SACW - 22 Sept 2015 | Afghanistan: fading hopes / Sri Lanka: statement on OHCHR reports / Pakistan’s Donald Trump / Pakistan-India: Mindless 1965 War Celebrations / India: Shameless Culture Minister ; Hindutva Terror of 'Sanatan Sanstha'; republic's common sense / Greece: Syziza victory and revived Golden Dawn / South African Political Life / Europe Refugee Crisis

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Mon Sep 21 16:15:37 EDT 2015


South Asia Citizens Wire - 22 Sept 2015 - No. 2871 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Statement by Sri Lankan Civil Society members on OHCHR reports on Sri Lanka
2. ‘A Bangladesh tragedy with universal resonance' | Beena Sarwar
3. Pakistan’s  Donald Trump | Pervez Hoodbhoy
4. India: Shame on You, Mr. Culture Minister . . . | Siddharth Varadarajan
5. India: UID - Five Myths | Reetika Khera
6. India: Mumbai Press Club condemns Sanathan Sanstha threats against scribe
7. India: Hindus and others - The republic's common sense | Mukul Kesavan
8. India: Sahmat Statement Supporting A.R.Rahman (17 Sept 2015)
9. Photos from PinjraTod [Break Hostel Locks] - campaign against discriminatory rules for womens hostels in Delhi's universities
10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Bombay high court refuses to relax ban on sale of beef for Bakri Eid in Maharashtra
 - India: Sought Sanatan Sanstha's Ban in 2011, Sent Dossier to Centre: Prithviraj Chavan | NDTV Discussion
 - India: Fumigation of culture - Why BJP's cultural hygiene project is futile & with dangerous effects (Shiv Visvanathan)
 - India - Pansare murder case: SIT suspects role of two accused in Goa blast
 - India - 2008 Hindutva Terror Episode in Malegaon etc.: Charges framed against Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur in Sunil Joshi murder case
 - India police officers feel targeted for offering evidence against prime minister (Shashank Bengali / Los Angeles Times)
 - India: Hindu Yuva Vahini president, 3 others booked for calling AMU 'nursery of terror'
 - India: The ministry of culture seems to think every organisation is a variant of an RSS Shakha [branch]
 - India: Jawed Akhtar on the Fatwa by Raza Academy Against A.R. RAhman
 - India: Police won't let a UP's Mushara village sacrifice goats on Eid - to appease far right hindutva leader Adityanath's men
 - India: Ram Madhav, RSS man and current BJP general secretary interview by Sagarika Ghose (TOI, 20 sept 2015)
 - BJP’s divisive impulses are test of India’s plurality (Amulya Ganguli)
 - India: 'Sanatan Sanstha', Hardline Hindu in thought, violent in action

::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
11.  Militaristic turn   - Editorial, Daily Times (Pakistan)
12. India and Pakistan loudly commemorate the war they both ‘won’ | Jason Burke and Jon Boone
13. From Kabul with fading hopes: Afghanistan’s war continues | Haroro J. Ingram
14. Netaji and India’s dictatorship urge | Nalin Mehta
15. India: Bygone courtesies - Rajya Sabha was a different space twenty years ago | A.M. [Ashok Mitra]
16. The EU’s woeful response to the refugee crisis has revived Golden Dawn | Yiannis Baboulias
17. Borderland Europe and the challenge of migration | Etienne Balibar
18. The State of South African Political Life | Achille Mbembe
19. Ibroscheva on Ghodsee, 'The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe'

========================================
1. STATEMENT BY SRI LANKAN CIVIL SOCIETY MEMBERS ON OHCHR REPORTS ON SRI LANKA
========================================
We call upon the Member States of the HRC to ensure that the consensus resolution on Sri Lanka to be adopted at the present Council session endorses the positive commitments of the government, findings and recommendations of the OHCHR reports
http://www.sacw.net/article11655.html

========================================
2. ‘A BANGLADESH TRAGEDY WITH UNIVERSAL RESONANCE'
by Beena Sarwar
========================================
article on a film about the Rana Plaza incident
http://www.sacw.net/article11650.html

========================================
3. PAKISTAN’S DONALD TRUMP
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
========================================
Take away the “faintly” and this neatly fits Trump’s Pakistani counterpart, cricketer Imran Khan, who burst upon Pakistan’s political scene with his mammoth Lahore jalsa of 2011. With a lavish lifestyle and his playboy past neatly tucked away in some closet the reformed Khan promised the moon as he cavorted on the stage, loudly praying towards Makkah for success.
http://www.sacw.net/article11660.html

========================================
4. INDIA: SHAME ON YOU, MR. CULTURE MINISTER . . . | Siddharth Varadarajan
========================================
Mahesh Sharma's utterances about Muslims, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and other matters are not casual off-the-cuff remarks; they have to be seen in the context of the guidance provided by the RSS to the government
http://www.sacw.net/article11659.html

========================================
5. INDIA: UID - FIVE MYTHS | Reetika Khera
========================================
Many people believe that the UID project is essential for poor people, better implementation of government programmes and so on. This note by Reetika Khera dispels these and other misconceptions about UID, using the government's own data.
http://www.sacw.net/article11642.html

========================================
6. INDIA: MUMBAI PRESS CLUB CONDEMNS SANATHAN SANSTHA THREATS AGAINST SCRIBE
========================================
Mumbai Press Club notes with serious concern the Sanatan Sansthna targeting Shaymsundar Sonnar, a senior journalist with a Marathi newspaper 'Prahaar' and senior journalist Nikhil Wagle.
http://www.sacw.net/article11658.html

========================================
7. INDIA: HINDUS AND OTHERS - THE REPUBLIC'S COMMON SENSE | Mukul Kesavan
========================================
The historical significance of Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist regime will be measured not by its economic record but its success (or failure) in changing the political common sense of the republic
http://www.sacw.net/article11657.html

========================================
8. INDIA: SAHMAT STATEMENT SUPPORTING A.R.RAHMAN (17 SEPT 2015)
========================================
We welcome and whole-heartedly support the statement of musician AR Rahman where he speaks about his decision to compose music for the Iranian film ‘Muhammad: Messenger of God”'. He has thoughtfully struck the right note as he has answered questions raised (completely out of line) by the Raza Academy, about why he chose to compose songs for the film.
http://www.sacw.net/article11639.html

========================================
9. PHOTOS FROM PINJRATOD [BREAK HOSTEL LOCKS] - CAMPAIGN AGAINST DISCRIMINATORY RULES FOR WOMENS HOSTELS IN DELHI'S UNIVERSITIES
========================================
http://www.sacw.net/article11652.html

========================================
10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
 - India: Bombay high court refuses to relax ban on sale of beef for Bakri Eid in Maharashtra
 - India: Sought Sanatan Sanstha's Ban in 2011, Sent Dossier to Centre: Prithviraj Chavan | NDTV Discussion
 - India: Fumigation of culture - Why BJP's cultural hygiene project is futile & with dangerous effects (Shiv Visvanathan)
 - India - Pansare murder case: SIT suspects role of two accused in Goa blast
 - India - 2008 Hindutva Terror Episode in Malegaon etc.: Charges framed against Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur in Sunil Joshi murder case
 - India police officers feel targeted for offering evidence against prime minister (Shashank Bengali / Los Angeles Times)
 - India: Hindu Yuva Vahini president, 3 others booked for calling AMU 'nursery of terror'
 - India: The ministry of culture seems to think every organisation is a variant of an RSS Shakha [branch]
 - India: Jawed Akhtar on the Fatwa by Raza Academy Against A.R. RAhman
 - India: Police won't let a UP's Mushara village sacrifice goats on Eid - to appease far right hindutva leader Adityanath's men
 -  India: Ram Madhav, RSS man and current BJP general secretary interview by Sagarika Ghose (TOI, 20 sept 2015)
 - BJP’s divisive impulses are test of India’s plurality (Amulya Ganguli)
 - India: 'Sanatan Sanstha', Hardline Hindu in thought, violent in action
 - India: Far Right VHP says expanding its free health service in Kerala to expand its base
 - Secularism irrelevant in India says RSS propaganda effort
 - India: Far Right Sanatan Sanstha threatens filmmaker Anand Patwardhan
 - India: Why the Sanatan Sanstha doesn't like rationalists (Ipsita Chakravarty)
 - Stop outraging over Marathi – Hindi and English chauvinism is much worse in India (Shoaib Daniyal)
 - India: Women’s voices from Atali (Dr. Sandhya Mhatre and Neha Dabhade)
 - India: Hindutva is boring - Aakar Patel wants its tweaked
 - Nepali secularism has pronounced Hindu tilt (Prashant Jha)
 - India: Pune hub of Sanatan Sanstha, a radical Hindu group
 - India: To beat caste system, Communist leader named his children after spaceships, celestial bodies
 - India: [Modi Government's] Unwarranted pettiness [over NMML] (editorial, The Hindu) 

 - available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: RESOURCES & FULL TEXT :::
=========================================
11.  MILITARISTIC TURN  
Editorial, Daily Times (Pakistan)
=========================================
(The Daily Times, 20 September 2015)

In a controversial move, Japan’s parliament has voted to allow its military to fight overseas for the first time since World War II (WWII) ended 70 years ago amidst unprecedented levels of fierce protest, both inside and outside parliament, against this bill. After WWII culminated with atomic bombs being dropped on two Japanese cities, the reconstructing post-war Japan adopted a pacifist constitution to prevent a repetition of the atrocities committed by Japanese Imperial forces in East and South East Asia. The famous Article 9 of that constitution outlawed the right to wage war or even the threat of war as a means of resolving any international conflict in adherence to principles of international peace. Japan was only to have “Self-Defence Forces”, which would only respond to a territorial attack. In the post-war arrangement, the US played a great part in guaranteeing the security of Japan. Now, with the support of the US, Japan’s conservative nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has finally been able to realise his long-held ambitions and has pushed for a radical reinterpretation of Article 9 that would allow Japanese military forces to be deployed in foreign territories, if a threat is perceived to Japan that can only be met with force or if a close ally is attacked.

Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has an absolute majority in parliament and has been able to pass the deeply unpopular measure regardless of the delaying tactics of the opposition and the outcry of thousands of people taking to the streets of Tokyo. In the process he has been accused of acting like a dictator and exploiting the democratic process for decidedly undemocratic ends. Abe’s government has a track record of denying Japanese atrocities during WWII, to the great annoyance of neighbouring Korea and China, and this latest measure continues a trend of history-defying hyper nationalism. However, the proudly pacifist Japanese people have turned against Abe and his popularity ratings are tanking. The anger and frustration of the Japanese is understandable as they are still living with the memory of the terrible war, a war which ended in disaster for them, and do not want to shed more blood in foreign countries after the devastation wrought by their forces on their neighbours. Now they face the prospect of sending their soldiers to far-off lands to fight the questionable wars of US-led coalitions. Abe’s party has used the threat of a rising China and North Korea to argue for the bill, but Japan has survived just fine so far without investing heavily in a military and has instead prospered economically and technologically by focusing on those fronts. This turn towards militarism bodes poorly for the stability of the region and can set off a globally undesirable arms race with China. Japan’s legacy as a beacon of pacifist hope is at stake.*

=========================================
12. INDIA AND PAKISTAN LOUDLY COMMEMORATE THE WAR THEY BOTH ‘WON’
by Jason Burke and Jon Boone
=========================================
(The Guardian, 20 September 2015)

Narendra Modi surprises some by ordering high-profile celebrations costing £3m to mark India’s role in 1965 war
[PHOTO] Helicopters fly near the India Gate war memorial during rehearsals for celebrations for the India-Pakistan war of 1965. Photograph: Tsering Topgyal/AP

Jason Burke in Delhi and Jon Boone in Islamabad

The four helicopters trailing giant flags had passed an hour earlier; the tanks and fighter jets would come later. Now, it was the turn of a formation of sword-wielding, stamping, infantry in golden turbans to entertain the crowd packed into the grandstands halfway between the stately India Gate and the vast presidential palace in Delhi’s centre.

The Verma family – mother, father, son and daughter – had come from the eastern outskirts of the Indian capital to watch the show. “It was necessary to come. I am a proud Indian ... we have to remember our victories, our sacrifices. We have to remember what we can do, and what can be done. This will frighten some people and that is a good thing,” said Priyaranjan Verma, 43, a finance manager for a freight firm.

The “some people” he was referring to were the 190 million or so inhabitants of Pakistan, or at least their rulers.

Sunday’s parade marked the climax of a month of events in India commemorating the golden anniversary of the 1965 war with the neighbouring country. The partition of India had occurred 18 years before 1965, when the country gained independence from Britain. Pakistan and India have each claimed victory in the inconclusive 60s conflict, one of four they have fought. But over the decades both nations appear largely to have forgotten this war, with history books focusing on the more dramatic clashes of 1947, 1971 and 1999.

It surprised some onlookers then when the government of Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist politician who won a landslide election last year after promising to bring economic development and make India “respected”, ordered a high-profile, month-long celebration of his nation’s “victory” in the 1965 war. The event is reported to have cost more than £3m, and has included military displays in provincial towns, giant newspaper adverts, commemorative coins and stamps, as well as a team of naval personnel motorbiking 1,200 miles across India.

Modi opened an exhibition in central Delhi devoted to the war, commenting that “the valour [and] sacrifice of our armed forces during the 1965 war remains etched in the memory of every Indian”.

The 60s conflict started when Pakistan fomented violence in the disputed Himalayan former princedom of Kashmir and ended with a UN-sponsored ceasefire followed by an exchange of captured territory. The war entailed fierce fighting, particularly between tank units, and it is thought both sides suffered more than 3,000 casualties.

At the opening ceremony, Manohar Parrikar, India’s defence minister, said the exhibition commemorated “the first major war that India won”. He added: “Some people raise the question whether India won, or was there a stalemate? Even as a nine-year-old kid I was of the firm opinion that India won hands down.”

Some historians’ opinions differ. “It was inconclusive and that is recognised … even by those involved in the conflict. We actually gave up what little territory we seized and by no yardstick can it be claimed a victory,” said Pallavi Raghavan, a specialist in relations between India and Pakistan, working at the Centre for Policy Research, in Delhi.

However Dilip Hiro, a journalist and analyst, wrote in a recently published account of relations between India and Pakistan that “[India] won by not losing … [Pakistan] gained nothing from a war it initiated”.

The war fought between the two states in 1971, however, was a conclusive defeat for Pakistan. A tentative peace process which followed a further confrontation in 1999 has been frozen since an attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants in 2008. The attack in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, targeted luxury hotels, commuters, a Jewish centre and tourist sites. There have been several intensive exchanges of artillery fire in the past year, while India continues to blame Pakistan for unrest in Kashmir.

Pakistan reacted to the celebrations in India by upgrading its own annual Defence Day, which traditionally marks the 1965 war. Normally a relatively low-key affair, the ceremony held on 6 September was transformed into a big television event, with parachute drops by special forces, air displays and exhibitions of military hardware at various sites around the country.

At the main ceremony, at army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the army screened video re-enactments of key battles against Islamist militants.

Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Raheel Sharif, used the occasion to deliver a sharp warning to India that it would “pay an unbearable cost” if it ever resorted “to any misadventure”. He added: “The armed forces of Pakistan are fully capable of dealing with all types of internal and external threats, may it be conventional or sub-conventional, whether it is cold start or hot start. We are ready.”

His speech was a riposte to the remarks of his opposite number, the general Dalbir Singh Suhag, who said India was ready for the “swift, short, nature of future wars”.

India’s army has long been planning for a “cold start” in any possible confrontation with Pakistan, which would allow it to quickly retaliate, fielding military units with little preparation and thus countering its smaller neighbour’s ability to concentrate forces more rapidly.

Sharif also struck a hard line on Kashmir, saying it could “no longer be put on the back burner”, although few foreign policy experts think Pakistan will ever gain control of the whole region.

Amid the army’s publicity drive there were signs of a surge of patriotism, even bellicosity, among sections of the public. A newspaper account of a lecture at Karachi University, at which the historian Akbar Zaidi questioned the popular narrative that Pakistan won the 1965 conflict, provoked a storm of anger on social media, with many alleging the newspaper was in the pocket of India.

“With the celebration of the victory in the 1965 war round the corner, there can be no bigger lie [than] that Pakistan won the war,” he was reported to have said. “We lost terribly in the 1965 war.”

Raghavan, the Indian historian, said the focus on conflicts ignored the long history of dialogue and exchange between the two nations. “The warfare has always been contained, never all-out. Each time there is an episode of violence it is followed by an episode of engagement. There is always much good will on both sides and the reasons for that are as durable as the reasons for going to war.”

The sentiment was not universally shared at the parade ground in Delhi.

“These are bad people but we are not frightened of them. Why should we be when we always win?” said Verma, as he quickened his pace to avoid missing the motorbike display team.

=========================================
13. FROM KABUL WITH FADING HOPES: AFGHANISTAN’S WAR CONTINUES
by Haroro J. Ingram
=========================================
(The Conversation - September 16, 2015)

Afghan refugee children returning from Pakistan learn about the dangers of mines and explosives at a UNHCR registration centre in Kabul. Reuters/Ahmad Masood

It is fighting season in Afghanistan and August was particularly bloody on Kabul’s streets. In the weeks before I arrived in the city, attacks had left dozens dead, hundreds more injured and faith in the government’s ability to secure the capital all but shattered.

While a secure Kabul rarely means a stable Afghanistan, an insecure Kabul inevitably signals a deeply unstable nation. Kabul’s violent summer pales compared to the surrounding provinces, especially in the south. As Western nations increasingly focus elsewhere, the battle for Afghanistan rages on.
‘Things are worse’

Afghanistan is delicately balanced between starkly different futures. During my first visit in 2014, the general feeling in the capital was of cautious optimism, even hopefulness. The impressive voter turnout for the national elections reflected a general feeling that a new government meant new possibilities and raised hopes for the future.

Returning to Kabul less than a year later, it seems the trajectory of Afghanistan’s future is shifting towards one of despair rather than hope. President Ashraf Ghani’s public chastisement of Pakistan after a suicide bombing at the entrance of Kabul’s international airport suggests frustrations have reached Afghanistan’s highest public office.

It is visceral on Kabul’s streets. From shopkeepers and taxi drivers to “gym rats” and university lecturers, my question of whether Afghanistan was improving, whether security was better despite August’s bloodshed, was met with the same response:

    Things are worse.

A combination of factors has contributed to this sentiment. A spike in insurgent violence and the drawdown of Western forces are obvious. A corollary of the drawdown has been that thousands of foreign workers have left Afghanistan, creating an economic vacuum that has left many local businesses scrambling.

Another factor is at play too. For much of its modern history, Afghanistan’s trajectory has been disproportionately shaped by foreign forces: the perpetual meddling of its regional neighbours, British colonisers in the early 20th century, the Soviet Bloc later that century and, most recently, a coalition of Western nations.

For the first time in decades, responsibility for Afghanistan’s future is perceived to rest largely in Afghan hands. The grim outlook expressed to me by locals thus reflected more than post-election frustrations; theirs was a sense of crisis born of the disparity between Afghan hopes for their government and its realities.

Moderating expectations will be crucial to curbing frustrations and sustaining security and stability.
The difficult road ahead

Afghanistan’s challenges are immense. With a population of some 28 million, 76% live rurally and more than 13 million suffer varying degrees of food insecurity.

Efforts to combat this rampant poverty are hindered by a gender inequality index which is among the world’s worst. The devastating impact of three decades of war is captured by almost half the population being under 14 years of age.

Most Afghans are rural-dwelling and poverty-stricken. H. Ingram, Author provided

Ethno-tribal allegiances continue to shape, to varying degrees, how many Afghans see themselves and each other, especially in rural areas. This is particularly noticeable during discussions about the nation’s security.

Sitting motionless in Kabul traffic, my taxi driver explained:

    Where the Pashtun people are, there are problems. In the south, always problems. Now, in the north, where the Pashtun people are, there are problems.

Pausing for a moment as the traffic started its crawl, he added:

    I know not all Pashtuns are bad … but most of them are.

Mediating these differences, not glossing over them, represents another complex challenge for the government.

These and many other issues need to be addressed while fighting multiple insurrections. The Taliban’s insurgency, rather than a single, coherent and homogenous force, is heterogeneous and characterised by several networks. These faultlines were recently exposed by the succession of Mullah Mansour as Taliban leader.

A fractured Taliban not only represents a more volatile threat but its breakaway factions could establish independent groups or join Islamic State’s local chapter, Wilayat Khurasan, which is leveraging this unrest to burrow into Afghanistan’s provinces.
Reasons for hope

Graffiti in a Kabul street. H. Ingram, Author provided

In isolation, the current picture of Afghanistan seems incredibly bleak. Yet, within its historical context, the country’s advancements are undeniable. It is easy to forget that a mere two decades ago Afghanistan was transitioning to Taliban rule following two ruthless wars.

There is another reason for hope. Afghanistan’s universities are filled with energetic and highly capable students. While speaking to a class of hopeful postgraduate researchers at Kabul University, their sense of responsibility for shaping their country’s future was palpable.

Education will be a crucial mechanism for bridging gender inequalities, fighting the root causes of societal problems such as poverty and extremism, and producing the next generation of Afghan leaders. The immense burden for harnessing the potential of Afghanistan’s very young and increasingly globally “connected” population for good and not ill will rest heavily on this generation.

Continuing Western support for current security and stability efforts will be essential to Afghanistan’s survival. But support for education in Afghanistan is an investment in the future. The world’s refugee crisis is merely a symptom of a more profound problem: the world’s tendency to ignore the human tragedies that produce refugees.

Afghanistan is on the brink of its best chance at a brighter and more hopeful future, but darker forces are committed to steering the nation in another direction. While Afghan hopes persist, surely ours should too.

Haroro J. Ingram is Research Fellow, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University

=========================================
14. NETAJI AND INDIA’S DICTATORSHIP URGE
by Nalin Mehta
=========================================
(The Times of India - September 19, 2015)
 
Did Shah Jahan want to build a black Taj Mahal? Did Lal Bahadur Shastri really die of a heart attack in Tashkent in 1965? Does the yeti really exist?
Files relating to Indian freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose are displayed at the Police Museum in Kolkata on September 18, 2015. The West Bengal government has declassified 64 files related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which have been placed in the archives of the Kolkata police museum. AFP PHOTO/Dibyangshu SARKAR (Photo credit should read DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images)

Files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose are displayed at the Police Museum in Kolkata  (AFP – Getty images/Dibyangshu Sarkar)

The mystery of Subhas Chandra Bose has been among great unsolved mysteries of India. Mamata Banerjee’s declassification of 64 Netaji files has just made it even more tantalizing. In one bold stroke Didi has got his family on her side, stolen a march over Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had personally promised to look into the matter and re-ignited a decades-old whodunit.

Whether Netaji was a Stalinist prisoner who returned as Gumnani Baba and whether Nehru’s government made a deal on him can only be answered from the files. On 14 December 2014, minister of state for home Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhary said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha that 87 top secret Netaji files could not be declassified because they are of “sensitive nature” that could be a problem for “India’s relations with other countries”.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with Mahatma Gandhi in February 1938

The Netaji legend has also endured for so long because of what he represented as an alternative future for India — a muscular, “manly” counterpoise to dominance of Gandhian ahimsa and Nehruvian morality that defined the nationalist movement and post-independence India.

There is a reason why stickers of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad still adorn most trucks and many car-windscreens. While most Indians followed Gandhi, many were equally ashamed at the notion of non-violence that was seen by many nationalist streams as too “effeminate”. Bose and his Indian National Army, in that sense, represented the martial valour of India in service of the nation.
Subhas Chandra Bose (in military uniform) with Motilal Nehru at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in December 1928

Subhas Chandra Bose (in military uniform) with Motilal Nehru at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in December 1928

Netaji loved dressing up like a general (even when he was the head of the Congress) and had dictatorial tendencies.

His 1935 book ‘Indian Struggle’ argued for a political system that was a mix of fascism and communism. In a 1943 speech in Singapore, Bose specifically called for a “iron dictator” who would could rules over India “for 20 years.” “There must be a dictatorship” he argued, “No other constitution can flourish in this country and it is so to India’s good that she shall be ruled by a dictator, to begin with …”

Many middle-class Indians still yearn for a strongman who can cut through the messiness of democracy and deliver governance. Netaji endures because while being a great patriot, he could also have filled in the blanks in that fantasy and for what could have been.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.


=========================================
15. INDIA: BYGONE COURTESIES - RAJYA SABHA WAS A DIFFERENT SPACE TWENTY YEARS AGO
A.M. [Ashok Mitra]
=========================================
(The Telegraph - September 18 , 2015)

My parliamentary career was not extensive: one term of six years in the Rajya Sabha two decades ago as the 20th century was approaching its end. Parliament - the Sansad - was not the ass pool it is today. True, there were one or two specimens who talked and behaved like a veteran leader of hoodlum elements and had been responsible, directly or otherwise, for a hundred murders. There was another lot too, who, while gentlemanly in manners, must have accumulated a hundred crore or more through grossly unfair means. The Constitution was still considered as sovereign; both those who occupied the treasury benches or were in the Opposition by and large tried to go by the rule book. True, there were times when tempers flew high and there would be angry walks to the well. But such occasions were few and far between. Able, well-informed speeches were listened to with respect irrespective of the political allegiance of the speakers or the particular views they were expressing. The question hour was often noisy but at the same time exciting enough, and ministers needed to be alert while responding to 'starred' questions and the sharp spells of comments and interjections that followed. In short, civilization had not altogether bidden adieu to Parliament House.

In fact, I have warm, abiding memories of courtesy, kindnesses and consideration extended to me by many parliamentary colleagues and even those who radically disagreed and, in fact, despised my ideological position. I would at this point like to recollect and put on record a few instances of such grace-laden courtesies before the faculty of the mind breaks down totally.

My swearing-in in the Rajya Sabha was on August 19, 1993; I remember the day particularly because earlier in the day Utpal Dutt had passed away in Calcutta.

It was quite a number of years since I had formally resigned from the party when it decided to send me to the Rajya Sabha and had therefore no place in the official hierarchy of the party in the House and was assigned a seat on a relatively rear bench. No matter, I was at the receiving end of an extraordinary gesture of thoughtful courtesy by the leaders of the Janata Dal, at that moment constituting the main Opposition in Parliament. The furore over the Bofors scandal was yet to die down and I had some things to say.

During my first few weeks in the Rajya Sabha, whenever my turn came to speak on this or any other important economic issue, Inder Gujral and Jaipal Reddy, then stalwarts of the Janata Dal in the Rajya Sabha, would insist on my addressing the House from the seat of either of them at the very front and right across the treasury benches occupied by senior Congress ministers. This happened on at least a couple of occasions.

The next instance of out-of-the-way-generosity extended to me during formal proceedings in the Rajya Sabha had a bit of a personal angle. The second half of the last decade of the last century was a period of considerable political confusion, reflected in the fact that the Lok Sabha got elected in 1996, got dissolved within two years, the poll in 1998 did little to clear the confusion and yet another election had to take place in 1999. Following one of these polls - I cannot quite remember it with precision which one it was - T.N. Chaturvedi, who had retired as comptroller and auditor general of India, got elected to the Rajya Sabha as a nominee of the Bharatiya Janata Party. This came as a surprise to many of us who had known him for long years. He entered the Indian Administrative Service in the early 1950s and was in the Rajasthan cadre. After a most distinguished career in that state as well as in New Delhi, he had been home secretary in the Union government, and subsequently picked as the country's comptroller and auditor general. It was his zeal which unearthed the shoddy goings-on preceding the signing of the Bofors agreement. Quite understandingly, he was immensely disliked by Congressmen. His donning the BJP garb nonetheless took me aback. Way back in 1959, we had been to Washington DC, where he took a six-month training course with the Economic Development Institute. I was then on the faculty of the institute. I got attracted to him because he was far different from the common IAS type. He was, and continues to be, a bookworm, has a fantastic collection of books which now adorns his modest house in Noida. He lives a quiet life there, immersed in books, following the end of his tenure as governor of Karnataka. He once confided to me his cynicism regarding the BJP ideology; it was because he could not say 'no' to the earnest request of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom he greatly admired, that he agreed to take that party's ticket.

But to return to my story. It must have been in that relatively narrow space of time between 1996 and 1998. A discussion was on, perhaps on a bill, or it could be on some specific issue. A Congress member had just sat down after gurgling out a long-winding speech in the course of which he had, quite out of context, made some wild allegations against the Left regime in the state I represented. I was scheduled to speak on behalf of my party, but my turn would come much later, possibly the following day, and the morning papers would carry a report on the Congressman's accusations that had gone uncontradicted. The next member who was called to speak was from the BJP, and what luck, it would be Chaturvedi. He had just stood up and was gathering his notes as I rushed across and caught his attention. He straightaway nodded positively to my barely audible request and prayed to the presiding officer to allow me to speak during his turn, he would avail of the opportunity to speak during the time allotted to me. There was no objection from any quarter and I launched into my rebuttal. Later in the evening as I approached him to thank him, he beamed and remarked, "The guru of course must speak first."

Call it incident, call it episode, the third item in this factual narrative of mine is almost identical to the second with just one change in the dramatis personae. Again, it was a discussion on some important issue; my name was listed for speaking, but close to the time of adjournment of the House at around seven in the evening. The discussion was meandering on, when I received a message from Calcutta: one of my very close relatives had passed away, they would await my arrival from Delhi by the evening flight before leaving for the crematorium. I rose to draw the attention of Najma Heptullah, deputy chairperson, who was presiding. Without mentioning the bereavement, I merely mentioned that an emergency had arisen which needed my flying back to Calcutta by the evening flight and whether some minutes could be squeezed to enable me to speak immediately and leave for the airport to catch the fight. Since the list of speakers and the sequence of their speaking had been decided at the meeting of the business advisory committee, she wrung her hands to express helplessness. At this point, the speaker next to speak from the Congress benches rose. He was no less than K.K. Birla, son of the grand pioneer of Indian industrialization, G.D. Birla, and one of the major targets of my frequent attacks against predatory capitalism. It would be a 'great privilege', K.K. said. He let me speak at this very moment and he would speak later. I spoke for a few minutes on the points I wanted to make, crossed the floor to shake hands and thank Krishna Kumar Birla for his wondrous gesture and rushed to the airport.

My last story was even stranger. The BJP had finally managed to form the government, Vajpayee was prime minister. I was at the fag end of my tenure. A special discussion was agreed upon, on the Opposition's insistence, on growing economic corruption in the country. It was generally agreed that I would be the main speaker in the House on behalf of the party whenever important economic issues came up. This time it was different; the young leadership had taken over full control of the party in my state, they had apparently sent a message to the effect that one of them, who had been in the Rajya Sabha for some time, would speak on behalf of the party in the debate over corruption. He was at least 35 years younger than me in age, had no background in economics and he had once confided to me that he was still in school when I was sworn in as the finance minister of the state he and I belonged to. He made a neat little speech, smart, but at a somewhat superficial level, and barely touched upon what I thought was the key point that ought to be made by the Left: the spread of the neo-liberal philosophy urging profit maximization by whatever means is one of the leading factors underlying the rapid growth of economic corruption. I chanced upon Ram Jethmalani, who had been elected to the Rajya Sabha on the BJP ticket, in the lobby. We fell in conversation; the matter of the on-going debate naturally cropped up. I casually mentioned the apparent lack of awareness concerning the perils of over-obsession with profit-making. Jethmalani seemed surprised at my not participating in the debate and suddenly made an extra-ordinary suggestion: he was scheduled to speak on the next day and had been allotted 20 minutes; after he had spoken for a couple of minutes, I should stand up with an interjection, he would allow me to go on and make my point in regard to the risks underlying the total sell-out to economic-neo-liberalism. I must confess I did not mention to my party colleagues Jethmalani's gracious offer since they were, I was sure, bound to suspect a 'BJP plot' and would strongly advise me against falling into it. Nothing untoward took place. Jethmalani kept his word, he let me interrupt his speech; I however retained my sense of proportion, said what I wanted to say within four minutes and sat back. Jethmalani resumed his talk, made no reference to the point I had made and went on till his quota of 20 minutes was over.

It would be caddish on my part if, as the dusk descends on my existence, I fail to refer to such gestures of open magnanimity by one's political opponents. All this is quite apart from innumerable acts of courtesy and exchange of compliments in private among sworn public rivals, such as the occasion when Kapil Sibal and I were passing each other in the corridor of Parliament, when Sibal suddenly stopped and whispered into my ear: he could not of course say it openly, that he listened with great avidity every time I spoke in the House.

My experience during my relatively brief parliamentary career was certainly not unique: in spite of the increasing existence of crude and vulgar behaviour on the part of a few abominable specimens, civilities still reigned in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and members of parliament, even when their political views were totally polarized, would often be full of consideration for, and gracefully courteous towards, one another. But that was almost two decades ago and neo-liberal economic notions were yet to be firmly grafted into the nation's ethos. It is an altogether different universe now. Once ideas such as, in order to promote one's cause the offer of a bribe is eminently justified, take root in the public consciousness, it is open season for criminals of all species. For it is then one short step to argue that committing a murder is no particular offence if it were necessary for ensuring a bonanza for oneself. Parliament, after all, represents the people, or at least the goons and hoodlums who terrorize the people into voting for them.

=========================================
16. THE EU’S WOEFUL RESPONSE TO THE REFUGEE CRISIS HAS REVIVED GOLDEN DAWN
by Yiannis Baboulias
=========================================
(The Guardian - 21 September 2015)

 The gains of the Greek neo-Nazi party in the recent election are emblematic of how the far-right across Europe is exploiting the deficit of leadership on this issue

Refugees arrive on Sykamias beach, west of Mytilene: ‘The astonishing deficit of leadership from EU politicians on how to deal with the refugee crisis is playing into the hands of the far-right.’ Photograph: Iakovos Hatzistavrou/AFP/Getty Images

In the port town of Mytilene, the weight of the refugee crisis faced by Lesbos and other Greek islands becomes painfully obvious. Despite the fact that only about 5,000 people remain (out of the 20,000 who were stuck here in previous weeks), there’s hardly an inch of public space in which tired bodies escaping war and poverty aren’t present under the scorching sun. Taking advantage of the visibility and scale of the problem, Lesbos became one of the main targets for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, as it sought to strengthen its influence in the run up to yesterday’s elections. Unfortunately, it seems that it has worked.

As Syriza and Alexis Tsipras are celebrating a strong result that puts them seven percentage points ahead of conservative New Democracy and ensures they’ll be returning to the helm of the country, the polls also tell another story that will have repercussions beyond Greece’s borders. It is one of a neo-Nazi threat that not only refuses to go away, but also has managed to solidify a block of voters that still supports it, despite the numerous charges and convictions of party members and leaders, including several counts of assault and murder.

Golden Dawn has secured the third place with 7% of the vote, up from 6.3% in January. While its percentage is artificially inflated because of very high abstention rates, it seems that some 400,000 Greeks will always turn up to support it in the ballot. And if it is losing much of its influence in the working-class neighbourhoods of big cities (as preliminary data suggests), it is making it up with an influx of votes from areas afflicted by the refugee crisis.

On Lesbos, the third biggest island in Greece, Golden Dawn’s share of the vote shot up to 7.8%, from 4.7% in January. On Samos, the party received 7.7%, from 5.5% in January. Across the Dodecanese, its percentage went up to 8.1% from 5.5%, with the tiny island of Symi – that has little more than 2,000 permanent residents and which has received 5,500 refugees since March – giving it 10.7%, up four points from the 6.5% where it stood before.

    Ukip, the Front National in France, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary are using the crisis to stoke up fears of 'invasion'

A few days before the elections, Yiorgos Palis, a candidate then with Syriza in Lesbos and now MP for the island, told me that “the far-right showed its face here, but the people kept their cool”. While a massive turn to the far-right failed to materialise, it made significant gains.

The reasons for this are plain to see. The lack of a coherent strategy and astonishing deficit of leadership we are witnessing from EU politicians on how to deal with the refugee crisis across the continent is playing right in the hands of the far-right.

Similarly to Golden Dawn, parties such as the Front National in France, Ukip in the UK and Viktor Orbán’s party in Hungary, are using the crisis to stoke up fears of “invasion” and advertise threats to the very existence of a “Christian Europe” which they must defend, reaping temporary but significant electoral benefits. The poison they are promoting has viral qualities: even in the Czech Republic, a country hardly faced with an immigration problem, xenophobia and far-right rhetoric is now the mainstream.
How do I ... offer a room to a refugee?

Unfortunately, it’s not hard to see how this is achieved. Greek voters were faced with a terrifying image last week: Golden Dawn was using small children in its TV ads, to promote vile and xenophobic propaganda, with slogans like: “I don’t want to be a minority in my own country.” What’s even worse is that some in New Democracy still view Golden Dawn supporters as a legitimate pool of voters and they regularly pander to them, adopting much of the xenophobic bile. It should serve as a warning to those who endlessly stall and dither on coming up with a solution to a crisis with no end in sight.

So far, every form of crisis has been dealt in ways that make the European Union itself appear to be the problem. The Greek financial crisis prompted capital controls (effectively stopping the free movement of capital in the EU); the refugee crisis brought closed borders and the suspension of the Schengen treaty. This attitude is now giving rise to the enemy within, forces that aim to stoke fear and violence, and put an end to any form of transcontinental solidarity and cooperation.

All these actions are unfortunately seen as reassertions of sovereignty, in the face of indifferent elites, by their respective electorates. And as long as we keep trading democratic process for bureaucratic dithering, the threat will keep growing. For now, it has created a solid base for itself in Greece.

“We are not just a protest movement any more,” said the Golden Dawn’s deputy Ilias Kasidiaris after the results were in. This carries an element of truth. Given enough time and materials, it will most certainly be looking to build on it. And the feeling is in no way limited to the Greek shores.


=========================================
17. BORDERLAND EUROPE AND THE CHALLENGE OF MIGRATION
by Etienne Balibar 
=========================================
(Open Democracy - 8 September 2015)

We tend to think that the external limits of the European Union define the 'real' borders of Europe, which is a mistake.

The wrinkled sea. Flickr/jenny downing. Some rights reserved.Confronted with the violent and obscene images that have been reaching us ever since the influx of refugees entered new dimensions this summer, we may wonder: Why is it that Merkel addresses the issue much better than Hollande does, and Sigmar Gabriel much better than Manuel Valls?

Why is it that – all things considered - Germany behaves with much more dignity and efficiency than France, let alone the UK or Hungary? Surely, because in the long term Germany is in need of the migratory input while France is not (or so she thinks).

Surely also because a majority of Germans have learned a lesson from fascism and from the Cold War, which the French still haven't learned from colonial and neo-colonial history.

But all this only alludes to an issue which has now become impossible to ignore: namely, the relationship between European construction (or de-construction) and the new reality of human migration engendered by underlying catastrophes such as sweeping terrorism (including state terrorism) and unfettered globalization in the circummediterranean region. Hence, we need to restart from the structural data, we need to measure the changes that have since occurred and to ask once again what politics can contribute in this context.

Tens of thousands of 'migrants' - men, women and children - from Africa and the Middle East (Syria in particular) are flooding the systems of control and admission of European member states - first those of riparian states in the Mediterranean region, then those of other states further north. Robbed, deported, tucked into transit camps or left in the no man's land of harbour or railway areas, sometimes strafed or sunk with their makeshift vessels, they die or fail in front of such or such barrier, but they persist and are now here. What will we do about them? What are the governments doing, now that not only militant human rights associations and people in charge of registration or emergency relief operations, but even European officials are speaking of the biggest wave of refugees and the biggest sum of misfortune on the continent since World War II?

Well, they unroll several kilometres of barbed wire. They send the army or the police to push back these scraps of humanity which no one wants to keep while at the same time announcing 'deliberations' and calling for 'pragmatic' solutions.[1]

The problem, they say, is 'European'. But when the President of the Commission asks for the member states to agree on the distribution quotas of refugees on the basis of each country's population and resources, all or almost all eschew this proposal with various arguments. Europe thereby uncovers what it has turned into by approbation or under the pressure of some of its citizens, but against the deep sense of many others: a coalition of selfishness rivalling for the trophy of xenophobia.

It is therefore no overstatement to speak of disgrace.[2] 500 million 'rich' Europeans (very unequally, it is true) are not able and not willing to accommodate 500,000 refugees (or even ten times their number) knocking on their doors. What is more, these unfortunates are fleeing massacres, civil wars, lethal dictatorships or famines, which certainly have very diverse and multiple causes and responsibilities: but no one could dare to claim Europe is guilt-free, in the long term as well as in its more recent policies, be it through cynical alliances, incautious interventions, or a continuous flux of arm sales.

However, collective humiliation is a form of auto-destruction. To repeat that the moral foundation of the European construction - its distinctive character (take a look at the East, take a look at the South...) - resides in promoting human rights and constantly denying any sense of obligation is one of the surest ways for a political institution to lose its legitimation. And, as often happens, this disgrace is not even counterbalanced by profits in security or in the economy.[3]

Rather, it is slowly but steadily pushing the European Union towards the collapse of one of the 'pillars' of its communitarian edifice: the mutualization of its borders and the unified control of entries into and departures from the European zone through the Schengen system.

None of this was unforeseeable. In fact, the 'tragedy' and the 'challenge' took months, even years, to evolve. During this time witnesses and analysts were decrying the aggravation caused by the voluntary self-deception of the politicians or their complaisance towards a public opinion which they deemed universally hostile to the reception of the 'world's misery'. The very name Lampedusa says it all.[4]

But an effect of exorbitance has just taken place which makes us realize that we have now entered a new era and that terms such as 'migrations', 'borders', 'population' along with the political categories built upon them have changed their meanings. Hence, we cannot use them as we have so far. On this as on some other points (such as currency, citizenship, labour) we can say that Europe will either be realized by revolutionizing its vision of the world and its societal choices or it will be destroyed by denying realities and by holding onto the fetishes of the past. I would like to expound this outcome in a few words.

Europe conceived itself as developing borders of its own, but in reality it has no borders, rather it is itself a complex 'border': at once one and many, fixed and mobile, internal and external. To say it in plainer English, Europe is a Borderland.[5] This implies, I believe, two things of fundamental importance despite their paradox; two things whose consequences may remain out of reach if we continue to think in pure terms of national sovereignty and of police:

Firstly, that Europe is not a space where borders exist alongside one another but rather on top of one another without really being able to merge into one another.

Secondly, that Europe forms a space within which borders multiply and move incessantly, 'chased' from one spot to the other by an unreachable imperative of closure, which leads to its 'governance', resembling a permanent state of emergency.

Regarding the first point, it is worth remembering a fact which we fail to draw a lesson from: even if we merely keep to current realities and decide to leave out traces of the cultural and institutional past, Europe does not have a unique identification when it comes to its 'territory'.

We tend to think that the external limits of the European Union define the 'real' borders of Europe, which is a mistake. These limits do not coincide with those of the Council of Europe (which include Russia and determine the area of competence of the European Court of Human Rights), nor with those of NATO, which includes the US, Norway, Turkey, etc. and is in charge of protecting the European territory (especially against Eastern enemies) and engineering some of the military operations on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, nor with the Schengen zone (which includes Switzerland but excludes the UK), nor with the Eurozone which shares the common currency controlled by the ECB (and which still includes Greece today but not the UK, Sweden or Poland). In the light of recent developments, we should - I think - admit that these delimitations will never merge. And that, therefore, Europe cannot be defined on the basis of a territory, except in a reductionist and contradictory way.

But what is the historical meaning of this fact? A long retrospective would be necessary in order to understand why the apparently univocal national borders which serve as the 'absolute' model of the border institution actually only constitute part of it. In fact, they could never exist independent of other alignments that allow them to function on a local as well as on a global level, thereby delineating more or less sovereign territories while regulating the global flux of populations by guiding them (for instance from metropolises to colonies, from North to South or the other way round) and by distinguishing between them.[6]

The following vignette should here suffice: during the age of colonial empires - as the maps posted in our classrooms used to clearly show - a country like France always had double borders, as it always had to define the limits of the 'French nation' on the one hand and the totality of its 'outremer possessions' on the other hand. Since this disposition was also applied to other empires, an implicit opposition between Europe and the rest of the world, between the natural residence of the 'Europeans' and that of the 'non-Europeans' (commonly qualified as 'indigenous peoples') was drawn.

It would be rather careless to believe that this grand distribution has stopped haunting our understanding of the relationship between the interior and the exterior which commands our perception and our ways of administering the 'newcomers' on European soil. But even though the current system is based (as it has been at each stage of global history) on the principle of a double level, allowing for each 'local' border to function as a projection of the order of the world (and of its often prevalent other side, namely disorder), it is evidently much more complex than the old one.

And this is mainly due to the fact that the relation between the nation-states (even the powerful ones) on the one hand and the 'nomos' of the earth and the distribution of its population on the other hand has changed. For the former have stopped to be theinitiators and have become receivers or at best regulators. Thus, a border is not what a state 'decides' it is in terms of power relations and negotiations with other states but what the global context dictates. No gesticulation (Manuel Valls in Ventimiglia), no coastal guards (Frontex) and no barbed wire (at the Hungarian border) will change this.

The preserved DDR border at Thuringia, Germany. Flickr/D Lumenta. Some rights reserved.But let us get back to the saddening spectacle Europe is offering us as it is being confronted with its 'challenge of migration', and let us try to better describe the meaning of the multiplications and displacements of borders. This is the second point. Let us examine two emblematic case examples.

Firstly France, between Ventimiglia and Calais. On its 'southern' slopes it bars the way and reacts condescendingly to Italy's requests and complaints even though Italy is, together with Greece, the member state which is currently 'holding the reception'for the migrants on behalf of Europe.

The rules of repudiation are being applied without scruples, and the 'Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité' are cleaning up the beaches. On its 'northern' shore, France combines negotiation with repression in order to lighten the burden the UK has in a certain way subcontracted by keeping out of the Schengen zone. At the same time the UK continues (but for how long?) to attract migrants with a more 'liberal' legislation when it comes to personal and labour rights. Are we dealing with two unrelated situations or rather with one single 'border' represented by the French state?

Let us now turn to the Danube region between Germany and the Balkan states. Migrants here come mainly from the Middle-East but also from some countries or almost-countries originating from the ex-Yugoslavian dismantlement. Everywhere the walls are rising, not in order to make the increasing flux of migrants halt that are coming mainly from Greece and Macedonia, but to send them to other transit points.

And it is Germany, the terminal stop of the exodus, which (as I have said earlier) provides the main humanitarian effort (though accompanied by violent internal controversies and fits of lethal racism) while it simultaneously deploys politico-juridical argumentations that favour a distinction between 'asylum seekers' and 'economic migrants', and most importantly (for some migrants who are fit for work are welcome in Germany) in favour of reviewing the list of 'safe countries' which do not pose an immediate 'lethal' threat to their nationals.

Together, these situations draw a clear but rather unconventional picture. On the one hand, formal membership of the EU has become a second-rank criterion: historically and geographically all the Balkan states belong to Europe, which implies for instance that the Hungarian 'wall' cuts through Europe - thus reproducing a kind of segregation which Europe pretended to have consigned to history (as the spokesperson of the Commission has pointed out in a low voice).

On the other hand, some European countries are tentatively perceived by others not to be fully European, or to merely belong to 'buffer zones'. But this ascription is relative rather than absolute. It follows a North-South 'gradient', as physicists would say, of political, sociological, ideological, and even anthropological meaning. The 'South', the other Europe, isn't fully European as it still stands with one foot in the Third-world or at any rate serves as an entry gate for the latter. For France, this 'South' is Italy, but for the UK it's France. For Germany it's Hungary and beyond, but for Hungary, it's Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey...

This raises the question: Who stops whom? Who serves as border control to the neighbouring state? The answer is: the southernmost (or rather South-Easternmost) state.[7] As a British vacationist quoted by the Guardian coarsely stated, it would be necessary to create 'one-way crossings' on access points such as the Eurotunnel for some groups of people.

We can now reach the inescapable conclusion: as a matter of fact, the 'external borders' of Europe cut right through it and fragment it into several superimposed slices. In consequence, Europe, though officially belonging to the 'North', eventually turns into nothing more than another field to enact the division of the world into a 'North' and a 'South'. But this delineation is not really definable anymore. It becomes clear why some member states are tempted to 'amputate' other states from the European Union so as to better protect themselves from what these represent or give way to.

And it becomes all the clearer taking into account the economic delineations (often even described as 'cultural' ones) which have widened the gap caused by unfettered liberalism between North and South (or between 'creditor states' and 'debtor states') within Europe itself. This makes sense, doesn’t it? Well, except for the fact that however, 'pragmatically' speaking, it makes no sense at all. For, where would this supra-border be drawn and what would be its legal definition?

I could stop here and try to extract some political and moral consequences accompanied by gloomy predictions for today and tomorrow. But I think a further step is necessary, despite the risk of seeming too speculative. What we are referring to here from a European point of view is part of a much broader field - namely the overthrow of the course of recent history (Europe is not the 'capital of the world' anymore, it has become a mere 'province' as Dipesh Chakrabarty[8] has put it) and the economic and technological changes which transform the way humanity relates to itself and which bring about huge inequalities.

On the one hand there are those who practically 'live' on planes, airports, shopping centres, conference halls, and on the other hand those who travel by foot or on trucks on the roads of exile, carrying a child in their arms and a backpack on their shoulders - the only things that they still own. But between these two extremes are also masses of more or less 'precarious' migrants and non-migrants. Somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean gigantic container ships coming from the now enlarged Suez canal and the decaying dinghies of human smugglers crammed with migrants meet one another (do they actually 'meet'?).

What has radically changed, as we can clearly see, is the regime of the flow of things and people. War, terror, dictatorship, fanaticism reaching our very doors don't simply follow such or such 'logic' but their consequences (which, let's be honest, have no foreseeable end) do fit into a certain frame and sharpen the contradictions. Maybe then, it is necessary to invert our understanding of the relation between 'territories' and 'movements' (or displacements) as some sociologists, jurists and philosophers have been suggesting for quite some time now.

For our understanding is still captive of schemes and norms that have shaped centuries of national sovereignty, which see the state as a subordinating power, assigning to each peoples a legally demarcated territory. In other words, states used to allocate citizenship in an exclusive manner in order to limit and control the freedom of movement, which in a certain way is 'primary'. But increasingly states are losing this unrestricted power without exception or controls: the world is not 'westphalian' any more. The consequences regarding our ways of addressing human rights and political rights issues in the era we are chaotically but irreversibly about to enter, are radical.[9]

I won't carry this speculation to the end even though it hints at the new regime of movements and territories that I have just evoked. Rather, I would like to turn to the more immediate and more urgent question: what is the most effective and the most civil (not to say 'civilized') way to govern a permanent state of emergency in which borders that we inherited or added are either beginning to collapse unless they become continuously fortified and militarized?

I have to repeat what is practically at stake: human beings who are 'in excess' and their inalienable 'right to have rights' - not to the detriment of those who already have them, but next to them and together with them. No one can claim such a governance is easy, but it certainly should not be based on obsolete discriminations ('migrants' and 'refugees') or dangerous generalizations ('refugees' and 'terrorists') that nourish racist fantasies, prompt murderous acting out and disarrange the surveillance policies that the state needs to efficiently protect its citizens.[10]

Likewise it won't be achieved if the 'poor residents' (still in the great majority) are pitted against the 'poor nomads' (less numerous but more visible and ever increasing) by social disqualification, precariousness, forced relegation into dis-industrialized areas which are nothing but cultural and economic ghettos. If we want hospitality to prevail over xenophobic sentiments - sentiments which eventually trap politicians to such a point that they will have no other 'choice' than finding new expiatory victims such as Roma or immigrants to nourish it - the social cleft needs to be confronted at the same time as the postcolonial resentments.

There is thus no way around these two alternatives: either social security for all or 'insecurity of identity' and thriving nationalism which bring about the breakdown of the collective security system that has so long been sought and fought for as well as the destitution of the 'European idea' itself.[11]

The irony of it all, however, is that part of the solution is within reach: this minimum would be achieved by 1) an official declaration on the 'state of humanitarian urgency' on the entire 'territory' under the auspices of the European Commission, 2) the binding commitment of all EU member states to treat refugees with dignity and equity from each according to their objectively measurable ability.

It is true that the consequences of this minimum would potentially be considerable: re-valorization of the powers of the European Commission, institutionalization of humanitarian norms on a par with budgetary and commercial norms, liberation of resources for a politics of assistance and integration (which in turn would increase the necessity of democratic control at a 'federal' level), concerted educational programmes against racism... In short, a re-invigoration of the European union project, in opposition to current tendencies. Is it conceivable? Perhaps, if a common sense still exists among us.

Thanks to Moh Hamdi for the translation from French.

This article will be published in the quarterly Vacarme, in Autumn 2015.

If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? on Facebook and following us on Twitter @oD_Europe

[1]Only the German chancellor has unilaterally announced on 25th August 2015, after an unproductive meeting with François Hollande, that Syrian refugees will not be sent back to their country of entry as intended by the Dublin Agreements.

[2]Angela Merkel has said during a meeting with the citizens of Duisburg transmitted over the internet: “Europe is in a situation which utterly dishonours it; it simply has to be said”.

[3]Regarding the economy, if not the security, the great 'School of Toulouse' (in the person of Ms. Emmanuelle Auriol) has suggested an ultra-liberal solution: put entry visas on the market whose costs would be regulated by demand and offer. One question: Where to put the sales outlet? Damned be those borders...!

[4]See Michel Agier :   « La tragédie de Lampedusa : s'émouvoir, comprendre, agir » (Le Monde | 04.10.2013) et « Lampedusa : pour une autre politique migratoire en Europe » (Le Monde | 08.10.2013).

[5]See my essay « Europe as Borderland », Society and Space, Volume 27, Number 2 April 2009

[6]I have addressed this issue in several publications since « Qu'est-ce qu'une frontière? », in La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx, Paris, Galilée, 1996. See also: Carlo Galli : Spazi politici. L'età moderna e l'età globale, Bologna, il Mulino, 2001; Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignties, Zone Books 2010; Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary : Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière aujourd’hui ? PUF 2015.

[7]In an opinion column of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (24 August 2015), former minister of the green party, Joschka Fischer, has rightly pointed out, that a wave of refugees could also come from the East if the Ukrainian conflict worsens and spreads.

[8] Dipesh Chakrabarty : Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press 2000.

[9]See: Sandro Mezzadra et Brett Neilson : Border as Method,  Duke University Press, 2013; Enrica Rigo: Europa di confine. Trasformazioni della cittadinanza nell’Unione allargata, Préface par E. Balibar, Meltemi editore 2006.

[10]In April 2015, President Hollande has referred to the ships that commute from Libya to Italy: “They are terrorists”. It was not clear whether he was making reference to the traffickers or the passengers.

[11]We know that the notions of 'insecurity of identity' or 'cultural insecurity' have been put out by certain sociologists and Pundits: L’Insécurité culturelle. Sortir du malaise identitaire français, par Laurent Bouvet, Fayard, 2014.
About the author

Etienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor at Paris X Nanterre and Anniversary Chair of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Etienne Balibar has addressed such questions as European racism, the notion of the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence and politics, identity and emancipation.

His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, New Left Books 1970), Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso 1991), The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and Politics, Politics and the Other Scene (Verso 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton University Press 2004). His latest publication are Equaliberty (Duke University Press, 2014); Violence and Civility (Columbia University Press, 2015), and Citizenship (Polity Press, 2015).


=========================================
18. THE STATE OF SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICAL LIFE
by Achille Mbembe
=========================================
africasacountry.com - September 19, 2015

In these times of urgency, when weak and lazy minds would like us to oppose “thought” to “direct action”; and when, precisely because of this propensity for “thoughtless action”, everything is framed in the nihilistic terms of power for the sake of power  – in such times what follows might mistakenly be construed as contemptuous.

And yet, as new struggles unfold, hard questions have to be asked. They have to be asked if, in an infernal cycle of repetition but no difference, one form of damaged life is not simply to be replaced by another.

The force of affect

Indeed the ground is fast shifting and a huge storm seems to be building up on the horizon. May 68? Soweto 76?  Or something entirely different?

The winds blowing from our campuses can be felt afar, in a different idiom, in those territories of abandonment where the violence of poverty and demoralization having become the norm, many have nothing to lose and are now more than ever willing to risk a fight. They simply can no longer wait, having waited for too long now.

Out there, from almost every corner of this vast land seems to stretch a chain of young men and women rigid with tension.

As tension slowly swells up, it becomes ever more important to hold on to the things that truly matter.

A new cultural temperament is gradually engulfing post-apartheid urban South Africa. For the time being, it goes by the name “decolonization” – in truth a psychic state more than a political project in the strict sense of the term.

Whatever the case, everything seems to indicate that ours is a crucial moment in the redefinition of what counts as “social protagonism” in this country. Mobilizations over crucial matters such as access to health care, sanitation, housing, clean water or electricity might still be conducted in the name of the implicit promise inherent to the struggle years – that life after freedom will be “better” for all.

But fewer and fewer actually believe it. And as the belief in that promise fast recedes, raw affect, raw emotions and raw feelings are harnessed and recycled back into the political itself. In the process, new voices increasingly render old ones inaudible, while anger, rage and eventually muted grief seem to be the new markers of identity and agency.

Psychic bonds – in particular bonds of pain and bonds of suffering – more than lived material contradictions are becoming the real stuff of political inter-subjectivity. “I am my pain” – how many times have I heard this statement in the months since #RhodesMustFall emerged?  “I am my suffering” and this subjective experience is so incommensurable that “unless you have gone through the same trial, you will never understand my condition” – the fusion of self and suffering in this astonishing age of solipsism and narcissism.

So it is that the relative cultural hegemony the African National Congress (ANC) exercised on black South African imagination during the years of the struggle is fast waning. In the bloody miasma of the Zuma years, these years of stagnation, rent-seeking and mediocrity parading as leadership, there is hardly any center left standing as institutions after institutions crumble under the weight of corruption, a predatory new black élite and the cynicism of former oppressors.

In the bloody miasma of the Zuma years, the discourse of black power, self-affirmation and worldliness of the early 1990s is in danger of being replaced by the discourse of fracture, injury and victimization – identity politics and the resentment that always is its corollary.

Rainbowism and its most important articles of faith – truth, reconciliation and forgiveness – is fading. Reduced to a totemic commodity figure mostly destined to assuage whites’ fears, Nelson Mandela himself is on trial. Some of the key pillars of the 1994 dispensation  – a constitutional democracy, a market society, non-racialism – are also under scrutiny. They are now perceived as disabling devices with no animating potency, at least in the eyes of those who are determined to no longer wait. We are past the time of promises. Now is the time to settle accounts.

But how do we make sure that one noise machine is not simply replacing another?

Settling Accounts

The fact is this – nobody is saying nothing has changed. To say nothing has changed would be akin to indulging in willful blindness.

Hyperboles notwithstanding, South Africa today is not the “colony” Frantz Fanon is writing about in his Wretched of the Earth.

If we cannot find a proper name for what we are actually facing, then rather than simply borrowing one from a different time,  we should keep searching.

What we are hearing is that there have not been enough meaningful, decisive, radical change, not only in terms of the life chances of the black poor, but – and this is the novelty – in terms of the future prospects of the black middle class.

What is being said is that twenty years after freedom, we have not disrupted enough the structures that maintain and reproduce “white power and supremacy”; that this is the reason why too many amongst us are trapped in a “bad life” that keeps wearing them out and down; that this wearing out and down of black life has been going on for too long and must now be brought to an end by all means necessary (the right to violence?).

We are being told that we have not radically overturned the particular sets of interests that are produced and reproduced through white privilege in institutions of public and private life – in law firms, in financial institutions such as banking and insurance, in advertising and industry, in terms of land redistribution, in media, universities, languages and culture in general.

“Whiteness”, “white power”, “white supremacy”, “white monopoly capital” is firmly back on the political and cultural agenda and to be white in South Africa now is to face a new-old kind of trial although with new judges – the so-called “born-free”. 

Politics of impatience

But behind whites trial looms a broader indictment of South African social and political order.

South Africa is fast approaching its Fanonian moment. A mass of structurally disenfranchised people have the feeling of being treated as “foreigners” on their own land. Convinced that the doors of opportunity are closing, they are asking for firmer demarcations between “citizens” (those who belong) and “foreigners” (those who must be excluded).  They are convinced that as the doors of opportunity keep closing, those who won’t be able to “get in” right now might be left out for generations to come – thus the social stampede, the rush to “get in” before it gets too late, the willingness to risk a fight because waiting is no longer a viable option.

The old politics of waiting is therefore gradually replaced by a new politics of impatience and, if necessary, of disruption. Brashness, disruption and a new anti-decorum ethos are meant to bring down the pretence of normality and the logics of normalization in this most “abnormal” society.  Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and a plethora of black feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theorists are being reloaded in the service of a new form of militancy less accommodationist and more trenchant both in form and content.

The age of impatience is an age when a lot is said – all sorts of things we had hardly heard about during the last twenty years; some ugly, outrageous, toxic things, including calls for murder, atrocious things that speak to everything except to the project of freedom, in this age of fantasy and hysteria, when the gap between psychic realities and actual material realities has never been so wide, and the digital world only serves as an amplifier of every single moment, event and accident.

The age of urgency is also an age when new wounded bodies erupt and undertake to actually occupy spaces they used to simply haunt. They are now piling up, swearing and cursing, speaking with excrements, asking to be heard.

They speak in allegories and analogies – the “colony”, the “plantation”, the “house Negro”, the “field Negro”, blurring all boundaries, embracing confusion, mixing times and spaces, at the risk of anachronism.

They are claiming all kinds of rights – the right to violence; the right to disrupt and jam that which is parading as normal; the right to insult, intimidate and bully those who do not agree with them; the right to be angry, enraged; the right to go to war in the hope of recovering what was lost through conquest; the right to hate, to wreak vengeance, to smash something, it doesn’t matter what, as long as it looks “white”.

All these new “rights” are supposed to achieve one thing we are told the 1994 “peaceful settlement” did not achieve – decolonization and retributive justice, the only way to restore a  modicum of dignity to victims of the injuries of yesterday and today.

Demythologizing whiteness

And yet, some hard questions must be asked.

Why are we invested in turning whiteness, pain and suffering into such erotogenic objects?

Could it be that the concentration of our libido on whiteness, pain and suffering is after all typical of the narcissistic investments so privileged by this neoliberal age?

To frame the issues in these terms does not mean embracing a position of moral relativism. How could it be? After all, in relation to our history, too many lives were destroyed in the name of whiteness. Furthermore, the structural repetition of past sufferings in the present is beyond any reasonable doubt.  Whiteness as a necrophiliac power structure and a primary shaper of a global system of unequal redistribution of life chances will not die a natural death.

But to properly engineer its death – and thus the end of the nightmare it has been for a large portion of the humanity – we urgently need to demythologize it.

If we fail to properly demythologize whiteness, whiteness – as the machine in which a huge portion of the humanity has become entangled in spite of itself – will end up claiming us.

As a result of whiteness having claimed us; as a result of having let ourselves be possessed by it in the manner of an evil spirit, we will inflict upon ourselves injuries of which whiteness, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have been capable.

Indeed for whiteness to properly operate as the destructive force it is in the material sphere, it needs to capture its victim’s imagination and turn it into a poison well of hatred.

For victims of white racism to hold on to the things that truly matter, they must incessantly fight against the kind of hatred which never fails to destroy, in the first instance, the man or woman who hates while leaving the structure of whiteness itself intact.

As a poisonous fiction that passes for a fact, whiteness seeks to institutionalize itself as an event by any means necessary. This it does by colonizing the entire realms of desire and of the imagination.

To demythologize whiteness, it will not be enough to force “bad whites” into silence or into confessing guilt and/or complicity. This is too cheap.

To puncture and deflate the fictions of whiteness will require an entirely different regime of desire, new approaches in the constitution of material, aesthetic and symbolic capital, another discourse on value, on what matters and why.

The demythologization of whiteness also requires that we develop a more complex understanding of South African versions of whiteness here and now.

This is the only country on Earth in which a revolution took place which resulted in not one single former oppressor losing anything. In order to keep its privileges intact in the post-1994 era, South African whiteness has sought to intensify its capacity to invest in what we should call the resources of the offshore.  It has attempted to fence itself off, to re-maximize its privileges through self-enclaving and the logics of privatization.  These logics of offshoring and self-enclaving are typical of this neoliberal age.

The unfolding new/old trial of whiteness won’t produce much if whites are forced into a position in which the only thing they are ever allowed to say in our public sphere is: “Look, I am so sorry”. 

It won’t produce much if through our actions and modes of thinking, we end up forcing back into the white ghetto those whites who have spent most of their lives trying to fight against the dominant versions of whiteness we so abhor.

Furthermore, we must take seriously the fact that “to be black” in South Africa now is not exactly the same as “to be black” in Europe or in the Americas.

After all, we are the majority here. Of course to be a majority is a bit more than the simple expression of numbers. But surely something has to be made out of this sheer weight of numbers. We can use this numerical force to create different dominant standards by which our society live; paradigms of what truly matters and why; entirely new social forms; new imaginaries of interior life and the life of the mind.

We are also in control of arguably the most powerful State on the African Continent. This is a State that wields enormous financial and economic power. In theory, not much prevents it from redirecting the flows of wealth in its hands in entirely new trajectories. As it has been done in places such as Malaysia or Singapore, something has to be made out of this sheer amount of wealth – something more creative and more decisive than our hapless “black economic empowerment” schemes the main function of which is to sustain the lifestyles of the new élite.

The neurotic misery of our age

Finally, it is crucial for us to understand that we are a bit more than just “suffering subjects”. “Social death” is not the defining feature of our history. The fact is that we are still here – of course at a very high price and most likely in a terrible state, but we are here.

We are here – and hopefully we will be here for a very long time – not as anybody else’s creation, but as our own-creation.

To demythologize whiteness is to dry up the mythic, symbolic and immaterial resources without which it can no longer dabble in self-righteousness or in the morbid delight with which, as James Baldwin put it, it contemplates “the extent and power of its own wickedness.” It is to not be put in a position in which we die hating somebody else.

On the other hand, politicizing pain is not the same thing as advocating dolorism. In fact, it must be galling to put ourselves in a position such that those who look at us cannot but pity us victims.

One way of destroying white racism is to prevent whiteness from becoming a deep fantasmatic object of our unconscious.

We need to let go off our libidinal investments in whiteness if we are to squarely confront the dilemmas of white privilege. Baldwin understood this better than any other thinker. “In order really to hate white people”, he wrote, “one has to blot so much out of the mind – and the heart – that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose” (Notes of a Native Son, 112).

This is what we have to find out for ourselves – in a black majority country in which blacks are in power, what is the cost of our attachment to whiteness, this mirror object of our fear and our envy, our hate and our attraction, our repulsion and our aspirations?

Part of what racism has always tried to do is to damage its victims’ capacity to help themselves. For instance, racism has encouraged its victims to perceive themselves as powerless, that is, as victims even when they were actively engaged in myriad acts of self-assertion.

Ironically among the emerging black middle class, current narratives of selfhood and identity are saturated by the tropes of pain and suffering. The latter have become the register through which many now represent themselves to themselves and to the world. To give account of who they are, or to explain themselves and their behavior to others, they increasingly tend to frame their life stories in terms of how much they have been injured by the forces of racism, bigotry and patriarchy.

Often under the pretext that the personal is political, this type of autobiographical and at times self-indulgent “petit bourgeois” discourse has replaced structural analysis. Personal feelings now suffice. There is no need to mount a proper argument.  Not only wounds and injuries can’t they be shared, their interpretation  cannot be challenged by any known rational discourse. Why? Because, it is alleged, black experience transcends human vocabulary to the point where it cannot be named.

This kind of argument is dangerous.

The self is made at the point of encounter with an Other. There is no self that is limited to itself.

The Other is our origin by definition.

What makes us human is our capacity to share our condition – including our wounds and injuries – with others.

Anticipatory politics – as opposed to retrospective politics – is about reaching out to others. It is never about self-enclosure.

The best of black radical thought has been about how we make sure that in the work of repair, certain compensations do not become pathological phenomena.

It has been about nurturing the capacity to resume a human life in the aftermath of irreparable loss.

Invoking Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and countless others will come to nothing if this ethics of becoming-with-others is not the cornerstone of the new cycle of struggles.

There will be no plausible critique of whiteness, white privilege, white monopoly capitalism that does not start from the assumption that whiteness has become this accursed part of ourselves we are deeply attached to, in spite of it threatening our own very future well-being.

=========================================
19. IBROSCHEVA ON GHODSEE, 'THE LEFT SIDE OF HISTORY: WORLD WAR II AND THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE'
=========================================
 Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee. The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $84.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-5823-7; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-5835-0.

Reviewed by Elza Ibroscheva (Southern Illinois University)
Published on H-SAE (September, 2015)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

In the last hundred years of the development of human thought, one particular organizing idea engendered to express the collective aspiration of working-class people has also become the most antagonizing ideology of contemporary history. Communism—the belief in the transnational collectivity of the proletariat—inspired revolutions and imagined the possibility of a world in which every laboring body was entitled to a measure of prosperity and happiness. However, the very same belief in a people’s rule and collective welfare gave rise to oppressive, authoritative regimes that hijacked the communist ideals to produce police states ruled by brutality, fear, and economic inefficiencies. Today, after the collapse of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, a complex ideology is often reduced to a simple black-and-white equation that is usually translated by the reigning coalition of scholars, analysts, and opinion makers thus: the failure of the Soviet-style experimentation with the communist ideal proved that it is just that—an ideal without practicality. Moreover, its violent disintegration only strengthens the belief that capitalism, now synonymous with democracy, reigns supreme as the ultimate aspiration of all contemporary humankind. 

The story of communism, however, is far from being so simplistic and one-dimensional. It demands an honest, unflinching exploration, devoid of the persistent negativity that surrounds the highly politicized, often purposively manipulated public perception of this critical period of modern history. This is exactly the kind of challenge for Kristen Ghodsee, who does an outstanding job in revealing the untold story of communism in her latest book, The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Ghodsee, a master ethnographer and author of several award-winning books on Bulgaria’s cultural history, proves an able storyteller, uncovering the complexities of cultural memories in eastern Europe while personalizing their everyday occurrence. As in her previous books, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (2005) and Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism (2011), her work focuses on the recent history of Bulgaria, a country in the region of which she clearly has an intimate and direct knowledge. Her skills as a seasoned ethnographer and “part-time” Bulgarian resident shine in her astute analysis of the cultural and social circumstances that account for what has become the convoluted and highly controversial history of communism.

Ghodsee’s goal is to answer a simple yet contentious question: What was/is communism, and how did it became so reviled and demonized, both in the West and more importantly, in eastern Europe, the region which saw so many incarnations of this powerful ideology? To do so, she uses a less conventional approach, at least as far as academic writing is concerned. Instead of focusing on a meta-analysis of the political and social complexities that surround the rise and fall of communism, she chooses to recast the story of communism not as a grand historic narrative, but as a personal one—a story told through the rise and fall of two seemingly unrelated, yet intertwined human fates: an Englishman by the name of Frank Thompson and a young Bulgarian girl named Elena Lagadinova. Major Frank Thompson, brother of historian E. P. Thompson, crossed paths with Elena, the youngest guerilla fighter in the communist “partisan” resistance movement in Bulgaria. At first, their seemingly disparate paths in life appear impossible to place in the same story, let alone in the same geographical location. And yet, with her keen eye for detail and talent for finding the most obscure yet illuminating cultural cues, Ghodsee takes us on a journey following Thompson’s path of discovery and sacrifice.

In part 1, the first three chapters of the book follow both Ghodsee’s personal interest in Thompson’s story and the details of his life in Britain, where he cultivated a sophisticated understanding of the ideals of the communist movement. His military involvement with the British army was a result of his desire to engage with the struggle of the Bulgarian antifascist movement he learned about in following the trial of Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, accused of setting the Reichstag on fire in 1933. Major Thompson found his way into tiny Bulgaria as a member of the Special Operation Executive, a unit which sent British officers to work together with local resistance movements. Growing further captivated by the ideals of communism and the Bulgarian spirit of resistance against the Nazi occupation, Thompson ran into the Lagadinovs, whose story we discover in the next nine chapters of the book. Ghodsee tells an engaging story of courage and perseverance, of sacrifice and naive idealism, all leading us to understand how and why people of such disparate backgrounds and upbringing—an intellectual in the United Kingdom and a family of peasants in Bulgaria—were inspired and united by the what she describes as the common aspiration for a “world in which peasants and workers control their own fate” (p. 189).

Thompson’s devotion to helping the partisans is captured well by Ghodsee’s writing. Meeting the Lagadinov brothers’ brigade made him more confident in his mission, but it also lead to his ultimate demise. After a stakeout, Thompson and his comrades were captured by Bulgarian gendarmes and executed, shot by a firing squad; his body was tossed in a mass unmarked grave. His personal sacrifice, selfless to some and reckless to others, was used by the resistance movement as an example of the moral high ground to which true communists ought to adhere. Ghodsee’s narrative also follows the not so glorious daily life of the partisan, as he or she often trailed through a mundane routine. The story seamlessly transitions from the death of an idealist Brit into the rise to fame and distinction of the youngest partisan in Bulgarian history, the Lagadinov sister. Elena, also known as “the Amazon,” becomes the main character and Ghodsee’s most intimate principal informant in the remainder of the book. This second section focuses on the role of the partisan movement in stabilizing the country in the post-World War II period, becoming the backbone of the Communist Party in Bulgaria and symbolizing the eventual moral bankruptcy of the regime.

Elena’s story reveals a remarkable and touching personal account of the rise and fall of the communist ideal—from Elena’s rise to prominence as the token female leader, instrumental to engaging women in the new policies of domestic and industrial labor; to her family story as a mother, a prominent scientist, an internationally renowned women’s rights leader, and an outspoken advocate; to her humble, no-frills, low-profile life as a pensioner in the postcommunist realities of present-day Bulgaria. With Ghodsee’s expertise as a scholar of gender, she captures the complexities of Lagadinova’s story, encapsulating her personal struggles coming to terms with how her grand ideals went wrong and how the lived experiences of people during those times reflected the intricate story of communism. As Ghodsee herself argues, “learning about the communist era was like trying to find the center of an onion. The official layer of history told by the professional historians was wrapped around the remembered experiences of those who lived through it” (p. 157).

While peeling away the layers of the onion, Ghodsee also makes us aware of the manipulative, revisionist attempts—often enabled by foreign players and interested parties—to shroud the “true” story of communism in mystery by deliberately fabricating stories of communist abuse, oppression, and brutality. As Ghodsee contends, “since the global economic crisis in 2008, government and corporations are especially eager to remind the public about the evils of communism” (p. 198). She illustrates how history can be hijacked and manipulated, returning to Thompson’s personal story as she reveals that the very people who executed him are now celebrated as victims of communism, immortalized in their own monuments, while the partisans’ own places of rest are defaced and purposely destroyed.

The Left Side of History is a remarkable account of Bulgaria’s current history of triumph and despairs, wrapped in the aspirations, hopes, and tragic failures of humans. It is told with astute historical accuracy and striking intimacy concerning the personal stories of Bulgarian communist activists, as well as ordinary people whose lives were indelibly marked by the rise and demise of communism. Ghodsee’s narrative provides a somber reminder that, despite the current economic and political impasse of the postcommunism transition, it is important to remember that not all who “fought on the left side of history were Marxist zealots bent on world domination” but ordinary people whose dreams and hopes were guided by a common desire to improve the lives of everyone (p. 199).


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
=====================================


More information about the SACW mailing list