehna, women’s rights in Syria were a far cry from what she is now experiencing in Germany: “The laws in Syria don’t support women. There are written laws, but in reality … society looks at men and women differently. There is more support and freedom here than in Syria.”

Ghada, a 44-year-old from Aleppo, lived a very different life. She fled to Germany to escape her strictly religious family and husband, leaving two of her three children behind: “Women’s rights are suppressed in Syria. … I’ve had enough of it. … In Syria, I was forced to wear a headscarf and a long black coat. … Here in Germany, I have more freedom. I am far away from the oppression.”

Relationships at Risk

Unlike Ghada, who deliberately left her husband behind, many Syrian women have chosen to divorce their husbands in Germany, putting an end to their traditionally preordained roles as housewives. In Syria, women are legally allowed to file for divorce, albeit with more restrictions than men. But besides this discriminatory legal setup, they face pressure and intimidation from their families, neighbors and friends. Character assassination, social exclusion and slander are just some of the repercussions for divorced women who are still condemned by most segments of society.

Najat Abokal, a family attorney in Berlin, noticed an above-average proportion of Syrian women coming to her office and filing for divorce within the first year after the peak of refugee arrivals in 2015. As Abokal the Frankfurter Allgemeine, divorce was the only option for many women to escape domestic violence and begin an independent life. The divorces were often preceded by a period of separation before being reunited with their husbands who had stayed behind in Syria.

During this period, women learned to make decisions that they would have previously left up to their husbands. The unforeseen, long separation has helped many women develop self-confidence and awareness of their new rights. Social psychologist Bita Behravan, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, that women’s respective socio-economic backgrounds are secondary in terms of how they take in their new life in Germany. Women who lived in both modern and traditional roles in their countries of origin cannot help but notice their higher status in Germany.

Hence, the process of integration for Syrian women is an entirely different experience to that of men. Women can see the new values and norms as an opportunity. Men, on the other hand, might perceive it as a fall from grace. From the day they are born, they are used to being taken care of by women. Conversely, they traditionally play the role of providers. After arriving in Germany and reuniting with their wives, these men have to cope with the fact that they are  to take up work instantly, that their salaries are not enough to support the family and that their wife’s second income is required to make ends meet.

Besides, they often depend on their wives’ better German skills in daily life. This initial feeling of helplessness and discontent considering the intra-familial role reversal puts an immediate, and sometimes insurmountable, strain on marriages.

Worth It

Single  in Germany face similar fears of judgment as those trying to escape their marriages. In Syria, relationships outside of wedlock remain taboo — at least publicly. Underneath the surface of religious rules, premarital sexual relationships certainly exist, particularly in late adolescence and early adulthood. However, they remain an unspoken secret and are hushed up in the family and the public sphere. This spiral of silence does not vanish into thin air as soon as Syrian women cross the border into Germany. Even if they intend to leave behind the dominance of family and religious rules in favor of a liberal approach to love and sexuality, the fear of condemnation from their families or tainting the family honor looms large.

Speaking to , 24-year-old Syrian student Hana opened up about the different approach in her new home country: “Here in Germany … people don’t look into your personal life and they don’t require a certificate of marriage for a couple to live together. I feel more freedom and confidence to make my own decisions.” Nonetheless, she decided against telling her family that she now lives with her boyfriend.

In addition to fearing condemnation at home, women who embrace a more Western lifestyle worry about the judgment of men who have sought refuge in Germany but have retained patriarchal social attitudes. “Many immigrants come from patriarchal cultural contexts in which male dominance and female subordination are considered normal,” Susanne Schröter, director of the Global Islam Research Center in Frankfurt. Young refugee men often lose their former dominant role. Hence, some tend to revert to patriarchal practices of their homelands “to prevent these unruly women and girls from gaining freedom through violence.”

Very few women manage to resist this pressure and the weight of religious traditions and expectations. Yet despite these obstacles, many Syrian women in Germany have caught the independence bug. Through prior experiences, they have learned that winning their freedom and shaping their own lives requires strength and effort. Having endured oppression in Syria and taken on the dangerous journey to their new homes, those remaining risks seem worth taking. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The fact is that we do live in an age of resentment, and populism has been among its main political beneficiaries. Resentment has been for propelling Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, contributing to the narrow, playing a in Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, and fueling the most recent for radical right-wing populist parties in Europe. Those who vote for them are to be “fearful, angry and resentful of what their societies have done for them over the years.” Those of us who have been studying these developments for the past several decades could not agree more.

Unsocial Passion

Populism derives much of its impetus from the force of the emotions it evokes. The arguably most potent of these emotions is resentment. Unfortunately, more often than not, the link between resentment and populism is merely asserted, as if it were self-evident. As a result, resentment is either trivialized or comes to stand for about any emotion .

The reality is, however, that resentment is a highly complex, equivocal and ambiguous emotion.  Etymologically, resentment from the French verb ressentir, which carries the connotation of feeling something over and over again, of obsessively revisiting a past injury (from the outdated se ressentir). It is for this reason that Adam Smith, in his 1759 treatise on moral sentiments ranks resentment among the “unsocial passions.” This is not to say that resentment is an entirely odious and noxious passion. On the contrary, Smith makes a that resentment is “one of the glues that can hold society together.” For, as Michelle Schwarze and John Scott have , “we need the perturbing passion of resentment to motivate our concern for injustice.”

On this view, resentment represents what Sjoerd van Tuinen has “a mechanism of retributive justice” that “prevents and remedies injuries.” It is from this sense that Smith’s notion of resentment as the glue that holds society together derives its logic and justification. If resentment is an unsocial passion, it is, as , that resentment, if “unregulated … can be the most socially destructive of all passions.” Here, resentment is nothing but vindictiveness and rancor, the urge to find malicious pleasure in revenge. This is the dark side of resentment.

The other, positive side to resentment is what the “safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.” In this iteration, resentment serves as a mechanism that “prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence.” This type of resentment is, as , “vitally important to maintaining the proper regard for the status of persons as equal participants in a common moral world.”

As a moral emotion, , “resentment is not only an appropriate individual response to failures of justice, but it is also an indispensable attitude to cultivate if an overall degree of fairness is to be maintained in society.”

An excerpt from a speech by Frederick Douglass, the prominent 19^th-century African American abolitionist, orator and preacher illustrates the point. Speaking before the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, that it was “perhaps creditable to the American people” if European immigrants from Ireland, Italy or Hungary “all find in this goodly land a home.” For them, he continued, “the Americans have principles of justice, maxims of mercy, sentiments of religion and feelings of brotherhood in abundance.” When it came to “my poor people (alas, how poor!) enslaved, scourged, blasted, overwhelmed, and ruined,” however, “it would appear that America had neither justice, mercy, nor religion.” As a result, he charged, African Americans were aliens “in our native land.”

Strangers in Their Own Land

The irony should not be lost on anyone who has followed the course of American politics in recent years. In 2016, Donald Trump not only secured the Republican nomination, but he was also elected president of the United States. He did so on a platform that catered to the disenchantment of large swaths of the country’s white population with a political class that appeared to care little about their concerns. Trump scored particularly big among the millions of white Americans who thought of themselves as having become, in , strangers in their own land.

Similar sentiments have been reported from the eastern part of Germany. A from 2019 by one of Germany’s leading public opinion firms came to the conclusion that 30 years after unification, “many eastern Germans still feel like aliens in their own home.” The political fallout has been dramatic: The “feeling of alienness” has informed party preferences more than have differences between political agendas.

Other studies have shown that a significant number of eastern Germans see themselves as second-class citizens. Talia Marin, who teaches international economics at the technical university in Munich, these sentiments to the fact that after unification, many eastern Germans were being told in not particularly subtle ways that their skills and experience acquired during the communist period “had no value in a market economy.” Confronted with this “feeling of worthlessness,” they “lost their dignity.” A from 2019 provides evidence of the extent to which eastern Germans continue to feel slighted. In the survey, 80% of respondents agreed with the statement that their achievements in the decades following unification have not received the recognition they deserve.

Dignity, studies have shown, is central to contemporary politics of recognition. It is at this point that resentment and populism meet. For, as , resentment represents “an interpersonal dynamic which desires the restoration of respect.” Recognition, , constitutes a “vital human need.” Recognition entails, in , “acknowledging and honouring the status of others.”

The opposite is misrecognition. Misrecognition, in turn, is a major source of resentment. Pierre Rosanvallon, in a recent essay on populism, ranks resentment among what he calls the “emotions of position.” These are emotions that express “rage over not being recognized, of being abandoned, despised, counting for nothing in the eyes of the powerful.” In his view, what provokes these emotions is the huge gap that often exists between objective reality, such as the fact that, in terms of GDP, France is ranked fifth among industrialized economies. Subjectively, however, the daily lived experience of a substantial number of French people is quite different who face difficulties making ends meet.

France is hardly unique. As early as 2008, one of the BBC’s top executives, Richard Klein, that “the people most affected by the upheaval” that had characterized Britain during the past decade, both economic and cultural, “have been all but ignored.” Klein’s comments were made at the occasion of a BBC documentary series on Britain’s white working class. The documentary revealed a of “victimhood, rage, abandonment and resentment” among these strata. Not even the Labour Party, once the protector of working-class interests, seemed to consider them important. As a result, they felt completely abandoned, no longer worthy of dignity and recognition.

This is what also seems to have happened in post-unification eastern Germans, or at least not in the perceptions of eastern Germans. Otherwise, they would hardly consider themselves second-class citizens, not on an equal footing compared to westerners. The result has been widespread resentment, surfacing, for instance, during the refugee crisis of 2015-16. At the time, the priority was to integrate the hundreds of thousands of newcomers Angela Merkel’s government had allowed to enter the country. For good reasons, in the east, the mood was one of irritation, if not outright hostility.

The predominant notion was that the government should first integrate what was once communist East Germany. Eastern Germans that in the years following unification they had been asked to fend for themselves. Yet a few decades later, the state was lavishing benefits and support on refugees. For them, eastern Germans grumbled, the state did have money, for “us,” not.

Misrecognition

The eastern German case is a classic example of misrecognition, defined as the denial of equal worth, which its victims from interacting on par with the rest of society. It denies its victims mutual recognition and, in the most extreme case, excludes them from equitable and just (re)distribution. Objectively, this might sound like a thoroughly unfair assessment. After all, for decades, the German government transferred a massive amount of funds to former East Germany (GDR). German taxpayers were forced to pay a “solidarity surcharge” designed to finance Aufbau Ost, a program of reconstruction designed to allow the eastern part of the country to catch up with the west.

Yet none of these measures appear to have substantially reduced the lingering sense of resentment prevalent among large parts of the eastern German population. In 2019, around in the state of Brandenburg considered themselves second-class citizens, while some 70% resented the economic and political dominance of westerners. Two years later, a few days prior to the regional election in Sachsen-Anhalt in June 2021, there agreed with the statement that “in many areas eastern Germans continue to be second-class citizens.”

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Federico Tarragoni, a leading French expert on populism, provides another of misrecognition, this time not from Western Europe but Latin America or, more precisely, from Venezuela. Tarragoni is primarily interested in explaining the widespread support Hugo Chavez garnered among large parts of Venezuela’s population. On the basis of discussions with ordinary Venezuelans living in the outskirts of Caracas, he reports the profound sense of injury and injustice experienced on a daily basis by the inhabitants of these barrios, who have a strong sense that nobody has any interest in them. They are cut off from the rest of Caracas. As one resident puts it, these are places where taxis don’t go. For Venezuela’s high society, these barrio dwellers are nothing but “savages” for whom they have nothing but disdain and contempt.

It should come as no surprise that contempt on the part of one side breeds resentment on the part of the other. Resentment, in turn, evokes a panoply of related emotions, such as anger, rage, even hatred, and particularly a wish for vengeance. When unfulfilled, however, when justified grievances are met with smug indifference on the part of those in charge, the wish for vengeance is likely to turn into resignation. In the sphere of politics, resignation is reflected in a drop in electoral participation, at least as long as there is no credible alternative. This is where populism comes in.

Feeding on Resentment

Populism feeds on resentment. Populist “encode reactions to a sense of loss, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement; they consolidate feelings of fear, anger, bitterness, and shame.” The targets of populist discourses are, however, rarely the institutions and policies responsible for socio-economic problems, such as neoliberalism, international financial markets or transnational corporations. Rather, they are found in groups that appear to have gained in visibility and recognition, such as ethnic and sexual minorities, while others have been losing out. Populists channel the resulting wish for vengeance to the one place where everybody, independent of their social status, has a voice — at the polls.

Election time is . This is how two prominent Austrian political scientists commented on the fulminant upsurge of support for the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) under its new leader, Jörg Haider, in the late 1980s. In the years that followed, the Austrian experience was replicated in a number of Western European countries, most notably Italy, Switzerland and across Scandinavia. The arguably most egregious case in point, of course, was Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 — an act of vengeance, at least in part, against a political establishment that more often than not appeared to show little more than thinly veiled contempt for ordinary people and their increasingly dim life chances (viz Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”).

The vote for Trump was an instance of what Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, from the London School of Economics, has as “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” These are once-prosperous regions that have fallen on hard times, walloped by the decline of mining, by deindustrialization and offshoring: the Rust Belt in the United States, northern England in the UK, Wallonia in Belgium, the Haut-de-France region in the north of France. These areas have been left behind in the race to remain competitive — or regain lost competitiveness — in the brave new world informed by financialization and globalization.

To be sure, these developments have been going on for some time. More than a decade ago already, the French political geographer Christoph Guilluy drew attention to the emergence of what he called “” — peripheral France. These are areas increasingly cut off from the dynamic urban centers. These are the areas, Guilluy noted, where the large majority of the “new popular classes” live, far away from the “most active job markets.” Thus, Guilluy charged, “for the first time in history, the popular classes no longer reside ‘where the wealth is created’ but in a peripheral France, far from the areas that ‘matter.’”

The demographer and historian Hervé le Bras has extended the territorial analysis to include France’s educated middle class. He finds that “” increasingly also affects these social strata, segregation largely dictated by educational level. The higher the level of education, the closer a person lives to the urban center. The opposite is true for those disposing of lower levels of schooling who, as a result, see their upward mobility effectively blocked. The situation of qualified workers is hardly any better. Their qualifications progressively , they too find themselves relegated to the periphery, far away from the most advanced urban centers, more often than not forced to do work below their qualifications.

Brave New World

In this brave new world, it seems, a growing number of people are left with the impression that they have become structurally irrelevant, both as producers, given their lack of sought-after skills, and as consumers, given their limited purchasing power. Unfortunately for the established parties, as Rodriguez-Pose readily acknowledges, the structurally irrelevant don’t take their fate lying down. Telling people that where they live, where they have grown up and where they belong doesn’t matter, or that they should move to greener shores where opportunities abound more often than not has provoked a backlash, which has found its most striking expression in growing support for populist movements and parties, both on the left and on the right.

The eastern part of Germany is a paradigmatic case in point. British studies suggest that there is a link between geographical mobility — and the lack thereof — and support for populism. To be sure, there are plenty of people who insist on staying in their familiar surroundings for various perfectly sensible reasons, such as family, friends and proximity to nature. At the same time, however, there are also plenty of people who stay because they have no options, which, in turn, breeds resentment.

As , “the lack of capacity and/of opportunities for mobility implies that a considerable part of the local population is effectively stuck in areas considered to have no future. Hence, the seed for revenge is planted.” This is what has happened in parts of eastern Germany. One of the most striking demographic characteristics of eastern Germany is its skewed age distribution, disproportionately . And for good reason: After unification, many of those who could get away left in search of better life chances in the west.

The German ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba has characterized the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the east as “the revenge of the villages.” In fact, a number of studies have shown that the AfD did best in structurally weak areas, characterized by demographic decline and lack of perspectives for the future. The most prominent example is Lusatia, a region in eastern Brandenburg and Saxony, bordering on Poland. In the regional elections in 2019, the AfD reached some of its best results in Lusatian villages, in some cases almost .

The region is known for lignite mining, which during the GDR period represented a major industrial sector, attracting a number of industries and providing employment for the whole region. After unification, however, most of these industries , resulting in mass unemployment and a large-scale exodus of anyone who could. The recent reversal of Germany’s energy policy, which entails a drastic reduction of coal in the energy mix, means that the days of lignite mining are counted — another blow to the region, rendering it even more economically marginal — if not entirely irrelevant. Under the circumstances, resentment is likely to remain relatively high in the region and with it continued support for the AfD.

Resentment, the Presbyterian bishop, theologian and moral philosopher Joseph Butler insisted in a sermon from 1726, is “one of the common bonds, by which society holds itself” — a notion later adopted by Adam Smith. Today, the opposite appears to be the case. Today, more often than not, resentment is the main driver behind the rise of identity-based particularism (also known as tribalism) and affective polarization, both in the United States and a growing number of other advanced liberal democracies.

Diversity in its different forms, with ever-more groups seeking recognition, breeds resentment among the hitherto privileged who perceive their status as being assaulted, lowered and diminished. The current stage of liberal democracy, or so it seems, generates myriad injuries and grievances and multiple perceptions of victimization, each one of them prone to fuel resentment, providing a basis for new waves of populist mobilization.

Populist mobilization, in order to have a chance to succeed at the polls, has to offer a positive motivation to those who experienced disrespect, contempt, slight or a general lack of recognition or appreciation. This is, to a certain extent at least, what is meant when we talk about the “” of the experiences of ordinary people. Valorization means in this context taking ordinary people, their concerns and grievances seriously. Populist valorization, however, falls far short of the norms of recognition, which are based on mutual respect and esteem.

It represents nothing more than what Onni Hirvonen and Joonas Pennanen as a “pathological form of politics of recognition” centered upon “the in-group recognition between the members of the populist camp” and the denigration of anyone outside. As such, it cannot but “contribute to the feelings of alienation and social marginalization” that were the source of resentment in the first place. It is unlikely to assuage the profound political disaffection permeating contemporary advanced liberal democracies. In the final analysis, the only ones who truly benefit from the politics of resentment are populist entrepreneurs.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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But that is not all. One of Biden’s most intimate advisers during last year’s election campaign, economist and former director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, Larry Summers, has been leading a vociferous campaign opposing Biden’s policies on the grounds of a lurking . He fears that the combined effect of COVID-19 relief and an ambitious infrastructure project accompanied by diverse social reforms will stretch the economy to the point of triggering uncontrollable inflation, the bugbear of traditional politicians. Biden may want to be remembered as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Summers appears to be inspired by the thinking of FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover.

Hoover was the president on whose watch the 1929 stock market crash occurred. Historians have identified excessive leveraging and the inflation of asset prices as the main contributing factor to the 1929 crash that marked the end of the Roaring ‘20s. That sobriquet for a decade that followed World War I and left in its wake the Great Depression reflects the wild optimism that reigned at the time. The US had survived a “war to end all wars” and now embraced what President Warren G. Harding called “the return to normalcy.”

Proud of their role in ending Europe’s war, Americans — though deprived of alcohol that had been banned in 1919 by a constitutional amendment — interpreted normalcy as an open invitation to self-indulgence. Throughout that roaring decade, the stock market reached for the ceiling before crumbling to the floor in 1929.

To avoid the mistakes that led to depression, politicians have since crafted their preferred ways of fending off imminent disaster. They called the latest trick, perfected after 2008, quantitative easing (QE), a fancy name for the printing of money gifted to banks and corporations skilled at keeping it out of the reach of ordinary people. Quantitative easing magically inflated asset prices with little effect on the consumer index, a phenomenon all politicians gloried in for two reasons. First, it avoided consumer blowback against price-tag inflation. That always puts voters in a bad mood, threatening prospects of reelection. Second, QE meant that there would be unlimited cash available to corporate donors to finance their political campaigns.

The COVID-19 crisis arrived at a point where interest rates had fallen to close to 0% and in some cases had gone negative. The encouraging news concerning effective vaccines at the end of 2020 gave hope of a rapid return to Hardingesque normalcy. But today, things have become more complicated. The new Delta variant of the coronavirus threatens the optimists’ vision of a prosperous post-pandemic world. Add to that the raging debate about spending trillions to implement the long-delayed response to a crumbling infrastructure in the US and it becomes clear that many now doubt the likelihood of a smooth transition to a new normalcy, in which the market’s productive forces, guided by an invisible hand, will solve problems on their own while government spending is reined in.

The question arises: Is it reasonable to print money to solve otherwise unsolvable problems? Larry Summers says it will provoke inflation. Janet Yellen, Biden’s treasury secretary, disagrees: “Is there a risk of inflation? I think there’s a small risk. And I think it’s manageable.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Inflation:

1. The characteristic expansion of all types of bubbles during their formation and preceding the moment at which they burst

2. A general characteristic of any system that seeks to build an elaborate superstructure of hyperreality to replace traditional human activities, institutions, economic relations and social behavior, whose elements range from methods of governing and ideological frameworks to acceptable forms of public rhetoric

Contextual Note

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist and loyal Democrat this week that “while I’m in the camp that sees the current inflation as a transitory problem, we could be wrong.” He thus acknowledges that the threat of inflation is real while reiterating an optimism similar to Yellen’s. Consistent with The Times’ editorial line, he aligns with the president’s political agenda of Biden in his quest to be remembered as a second FDR.

Some have that Summers’ bitterness about not having been handed the job of treasury secretary explains his loud complaining about the danger of inflation. But Summers may have missed the real threat facing the economy, just as he not only the situation in 2007 but even the Asian crisis in the 1990s. “In terms of judgment, in forecasting his record has been atrocious,” according to Joseph Stiglitz. But does that mean Yellen and Krugman are correct?

Who’s to Blame for a Tanking Economy?

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Theron Mohamed, writing for Business Insider, cites a number of experts who beg to differ, including Michael Burry, who famously predicted the 2008 crash and became the hero of the book and film, “The Big Short.” These market analysts see something than inflation in the offing. According to Mohamed, “Michael Burry and Jeremy Grantham are bracing for a devastating crash across financial markets. They’re far from the only experts to warn that rampant speculation fueled by government stimulus programs can’t shore up asset prices forever.”

Whereas Summers and Krugman are debating possible effects on the consumer index, Burry and Grantham are talking about a market meltdown, possibly a new depression. And they dare to designate the true villain: the obsession with shoring up asset prices.

Historical Note

A recent study by Yale Insights points to a historical constant that exists despite radically changing market and regulatory conditions. “Downward leverage spirals are believed to be one of the main triggers of the 1929 U.S. stock market crash,” professor Kelly Shue points out. “Leverage-induced fire sales were also a contributing factor to the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the U.S.” She adds that the same phenomenon underlay the Chinese stock market crash in 2015.

Measures taken with the intent of avoiding a depression have paradoxically aggravated the conditions that may result in a monumentally devastating depression. The intention of the Treasury and the Fed to employ quantitative easing to “shore up asset prices forever” contains one significant error: the belief in “forever.” It parallels the belief of every administration since George W. Bush — now for the first time called into question by Biden — that American wars can also be carried on forever.

The link between the two may be more direct than most people recognize. Military investment and activity have become the core of the US economy. Bloated defense budgets are today’s “pump priming.” Wars keep a cycle of investment alive that nourishes not only industries that directly benefit from defense procurement but more broadly the entire technology sector, which has become the locomotive of the civil economy.

The problem may even sink deeper into the structure of the US economy. Robert Kuttner recently a “dirty little secret of the recent era of very low inflation.” He believes that “the prime source of well-behaved prices has been shabby wages.” Citing “outsourced manufacturing, gig work, weakened unions, and a low-wage service sector,” he notes that the economy’s very real gains from productivity growth have all “gone to the top.”

When nearly all incremental wealth is tied up in assets that may come tumbling down at any moment, nobody is secure. After the crash, the rich will lament their losses and their inability to rebuild. Millions will lose their gig work and below-survival wages in real jobs with no hope for a rebound. And with COVID-19 still creating havoc and climate change more and more visibly aggravating its effects, the problem of inflation we should be most worried about is the verbal inflation of experts who believe their discourse is capable of shoring up a failing system.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Can an Inflatable Economy Survive? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But the American giant is stumbling. Today, Americans fear that the US is in decline. Its economy is progressively skewed to the ultra-rich. Its national government is almost paralyzed. China is challenging Washington’s international power and leadership. American society is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, with up to 40% of Americans believing that a “” leader — a fascist — is preferable to democracy.

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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Almost all Americans worry that for the first time in history, their children will be than they are. Many of America’s political moderates and progressives fear that America’s democracy will be replaced by and consider former president Donald Trump and the current Republican Party fascist. Yet on the other side of America’s political divide, an NPR/Ipsos poll in December 2020 found that 39% of Americans believe that the country is controlled by a sinister “,” and this enrages them.

Social Stresses

My family and I are literally what made America. Since my ancestors arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower off the shore of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, America was created by “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” popularly known as WASPs. The culture that shaped the United States for 350 years was overwhelmingly English, then Western European, with a dominant Puritanical, Protestant ethos.

For 15 generations, America was also culturally and legally a society for whites. Even for my generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans still changed their surnames to sound more “Anglo” — dropping the last vowel, say, from the Italian (and Catholic) “Lombardi” to “Lombard,” to appear more WASP-like and less “ethnic” or un-American. Fully 10% of the population was black, but they were excluded from power and lived on the cultural periphery. Half the nation still lived in an apartheid “” regime, the legacy of centuries of white domination and black slavery. In the media, one saw only white faces like mine, except in subordinate or, rarely, in “exotic” roles. And, of course, America, like the rest of the world since time immemorial, was only a man’s world.  

But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, America began a stupendous social change, with blacks and women gaining unprecedented rights. Furthermore, non-WASP immigrants have arrived in the US by the tens of millions. When I was born, America was over . By the year 2045, under . The trend has already been clear for decades. In the past dozen years, the US has elected a black president twice, a black-Indian female vice president, and its second Catholic president.

Today, the US has a vibrant black middle class. Its Asian population is growing rapidly. Asian and Indian Americans hold many prominent positions in the country’s economic and scientific establishments. Women now hold countless key positions in all sectors of the US economy, including boardrooms. This demographic and social revolution has diversified America but also engendered a nativist, racist reaction and the rise of a fascist: Donald Trump.

Socially conservative whites — especially the least educated — have literally taken to the streets to “” their country from these changes. Donald Trump voices their anger and their demands. Having lost the presidential election of 2020 yet having refused to accept verified results, the Republican Party has taken dozens of measures to voting access for non-whites. There has been talk of civil war, and there has been an insurrection.

Economic Stresses 

Real incomes have largely for about 40 years. Globalization has destroyed entire sectors of America’s middle-class economy. Much of US manufacturing has moved abroad to lower-wage economies. In the 1960s, the single male income earner could provide a middle-class life for most families. Today, of families require two full-time incomes to maintain a middle-class life. According to a Brookings , women account for “91% of the total income gain for their families.”

In 2019, a Federal Reserve study that almost 40% of Americans “wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off.” With $41.52 trillion in assets, the top 1% of households more than 32% of the country’s wealth. With just $2.62 trillion in assets, the bottom 50% own a mere 2%. This concentration of wealth is creating social and political strains.

America Is No Longer One Nation

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The Republican Party has based its appeal on these grievances for decades, and Trump, the classic demagogue, exploited them all the way to the presidency. Blaming stagnation and increasing economic insecurity of ordinary Americans — and their loss of white social status — on globalization has been a ploy of Republicans since the mid-1960s. The party has progressively based its appeal on such tropes and fears since.

Today, Republicans systematically oppose any action by the federal government as a threat to “freedom.” They seek to reduce taxes, gut economic regulations, lower investments in infrastructure and slash expenditure on education, which they deem to be a means of dangerous social engineering. 

Political Stresses

As McKay Coppins has in The Atlantic, after emerging as the leader of the Republican Party in 1994, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” As speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich sought to demonize and destroy the Democratic Party. He refused to cooperate, let alone compromise with the Democrats at any level either in the White House or Congress.

When Barack Obama was elected president, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acted ruthlessly to everything the Obama administration proposed. Before the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell : “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Today, McConnell has that “100% of his focus is on blocking” President Biden’s agenda.

Since the mid-1990s, American politics has turned increasingly polarized, its federal government almost paralyzed. There are two principal reasons the US suffers from political rigor mortis. First, the Republican Party has become increasingly . The Democratic Party remains more moderate and open to compromise but has gotten little in return from the Republicans. Second, America’s electoral structures accord a disproportionate weight to rural districts, which is where the anxious, angry and reactionary WASPs and other whites live. The more ethnically diverse, urban and educated citizens tend to live in the major cities, heavily concentrated on the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. 

On July 1, 2019, population was 578,759 while numbered 39,512,223. In the presidential elections, Wyoming receives three electoral college votes; California receives 55. This means a vote for president in Wyoming is worth more than 3.72 times a vote in California. However, it is in voting for the US Senate where Wyoming really has an edge. Every state in the US elects two senators, regardless of its population. This makes a vote in Wyoming 68.27 times more valuable than a vote in California. 

This structural bias toward less populous rural states gives Republicans a tremendous political advantage. It has enabled them to triumph in two of the last six presidential elections despite winning a minority of the popular vote and to frequently hold a majority in Congress and Senate, despite receiving lower overall votes. America is so evenly divided politically that one party often controls the White House while the other dominates Congress, or at least one of its two chambers. Given the partisan gridlock in the US, this virtually brings legislation to a halt.

The consequences of this electoral and institutional schizophrenia are everywhere to see and experience: American roads, bridges, water mains, harbor facilities and education now lag far behind most developed countries and even many emerging economies. Some foreign visitors to the US have commented that American infrastructure reminds them of the 1950s — which is precisely when much of it was built. The Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train network, awes Americans, including myself, and it is 50 years old. America has always been a “third-world country” for the ethnically excluded. Now, the strains and failures of America’s social, economic and political paralysis extend more broadly through society. Even the WASPs are not spared.

Global Stresses 

Two global issues in particular shape American public life and self-doubts. First, the US is no longer the only great power. China’s rise has been breathtaking. Beijing challenges American preeminence in trade, technology, diplomacy and military strength, posing the greatest challenge to the US since World War II. Many Americans fear that China’s rise is a sign of American decline.  

Second, global warming threatens the American way of life and shapes much of the political debate about the environment, the economy and the role of government. Signs of a literal cataclysm are already upon us. The West Coast has experienced the in recorded history and is living through the worst drought in . In 2012, the US Geological Survey estimated that sea levels would on the East Coast by nearly 50 centimeters by 2050. In 2021, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association projects the same level of sea rise in Boston and Massachusetts. By 2050, the spot where my Mayflower ancestors began the American experiment 400 years ago will be swallowed by the sea.

Yet even global warming divides America. Most of the Republican Party believes that global warming is a perpetrated by the “deep state” so that scientists can have jobs. Some even assert that the California wildfires are linked to “.” These Republican beliefs are an amalgam of lunacy and old fascist tropes. That one of the country’s two major political parties believes such dangerous lies and delusions bodes ill for America’s future. 

During his campaign and since becoming president, Joe Biden has that the next four years will be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” He and his party have to end the paralysis of America’s public institutions and democracy, heal social divisions, and reduce growing economic inequality. They must rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and rise to the challenge of China as a fast-emerging peer competitor in international and economic affairs.

The Republican Party and nearly 40% of the American population will every step Biden attempts. The rural bias in the country’s political structures consistently grants this 40% control of about half the House of Representatives and Senate. Biden must win majorities to implement his transformative economic, social, political and diplomatic policies with only the slimmest majority possible in the legislature.

Furthermore, this majority is fragile. Of the 100 seats in the , Republicans have 50, Democrats 48 and independents two, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The vice president presides over the Senate and supports the president but may only vote in the event of a 50-50 split. Historically, most presidents have struggled to enact their agenda even with strong electoral majorities.

No president since Abraham Lincoln in 1861 has had to deal with such an array of grave social, political and economic crises. Throughout history, many states have proven unable to address structural, systemic problems with legislation and policies that do not profoundly alter these structures or systems. In most instances, however, this requires major social and political upheaval, sometimes even revolution. This has happened before in America — in 1776, when there was revolution, in 1861, when there was civil war, and in 1929, when there was economic collapse. 

Within the current framework of American democracy, Biden can probably only succeed in radically addressing America’s daunting democratic, diplomatic, social, political and economic challenges if his party wins a more solid majority in both chambers of Congress. Thus, all eyes, hopes and fears turn to America’s congressional elections of 2022, now only 16 months away. This historic vote may well decide who wins the “battle for the soul of the nation.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post America, the Stumbling Giant appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Women Become Collateral Damage in COVID-19 Pandemic

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As some of us begin to return “back to normal,” a new threat is emerging. Research indicates that men are far more likely to want to come into the office than women, threatening to bring back the days when office spaces were dominated by men. What does this mean for the future of gender equality in the workplace?

After the Storm

First, let’s look at the raw numbers. A recent UK-based poll of over 2,000 business leaders, office managers and employees shows that almost want to work from home at least once a week when the pandemic is finally over, versus just 56% of fathers. Given that many employers are keen to accommodate the wishes of their staff when it comes to work format, this means within a few short years, we could see offices that are less gender-balanced than they are at the moment.

It could be contended, of course, that this does not matter so much. The experience of the pandemic has proven to many employers that it’s more than possible to build a without interrupting business operations. There are numerous tools that allow most things to be done virtually, and many people are more productive at home than in the office. Similarly, working from home doesn’t appear to be correlated with lower wages in itself. For example, the makes $45 an hour, a figure that hasn’t changed that much over the pandemic period.

However, there are some real concerns exposed by the research. Chief among them is the fact that, for women, career development appears to be positively correlated with in-person work. In other words, while working from home doesn’t appear to affect men’s prospects of getting promoted, it does for women.

In-person attendance at the office can boost an employee’s career prospects, if only because they are more visible in the workplace. Given this, it’s easy to see what may begin to happen if women work from home more than men. Not only will individual women be passed over for promotions, but companies will start to see increases in the gender disparity in leadership roles. Even more problematically, some research suggests that this in that high-ranking executives are more likely to work from the office rather than home, thus exacerbating the problem further.

The Cost of WFH

The research also raises some troubling questions about the way in which employees see their responsibilities. Implicit in many women’s responses to the survey was the idea that they need to balance domestic responsibilities with their professional lives. In other words, more women may choose to work from home, not because they actually want to, but because they are already disproportionately burdened with things like childcare responsibilities. This risks the long-standing when it comes to unpaid labor like domestic work.

The problem here is that many companies are (rightly) presenting a choice to workers to either continue working from home or come back to the office. And while this is presented as a choice primarily related to wherever a worker thinks they will be most productive, the choice is made more complicated for many women by gendered expectations. 

There is a well-established link between domestic labor and professional career advancement. It is well known that unpaid household labor has always been a barrier to women advancing at work as the majority of domestic and childcare responsibilities continue to fall on women. This has only worsened in the pandemic when mothers were, for example, more likely to take on the responsibility of educating their children when schools were closed.

Pandemic Family Life: The Struggles Behind Closed Doors

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As we emerge from the pandemic, we may be exacerbating these damaging stereotypes. It would be very troubling, for instance, to return to a world in which many families feel that men “belong at the office” and women “belong at home.” Even if the women at home are working, it doesn’t hide the fact that this attitude reminiscent of the 1950s will now result in women working full time as well as shouldering most of the household work.

This effect may be even worse among minority groups. There are already many in business, tech and numerous other fields independent of gender, so these communities could be even more greatly affected by the gender gaps left over from the pandemic. 

It is important, of course, to recognize women’s agency in making the choice to work from home. For many women, the last year has been a revelation because it has given them the flexibility they’ve long been asking for when it comes to balancing professional and domestic responsibilities. For many women, this flexible schedule is a major advantage and is one of the reasons why they may be reluctant to return to the office.

Not All Bad

While we must recognize these hidden costs, it is equally important to admit that the pandemic hasn’t been entirely bad news, even when it comes to gender equality. The normalization of remote work has saved many women hours in commuting time and given them back control of their schedules. These short-term gains should not be ignored.

Similarly, this normalization of remote work may allow women to advance their careers in other ways. We’ve seen a spike in online businesses being founded over the past year, as there are now more types of that can be run entirely online than at any time before. Subsequently, many women have taken advantage of working from home to research the different types of online businesses they can start.

Also, having men home from work — especially for couples who follow more old-fashioned gender roles — may also have had a positive effect on how involved men are in childcare and domestic labor. Many couples have been able to divide these tasks more evenly over the past year, adopting more egalitarian strategies in the division of labor. These strategies, it has been suggested, can improve , and even their professional productivity. 

Still, challenges remain. We should remember that not all households are headed by heterosexual couples — or couples at all — which may complicate an approach that seeks to use existing gender stereotypes to reach a more equal division of labor. Similarly, in a social environment where even the radical right is trying to use feminism as a rallying cry, raising the issue of gendered labor risks polarizing the debate. We must be careful not to get bogged down in such polarization lest it cloud the facts of the matter and prevent progress. 

It is possible that some of these concerns will not come to pass. There is, in fact, a school of thought that argues that the post-pandemic period will be much like the times we thought may never return. Nevertheless, given the hard work and the bravery that it took to reach the still-incomplete state of gender equality at the end of the previous decade, it would be wise to pay attention to issues like these moving forward. 

It may be the case that family and childcare policies will be the way toward post-pandemic recovery. Ultimately, we should be careful to ensure that the pandemic doesn’t reverse the progress we’ve made on gender equality while also recognizing that working from home can be a positive step for many women. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will Women Return to the Office? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The new policy states that “any current or former locally employed staff who are assessed to be under serious threat to life are offered priority relocation to the UK regardless of their employment status, rank or role, or length of time served.” To date, more than 1,300 Afghans and their families have been to the United Kingdom. Another 3,000 more are expected to relocate.

Scholars Under Threat

The ARAP rightly assesses that the local Afghan staff who have worked for the British over the past 20 years are at risk. However, it fails to recognize that Afghan graduates of British universities face a similar threat. These graduates have been one of the main drivers of development in Afghanistan. They have worked for the United Nations, the World Bank and various government entities around the country. They have also promoted British cultural values in Afghanistan. Naturally, the Taliban does not view them favorably.

In particular, the attract the ire of the Taliban. Over the years, the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has given out scholarships to some of the most promising Afghan students. Their identification with Britain has attracted special attention from the Taliban, who have called them the “spies of the Englishmen” and “children of the devil ” among other things. Such sayings have not been reported in Western media, but Afghans know this only too well.

International forces have just withdrawn from the . The Taliban are gaining ground and have even captured the main border crossing to . The Afghan government forces are . Kabul is already a dystopian city. The progress Afghanistan made around human rights, women’s empowerment, education, economic development and in other areas is already being rolled back. The Taliban view of the world is almost medieval. Harsh Islamic law that bans modern banking, women’s rights and fundamentals such as freedom of expression will soon hold sway again. Chevening scholars are likely to be hunted down and slaughtered, often publicly, because they are tarred by their association with Britain.

The Taliban have a terrible track record. In the past, they have killed thousands of people, closed down schools for and imposed draconian punishments, often as a public spectacle. It is an open secret that al-Qaeda used Afghanistan as a base during the reign of the Taliban. Those dark days are about to return, and anyone associated with the West will be targeted. Those associated with the US and the UK are already paying with their lives.

Three Good Reasons

The British government has a not only to the local staff but also to the Chevening scholars. The ARAP should cover the latter too. The very scholarship the FCDO granted to promising Afghan students has now become a noose around their necks. The Chevening scholarship has opened new doors for Afghan graduates, but it has also marked them down as Western collaborators in the eyes of the Taliban. Women scholars in particular face a risk. They are often seen as corrupted by Western values and a threat to the traditional Islamic order. Abandoning these scholars to their fate would be the wrong decision for any fair-minded British government.

There is also an economic argument for admitting Afghanistan’s Chevening scholars. In the post-Brexit era, the UK wants to be a global hub for talent. It is in the self-interest of the British government to attract highly skilled and driven professionals from around the world. The Chevening scholars have been trained in the finest British universities. Many of them have also worked abroad or have professional experience with international organizations. They have the skills, the resilience and the initiative to contribute greatly to the British economy. 

There is a social argument for Chevening scholars too. They are some of the most cosmopolitan and cultured people in Afghanistan. While studying in the UK, many were active in student life, organizing discussions, volunteering with charities and hosting cultural events. They have an ability to assimilate into the British culture while adding a distinctive flavor to an increasingly multicultural nation. The Afghan scholars are likely to contribute to the arts, civic engagement and the communities they join. They will be an asset to the UK just as the Huguenots, the Jews, the Pakistanis, the Indians and countless others have been in the past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Britain Must Protect Afghanistan’s Chevening Scholars appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Why Do So Many Athletes Have Mental Health Issues?

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It is only over the past 30 years that women have clawed their way into the upper echelons of sport. Britain’s Jane Crouch and the USA’s Gail Grandchamp were granted licenses to box professionally in 1994 and 1992 respectively. The Women’s National Basketball Association started in 1997. The professional Women’s United Soccer Association launched in 2001 in the US after the breakthrough FIFA Women’s World Cup of 1999. Women were warned for decades of the dangers of distance running, but in 1993, Wang Junxia broke the 30-minute record for 10,000, confirming that the “” was bogus.

Transitions

Women now fight in mixed martial arts, play cricket, rugby and every other sport once considered a men-only affair. And yet three recent developments that might have been hailed as progressive in a different context are, as many see it, threatening to undermine women’s sport.

Earlier this month, 400-meter runner was ruled out of the US Olympic trials because she didn’t satisfy the conditions the track and field governing organization, World Athletics, established in its eligibility regulations for certain women’s events. Among those requirements was that female competitors’ testosterone levels had to be below 5 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months. Testosterone is the hormone that stimulates the development of male secondary sexual characteristics and which some believe confers a physical advantage in sports.

While there is to support this, competitive success rests on motivation, confidence, attention focus and other non-physical attributes, as sport psychologists often remind us.

Telfer had previously competed in men’s events. She was assigned as male at birth but transitioned to female and, in 2019, won a National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s title. Within days of the Telfer decision, New Zealand announced its Olympic team that included a weightlifter who, like Telfer, was born a man and also transitioned. In her case, she did fulfill eligibility requirements and has done so since 2015. Injury prevented her from competing in the 2016 games.

We have become accustomed to athletes who have transitioned from male to female and the understandable obstacles they face in trying to reintegrate into sports. So it was unusual when Kumi Yokoyama, a football player in the US , recently , “In the future, I want to quit soccer and live as a man.” They (Yokoyama’s preferred pronoun) played for Japan in the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France and, as far as we know, were assigned a female gender at birth. Female-to-male transitions in sport are rarer and less controversial, although a player who identifies as male but who competes in a woman’s league as Yokoyama does may yet prompt deliberation.

End of Women’s Sport?

It’s easy to appreciate why so many women (and a few men) in and outside of sport are upset. As they see it, women have spent a century fighting to crush the sobriquet of “the weaker sex” and establish a presence in elite sport. No sooner have they clinched what appeared to be a victory that they find their competitions filling up with women who used to be men, women who wish to be known as men and women who were born men allowed to compete as women but are now excluded because they have too much testosterone.  

It must feel like winning a tough three-set tennis match only to be told by the umpire that the rules have changed and it’s now a best-of-five game. Hubbard’s inclusion, in particular, “is the beginning of the end of women’s sport,” according to of The Spectator. She should probably have added, “as we know it.” The change does not seem terminal, at least not to me. But, for sure, the landscape of women’s sport is changing noticeably.

Biological males have been competing in women’s events at least since the 1920s, when , a British shot-putter and javelin thrower, won all manner of competitions. Upon retiring, Weston and married a woman. In 1936, , a German high jumper, competed at the Olympic Games and was later declared to be an anatomical male. At the same tournament, Polish runner Stanisława Walasiewicz, aka Stella Walsh, was regarded with suspicion; she was shot in the US in 1980 and her autopsy revealed “ambiguous” sexual features. There are several other examples of men — either masquerading as women or living their lives naively as women without realizing their sexual identities — who have competed against women in organized sports.

The case that brought the transgender issue to prominence was that of Renee Richards, who played tennis as Richard Raskins before undergoing gender reassignment surgery, then resuming her tennis career on the women’s circuit. The United States Tennis Association insisted that Richards should take a test to determine her sex. In 1977, the New York Supreme Court that this demand was “grossly unfair, discriminatory, and inequitable, and violative of her rights.”

Denaturing Sex

Following the Richards controversy, a Canadian mountain bike racer competed as a female for Canada at the World Championships, having undergone reassignment surgery in 1996. This sparked debate with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and, in 2003, its medical director announced: “We will have no discrimination … the IOC will respect human rights … after certain conditions have been fulfilled, the athlete will be able to compete in his or her new sex.” The “conditions” related to the length of hormone treatment and timing of surgery.

While the IOC’s approach at the time seemed inclusive and in sync with the times, transitioning, as the reassignment process is now known, was set to become more prevalent. was included by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 and so became a legitimate, treatable medical condition. As well as surgery, hormone therapy can be prescribed, although in recent years a more subjective response has also been recognized. Self-identification became a means of attributing sexual characteristics to oneself.

This effectively blurred the conventional distinction between sex and gender, the former once considered the physical categories of male and female, the latter the social and cultural differences conventionally ascribed to those categories. Once the traditional sexual binary of male and female came under scrutiny, we effectively denatured sex, making it possible to choose how we wished to be known, addressed, treated and, generally, thought of. We brought sex under our volition, adapting it in a way that made it shapeable. Now, sex is practically indistinguishable from and even interchangeable with gender.

Criminal justice systems, educational institutions, the armed forces and most other areas of society have made accommodations to the disappearing sexual binary. In recent weeks, British supermarket chain announced that it will allow staff who identify as women, even those assigned male at birth, to use its female washrooms. A prominent independent substituted the term “head girl” for the nonbinary “learners.”

Biological Destiny

Sport is different. Its history is predicated on the myth of frailty, and its entire structure has developed in a way that reflects this. Only in a minority of events are women allowed to compete with and against men. For the most part, sports are segregated. The policy most in harmony with cultural trends, particularly that of gender fluidity, is to welcome people who presently consider themselves women, no matter what their background may be. After all, the salutary reminder that served feminism so well in the 1970s and beyond was that “biology is not destiny.”

Historically, women have been denied the right to own property, vote, keep their own income, be educated, serve in the military or in politics, or participate in dozens of other pursuits that men have controlled. In a sense, natural-born women have a right to be angry over transgender women. “Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman,” is how of The New Yorker sums up one position. Women haven’t been gifted their rights — they’ve fought for them. This is especially true in sport.

So what happens next? One by one, sports will broach the subject and find a way of including transgender competitors in the events that reflect their present sexual identity — in other words, what sex they consider they are. Some sports that have already made adjustments and modified eligibility rules will probably maintain them for the time being. Others will find such rules unnecessarily awkward. Others still will struggle to find an accommodation. But all sports will admit transgender competitors, no matter how hard and for how long objectors protest their inclusion.

This is an unwinnable fight, and the longer it persists, the more protesters risk being derided as transphobic and out of touch. Sport’s are gratifying symbols of oneness, but in practical terms, its diverse, incongruous, even adversarial elements make sport a twisted, confused entanglement that will be difficult, if not impossible, to unknot.

*[Ellis Cashmore is the author of “.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As a child, I experienced the difficulties of dyslexia firsthand. Growing up, I often felt dumb, lacked confidence and had low self-esteem. I couldn’t read until much later than my classmates, albeit slowly, and continue to have difficulties with math. When paying bills, for example, I still say each number out loud, highlight each digit and review it several times before I hit send on my laptop.

To this day, I still have stomach aches weekday mornings Monday through Friday, but not Saturday or Sunday. This was caused by the anxiety I felt waiting for the school bus and knowing that when I arrived at school, I would not be able to complete tasks, somehow embarrass myself and feel stupid.

Stop Treating Teachers as Cheap Labor

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Before the Christmas vacation in first grade, I recall being very excited hearing bells ringing in the hallway. Our teacher told us it was Santa’s elves putting candy in our boots. We all darted out of the classroom into the hallway. I was shocked to find sticks in my boots. Was I a bad kid? My teacher, not being familiar with dyslexia, probably thought I was lazy.

Needless to say, I failed first grade. However, I was fortunate to repeat it at a nearby school that had an excellent special education teacher. Her instruction, along with support from my family and friends, helped me cope, build much-needed confidence and self-esteem. My father repeatedly told me that I could achieve anything I wanted if I was willing to work hard. He also told me that if it took me twice as long as other students to complete my homework or study for tests, that’s what I had to do.

Other dyslexics are not as fortunate as I was and don’t have the educational assistance, emotional support or encouragement I received as a child. Consequently, it’s estimated — and is no surprise — that dyslexics include over 30% of , 50% of all adolescents involved in rehabilitation and nearly half of all those in the United States.

The brains of dyslexics are wired differently. On the upside, dyslexics think outside the box in a non-linear way, in pictures, not words. Research indicates dyslexics are highly creative, insightful and intuitive, and are able to identify complex patterns much more easily than the average person. I credit this characteristic, which I identify as big-picture thinking, for my ability to connect the dots in seemingly unrelated economic trends and other factors.

In the United States, it’s that dyslexics, who may as much as 10% to 20% of the population, comprise approximately 35% of entrepreneurs, 40% of all self-made millionaires, and 50% of rocket scientists at NASA. Dyslexia is so common at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s called “the MIT disease.” Interestingly, years ago, the American Astronomical Society noted that astrophysicists with dyslexia at times outperformed their non-dyslexic colleagues in identifying the distinctive characteristics of black holes.

Many of the world’s most famous and successful people are dyslexics. This reportedly includes Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci, Bill Gates, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Charles Schwab. Their genius didn’t occur in spite of dyslexia but, more likely, because of it.

In addition to its advantages, dyslexics also often learn to cope with difficulties and deal with failure, which is part of any successful process. I suspect many of my early achievements were motivated by my need to prove I wasn’t a failure.

The advantages of dyslexia are extensive, but they often remain untapped if dyslexic students don’t have access to quality special education services. Although mandated by US federal law, students don’t always get an adequate individualized education plan or the help they need.

According to Annual Performance Reports from the US Department of Education, the cost of schooling a child receiving a special education can be more than twice the average. Since poorer school districts are not as well financed as wealthier ones, and teachers are not always sufficiently trained, many children with dyslexia fall through the cracks, as the numbers above make obvious. This needs to change.

Just as important, the advantages of dyslexia will not be obtained if the child has a negative attitude or a poor opinion of themselves. I’m reminded of the wise words from Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t … you’re right.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The basis of guacamole is smashed ripe avocados. Most of the avocados sold in European supermarkets originate from a handful of countries. In Switzerland, for instance, most avocados are imported from Chile, Peru and Spain. In 2020, imported roughly 19,000 tons of avocados. Over the past several decades, avocado imports have skyrocketed across Europe. In , for instance, between 2010 and 2015, avocado imports rose from 28,000 tons to 45,000 tons; by 2020, it more than 118,000 tons, reflecting an ever-growing demand. Once considered an exotic fruit, today the avocado has become a staple as common as the good old potato.

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The reason for the popularity of avocados is hardly a secret. Like blueberries and quinoa, avocados count among today’s “.” They are not only a great source of nutrients and fibers but also, more importantly, of “heart-healthy monounsaturated fatty acids.” Avocados are supposed to be able to lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels and thus reduce the risk of heart disease. At the same time, they contain antioxidants that might of contracting certain types of cancer. Health-conscious consumers buy avocados, so do trendy urban Green-voting hipsters, vegetarians and .

For many of them, avocados are not only a delicious ingredient, but a . Unfortunately, more often than not, the environmental consequences of a healthy diet are disastrous, particularly in the case of avocados.

The Right to Water

Avocado production is highly water-intensive, roughly , more than 12 times as much as it takes to grow a tomato. (Avocados, like tomatoes, are a fruit, not a vegetable.) Ironically enough, most avocados are grown in relatively arid regions. In California, for instance, whose avocado output amounts to several hundred million pounds per year, the fruit is in the southern parts of the state, from San Luis Obispo to San Diego, in the desert. For that is what is — a “natural desert irrigated by man into a sense of artificial lushness.” It takes a bit less than 75 gallons (about 280 liters) of “blue” water to grow a pound of avocados. Blue water comes from rivers, lakes, streams and aquifers; it does not include rainfall (“green” water) or recycled (“grey”) water.

In late 1972, Albert Hammond stormed the charts with his song “It Never Rains in Southern California.” The title was a bit of an exaggeration. It does rain, on occasion, yet hardly enough, particularly in recent years. In the mid-2010s, California was faced with one of the most severe prolonged droughts in its history. With climate change, the situation is likely to get even worse. At the time of the drought, one commentator her readers that “you should think twice before eating avocados.” That was in 2015. Yet her words are as pertinent today — and arguably even more so — as they were then.

Take the case of Chile, a top exporter of avocados. In 2019, Chile exported some 145 thousand metric tons of its avocado crop. Most of the exports went to Western Europe, with the Netherlands topping the list. In fact, the imports more avocados from non-EU countries than all other member states combined. By 2019, the country accounted for almost two-thirds of EU avocado imports from non-EU countries. More than 90% of imported avocados are reexported to the rest of the European Union after being inspected and repackaged.

Chile is a main supplier of “Dutch” avocados, second only to Peru. In Chile, avocados are primarily grown in the Petorca province, the northernmost part of the Valparaiso region, some 200 km north of the capital, Santiago. In Petorca, , “with droughts happening once every seven years.” Yet as an in The Guardian has claimed, in Petorca, “every cultivated hectare requires 100,000 litres of water per day, an amount equivalent to what a thousand people would use in a day.” In 2019, the Chilean government declared a water emergency in the province.

Since 2016, the people living in Petorca have been allocated 50 liters of water per day, a fraction of what avocado trees need. In fact, the water shortage has been so acute that water was being delivered by trucks. When the water was tested, it contained far above the legal limit, among children.

The fact is that in the major avocado exporting countries in Latin America — Mexico, Chile and Peru — the primary has been “through plantations where avocados are grown in monoculture. This type of agriculture is associated with high water usage due to a heavy reliance on irrigation systems and management practices that degrade soil quality and thus, its water-holding capacity.”

According to international conventions, access to safe water is a fundamental human right. In 2020, Leo Heller, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights to drinking water and sanitation, the Chilean government that it failed to meet its international human rights obligations if it continued to prioritize “economic development projects over the human rights to water and health.” In April 2020, the Chilean government resolved to increase the daily water allowance for Petorca’s residents to 100 liters.

A week later, it revoked the resolution, most likely in response to pressure from the avocado industry. For, as Heller noted, in the meantime, the Chilean government not only continued to “grant new water rights to agricultural companies” but also failed “to control the illegal and excessive use of water by avocado companies.” So much for sustainable development.

Avocado Superpower

This holds true even more for the globe’s number one avocado exporter — Mexico. Most of the Mexican avocados are produced in the state of Michoacan, just west of Mexico City. Most of these avocados are exported to the United States. When it comes to avocados, Mexico is a superpower. In fact, , Mexico “controls half of global avocado trade.” Avocados are a lucrative commodity, attracting unsavory characters, most notably Mexico’s notorious , extorting “producers, transporters and packers to gain control over the sector.”

At the same time, the expansion of avocado production for export to the Unites States has had a devastating impact on the region’s flora. According to every year, more than 20,000 hectares of forest land have been converted into avocado plantations, resulting in massive deforestation, which in turn has taken a toll on . At the same time, the focus on avocados has jeopardized food security in the region, with the cultivation of the cash crop supplanting local staples.

Finally, there is the problem of virtual water. Virtual water refers to the amount of water embedded in the production of a commodity. The virtual water content of avocados is exceedingly high. Avocados exported from Mexico, Peru and other developing countries to Western Europe and North America translate into massive amounts of virtual water imported from water-scarce to generally water-rich countries.

The UK is a case in point. In 2017, the country’s from its five most important suppliers (Peru, South Africa, Chile, Israel and Spain) was estimated at over 25 million cubic meters annually, “equivalent to 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.” As a result, a recent notes, “the overexploitation of water underlying the avocado trade flows may end up worsening environmental conditions in many relatively poor countries in which the export of avocado is often regarded as an important source of economic growth.”

The situation is likely to get even worse given the growing demand from China. Both Chile and Peru have free trade agreements with China, granting them privileged access to the Chinese market. In the six years between 2012 and 2017, the amount of avocados exported to China from 1,500 tons to over 32,000 tons. In Latin America, avocados are seen as “green gold.” Unfortunately, as been the case throughout history, gold tends to cloud the human mind and, eventually, turn into a curse.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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When a far more violent crisis broke out in Jerusalem last week, US President Joe Biden demonstrated his own firm resolution to steer clear of an escalating conflict that had begun in East Jerusalem and has now reached beyond Israel’s borders into Lebanon and Jordan. Biden has taken up his post at the washbasin to avoid having to speculate about the truth.

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In a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Wednesday, Biden reaffirmed the position traditionally taken by all recent US presidents that consists of deferring to Israel’s every wish. Netanyahu appreciated Biden’s compliance. He to the media the logic the Biden administration endorsed: “They have upheld our natural and self-evident right to defend ourselves, to act in self-defense against these terrorists who both attack civilians and hide behind civilians.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Self-evident:

Unquestionably true, especially when the assertion corresponds to one’s self-interest

Contextual Note

When a modern politician bandies about the adjective “self-evident,” it inevitably evokes Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

As a child of the European Enlightenment, Jefferson built his reasoning on philosophical grounds that appear beyond the scope of Bibi Netanyahu’s commitment to self-interested expediency. What Jefferson described as self-evident were “truths.” In contrast, Netanyahu evokes “rights” he considers self-evident, specifically the right to violate international law when Israel feels threatened. Jefferson’s “truths” are the equivalent of axioms in mathematics. They stand as true without being derived logically from any other truth. Netanyahu’s “rights” are self-declared rather than self-evident.

Jefferson modeled his thought on the political philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, a proponent of government by consent of the governed. Locke insisted on the government’s requirement to respect its citizens’ “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson extended the meaning of “property” by calling it “the pursuit of happiness.” Even non-property owners in a democracy could thus be deemed citizens. (That of course excluded slaves, including Jefferson’s own slaves, who existed as the property of property owners).

Most modern politicians have lost all interest in philosophy. They prefer to evoke half-remembered philosophical concepts and use them as meaningless rhetorical placeholders. In his attempt to sound Jeffersonian, Netanyahu expediently skips an important step in Locke’s and Jefferson’s political reasoning: the philosopher’s insistence that a government’s legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed. That ultimately means that political rights exist not as self-evident principles but as an effect of the law, which is the expression of a social and political consensus serving to limit rather than expand the government’s capacity for aggression.

Netanyahu takes the Jeffersonian idea of a self-evident truth about political systems, turns it on its head and transforms it into the inalienable right of the government to violate the rights of the people under its jurisdiction. Concerning self-evident truths, : “I may warn men not to make an ill use of them, for the confirming themselves in errors.”

Some justly accuse Jefferson of cheating, having glossed over the paradox of slavery while asserting that all men are created equal. Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel’s “self-evident right” to self-defense places him closer to Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of passive obedience to governmental authority, than to Locke. Hobbes’ emphasized the idea of “sovereignty by institution.” It supposes citizens voluntarily yield their rights to the institution and cannot contest its sovereignty.

Bibi naturally assumes the Jews have transferred their rights to his government. He also expects the Israeli Arabs — citizens who theoretically, but not in practice, have equal rights with the Jews — to do the same, but they now . As for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, the only rights they can claim are derived from international law, which the Israeli government routinely flouts.

The current strife in Jerusalem began with the cynical, supposedly legally justified expulsion of Palestinians, who had been living in their homes in East Jerusalem for decades after the forced reassignment of residency that followed the Palestinian exodus in 1948. This demonstrates how far from the self-evident truths of Jefferson and Locke the supposedly democratic Israeli government has veered. Property even for Arab citizens of Israel is a purely relative concept. As for life and liberty, the Gazans, in their open-air prison, have no hope of enjoying such rights.

Historical Note

When the Israelis destroyed the building housing the offices of AP and Al Jazeera in Gaza City on Saturday, they demonstrated their disdain for the liberty of the press. Americans and the US government should be appalled at this violation of what they deem to be sacred “constitutional” values. But it has become evident — if not self-evident — that the Biden administration has no interest in promoting a moral reading of the events in Israel. Calling for a voluntary ceasefire is admirable but will have no effect. When he his “hope … that we will see this coming to a conclusion sooner than later,” he appeared hopeful but helpless. 

In his victory speech in November, that the nation’s vocation was to “lead by the force of its example and not the example of force.” Faced with the current crisis, he is neither showing an example nor leading, but rather following Israel’s example of leading by force. Many are wondering whether the very idea of leadership by the United States hasn’t lost its former meaning.

In February, clownish UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that “Joe Biden has put the United States back as leader of the free world in a fantastic move that has helped the West to unite.” Johnson was reacting to the speech in which Biden promised to return to the Paris Climate Agreement and move forward with the Iran nuclear deal. The return to the climate accord took place effortlessly but appears to be of little consequence. As for the Iran deal, negotiations have been engaged but possibly too late to expect any enduring success.

The Biden administration’s anemic reaction to the growing crisis in the Middle East demonstrates that, rather than confirming the nation’s status as “leader of the free world,” it would be more apt to call it “the follower of an apartheid state.” A 2017 in The Atlantic pointed to the persistent but absurd habit reigning in the media of referring to the US president as the “leader of the free world.” The idea of dividing the globe into the free and the unfree worlds theoretically disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union. This time around, what has disappeared is the very idea of American leadership. Fewer and fewer countries believe in it. Biden’s hesitations and inaction on various important issues illustrate why.

Martin Indyck, writing for Foreign Affairs, offers a of the stakes and tactics underlying the superficial game the various concerned parties have been playing in the current crisis. He concludes that “the most basic instincts of the Biden administration are correct.” This is reassuring for the administration, but Indyck may not have noticed the long-term deterioration of the world’s perception of US leadership. He may be mistaken when he sees little risk in simply throwing up one’s hands at yet another Middle East crisis and hoping for a return to “normal.”

Pontius Pilate’s disinfected hands played a role in launching the religion that would eventually dominate Europe. Still, Pilate’s Roman Empire thrived for another three centuries before one of its emperors, Constantine, decided to turn it over to the Christians. How long does Biden expect his empire to last?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Women Become Collateral Damage in COVID-19 Pandemic

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COVID-19 has exacerbated many of the injustices that face vulnerable families, women and children in every country, but especially in those nations undergoing political and economic turmoil, from inadequate internet access to housing instability, tacit unschooling and food insecurity. Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, recently that “the cards have been stacked against them in terms of jobs, housing, community, social support and health care.” In turn, new and different types of inequality, such as the mental health and wellbeing gap or digital and gender inequalities, are exacerbated. Each is a threat to the human dimension of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Facing the Crisis

There is empirical evidence that families, women and children are experiencing mental health stress in the face of the unfolding crisis. The cross-sectional COVID-19 Family Life Study initiated at the College of Public Policy, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, carried out online surveys among 123,845 parents of children under 18 spanning every continent between March and October 2020. The results show the worrying incidence of parents’ and children’s mental health, wellbeing, behavioral and emotional difficulties. 

During the pandemic, anxiety was the most pervasive symptom among parents, followed by depression, then stress. The prevalence differed significantly according to gender, education and employment status. Symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress were found in mothers, parents with primary and intermediate educational levels, as well as retired and unemployed parents.

Parents reported elevated levels of anxiety in their children across high-income, upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income countries, as by the World Bank. In countries facing political instability or conflict, such as Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Venezuela, Iraq and Syria, however, the pandemic has had a severe impact on children’s levels of anxiety. Palestine had the highest percentage of children experiencing elevated and severe levels of anxiety compared to countries with high incomes such as Greece, Norway, Poland, Italy and Australia, which had the lowest.

In Asia, children in early adolescence living in single-parent households experienced higher levels of anxiety. In the Gulf region, over 30% of parents reported their children experiencing an elevated level of anxiety and over 20% reported severe difficulties in their child’s emotional, behavioral and attentional abilities. The study also shows that teens are struggling under the oppressive weight of anxiety and depression, many of whom live in low and middle-income countries.

Children’s activity, eating and sleep routines have been disrupted globally, which may have detrimental effects on their health and overall development. More than half of parents surveyed in the UAE, Lebanon, Indonesia, the United States, the Netherlands, China, Pakistan, Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, Sudan and Peru reported an increase in their children’s sleep problems. Over 50% of parents in Qatar, Bahrain, Italy, the US, Oman, Kuwait, Germany, China, Chile, Venezuela, Malaysia, Nigeria, India and Iraq reported an increase in their children’s reading difficulties. In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Sweden, Oman, the UAE, Singapore, France, the US, Norway, Brazil, Jordan, Nigeria, Tunisia, Kenya, Algeria, Angola, Ecuador and Chile, more than half reported an increase in their screen time.

The results reflect humanitarian crises that predate the pandemic. Many already vulnerable refugees have been plunged into even greater precariousness, for example. The data shows an increasing inequality between countries, with children in high-income countries experiencing fewer mental health problems than those in the global south. While the challenges of the pandemic are overwhelming for all of us, the more pronounced psychological symptoms among children and teenagers may also be a reflection of the inequities inside their homes and in some cases the utter lack of protection offered by national systems. It is also in these countries where mental health counseling is too often unavailable for those who need it most.

The disruptions to children’s physical activities, sleeping and eating routines, reading and screen time will have a long-lasting effect on their physical and mental health. These must be addressed if we are to guard children’s wellbeing and prevent the onset of more severe behavioral and emotional problems.

Facing the Future

Parents are facing serious challenges and need support if they are to continue fulfilling their foundational role in providing secure, stable and healthy home environments for their children. The most vulnerable families, those who are plagued by poverty, those mired down by gender inequality, and those living in conflict zones, must receive the support they need and deserve.

These more vulnerable families do not have the personal resources to manage the multi-layered pandemic crisis. Their vulnerabilities are too easily exploited, whether within the labor or the housing market, with the most vulnerable often willing to accept abusive conditions to stave off complete destitution. Negative coping strategies may include behavioral disengagement, self-blame, denial and substance abuse, leading to further social exclusion.

On the International Day of Families, we must be mindful that the global SDGs will be difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill unless strategies to achieve them focus on the family. Our policy choices today will determine how quickly countries can overcome the pandemic’s impact. Otherwise, we risk aggravating the already deep inequalities both within and between countries.

Technology and digital tools can help in many respects, offering mental health support or giving parents access to essential public health information and tips on how to recognize and cope with the symptoms of anxiety in their children and teens. But for that to work, the widening digital gap must be addressed. The challenges ahead include the need to develop global, regional and national intervention programs to offset the effects of the pandemic. Evidence-based policy interventions can do much to ensure a fair global order that recognizes the inherent dignity of all persons and all families.

Far beyond the span of current COVID-19 stimulus packages, there is an urgent need for investment and support by governments to protect families, as evidenced by the study. Over 90% of parents surveyed reported an urgent need for financial support for families and the elderly, work-family balance arrangements, mental health programs for parents, children and adolescents, and parenting and relationship education programs. The pandemic has illuminated positive opportunities for shaping family and childcare policies, and family policies must be the foundation of post-pandemic recovery.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As the United States has started to formally withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, life keeps getting harder for the vulnerable ethnic minorities in Afghanistan such as the Hazaras, who have suffered long-term persecution. Distrustful of the government forces, the Hazaras considered US presence as a protective shield against attacks. According to a by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, there have been more than 25 acts of terrorism against the Hazara community between 2014 and 2018, including bombings of maternity hospitals, wrestling clubs, mosques and schools. Last time, in October 2020, the Kawsar-e-Danish education center in Kabul was targeted by Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-KP) militants, killing at least 30 students.

No Clear Vision to End Violence in Afghanistan

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While the IS-KP and the Taliban have claimed responsibility for almost all of the acts of violence against the Hazaras in the past, so far, the May 8 attack remains unspoken for. The motivation behind this latest atrocity remains murky, especially since IS-KP does not officially exist anymore, having failed to establish a base in the country. A Taliban spokesman recently told that the attack has been carried out by the Islamic State with the help of the Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security to damage the reputation of the Taliban.

As some lay the blame on the authorities, officials believe the attack has been carried out by the Taliban. Amid the confusion, the Afghan government and various political parties are calling on the UN to investigate the bombing. According to of The New York Times, “Whoever was responsible, they appear to have taken pains to kill as many of the girls as possible.”

Active Target

Since 2014, a year that marked the and saw IS-KP emerge in Afghanistan, the Hazara community has become an active military target for various armed groups and has accused government forces of standing by as massacres continue unimpeded. In the of Sarwar Danish, Afghanistan’s second vice president and himself an ethnic Hazara, in some cases, the community holds the government responsible for the attacks against it.

At the end of 2020, for instance, government forces attacked Habibullah Ghoriani, a tycoon known for arming local Hazaras in Herat province. According to locals and eyewitnesses, the army opened fire on Hazara civilians, including women and children.

In late January, government forces killed 11 Hazaras in the highlands of Behsud district of Maidan Wardak province, claiming that they were affiliates of a local commander who fought against the Taliban and formed the , a Hazara militia. The Afghan National Security Council and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission later sent two separate delegations to the scene. The results of both investigations showed that , the police chief of Maidan Wardak, committed war crimes and shot at peaceful demonstrators. Although the Interior Ministry announced that Fadaei had been suspended from his duties and the case referred to the attorney general, a few days after the incident, he was appointed police chief of Laghman province without ever standing trial.

Such atrocities have a long history and are deeply rooted in Afghanistan’s culture, society and politics. The Hazaras have faced long-term persecution and discrimination from the majority Sunni Muslim population for being the adherents of the Twelvers branch of Shia Islam. Above all, the Hazaras are viewed as the descendants of Genghis Khan, whose armies ransacked the Islamic world, putting an end to the Islamic Golden Age in the 13^th century. 

In the late 19^th century, Abdur Rahman Khan, the emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, declared jihad against the Hazaras, more than 62% of their population. Widespread antagonism toward the Hazara community means that the ethnic group is subject to systematic physical elimination, violence and discrimination for religious and racial reasons. On the day of the school attack, for instance, an Austro-Afghan journalist and author, Emran Feroz, “When I was in Dashte Barchi in March, I made a horrible experience that shocked me. I was making photos of a sports event mainly visited by Hazara. Security was bad. So, I asked a soldier about it. His answer: ‘Let them kill the Hazara.’ He continued racist slurs. I freaked out.”

The Responsibility to Protect

The important question now is what should be done to protect this community?

The day after the attack, the families of the victims on the International Court of Justice to impartially assess the bombing. Furthermore, the Hazara diaspora is working to have the 19^th-century recognized. There is also the move to petition the International Criminal Court to start an investigation into crimes against Hazara civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the community is disappointed with the government’s lack of action. Sarwar Danish the May 8 bombing an act of genocide, mentioning that the terrorists targeted a particular ethnic group with distinct beliefs. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in a also called on a team of UN experts to investigate these killings and other violence in Afghanistan. 

The Afghan government and the international community must recognize the Hazara ethnicity as a group subject to systematic discrimination and violence. The Afghan government and the United Nations have a legal, moral and political obligation to protect such a community. This should be clearly reflected in international declarations as has been proposed by the .

There is a number of measures that can be implemented to protect the Hazara community in Afghanistan. First, the presence of the Hazaras at the strategic, staffing and operational levels of the country’s security sector must be increased and ensured. At the present moment, the number of Hazaras in senior and middle ranks of the security organs is in the .

This has intensified targeted attacks against the ethnic group because officials do not feel responsible for securing the Hazaras and are unfamiliar with the socio-cultural and environmental conditions in which the community lives. The first vice president of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, before assuming office, had that he would provide a way of self-protection for the community via intelligence-sharing. Now in office, fulfilling that promise would go a long way.

Second, the international community should use any possible cultural, political and military tools commonly deployed to protect vulnerable groups from extremists. It is key that the Hazara genocide is acknowledged by both the Afghan government and the UN. The attacks on the Hazaras in the last six years go beyond war crimes and crimes against humanity and carry the hallmarks of modern-day genocide. The government of Afghanistan and international organizations should pay attention to the evidence presented to international legal authorities and consider the demands of the Hazara diaspora.

Last but not least, the government of Afghanistan has to strengthen and support the Hazara community so that it can protect itself within the framework of national security and international values as it has successfully done in the past. In 2017, following the escalation of targeted terrorist attacks on the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the government decided to arm civilians to protect Hazara mosques and religious ceremonies. The government’s plan was to people under the aegis of the Interior Ministry.

The plan was so successful that, , a Hazara leader and President Ashraf Ghani’s senior adviser on security affairs, it prevented terrorist groups from attacking Hazara religious ceremonies and mosques during some important ceremonies, such as the Muharram. By implementing such a program, the Afghan government will take a big step toward securing the Hazara areas in the country. Until this is achieved, the Hazara community will continue to face threats to its already precarious existence in Afghanistan.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Hazara Minority’s Precarious Existence in Afghanistan appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The suffering of Arab Jerusalemites — Christian and Muslim — has gone on for far too long. In 1967, the Arab residents of the Moroccan Quarter were forcefully evicted from their homes before Israeli forces razed the neighborhood entirely, and the same story seems to have repeated itself ever since, with the recent events at Bab al-Amoud, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah being its latest iterations.

Israel Must Accept ICC Jurisdiction Over Palestine

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When on June 27, 1967, Israel extended the remit of its laws and administration to include the Old City and other areas, it acted in direct contravention of Article 43 of the Hague Regulations that requires an occupying power to “respect, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” Any impartial examination of Israeli measures, both administrative and other, taken in relation to Jerusalem, would make patently clear that Article 43 has been violated, and so have Articles 56 and 46.

Ample Evidence

There is ample evidence of the demolition of privately-owned Arab property in Jerusalem to make way for the construction of large apartment complexes in the environs of a city now enlarged. There is ample evidence too of the expropriation of private land and property, which is not, in point of fact, necessarily justifiable on national security grounds. Dispossession, the purpose of which can only be to reconfigure the demographic balance and to prevent the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination, does, however, meet Israel’s demand for housing.

When expropriation amounts to confiscation, it is likely to be in breach of Article 46, which states that “private property must be respected” and “cannot be confiscated.” Demolitions clearly violate Article 53, which prohibits the destruction of property situated in occupied territory. In addition, when enacted as punitive measures, demolition and/or confiscation clearly amount to collective punishment, a crime under international law and a violation of the provisions of international humanitarian law and the principles of customary international law.

Turning a blind eye to flagrant violations of human rights law and international law does have grave repercussions. In our rules-based international order, world peace and security depend ultimately on UN member states upholding Security Council resolutions that in relation to the question of Palestine criminalize the acquisition of territory by force, the building of settlements in occupied territory and the misrepresentation and falsification of facts on the ground. Not only are confiscation, demolition and annexation serious breaches of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, but they also violate Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that hold “inadmissible” the taking of land or territory by war or by force.

Equally inadmissible is annexation. Among the disastrous consequences of further annexation would be the resulting demographic imbalance in the occupied West Bank. Many Palestinians will neither leave their land or their home voluntarily nor relinquish them without resistance. Annexation is a clear breach of international law, which precludes, indeed considers a crime, any form of discrimination against or oppression of one people or racial group over another. This, as regards the situation in the West Bank, has been described by the United Nations, and others as constituting apartheid.

Unless creeping annexation is halted, the viability of a Palestinian state will be further jeopardized, with any such state effectively reduced to a number of Bantustans: disconnected, walled-off islands of land, isolated, incoherent and with no territorial connection to the outside world. Such a result would render the two-state solution inviable, with obvious consequences for international efforts to resolve the conflict.

Near-Perpetual Injustice

Mediated by anger, frustration and hopelessness, decades of systematic humiliation and discrimination can lead to acts of violence, but violence cannot and must never be the response to the violence of others even when that violence is enacted with glaring impunity. Palestine is a woeful tale of an increasingly lonely people beset by near-perpetual injustice, whose moments of hope are oft-shattered by belligerent and reckless politicking. The toll of recent days — the lives indiscriminately taken, the trauma-mangled psyches, the futures broken — does drown out non-violent opportunities for change.

International pressure is vital if violence on both sides is to be halted; a halt in hostilities in and of itself cannot win the peace. There is both the urgent need for new channels of communication and the desperate need for a vision that offers on-the-ground evidence, powerful and immediate, of what the dividends of peace would look like. The security-for-peace formula should be embraced and its goals achieved. Historical obscurantism is not a solution, and despite the legal and ethical obligation to respect human rights, it is crystal clear that neither law nor ethics can ensure either respect or compliance.

Mutual respect and peaceful co-existence are requisites for a just, lasting and, comprehensive peace, which we can wage through the development of a greater receptivity: “I become myself by what I am given by the other.”

We must remember why we care so much about Jerusalem so that once again it can be celebrated as the City of Peace. Jerusalem is a shared gift, not the exclusive property of one government or one people. Because the future of the Holy City matters to us all, we need to ensure the equal treatment of and prosperity for all its residents. Whatever happens in Jerusalem is a testament to the strength or weakness of the relationship between the Abrahamic faiths and the relationship between our societies and cultures.

The deadlock must be broken. The status quo is untenable.

*[This article was originally published by . HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal will appear on its on Friday, May 14.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Future of Jerusalem Matters to Us All appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The good news coming from the White House predictably triggered bad news on Wall Street. CNBC that within hours, share prices of major vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies “including Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, dropped sharply.” The alarm may have been exaggerated. “Johnson & Johnson shed a modest 0.4%,” and closed higher at the end of the week. Pfizer and the others had also gained ground by Friday.

It’s Time to Invest in Curiosity

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The brief Wall Street plummet was enough to provoke the ire of Stephen J. Ubi, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, ready to demonstrate the bad faith everyone might expect from a powerful industrial lobbyist. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic,” he explained indignantly, “the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Public and private partners:

A euphemism invented to hide the practice of getting taxpayers (the public) to pay for research that will guarantee future profits for commercial firms (private partners) by gifting them a monopoly permitting exorbitant margins on sales to the public, whose tax dollars funded the research

Contextual Note

The pharmaceutical industry will tend to judge any political decision made in the name of human health and the prosperity of all as an act of “sowing confusion.” In our ultra-rationalist economy, profit has become the sole measure of value. Compromising profit is evil, and, as Milton Friedman endlessly repeated, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Calling into question the pricing strategies of private companies in the supposed free market is considered a dangerous heresy.

When a government puts up money and resources to stimulate research, guarantees massive purchase orders and transfers the intellectual property to private companies, the companies that benefit don’t consider it “a free lunch.” There’s a reason for this: A lunch at an expensive restaurant in New York may set you back $100 or more. A Coney Island hot dog costs less than $5. But the kind of transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector is routinely measured in billions, if not tens of billions.

The current system of research funding and pharmaceutical production has admittedly produced a certain form of consumer abundance. But the driver of the system even in ordinary times is the management of scarcity and human misery. There seems to be an iron-clad rule that many take to be a law of nature: The misery of the many serves the prosperity of the few. The enduring good fortune of the wealthy enterprises ensures their capacity to partially respond to the needs of the many — but only partially, thanks to the sacrosanct scarcity principle.

Ubi begins his complaint by reminding us that we are “In the midst of a deadly pandemic.” He doesn’t bother to mention that the pandemic might have been controlled months ago if, from the start, we had followed the advice of those who preached in favor of coordinated research and “patent pools.” As Alexander Zaitchik explained in his New Republic on the crucial role Bill Gates played in defending patents, there was a brief moment when the World Health Organization and health professionals were ready to coordinate global research by suspending considerations of private interest and monopolistic profit in response to an impending global threat. That, alas, was seen as stealing Big Pharma’s lunch and violating the consecrated principle of public-private partnerships.

When the pandemic began to spin out of anyone’s control, US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron proudly declared war against the virus. In a veritable world war against a truly evil enemy, with the well-being of every nation’s citizens at stake, reasonable people might expect private interests to give way to the public good. Not in today’s economy. The public sector has accepted its structural dependence on the private sector’s greed to accomplish even its most modest goals. Instead of pooling their efforts, the world’s nations acted as if every other nation was a rival, if not an enemy. Call it the triumph of the spirit of competition.

Historical Note

Ubi complains that the Biden administration took “an unprecedented step.” That is simply untrue. The (DPA), passed in 1950 during the Korean War, authorized “the federal government to shape the domestic industrial base so that, when called upon, it is capable of providing essential materials and goods needed for the national defense.” to The New York Times, the DPA “has been invoked hundreds of thousands of times” in recent years to ensure the procurement needs of the military. Is global health a less deserving cause than equipping an aircraft carrier?

Waiving the patents, according to Ubi “will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.” Some might see this as a threat. That actually makes sense, since threats are an item in every effective manager’s toolbox. But it becomes the equivalent of blackmail. In all likelihood, the Big Pharma behemoths would refuse to cooperate with the transfer of technology and know-how at a time when all processes need to be accelerated to achieve a lasting effect. They are the ones who possess the clout required to “undermine our global response” and “compromise safety.”

Most astonishing is Ubi’s claim that the “decision will sow confusion between public and private partners.” Although President Biden’s initiative is only a modest step forward, the waiver would be a welcome occasion to begin to clarify what a presumed “partnership” means. For the public, it could signal the breakthrough some believe they see in Biden’s stance. For the first time in at least two decades, the idea of putting a valuation on the public contribution and translating it into intellectual property rights becomes conceivable.

In the recent past, public investment in all kinds of innovation has been quietly transferred at a fixed price to private interests. In most cases, the price takes little account of actual cost and even less of commercial value. This is as true of Silicon Valley as it is of Big Pharma. The richest billionaires have benefitted from more than a few free lunches.

Ubi fears that the waiver will “further weaken already strained supply chains.” A year ago, the question of supply chains emerged as a major issue as the wealthy nations discovered they no longer had easy access to the masks, PPE and medical supplies needed to respond to the pandemic. In a competitive globalized world, nearly every nation suddenly found itself at a disadvantage. Ubi is right to signal “strained supply chains.” But the whole point of the waiver is to reduce supply chain bottlenecks at a moment of crisis.

Ubi’s final point concerns his fear of “counterfeit vaccines.” But liberating intellectual property reduces the attraction of counterfeits, an effect associated with the protected monopoly of exclusive brands. Illicit imitations of every type of commodity will continue to be an issue for local or national law enforcement. The medical profession is far more capable than retail stores to combat counterfeiting.

The CNBC article concludes with warnings about “China’s ability to piggyback on U.S. innovation to further its vaccine diplomacy aims.” It mentions Russia as well. The idea of cooperation appears nowhere in its reasoning. That is what’s expected from a media whose sole focus is on what affects the stock market. It cites The Washington Post editorial board’s of Bill Gates’s self-interested reasoning. With such well-funded resistance in the financial and political world, the likelihood of a serious change of outlook seems limited. DC lobbyists, generously funded politicians and conformist media clearly have more power than the American people and far more than the seven billion people that populate nations not called the United States.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Big Pharma’s Big Free Lunch appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The New York Times legitimately called Biden’s with a principle promoted by more than 100 countries “a breakthrough,” after noting that until Wednesday the US had been “a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend intellectual property protections in an effort to ramp up vaccine production.” Biden’s representative to the WTO, Katherine Tai, nevertheless emphasized that this dramatic reversal should be thought of as exceptional: “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines.”

For a Few Billion Dollars More

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Digging a little deeper into the perspective for change, Michael Safi at The Guardian the Biden administration “two cheers” rather than the three The Times appears to believe it deserves. This follows from Tai’s realistic assessment of how things are likely to play out: “Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Consensus-based:

Designed to protect vested interests, even in the face of a majority and the logic of history and health itself

Contextual Note

Times reporters Thomas Kaplan and Sheryl Gay Stolberg remain faithful to the patented meliorist approach the paper applies to nearly all policies conducted by a Democratic president. They emphasize the constructive process now underway at the WTO in a piece that echoes The Beatles song, “Getting Better All the Time.” The Biden administration seems to be telling the world: I’m changing my scene and doing the best that I can.

In contrast, the coverage by The Washington Post (owned by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos) spends most of its ink suggesting the proposed waiver probably is fundamentally a flawed idea, leaving the impression that not much if anything will come of it. According to its pessimistic take, “Tai cautioned that the discussions to proceed with negotiations over the waiver’s text would ‘take time.’ Current and former officials said that a final agreement could differ significantly from the proposed waiver, which India and South Africa first introduced in October, and that deliberations could fall apart entirely.”

CNN more prudently the fact that the US proposal “is preliminary and will not guarantee the global patent rules are lifted right away. But the Biden administration’s signal of support amounts to a major step that aid groups and Democrats had been pressing for.” It nevertheless appears to offer Biden his third cheer when it explains that the president “ultimately decided to support the waiver in line with his campaign pledge.” It quotes US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s claim that Biden “put people over patents.” 

But CNN points clearly to the true obstacle: “Members of the WTO must unanimously decide whether to loosen the restrictions. And while the US had been a hold out, other countries — including the European Union and Switzerland — have also resisted the step.” In other words, Biden may have killed two birds with one stone. By letting Europeans do the dirty work, he could save his standing with Big Pharma — surely the main reason for his hesitation — while appearing to stay true to the progressive principle of putting people over patents. Interestingly, France’s President Emmanuel Macron may be .

Historical Note

The Guardian reminds its readers that the proposal is limited to “waiving patents on Covid vaccines — but not on treatments or other technology used to fight the disease.” Whereas the US media presented the question as one of moral duty versus economic interest, both The Guardian and point to the practical question implied by the waiver: “If approved, the waiver would theoretically allow drugmakers around the world to produce coronavirus jabs without the risk of being sued for breaking IP rules.” For the developing world, feeling free from an imminent attack by corporate lawyers is indeed a kind of liberation.

In other words, the proposed waiver would leave the world a long way from the optimistic scenario originally evoked by health experts and scientists in early 2020 that Alexander Zaitchik in his exposé of Bill Gates’ influence on the WTO: “Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies.” The idea at the time was to mobilize everyone and maximize resources. This implied .

The health professionals facing the outbreak of COVID-19 understood both the scope of its threat and the dangers of an insufficiently coordinated organization to counter it. They also knew what the consequences of patent protection might turn out to be. The adoption of the agreement Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995 and TRIPS-plus in 1999 marked a landmark moment in the trend economists and politicians have celebrated with the term “globalization.” The specific rules applying to pharmaceuticals have been in place since 2005. In 2015, the website Infojustice the fact that the TRIPS agreement had established a regime in which “patents grant the patent holder a monopoly on the market that allows the blocking of price-lowering generic competition and the raising of prices which restricts affordable access to medicines.”

The history of the past two decades has demonstrated to the global south the risk existing patent laws represent for their health and welfare. In 2015, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights “attention to the potential detrimental impact these treaties and agreements … may have on the enjoyment of human rights as enshrined in legally binding instruments, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social. Our concerns relate to the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labour standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement.”&�Բ�����;

COVID-19 changed everyone’s perception. So long as the world was not faced by a politically toxic pandemic, the developed world was free to use its superior wealth and force to impose its rules on the rest of humanity. Any serious campaign to understand the fundamental asymmetry that was continually and silently aggravating the gap between the rich and poor nations was easily stifled. Thomas Piketty could write erudite books about the gap and what was driving it. But most people in the West had bought into the belief system promoted by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman, conveying the message that thanks to globalization and American technology, the world was now flat.

In an ideal scenario, the Biden administration will now begin to put pressure on Europe and Switzerland to emulate America’s courage in backing the proposed waiver. It will also pressure US vaccine providers to share their technology and know-how with the rest of humanity by convincing them to show not just their leadership but also their commitment to human health above profit. With or without patent protection, there is no danger of their becoming unprofitable, not with the power they have and an ever-expanding marketplace for health. But what we are witnessing, as they resist even temporary waivers, is the rentier’s obsession with automatically induced maximum profit making the question of health benefits a secondary consideration.

In the months to come, the world will be attentively observing the political and economic games now being played out. At some point, COVID-19 will begin to fade away. The world will then face the fear of the next contagion and perhaps begin seriously to struggle with a strategy to counter the effects of climate change. Awareness of the stakes is already much higher than in the past. It is time for the political class to begin assessing the risk that represents for their own future.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post After Long Wavering, a Waiver appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The crisis was still “unfolding” more than a year after the outbreak precisely due to Gates’ effective dictatorship over the global effort to combat the virus. Insisting on protecting Big Pharma’s intellectual property, Gates single-handedly blocked the one solution scientists and health experts were eager to run with: the sharing of industrial procedures to avoid hoarding and scarcity while addressing the needs of humankind.

Is Bill Gates a Danger to Humanity?

Now, even after massive coverage of the scandal provoked by Gates’ adamant opposition to intellectual property waivers that effectively limits the capacity to manufacture vaccines on the scale required for a pandemic, Neate once again expresses his effusive admiration, citing Gates’ willingness to spare no expense in the name of the cause: “It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this, the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars … being lost economically, it is worth it.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

A few billion (dollars):

Chump change for the hyperwealthy

Contextual Note

Gates’ statement deserves some careful unpacking. It reveals more than he may have intended about his worldview. It may even hold a clue to Melinda Gates’ this week, also covered by Neate. Gates mentions “constructs,” apparently referring to research projects declared stillborn when their results prove to be inferior to other projects bet on by the same philanthropist. He calls it “waste,” but he should know that the whole purpose of research is to distinguish what doesn’t work from what works well.

There is nothing wasteful about that effort. Wasted “constructs” are an essential consequence of the structure and logic of research. But focused on the naive idea of building the proverbial “better mousetrap,” Gates apparently deems anything wasteful that fails to pass the intellectual property test, pointing to guaranteed future profits.

After regretting the waste, Gates goes on to explain why such waste can be tolerated. It’s not because it is a stage in advancing the cause of human health. No, as James Carville once told candidate Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Gates talks about “the situation we’re in” and makes it clear that the threat he worries about isn’t to millions of people in the global south, but to the loss of trillions of dollars of economic activity. Gates is a man who knows his priorities. Those trillions produce the fortunes of multibillionaires whose philanthropy can save the human race. Unlike McKenzie Scott, Gates may not have noticed that the pandemic has comforted and increased the wealth of the current generation of multibillionaires, such as himself. The longer it lasts, the more durable will be the results.

Gates esteems that losing “a few billion” when your estimated fortune is around $124 billion is “worth it,” if what you’re doing is designed to save not so much people as the capitalist economy. He has repeatedly insisted not only that the protection of intellectual property is the key to the economy, but that a prosperous capitalist economy dominated by global powerhouses like Microsoft and Big Pharma is the key to human health. He sincerely believes this, even if along the way some “waste” occurs as hundreds of thousands die in India and Brazil and other places handicapped by a deficit of intellectual property.

Historical Note

Neate uses the occasion of the philanthropic couple’s impending divorce to heap more praise on Bill’s exemplary generosity: “Bill is the world’s fourth-richest person with his estimated $124bn (£90bn) fortune, but he would have been even more vastly wealthy if he had not committed to giving away at least half of his fortune before he dies.” That is technically true in terms of Gates’ personal holdings, but a foundation represents personal wealth in a different form.

Moreover, if wealth is power — as most people would admit — foundations offer direct political power in ways that personal wealth can never do. Those who shovel massive amounts of their personal wealth into foundations bearing their name and which they control are investing in their own political power far more than they are contributing to that collective idea that Adam Smith, the father of capitalist theory, once referred to as “the wealth of nations.”

Gates was certainly the luckiest techno-creator in the history of information technology’s triumph over the past 40 years. If IBM hadn’t gifted him the development and the intellectual property of MS-DOS — which IBM itself marketed across the globe in its PCs — he might have gone done in history as just another Harvard dropout addicted to experimenting with computer code. Anyone who spent the decade of the 1980s using MS-DOS can understand why Gates will never be remembered as among the most brilliant of a tribe that included Steve Jobs but also people like Tim Berners-Lee and Linus Torvalds.

The latter two never sought to become billionaires or business icons. Gates’ genius was focused on understanding how to leverage dropout. His story is similar in some ways to that of his friend, Warren Buffett, who honestly attributes his own success to his understanding of the mystery of . These hyperwealthy individuals share traits that some would call autistic.

In the course of his panegyric, Neate does have the decency to quote Anand Giridharadas, whom he identifies as “one critic of billionaire benefactors.” Giridharadas predicts that the Gates divorce will have ramifications in “the worlds of business, education, public health, civil society, philanthropy, and beyond.” He explains that it “is because our society has made the colossal error of allowing wealth to purchase the chance to make quasi-governmental decisions as a private citizen.”

We may wonder if the divorce is in any way related to the latest controversy about Gates’ role in the vaccine fiasco. Has Melinda read Zaitchik’s article or dared to listen to Giridharadas’s reasoning? Will we ever know? There is most likely a in the offing, possibly resembling McKenzie Scott’s $38-billion divorce arrangement with Jeff Bezos in 2019. 

Ms. Scott’s net worth today is estimated at $68 billion. Her commitment to philanthropy appears more sincere than her former husband’s or Gates’, especially as it is significantly less self-aggrandizing and reflects a more refined sense of . For Scott, “there’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.” She even dared to offer this that most billionaires avoid evoking out of fear of brandished pitchforks: “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

One serious question remains, and it concerns the media. Why do prestigious papers such as The Guardian and The New York Times consistently cheerlead philanthropists like Gates, refraining from any even mildly serious criticism? On the topic of vaccines, The Times featured a in March that contained, hidden in its depths, observations worthy of serious reporting. Investigative reporter Megan Twohey confessed that “we found time and again that there were a lot of people in the world of public health who would talk to us off the record about their concerns about Gates and his growing power and influence in the world of public health, but they were very reluctant to say so on the record, in large part because his money was everywhere.”

Twohey also remarks that “as he’s become more powerful, it has also become very difficult for people to imagine any more radical reform without his support.” Her editors apparently have never asked her to pen an article on Gates’ influence. With media like that, “radical reform” is indeed difficult to imagine in our current economy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post For a Few Billion Dollars More appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It is difficult to understand how a country of experienced farmers, extensively terraced areas and fertile agricultural valleys could fail to feed itself. In 1955, a mission of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to Yemen that it was one of the best terraced countries in the world at the time. Indeed, Yemeni farmers are worthy of being described as masters of their particularly harsh environment. The main features of Yemen’s geography and climate are seasonal rains in limited parts of the country and almost no precipitation elsewhere; semidesert coastal plains; western and central steep, rugged highlands of a volcanic mountain massif; and eastern and northeastern arid plateaus and vast deserts, including , literally the “Empty Quarter” — “the largest area of continuous sand in the world.”

What Caused Yemen’s Famine?

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But despite the fragility of the Arabian Peninsula’s environment, including its southwestern corner, the ingenuity of Yemeni farmers’ methods has successfully established innovative and truly sustainable systems of agriculture and food production since time immemorial. As it turns out, what has thrown Yemen into a downward spiral of rural marginalization and impoverishment is an insidious alliance between irresponsible, short-sighted governance and a reckless global food regime, one that is obsessed with the bottom line and market value. Together, as Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo in “The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry,” they worked to “reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry into volatile world markets and extend land alienation, while increasing import dependence.”

Once Yemen was hooked on “speculative world markets dominated by monopoly finance capital,” the rest of the damage was automatic. In fact, that is how free markets work, if that is what you feed into them. Yemen is a good case in point for malintegration with the global economy and the imposition of unequal agricultural trade at the expense of both food security and sovereignty.

Of Donkeys and Farmers

There are two main drivers of Yemen’s persistent and severe food insecurity. Both of them were simultaneously brought about by developmental interventions in the country, particularly in what is commonly referred to as northern Yemen. This part of the country is home to a major water-shed infrastructure spanning two fundamental food-producing systems: the mountain highlands and the lowland Yemeni Tihamah, the Red Sea coastal plain.

The first and foremost driver of insecurity is the large loss of domestic production of native staple grains, including, above all, sorghum. Called dhurrah in Yemen, sorghum is an important traditional staple for humans and livestock. As pointed out by Daniel Varisco in his of agriculture and water rights in Yemen, sorghum is boiled to make Yemeni porridge, aseed, a nutritious popular dish, and ground to make flour for baking traditional bread. Sorghum leaves and stalks are fed to cattle, the bottom part of the stalk is used as fuel for a traditional clay oven, tannur, and the surplus of sorghum fodder and grain is stored for the rest of the year (it is a summer crop, planted in late spring).

This loss is the direct result of the agricultural trade liberalization of the country’s local markets that was indirectly dictated to Yemen. It was done in the name of development, of course, by luring the country into artificially low prices for basic commodities on global markets. In her of Samir Amin’s writing and ideas, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven underscores that external dictates such as those imposed on Yemen have prioritized the demands of international capital over the long-term needs of the people. She adds that states, capitalists and non-capitalists alike, “need to invest not just in the goods that are the most immediately profitable on the world market or domestically, but in long-term projects that are the most likely to lead to improvements in living standards for people.”

As a consequence, Yemen became absurdly overdependent on basic foodstuff imports, including, notably, wheat and rice, from volatile world markets. In addition to leading to the country’s alarming state of hunger, the loss of domestic production has eventually resulted in a significant decrease in rural sustainability and livelihood. The domestic production figures speak for themselves. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (), Yemen produced between 700,000 and 760,000 tons of sorghum during the early 1960s. In 1960, the country’s was 5.3 million. In sharp contrast, by 2014, one year before the start of the war, the quantity dropped to less than half, 341,000 tons, and then to 222,000 and 162,000 tons in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

By that time, the population had grown to an estimated 27.2 million. Meanwhile, the country’s net domestic supply quantity of wheat, for instance, went from an average of 115,222 tons for the period 1961–69 to 3,104,625 tons between 2010 and 2017. Similarly, the average domestic supply quantity of rice went from 20,333 tons to 533,250 tons for the same periods. Given that Yemen does not grow rice and almost entirely imports wheat, these figures portray Yemen’s rapid and costly transformation from food self-sufficiency to striking food insecurity.

Capturing the essence of the collapse of Yemen’s agriculturally self-sufficient economy is the shrewd observation by a professor of political philosophy at the University of Sanaa that donkeys and smallholding agriculturalists in Yemen share the same fate. Originally published in 1988, Abu Bakr al-Saqqaf’s noted that lost donkeys that had been wandering the streets of the cities of Taiz, al-Hodeidah and Sanaa were dying of hunger or being killed by vehicles. Despite being an important agricultural asset, the animals were abandoned because their owners could no longer afford fodder. To deal with this problem, the Yemeni government borrowed money from the United States to supply fodder to local farmers instead of addressing the root cause of the problem.

The fate of the donkeys’ owners was no different. Coerced by the forces of the free market to abandon their agricultural lands altogether, they ended up wandering off en masse all the way to the Gulf, not just to urban Yemen. Previously dignified and accomplished farmers, Yemen’s smallholders and other rural male labor spent the rest of their working lives confined to small rooms they shared with other estranged comrades. Those who were better off lived in pathetic housing conditions in overpopulated and very poor parts of town. As such, Yemen’s peasantry was uprooted from the land, neither by chance nor by circumstances of their own making.

Draining Yemen’s Groundwater

The second driver of Yemen’s destitution is the major shift from longstanding rainfed agriculture to groundwater-dependent irrigated agriculture. It resulted from the introduction of hydraulic pumps powered by diesel in the country’s coastal region and dry plateaus, in addition to building expensive, high-maintenance barrages in the coastal spate-irrigated wadis — Arabic for valleys, watercourses without a permanent flow of water — as by Martha Mundy and several others. These new irrigation methods and permanent diversion structures were perceived by international development agencies as technological improvements.

From their point of view, groundwater mining served to increase water supply for the production of crops that had a high international market value. Thus, in a capitalist economy, they were justified. However, by disregarding the country’s well-known water scarcity, those substantial investments served as a second blow to Yemen’s sustainable agriculture and rural productivity. Over-financed and unregulated, irrigated agriculture has overexploited and depleted Yemen’s deep fossil aquifers. It favored perishable yet lucrative crops destined for local urban and Gulf markets.

In so doing, it benefited the country’s large, wealthy and internationally connected landholders at the expense of its rural smallholders. In the short term, this market-oriented production policy impoverished the country’s rural population by freeing it from the land. In the long term, it starved the whole country, today home to an estimated 30 million people, by reinforcing its dependence on imported wheat and other staples. Reporting on the findings of his ecological field of tribal farmers in al-Ahjur, a rich agricultural valley in the central highlands of Yemen, conducted in the late 1970s, Varisco concluded the following:

“The emphasis on new machinery, cash crops, and experimental farms represents a potential threat to viable traditional agricultural systems such as ghayl [Arabic for water flowing from springs] in al-Ahjur. The role of the small farmer, growing crops both for his own needs and for a regional market, is being challenged. Al-Ahjur represents all that is right with traditional agriculture in the Arab world. … Hopefully, the experience that has led to viable traditional agriculture in Yemen will not be ignored in the future development of the region and its resources.”

Many other informed experts have repeatedly cautioned that the injection of external agriculture technology and knowledge cripples Yemen’s development. In its titled “Groundwater depletion clouds Yemen’s solar energy revolution” published in April, the Conflict and Environment Observatory issued yet another blunt warning. According to the report, solar power is “vital to break a crippling dependency on diesel for water supplies but it risks increasing unsustainable groundwater abstraction.” The report states that “urgent action is needed by all stakeholders to prevent groundwater levels falling to the point that they become inaccessible,” stressing that “the consequences of inaction may be dire.” They already are.

Regrettably, all alarms sounded over Yemen’s food insecurity and water insecurity have been deliberately ignored. The obvious dispossession, displacement and imprudent exploitation of agricultural assets, labor and resources under neoliberal conditionalities make it a foregone conclusion to state that Yemen’s famine is but a historic policy failure, as Patnaik and Moyo demonstrate in their book. In the of Ali Kadri, “Yemeni labour and resources have to be continuously undermined and cheapened.” He explains: “The labouring classes in Yemen have to be denied control of their resources and readied to enter the global accumulation system as material of capital via its encroachment side.”

At any rate, agricultural policy in Yemen has commodified human life and dignity. Going forward, two things must change. First, Yemenis need to own their national development strategy. Second, the mainstream doctrines and attitudes toward the development of Yemen’s agriculture sector and the whole economy more broadly must change. In other words, postwar agricultural development policy must be both inward-looking and holistic. In agrarian societies, agriculture and rural production are integral to the whole economy. In the case of Yemen, a major change in agricultural policy that shifts away from ill-conceived neoliberal policies is inevitable, for they have not only silenced the interests of Yemen’s mostly rural population but famished the whole country.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Road to Yemen’s Starvation appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Biden administration has exceptionally called into question the US policy of hoarding vaccines for domestic use. It has agreed to share with India millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that was stockpiled while awaiting authorization for use on the US market. This became possible because it turns out the stock of authorized vaccines will be sufficient for domestic needs.

Following a telephone conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President , somewhat cryptically, that the US would be sending “the actual mechanical parts that are needed for the machinery they have to build a vaccine.” Does this mean India will be able to manufacture vaccines whose patents are held by Western pharmaceutical companies? The Indian Express that Biden’s initiative “comes after criticism of Washington over its delay in responding and its earlier cold shoulder to a request for lifting the freeze on export of raw materials linked to vaccine manufacturing.”

Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

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Everyone should know by now that the ice pack for America’s cold shoulder was provided a year ago by philanthropist Bill Gates, who continues to oppose the sharing of know-how and industrial secrets with those who need it most on the grounds that it undermines his logic of industrial production. Even when the taxpayer foots the bill, Gates believes private companies should retain the right not only to skim off all future profits but to manage the scarcity that ensures the vaccine’s long-term profitability.

Criticism of Gates has been rife in recent weeks, but nothing has been done to rectify an increasingly dangerous situation. The progressive populist website gives the details of a news conference in Washington, DC, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and several other lawmakers, accompanied by “leaders of labor, public health, faith and other civil society groups.” They urged the Biden administration to “join 100 other nations in supporting a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that now give a few corporations monopoly control over where and how much COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are made.”

Bernie Sanders stated the basic case: “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Common human morality:

An idea inherited from the past but clearly superseded in the present by the laws of free market capitalism that place economic interest above human need as the principal criterion governing public morality.  

Contextual Note

The above quote by Bernie Sanders also featured in an article on another popular progressive , Common Dreams. Jake Johnson it for Salon. Though it was a DC news conference headed by a prominent political figure, none of the major corporate outlets apparently considered it worthy of attaining The New York Times’ vaunted standard of “all the news that’s fit to print.” No one would deny Sanders’s exceptional weight of moral authority, acknowledged even by those who don’t share his “democratic socialist” agenda. So why wasn’t this news?

The simple answer to that question is that in today’s hypercompetitive world, where everything is about power and profit, the corporate media apparently have no idea what to do with the idea of morality. The institutions known as the liberal corporate media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and even much of broadcast news — stopped showing an interest in common morality the moment they began placing their trust in the likes of the CIA, the NSA and the countless lobbies as their most reliable source of political truth and practical wisdom. To the degree that the various conservative media have always believed in the merits of a dog-eat-dog world where all must fend for themselves in a struggle for personal advantage, they tend to treat the very idea of common human morality as an unfortunate attribute of “snowflakes,” the sign of a weak character.

Bernie Sanders grew up in a moment of history when the notion of a common human morality still had some impact on human behavior. Over the past half-century, it has been replaced by the kind of realism that focuses on personal ambition, private profit and the acquisition of power. Today’s media can only see Sanders’ invocation of common morality as a quaint vestige of former times.

Historical Note

In October 2020, the World Trade Organization published an on how the current intellectual property rules could effectively meet the needs of a human race confronted with a global health problem. Subsequent events have revealed how disingenuous their claims were. “Collaboration and cooperation among health technology developers, governments and other stakeholders,” it suggested, “can be positively supported by the IP system as well as by guidance on lawful cooperation among competitors under a country’s domestic competition policy regime.”

In a with the title “Why waiving patents might not boost global access to coronavirus vaccines,” the authors, Ashleigh Furlong and Sarah Anne Aarup, sum up the current state of the debate concerning the campaign to institute a temporary waiver of the reigning intellectual property rules to permit the production of vaccines in the countries where they are most needed: “By some accounts, the IP waiver is the answer to producing more desperately needed jabs, but it’s being blocked by Big Pharma and wealthy nations guarding their bottom line. Others attest that the waiver makes no sense for vaccines and is being backed by people who are seizing the issue as their chance to make more sweeping changes to the current IP system.”

The “others” in the last sentence would undoubtedly include Bill Gates. This confrontation could potentially become a significant moment in history. Sadly, it will have required the death of millions of people to provoke the “sweeping changes” that are clearly needed to reform a deeply perverse system.

The first indications of a historical shift may appear as soon as next week. On May 5, in response to an initiative of India and South Africa, the WTO’s General Council will meet to consider a patent waiver permitting nations in need to manufacture the vaccines whose IP is now jealously guarded by for-profit pharmaceuticals. According to the , the “United States so far has remained non-committal on the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) move of India and South Africa over this.” On Monday, the White House informed reporters “that no decision has been made yet” in response to the legislators’ demand for the US to back the proposal.

The suspense will grow in the coming days. Will Biden dare to defy Bill Gates? Does the president of the United States hold more power than the pharmaceutical industry? Before proving himself to be the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a claim his supporters have made — can Biden show even a slight aptitude to emulate the other, earlier Roosevelt, the trust-busting Teddy?

Theodore Roosevelt was not just a “rough rider” but also a rough and tough opinionated character. Yet he reflected something that still existed in his day, the idea of a common human morality. He expressed it through his trust-busting but also in various pronouncements. “This country,” he , “will not permanently be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” He could even political analysis: “This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either.”

No establishment Democrat or Republican, not even Bernie Sanders, would dare to pronounce such an obvious truth today, when the corruption that fuels the political system has been sealed into the economic ideology that governs it.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This new role, nevertheless, depended on him being one of the richest men on earth. He now wanted to be seen as the most virtuous wealthy man on earth, the one who only thought about what his money and wisdom might produce for other people. After shamefully neglecting philanthropy for the first 20 years of his professional rise to the top, Gates suddenly embraced it. You could say he took possession of it, just as, when he was still CEO of Microsoft, he would sometimes take possession of companies with competing products to drive them out of the market.

Thinking about what he could do for others and giving them the means to meet their needs or achieve their ambitions clearly wasn’t enough. Gates would not be a passive philanthropist. His contribution would consist of telling people what they must do and how they must do it. Although to some, such as or the Daily Devil’s Dictionary itself, it has been evident for some time, acute observers are just beginning to understand the extent of the damage produced by Gates’ commitment to spending billions of dollars for our collective health, education and welfare.

Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

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In yesterday’s column, we cited Alexander Zaitchik’s detective work in his New Republic with the title “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines.” Gates would probably argue that without the prospect of earning untold billions in the future thanks to their control of intellectual property rights, the incentive consisting of being paid generously to develop a global solution in the interest of humankind would simply fail to motivate the pharmaceutical giants who control the marketplace of critical drugs and vaccines.

Gates his hand at education and failed miserably. His role in defining the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 vaccine program produced a fiasco that could have been avoided. Gates is now focusing on agriculture, becoming, as a member of the Sioux nation, Nick Estes, , the “largest private owner of farmland in the US.” Gates is now particularly active in India’s agriculture, which is currently undergoing a major crisis. 

In all these cases, Gates steps in with cash and convinces others, especially public authorities, to support his projects with government funding that will be used to fulfil his, rather than the public’s, agenda. He runs his experiments, always designed as top-down management ventures. He then watches them fail and walks away, presumably a wiser man. Worse, the public only remembers that he put up the cash, not that he played Dr. Frankenstein or the sorcerer’s apprentice. The devastation he creates remains. In the best cases, the damage is local. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it has been global.

Dr. Joseph Mercola on The Defender, a website dedicated to “Children’s health defense,” the Indian scientist and ecological warrior, Vandana Shiva (a 51�Թ� contributor) concerning Gates’ foray into Indian agriculture. In his summary of Shiva’s points, Mercola cites this one: “Through his company, Gates Ag One, Gates is pushing for one type of agriculture for the whole world, organized top, down. This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Digital farming:

The transformation of an essential human activity aimed at feeding humans into a profitable activity aimed primarily at feeding the bank accounts of shareholders in agribusiness monopolies.

Contextual Note

Shiva and Mercola advocate for an intelligent, ecologically sound return to the human culture of farming. This implies more than following the mechanical rules of industrial processes. Like all cultures, it is a bottom-up creation that grows from human experience. It includes not only the respect for natural techniques and processes but also the maintenance and development of traditional relationships that imply human rather than purely technological control of farming.

Without denying science — Shiva has a PhD in quantum physics — she understands the very real cost of dehumanizing agriculture. India’s Green Revolution permitted a rational leap forward after the disorder of colonial rule, but it also set the stage for a disastrous transformation of the environment, which, if pursued, will transform India’s breadbasket into a desert.  

Should we listen to Shiva rather than Gates on the relationship between science and farming? After all, she is the scientist; Gates is an industrial promoter. Shiva justifiably exclaims: “My god, what kind of stage has the world reached that absolute nonsense can pass the science?” Historians may end up calling that stage in our economic and cultural history the “financialization of everything.”

Shiva seeks to counter the crushing weight of corporate power and monetary might in a hyper-industrialized, artificially intelligent economy that reduces human activity to the management of mechanized assets. The corporate powerhouses and sainted post-industrial gurus like Bill Gates definitely have data on their side. They live and breathe data. Data is literally their wealth and the only thing they seriously believe in. To prove that their policies are right, whether while manipulating the media or giving a TED Talk, it is data that they cite, not human accomplishment.

Their monetary wealth now focuses on monopolizing data and codifying it as intellectual property, which in turn inevitably extends their existing wealth. Data is, after all, an asset with low overheads and infinite capacity for duplication. That is the unique, nasty secret to the historical success of Microsoft. Bill Gates and the corporate world of which he has become the emblem represent the concentrated wealth with the power to influence governments and dictate policy.

Historical Note

Mercola compares Gates to John D. Rockefeller. Though he doesn’t mention their names, he remembers the maestros who founded the art of : Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. Those two men were called in to successfully transform Rockefeller’s public image from a grasping, evil robber baron to that of a munificent benefactor of humanity. Lee and Bernays did more than save Rockefeller’s tattered reputation. They inserted the meaning that was missing from the myth of capitalist acquisitiveness. Capitalism is not just about producing goods that become available to the mass of consumers. Thanks to philanthropy, it’s also a system designed to encourage a new type of virtuous behavior.

Rockefeller’s, JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie’s capitalism developed unhindered through the late 19^th century until a few political actors — two of them named Roosevelt — looked for largely imperfect but nevertheless reasonably effective ways of reining them in. That was a period in which manufacturing sat at the core of the economy, set the tone for the management of prosperity and produced the wealth that spread through the growing consumer economy.

At that point in capitalist culture, through most of the 20^th century, what counted tended to be tangibly material. In recent decades, financial games have overtaken all other forms of economic thinking. Bankers, industrialists and politicians depend on it for its so-called “productivity” — producing profits out of thin air. There may still be a tenuous link with the real economy since financialization seeks to establish and control monopolistic production and distribution. But the logic behind the production no longer has anything to do with human needs and even less with human culture.

Bill Gates is not alone, but more than any other public figure he has successfully positioned himself as the man who knows what everyone else needs and has the money to write the rules of the game on a global scale. Does this make him the new Satan? In one sense, Gates is simply the product of his times. Better than the visionary inventors — Steve Jobs or Elon Musk — Gates has always known how to appeal to the idea of pragmatic seriousness. MS-DOS, not Macintosh, conquered the world of business in the 1980s. But it has become increasingly obvious that thanks to his money, the world has become a poorer place.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is Bill Gates a Danger to Humanity? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Four months later, Trump began and blaming Xi’s China by claiming “that the virus originated in a laboratory and was accidentally released.” In September, he preferred to to his voters that COVID-19 was the result of an Asian conspiracy designed to undermine his presidency. This sparked a wave of anti-Asian attacks in the US that have continued to this day.

Prominent scientists today that Trump’s initial assessment may have been right. Their colleagues who dismissed the idea of an accidental release of the virus from a Wuhan laboratory were either misled or disingenuously defensive of an equally unproven thesis. The scientists may have been impelled to reject the suspicion of a laboratory accident not only out of a lack of direct evidence, but also out of fear of the political blame game the president was beginning to exploit to distract attention from his own failure to respond appropriately to the crisis.

Trump obviously preferred to see the war against a virus as a PR opportunity to bolster his image as a fearless leader. Allowing politicians to place blame on China, even for an accident, might have become as dangerous for the world as the virus itself, adding to the reigning misery rather than resolving the mystery of the origin of the disease.

Wealth Inequality Breeds Health Inequality

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Science itself and its public image have taken a hit from this ongoing catastrophe. The honored, if not revered Dr. Anthony Fauci to prioritizing the distribution of masks among the medical community above the general public at a time when little was still known about how contagious COVID-19 was and how it spread. Political leaders across the globe, including Trump, all found themselves in a thankless position as they were required to demonstrate their leadership with insufficient knowledge of the nature of the challenge and a penury of material means to confront it.

Many deserve to share the blame for a situation that, despite progress with vaccines, is still in many ways worsening. But, as Alexander Zaitchik exposes in an important in The New Republic, the person perhaps most to blame for our global failure to respond effectively is neither a scientist nor a politician. His name is Bill Gates.

Most rational people would reason that a global crisis requires a global response. Most realists recognize that in a civilization dominated by sovereign nation-states, summoning a unified response to any global crisis will never be easy. Humanity’s quasi-universal awareness of the problem of global warming over the decades demonstrates the difficulty of mobilizing humankind to implement even a minimalist response.

In his article, “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” Zaitchik narrates a depressing story that began in February 2020, when the nature of the COVID-19 threat had become clear. In conformity with its mission, the World Health Organization (WHO) a “research and innovation forum to mobilize international action” aimed at combating the spreading epidemic. It sought to “maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery.”

Collaboration and sharing of science would be critical to any effective response. With most research publicly funded — a point Mariana Mazzucato made this week — it specifically recommended . Zaitchik notes that optimism was still possible: “Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Proprietary science:

An oxymoron to the extent that “science” simply means human knowledge and cannot be owned or commodified.

Contextual Note

The WHO was thus prepared to play the role assigned to as stated in its constitution: “The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent upon the fullest co-operation of individuals and States.” Aware of the challenge lying ahead of them, the team began to prepare its campaign. Alas, it hadn’t counted on the intervention of the globe’s self-appointed Mr. World Health, Bill Gates, whose title derives from his contributing billions of dollars to the causes he believes in (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has $1.75 billion in the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine). Among them is the most sacred of all causes: intellectual property. 

Zaitchik describes in detail how Gates — a man with no skills in science, security or politics — has positioned himself to dictate to the world how contemporary science will affect every human being’s security. The key, following the logic of all capitalistic projects, is the management of scarcity. Without scarcity, industry cannot survive and prosper. Little does it matter that because of scarcity many humans simply will not survive.

Before Gates’s intervention, the group sought “to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO.” In so doing, they demonstrated their naivety: “That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down — from research and development to manufacturing scale-up — does not seem to have occurred to them.”&�Բ�����;But that is exactly what happened, thanks to Gates’s overpowering voice (measured by billions of dollars rather than decibels) and his “reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.” When the dust cleared, what emerged was “a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”

Zaitchik documents the ensuing catastrophe due largely to “Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine” and his “unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.” No one other than powerful governments can hope to compete with Gates’s cash reserves. But Gates’s own government, in Washington, DC, — whether under a Democrat or a Republican president — would never compete as a matter of principle. Competition is a private game. No other government in the world has the power to compete. The US government, like Gates himself, appears addicted to “politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies.”

Historical Note

The egregious oxymoron “proprietary science” would have seemed strange to the ears of anyone living before the industrial revolution. Were he alive today and imbued with modern economic culture, the 15^th-century German printer, Johannes Gutenberg, would be claiming a percentage of every book, journal or magazine produced thanks to his invention of the printing press. Instead, Adolph II of Nassau, Archbishop of Maintz rewarded Gutenburg — the Bill Gates or Elon Musk of his day — for his innovation “with the title of ‘Gentleman of the Court’.” He also received “a court outfit, a stipend and two tonnes of grain and wine, tax-free.” The wine can be explained by the fact that Gutenberg’s inspiration for the printing press came from observing a wine press.

Gates deserves to be similarly honored for his invention of MS-DOS. Rather than the billions extracted from the Earth’s entire population thanks to his skill at monopoly creation and predatory business practices, he should have received from the governor of the state of Washington an appropriate title (“Gentleman of the coding room”), a flashy suit of clothes with a matching raincoat (for Seattle weather), a generous stipend (a million of two per year would be appropriate) and maybe an unlimited supply of canned foods, since he is a believer in and expert practitioner of canned economic and scientific wisdom.

As many of the rest of us queue up for one of the competing vaccines that promise to bail us all out — despite their disparities in performance adding to the confusion created by the incompetence of competitive governments — we should reflect on what all this tells us about an economic system whose vaunted efficiency Gates believes in and practices while using his money and clout to impose it on an unwilling world.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Problem of Food Security in America’s Consumer Society

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In our little town, the Rs were the epitome of what across the Atlantic is referred to as “white trash.” At the time in Germany, there was hardly anyone who looked “different,” so “white trash” would have made no sense whatsoever. They were German trash, and everybody knew it. In my immediate neighborhood, there was a woman who had three “illegitimate” children, all of them girls, all of them with a reputation of being tomboys. My parents, of course, told me I better keep my distance. I did, if only to avoid being bombarded with stones — the weapon, at the time, of the weaker sex — and, of course, out of fear of being associated with German trash.

America’s Outcasts

These are some of the reminiscences, images and thoughts that recently crossed my mind while parts of Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.” Released in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, the book is as pertinent — if not more so — today as it was at the time it was published. This is the story of the , the vagrants and “crackers,” the rednecks and the “deplorables” who “have remained vilified, shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically — in poorhouses and trailer parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy — and in the nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and unceasing grimaces.”  

For anyone who has ever watched an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show” knows what I’m talking about. With 28 seasons and around 4,000 episodes, it was not only one of America’s most successful TV series but also an export hit that exposed the rest of the world to the other side of America in the crudest way. The show was so successful because it systematically brought out some of the worst in human nature while at the same time the “audience’s need to feel superior.” It reinforced age-old stereotypes that dismissed a part of America’s white population as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy and stupid” — stereotypes, as , that “remain with us until today.”

A case in point is the methamphetamine epidemic that the American Drug Enforcement Administration in 2003 as “the most dangerous drug problem of small-town America.” In fact, what distinguished meth was that the drug was most prevalent in rural areas in the country’s heartland, where it was “burning a hole,” as magazine put it, “through rural America.” What also distinguished it was that, unlike, for instance, crack cocaine, which is predominantly associated with inner cities and people of color, meth was largely characterized as a white-trash addiction. As Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, , meth was “a white trash drug — methamphetamines largely are consumed by the lower socio-economic element of white people. And I think we need to shame it, just like crack cocaine was a black-trash drug and is a black trash drug.”

The same applies to a certain extent to what Joshua Wilkey, in his blog , has called the “white-trashification of the opioid crisis.” Wilkey’s charges the political establishment in Washington with not giving “two shits” about the crisis, at least as long as it affects primarily the rural poor in depressed areas such as the Appalachians. At least two reasons account for this: first, the notion that addiction “is simply the result of stupid people making poor choices” and, second, that since the crisis “largely targets poor and rural areas, there’s less urgency on the part of urban elites to advocate for solutions.” To put it more brutally, white trash just doesn’t matter, if only because it does not conform to the dominant narrative — in which whiteness represents the “” — that serves as the justification for white socioeconomic dominance.

White Privilege

At the same time, the trope poses a challenge to the notion of white privilege, for white trash is a term that racializes whiteness by denigrating those as such “in race specific terms.” One way to get out of this quandary is to relabel a clearly derogatory racialized as “pseudo-racialization.” For the guardians of this type of wokeness — largely derived from critical race theory prevalent today in American academia and the chattering classes — this might sound reassuring. It shouldn’t, at least if wokeness is taken seriously. It should not be forgotten that wokeness is as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

The derogation, denigration and disparagement of, if not outright contempt for, America’s white underclass, mocked and dismissed as white trash, certainly counts for an egregious example of inequality alongside a range of dimensions — economic, social and cultural. White trash is the Lumpenproletariat of our globalized world, structurally irrelevant and, therefore, largely ignored — at least as long as it doesn’t become a threat to society as it did during the meth epidemic.

Worse still, as the notion of pseudo-racialization implies, the distress and despair of the white underclass are easily dismissed since its problems fall through the dominant grievances grid that today is almost exclusively informed by and defined in racial terms. What Ernesto Laclau has once called the “internal antagonistic frontier” that informs today’s hegemonic wokeness discourse runs between whites and everybody else. In this discourse, whiteness is automatically associated with privilege and entitlement. The white maligned underclass might be underprivileged or worse, but, being white, it is automatically subsumed under notions of privilege and entitlement for no other reason than that one so happens to be white.

The case of Oumou Kanoute, a black student at Smith College, which was in The New York Times, illustrates the point. Here even , in her recent defense of critical race theory, had to acknowledge that something went horribly wrong, that this was a case of “woke overreach.” Smith College is one of the most prestigious — and expensive — liberal arts colleges in the US. Students attending the college are the epitome of entitlement, given the prohibitive cost of tuition and board that easily amounts to nearly $80,000 a year. An in The Guardian from 2016 hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that “at the best colleges there are very few low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.”

As The New York Times account rightly put it, the Smith College incident is a story of the clash between race and class. Once again, class came out at the short end of the stick, resulting in the destruction of the reputations of a number of employees, all of them white, all of them part of today’s easily dispensable service class — janitors, security guards — who were labeled as racists and as carriers of white privilege. Yet, as a in The New York Times put it, “the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.” Does it matter? Apparently not, for as the initial report by The Times put it, the whole story “highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.” In short, something must be true because you think it is true. This might explain why even after an investigation exonerated the employees of racial bias, they received, unlike the student, from the administration. The white underclass apparently is not worthy of recognition.

Dispensable Service Class

The incident happened in 2018. In the meantime, Oumou Kanoute has on to Columbia University, another elite university. The fate of the targets of her accusations is largely unknown. But then, who cares about janitors and security guards? This is hardly a rhetorical question. According to from the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, the white poverty rate was 9%. This amounts to more than 17 million Americans. Poverty rates were disproportionately high (around 15%) in West Virginia and Kentucky, two Appalachian states, which were also among the top states when it comes to .

The impact was devastating. In 2017, the opioid-related in Appalachian counties was more than 70% higher than in the rest of the country: 24 versus 14 deaths per 100,000 residents. At the same time, the rate of Kentucky’s neonatal abstinence syndrome was more than than the national rate, West Virginia’s more than eight times.

The , recently published in a medical journal, of a physician who grew up in eastern Kentucky provides a first-hand account of the misery and despair the epidemic has wrought. Eastern Kentucky, a coal-mining area at the foot of the Appalachian hills, is among the poorest in the United States. Isolated and on the margins “both geographically and culturally,” the region and its opioid crisis were long ignored by the national media.

It was not until “it had spread to more affluent and valued parts of the country, almost 15 years later” that it would gain national attention. This is despite the fact that the region is overwhelmingly white. Magoffin County, for instance, which is the focus of the physician’s account, in 2000 was roughly 99% white. But then, who gives two shits about poor white trash — except, perhaps, to make money. Otherwise, why would Amazon a “Funny Kentucky White Trash Tee Shirt”?

In late 2016, an on America’s poor white underclass noted the “barely suppressed contempt” that “has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right.” In support of their observation, the authors cite a that appeared in the National Review, the flagship of the traditional conservative right, heaping scorn on low-income white voters for supporting Donald Trump in the primaries. Among other things, the author sneered:

“If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

In 2016, Trump won an overwhelming majority in eastern Kentucky. In Magoffin County, for instance, he won roughly 75% of the vote. Four years later, Trump once again carried Kentucky by a wide margin; the same was true for Magoffin County. And yet, in his four years in office, he had done little to nothing to improve the lives of America’s poor white underclass. To be sure, at one point, Trump had claimed he would revive the coal industry so dear to states like West Virginia and Kentucky. He didn’t, and, like any good populist, once in power, he largely ignored the plight of those whose pain he had earlier purported to hear. As , America’s poor, independent of race, by and large don’t vote and, therefore, can be dismissed. They don’t count, in more than one sense of the word.

Farewell to the Proletariat

Unfortunately, the left on both sides of the Atlantic has, to a large extent, bought into this trope. Instead of fighting for every vote, the left has written off significant segments of a potential electorate which, at one point, was part of its natural constituency. Yet in the late 1970s, at least in Western Europe, the left abandoned the concerns of blue-collar workers in favor of new “postmaterialist” priorities, promoted by the “new middle classes.” A paradigmatic text was André Gorz’s manifesto from 1980, “Adieux au proletariat” (“Farewell to the Proletariat”). In the decades that followed, the left increasingly adopted what has come to be known as identity politics, centering upon questions of gender, ethnicity and race.

There is nothing wrong with identity politics — as long as it is inclusive. Following , the potential of progressive politics crucially depends on the establishment of an alternative “powerbloc” that not only unifies different claims and struggles, such as the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future movements, but is also able to effectively challenge the dominant power structure and the hegemonic narratives, such as neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. Identity politics on the left these days focuses on minorities, such as LGBTQ and particularly race, in the process sidelining, excluding, if not outright dismissing questions of class. As one who identified himself as a “white man living paycheck to paycheck” put it in The Atlantic, “I think that most of us would acknowledge that minorities have it rough, but at least someone seems to care about them.”

In the end, a strategy that focuses almost exclusively on an anything-but-white identity politics — if it is at all a strategy — is only going to weaken any genuine hope for a more equitable politics. At the same time, it is likely to provide fertile ground for the exploitation of resentment and anger by cynical populists such as Donald Trump well versed in the deceptive appeal of symbolic politics, like feeding into delusions of white superiority, while doing nothing concrete, like raising marginal tax rates on the rich to pay for universal health care, for the “ordinary people” they purport to represent.  

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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According to the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSPC) last year, 3,752 women were violently killed. Of these were 969 classified as femicides — as the violent death of a woman because of her gender — a slight increase on the previous year’s figure. According to data by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico has the second-highest total number of femicides in the region — after Brazil — whilst nearby El Salvador and Honduras have the highest rates per capita. The of violent crime, a culture of machismo and weak implementation of measures designed to protect women mean Latin America is home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world.

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The first months of the coronavirus pandemic were particularly dangerous for Mexican women, according to Maissa Hubert, the executive sub-director of Equis Justicia Para Las Mujeres, a Mexico City-based NGO. “During the first months of the pandemic, we saw a rise in various forms of gender-based violence,” she says. “In total, 11 women killed each day, compared to 10 per day at the start of 2020.”

In March 2020, the emergency call centers 26,000 reports of violence against women, the highest ever in Mexico. The number of women leaving their homes to take shelter in the National Refuge Network .

Outside the home, however, the continued growth of Mexico’s transnational criminal organizations and the militarized response of state security forces have further increased risks to women. While crime dropped in the first months of the pandemic, the security vacuum has increased clashes between 198 active armed in the country’s “hyper-fragmented criminal landscape,” according to International Crisis Group.

Gangs and Militarized State Security

“Organized crime has aggravated the situation with regards to the murder of women,” says Maria Salguero, a researcher who the National Femicide Map. “The crime gangs use the dead bodies of women to send messages to their rivals. In states where there is a lot of organized crime, such as Juarez, Chihuahua, Guerrero and Naucalpan, we see high incidences of femicide, disappearances and rape.”

The situation is exacerbated by the further militarization of state security. The (BTI) country report on Mexico notes that “the army has been called upon to perform internal security tasks and is receiving large amounts of resources in the context of the war against drug trafficking.” It adds that the widening of the military’s mandate to include civilian tasks could have worrisome implications for consensus building in the country. As noted in the BTI report, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador‘s government risks losing public support if it cannot solve the challenges of corruption and violence in the country. It points out that “the fact that the army, which has so far not signified a threat to democracy, is required to undertake ever more tasks may be a threat in the future.” Such a breakdown in trust for institutions and the security forces could have knock-on effects for all violent crime.

On May 11, 2020, the Mexican armed forces and National Guard were given new to play a far greater role in policing violent crime in the country — giving them free rein to assume many of the police force’s duties — without any effective audit mechanism.

The effect of this process on gender-based violence is only now coming to be understood. “The attitude of this government and its predecessors has been that a military response to the security situation will protect all of us and women in particular,” says Hubert. “But the reality is that the increased circulation of firearms has had a tremendous impact on women.”&�Բ�����; 

Firearms were the weapon used in 60% of the total 1,844 murders committed against women in 2020. From 1998 to 2019, the number of women by firearms in Mexico rose by 375%. Over 2.5 million firearms have entered Mexico from the US over the last decade, and firearms accounted for the overwhelming majority of the total of 34,515 murders in Mexico in 2020, the highest number since 2015.

An Overlooked Issue

The continued emphasis on militarized security is sapping state funds at a time when resources for programs addressing violence against women in Mexico are being cut. In recent years, Mexican public policy has had a mixed record with respect to gender-based violence. It took until December last year for President Lopez Obrador to talk about gender-based violence, having previously avoided using the word femicide or acknowledge that women faced specific security concerns. In May 2020, he that 90% of domestic violence-related 911 calls were false. His team failed to provide evidence to support this claim when requested to by NGOs.

Despite this intransigence at the executive level, in recent years, there has been greater recognition of the problem at the federal and ministerial level, according to Hubert, with many long-lasting public policies proposed by the National Institute of Women, founded in 2001. However, many of the preventative and reactive policies introduced to tackle gender-based violence have been subject to cuts in government spending as a result of the pandemic.

“We analyzed the activity of the courts at the start of the pandemic, and we found gender-based violence was not being prioritized,” says Hubert. “Issues such as divorce and alimony are crucial for a woman looking to free herself from a violent situation, but they weren’t being attended to by the courts.”&�Բ�����;

For Saguero, the priority is to keep recording the names and identities of the victims of Mexico’s “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence. “Only by making the victims visible can we really make the scale of the problem visible,” she says, “but we have a lot of work to do because the numbers remain high.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. It stands to reason, however, that Trump’s repeated characterization of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” significantly contributed to the mobilization of anti-Asian resentment, particularly among his most ardent supporters. Trump had China as early as mid-March last year, when the pandemic was starting to spread in the United States. The results of an from April 2020 suggests that it had a considerable impact on public opinion. Among other things, the survey found that 60% of Republican respondents believed that “people or organizations” were responsible for the virus, most prominently the Chinese government and the Chinese people in general. In short, large numbers of Americans blamed China and the Chinese for spreading the virus — with sometimes fatal consequences.

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In mid-March, a man attacked the members of an Asian American family with a knife at a retail store in Midland, Texas. Only the intervention of a courageous bystander prevented a bloodbath. Nevertheless, several persons suffered serious injuries, among them two children aged 2 and 6. When interrogated, the perpetrator that he had thought “the family was Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.” They were actually Burmese.

A published in early April recorded over 1,000 incidents of anti-Asian cases of various types of aggression and discrimination associated with COVID-19 in the last week of March alone. Among them were individuals reporting having been verbally assaulted, spat on and shunned in grocery stores, supermarkets and pharmacies. Most of the incidences occurred in California, New York and Texas.

Divide and Rule

In the meantime, a year has passed, information available about the virus has dramatically increased, yet Asian Americans continue to be scapegoated and victimized. The dramatic increase in conspiracy thinking over the past several months, promoted by right-wing media and politicians alike, has done its part to fuel the flames of anti-Asian prejudice and hatred. The most recent cases that have caught widespread attention have been on elderly Asian Americans in California. One victim, an 84-year-old man, was knocked to the ground in a San Francisco street by a young man. The victim died two days later of his injuries, with the perpetrator now facing murder and elder abuse charges. The other victim was a 91-year-old man, by a young man wearing a mask and a hoodie in Oakland’s Chinatown. The victim survived the attack.

On the surface, the recent wave of anti-Asian hostility might easily be explained as being directly related to COVID-19. On second thought, however, things are significantly more complex and intricate. What might appear to be spontaneous outbursts of violence, verbal or physical — as, for instance against refugees in Germany and other Western European countries — are, in reality, the result of deep-seated diffuse resentments. What COVID-19 has done is to provide something like an excuse allowing these resentments to get out into the open.

To a large extent, as has been frequently pointed out these days, anti-Asian resentment is intimately tied to the myth of Asian Americans as the “model minority.” In this narrative, what accounts for the success of Asian Americans is intact family structures and a high priority accorded to education and traditional values such as thriftiness and discipline. This explains why, on , Asian American household incomes have been higher than those of white households. As has also been noted, this narrative has been primarily used not to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans but to blunt charges of racism and privilege. As Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced former Fox News star, rhetorically during a debate on the “truth of white privilege,” “Do we have Asian privilege in America?”

For O’Reilly and other prominent figures on the American right, the success of Asian Americans was a convenient occasion to bolster a rhetoric that blames blacks, Hispanics as well as the poor (independent of color) for their plight. If only they followed the example of Asian Americans, worked hard, kept their families together, and lived within their means — or so the charge goes — they too would be able to achieve the American dream. In short, individual flaws, rather than racism and discrimination, are to blame if some Americans fail “to make it.”

In order to bolster their case even further, right-wing “thought leaders” such as , the author, together with Richard Hernstein, of the 1994 bestseller “The Bell Curve,” had no qualms to note that with regard to IQs, Asian Americans came out on top, ahead of whites. More recently, Murray wrote a on the state of American education, charging that high schools were “going to hell” — unless “you’re Asian.” Analyzing SAT test scores over the past decade or so, Murry pointed out that the scores had declined for all major ethnic groups, except for Asians. Their scores had actually increased, and this not only in math, but also in verbal skills, where Asians had trailed whites in the past.

It should not entirely come as a surprise if comments like these and similar remarks provoke resentment, particularly on the part of minorities that are constantly subjected to this kind of comparison. One might suspect that this was exactly what was intended. By suggesting that Asian Americans might be “privileged” or pointing out, as Murray does, that Asian Americans constitute “the unprotected minority” they drove a between minorities that share a common, if differentiated, history of oppression, discrimination and structural violence directed against them. In Roman times, they used to call this strategy of safeguarding one’s hegemonic position divide et impera — divide and rule.

A History of Migration

The history of Asian migration to the West Coast in the 19^th and early 20^th century is replete with episodes of anti-Asian mobilization. The arguably best-known case was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers — but only after they the nation’s railway system. It came at the heel of intense anti-Chinese agitation, both “on the ground” in California and Oregon and in the US Congress. The rhetoric was highly charged, inflammatory — and meant to be so. In a , Senator Mitchell from Oregon, for instance, in 1876 characterized Chinese immigrants as a “festering sore which, like a plague-spot, has fastened itself upon the very vitals of our western civilization and which to day threatens to destroy it.”&�Բ�����;

Two years later, Representative Davis from California, , warned that Chinese immigrants posed a fundamental threat to the institutions of the republic.  The Chinese of California, Davis charged, clung to their nationality and separated themselves from other men; they were incapable “to change their ways and adapt themselves to their surroundings.”&�Բ�����;This alone rendered them “most undesirable immigrants.”&�Բ�����;Arrested in their development as a result of “ages of uniformity” that had “fixed the type,” they had “nothing in sympathy with the social and political thoughts of a free people.” Instead, their “political aspirations” were limited to a “paternal despotism, with no conceptions of a popular government.”&�Բ�����;

This meant that the Chinese were unfit for life in the United States. Exclusion was the logical consequence, as were various measures adopted in the decades that followed targeting Asians. In the decades that followed, western states and territories passed various pieces of legislation that prevented aliens from acquiring land. Although general in nature, they were against Chinese and particularly .

One of the more ludicrous exclusionary measures was San Francisco’s of 1870. Disguised as a sanitary measure, it was designed to expel Chinese workers from their crowded tenement quarters in the city’s Chinatown and thus “persuade” them to return to China. The ordinance led to the incarceration of thousands of Chinese from 1873 to 1886 “under a public health law driven by anti-Chinese sentiment.”

Even the populists, arguably the most progressive political force at the end of the 19^th century, adopted nativist rhetoric directed against the Chinese. In the early 1890s, several state populist platforms included a passage calling for the exclusion of Chinese and/or Asian immigration. The passage appealed particularly to women who felt from Chinese men for domestic services and laundry jobs. Anti‐Chinese agitators seized the opportunity and charged Chinese workers with threatening the job opportunities of working women. Anti-Asian exclusion and discrimination were also reflected in anti-miscegenation and naturalization laws. The first anti-miscegenation law, which derived its justification from views on racial distinctions and barred marriages between whites and Asians, was in 1861 by Nevada. In the decades that followed, 14 more states passed similar laws. It was not until the middle of the 20^th century to miscegenation laws were abolished.

This was also the case when it came to naturalization, the right to which was established in the Naturalization Act of 1875 that restricted American citizenship to whites and blacks. Whenever Asian immigrants in subsequent decades petitioned for naturalization, American courts ruled that Asians belonged to the “Mongolian race.” Ergo, they were not white and, therefore, not eligible for citizenship. In response to these court cases, Congress passed a law in 1917 banning immigration from most parts of Asia. Seven years later, Congress passed a further measure, excluding foreign-born Asians from citizenship “because they no longer were able to enter the country, and they could no longer enter the country because they were ineligible for citizenship.” It was not until 1952 that race-based naturalization was formally abolished.

A Privileged Minority?

Given this background, the suggestion that Asian Americans somehow constitute a privileged minority so dear to right-wing apologists of white privilege rings more than hollow — as does the myth of the model minority. The reality is quite different. The narrative of Asian American success obscures, for instance, the fact that over the past decade or so, has risen most dramatically among Asian Americans. According to Pew Research, between 1970 to 2016, the gap between Asians near the top and the bottom of the income ladder “nearly doubled, and the distribution of income among Asians transformed from being one of the most equal to being the most unequal among America’s major racial and ethnic groups.”

Poverty rates among Asian Americans have been than among whites, with some groups, such as Hmong and , far above the national average. This underscores the fact that Asian Americans constitute a that is ethnically, socioeconomically and, in particular, culturally highly diverse.

The dominant narrative of the model minority, largely promulgated by the white right, largely ignores these subtleties. Instead, it creates the image of the privileged minority — singled out by the white majority compared over other minorities — and, in the process, sows discord among America’s subordinate communities. The resulting resentment goes a long way to explain the recent wave of anti-Asian hatred. It is hardly a coincidence that both recent hate crimes against Asian Americans in northern California were committed by blacks.

It is also hardly a coincidence that the two attacks put Asian American activists into a quandary. As one of them noted, “If addressing violence against Asian Americans entails furthering stereotypes about Black criminality and the policies associated with those stereotypes … we’ve misdiagnosed the problem.” The problem, of course, is the widespread disgruntlement toward Asian Americans, wrongfully seen as constituting an “honorable white” minority bent on defending its privileges.

A case in point is the lawsuit against Harvard University in 2014 charging it with discriminating against Asian American applicants in favor of less-qualified black and Hispanic students. Hardly surprising, the Trump administration, ever eager to stir the resentment pot, sided with the plaintiffs. The administration’s that the evidence showed that “Harvard’s process has repeatedly penalized one particular racial group: Asian Americans. Indeed, Harvard concedes that eliminating consideration of race would increase Asian-American admissions while decreasing those of Harvard’s favored racial groups.”

For those in the know, the language echoed Murray’s notion of “protected groups.” Once again, divide et impera was in action. Courts finally rejected the plaintiffs’ case. But ill feelings are likely to linger on, feeding into extant resentments that appear to have poisoned the Asian American community’s relations with other visible minorities in the United States. Under the circumstances, anti-Asian hostility, hatred and violence are unlikely to fade out in the near future.  

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Divide and Rule: What Drives Anti-Asian Resentment in America? appeared first on 51�Թ�.