SACW - 18 Oct 2016 | Sri Lanka: When the Courts are Silent / Bangladesh: Culture of Violence / Pakistan: Asia Bibi's trial / India - Pakistan: War is No Solution - Appeal from Bengal / India: Aadhaar project; citizenship on religious lines? / Hungary: Assault on the press / USA: White Nationalism

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 18 Oct 2016 - No. 2913 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. India and Pakistan at War Against Peaceniks | Mohammed Hanif
2. An appeal by citizens of West Bengal against warlike situation between India and Pakistan
3. Pakistan: What you need to know about Asia Bibi's trial
4. India's Aadhaar project: An Assault on Welfare, Privacy and Democracy, Need for an Urgent debate | Aashish Gupta, Praavita Kashyap and Reetika Khera
5. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Hindu nationalists rally for Trump
  - India: Kairana and the politics of exclusion (Zoya Hasan)
  - Sri Lanka: Now, a ‘Siva Senai’ group in Sri Lanka
  - India: The BJP's fascination with a Dalit icon
  - India: Supreme Court to revisit judgments on Hindutva and Hinduism
  - India: Prime Minister's Office Foists Junior Lawyer with RSS Links as Indian Nominee to Top World Legal Body
  - India: Vrindavan ‘Nastik Sammelan’ called off amid protests by saints
  - India: Compensation most foul
  - India: Cultural practice does not recognise borders. Militarising it reduces it to a dangerous monolith (Githa Hariharan)
  - India: A year after Dadri, its lessons remain unlearnt and the murky role of Union minister for culture and tourism, Mahesh Sharma
  - New Book Announced: Ambedkar and Hindutva Politics (Ram Puniyani)
  - Religious fundamentalists hate but imitate each other
  - India: Army Mute as BJP Election Posters Feature Soldier, Surgical Strikes
  - India: UP Government agreed to a Rs 25-lakh "compensation" for Dadri suspect's kin
  - India: Retrograde Gender Politics on the Bench
  - India: From cow to holy-cow govt
  - India: Patriot games - Mitali Saran

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
6. Sri Lanka: When the Courts are Silent … | Shashik Dhanushka and Andi Schubert
7. Bangladesh: Violence is a culture now | Fardin Hasin
8. How the media in India and Pakistan created a war where there wasn't one | Haroon Khalid
9. India: Saffron light (Editorial, The Telegraph)
10. India: A coaching class for politicians - Go slow on nationalism. Don’t make us hang our heads in shame | Keki N. Daruwalla 
11. War over waters | Sudipta Bhattacharjee
12. India - Kerala: Why violence is the main political narrative of Kannur | Nidheesh M.K.
13. India: A communal bill - Don’t grant citizenship on religious lines, it goes against the idea of India (Editorial, The Times of India)
14. China: The Virtues of the Awful Convulsion | Ian Johnson
15. Indonesia: Grindr and Dozens of Other Gay-Networking Apps | Feliz Solomon
16. The crushing of independent press in Hungary | Hidvégi-B. Attila and Alexandra Barcea 
17. USA: The white flight of Derek Black | Eli Saslow

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1. INDIA AND PAKISTAN AT WAR AGAINST PEACENIKS | Mohammed Hanif
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Pakistani peace-mongers used to look at India with some envy — all that diversity, all those gods. And then an army that is answerable to an elected government. Now they look at India aghast: Their potential partners in peace across the border are beginning to sound like the bigots back home. India is becoming more like Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article12974.html

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2. An appeal by citizens of West Bengal against warlike situation between India and Pakistan
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We the following signatories from West Bengal are deeply concerned about the escalating tension between the two neighbouring countries, India and Pakistan
http://www.sacw.net/article12975.html

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3. PAKISTAN: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ASIA BIBI'S TRIAL
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The family of Asia Bibi is waiting anxiously for the Supreme Court to announce her appeal in a case that has been ongoing for over six years.
http://www.sacw.net/article12973.html

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4. INDIA'S AADHAAR PROJECT: AN ASSAULT ON WELFARE, PRIVACY AND DEMOCRACY, NEED FOR AN URGENT DEBATE | Aashish Gupta, Praavita Kashyap and Reetika Khera
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The aadhaar project, to provide a unique number to all residents in India, was packaged as a welfare-enabling programme. It was sold as an initiative for greater inclusiveness in welfare, a tool against corruption, greater efficiency and so on. Six years down the line, there is mounting evidence of the destruction of welfare programmes due to aadhaar-linkage. Moreover, the aadhaar project has a sinister side to it – it is a surveillance-enabling programme, which threatens privacy and democratic practice.
http://www.sacw.net/article12972.html

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5. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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  - India: Hindu nationalists rally for Trump
  - India: Kairana and the politics of exclusion (Zoya Hasan)
  - Sri Lanka: Now, a ‘Siva Senai’ group in Sri Lanka
  - India: The BJP's fascination with a Dalit icon
  - India: Supreme Court to revisit judgments on Hindutva and Hinduism
  - India: Prime Minister's Office Foists Junior Lawyer with RSS Links as Indian Nominee to Top World Legal Body
  - India: Vrindavan ‘Nastik Sammelan’ called off amid protests by saints
  - India: Why is Aakar Patel opposed to the Uniform Civil Code?
  - If Vigilantism Continues Unchecked, The Future Of Adivasis, And India As A Whole, Is Bleak: Nandini Sundar
  - India: Compensation most foul
  - India: As Politicians Made Ram ‘Hindu’, Indian Muslims Lost Their ‘Maryada Purshotam’
  - India: Cultural practice does not recognise borders. Militarising it reduces it to a dangerous monolith (Githa Hariharan)
  - India: A year after Dadri, its lessons remain unlearnt and the murky role of Union minister for culture and tourism, Mahesh Sharma
  - New Book Announced: Ambedkar and Hindutva Politics (Ram Puniyani)
  - India: Why I am not celebrating Durga Pujo (Dhrubo Jyoti)
  - India: Law Commission seeks public opinion on Uniform Civil Code
  - Religious fundamentalists hate but imitate each other
  - India: Army Mute as BJP Election Posters Feature Soldier, Surgical Strikes
  - India: UP Government agreed to a Rs 25-lakh "compensation" for Dadri suspect's kin
  - India: Retrograde Gender Politics on the Bench
  - India: From cow to holy-cow govt
  - India: Patriot games - Mitali Saran
   
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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6. SRI LANKA: WHEN THE COURTS ARE SILENT …
by Shashik Dhanushka and Andi Schubert
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(The Island, October 11, 2016)

The injunction order handed down against the public screening of Prasanna Vithanage’s latest movie Silence in the Courts has opened up space to question the function of justice in Sri Lanka. The movie is based on a true story about a Magistrate suspected of sexually abusing a woman as a favour for releasing her husband from remand custody. With the injunction order, there has been increased publicity about this issue even before the wider public have seen the actual movie. Much of the critical debate surrounding the movie has tended to focus on the censorship of the film and while this is an important question, we believe the silencing of Silence in the Courts offers us an opportunity to enter a much larger debate about the function of justice in Sri Lanka. Therefore, in this article we want to examine the nature of the methods used by citizens of this country to seek justice when the courts are unresponsive to their pleas for redress.

The Role of the Media

The important conversation that has emerged after the controversy over Silence in the Court highlights the crucial role the media plays as an alternative method of seeking justice. Almost all the major television channels have their own segments where the public can make complaints about the injustices that they face. More recently, there has also been an increased reliance on social media to highlight the daily experiences of injustice faced by the common person. This reliance speaks to a way of seeking justice that bypasses the unnecessary trouble that people must endure in pursuing justice through the ‘proper’ mechanisms. In other words, in the absence of faith in the judiciary, it is possible to notice an increasing reliance on the media as a mediator between police and the citizen. However, whether the media’s intervention promotes or hinders the pursuit of justice remains an open question.

The Role of Spiritual and Traditional Practices

Traditional practices like Polgasima (breaking coconuts), Miris Ambarima (grinding chilli), Dehi Kapeema (cutting lime)have been popularly recognised cultural practices for a long time. In fact, despite the establishment of a ‘proper’ ecosystem for a functioning legal system, these traditional practices continue to be very popular even today. People also spend a lot time and money on these practices. Interestingly, people turn to these practices not so much as an alternative but as a complementary corollary to the function of justice. For example, news broke recently of police seeking spiritual assistance from Buddhist monks to reduce road accidents in Mawathagama. This suggests that even Police officers appear to have far more faith in spiritual practices than in actual police work. The co-existence of these traditional/ spiritual practices with modern/ secular law enforcement mechanisms can be read as another indication of the lack of faith in Sri Lanka’s justice system. The persistence of these practices suggests that many people in the country, including the police, believe that while modern judicial systems are useful, they are never entirely reliable. Therefore, many people feel it would be best to have a spiritual/ traditional fall-back option in the likely event that these mechanisms fail.

Taking Law into their Own Hands

Another method of seeking justice that has become increasingly prevalent is visible in the conversations about the use of summary killings that emerged recently. For example, when the suspects in the killing of Sivaloganathan Vithiya were produced in the Jaffna High Court last year, the protesters who had gathered outside stoned the court demanding that her killers be handed over to them. These protesters believed that punishing these alleged perpetrators themselves was the best way to deliver justice and avoid a hopeless legal system. If this incident may appear to be extreme, consider how people tend to react when a thief is captured in their neighbourhood. More often than not, the thief is tied up and beaten by the people in that area instead of being handed over to the Police. Many people feel that making a complaint to the Police is an unnecessary trouble and can often result in further injustice to the party making the complaint. Therefore, there appears to be far more faith in the capacity of a mob to deliver justice than mechanisms such as the police and the judiciary.

The This refuses of the legal system is questioning the where we have place the relationship between the citizen and state.

Role of Community leaders

Another mechanism commonly adopted is to access justice through the mediation of a community leader. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of community leaders. One set of these leaders are the traditional, law-abiding elite like monks, school principals or other respected people in a village. These traditional leaders have generally been viewed as useful interlocutors when accessing judicial mechanisms at village-level. The popular expectation is that the meditation of these leaders would be a more efficient and effective means to ensure justice.

A more recent trend that is rooted in the changing social, cultural and economic dynamics of the country is the increasing transference of the symbolic capital of these traditional community leaders to a new breed of leaders emerging from the community. This emerging breed of community leaders is increasingly drawn from a business class composed of prominent drug dealers, Kassipu Mudalalis, contractors etc. in the village. This new business class seems to offer even more efficient and effective routes for the community to access justice. These individuals who, by virtue of their business, have had to engage extensively with the police and the legal system seem to have the knowledge, experience, and contacts to aid their fellow citizens who are seeking justice. In a lot of areas, it is these people, who are viewed as ‘lawbreakers’, who are often perceived to be a more effective route to accessing justice. In return for supporting people’s quests for justice, these ‘law breakers’ earn legitimacy in their communities and this legitimacy gives them security in their respective areas. Thus, quite paradoxically, the passiveness of the legal system encourages the active engagement of citizens with lawbreakers in order to access justice.

Conclusion: People’s Aspirations for Justice

As this essay shows, the expression of the desire for justice among Sri Lankans takes many forms. Some choose to sit on a wooden bench in a court on innumerable days for long hours. Others spend the entire night at a Devalaya to seek divine intervention for the injustice they face. Amidst these continued demands, people continue to experience delays and failures which have led them to question the capability and the commitment of state institutions to deliver justice. In spite of this failure of state mechanism to satisfy the demands of the average citizen, their aspiration for justice is never diminished. Faced with the incapacity and incapability of state mechanisms to provide justice, the average person reconciles their aspiration for justice by increasingly exploring alternative and/or complementary methods to pursue justice. Therefore, the debate over the release of Silence in the Courts should not be limited to questions of censorship or freedom of expression. Instead, it is an important invitation for a broader conversation about how we want justice to function in Sri Lanka. Without this broader conversation, the real challenge posed by the work of Victor Ivan and Prasanna Vithanage will continue to be unaddressed.

Shashik Dhanushka and Andi Schubert are Senior Researchers attached to the Social Scientists’ Association.

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7. BANGLADESH: VIOLENCE IS A CULTURE NOW | Fardin Hasin
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(Dhaka Tribune - October 08, 2016)

The hacking of Khadiza is not an isolated incident
Our society has a morbid fascination with violence

I’m not sure what to make of the latest in our series of violence against women: Must I be sad? Angry? Surprised? Shocked?

Or indifferent? Because sadness didn’t work the first time, anger didn’t work the second, and in a country as violent as ours, any display of power, no matter how brutal, is hardly shocking. It’s so horribly usual that people these days shrug it off even before they’ve read or heard the whole story.

And the stories are the same over and over again: Neither the motives nor the bureaucratic complications that seem to haunt our law enforcement agencies ever change. Neither does the media or the public’s role. We shed a few tears, demand that the culprit be thrown to the lions, and spend a few extra minutes trying to express our feelings through our Facebook statuses: Anything that can help us express our rage and our craving for justice.

A social media addict like me won’t complain about Facebook statuses. With a government as controlling as ours, the media outlets are often unwilling or unable to express public sentiments in their entirety. Social media lacks the constraints set by our authorities (regulation of advertisements, for one) and allows people to express their “raw” opinions, unfiltered by technical jargon and ideological tailoring (at least in some cases).

These “raw” opinions are not always politically correct, and in more than a few cases, the criticism is directed at the victims for any perceived immodesty on their part (because patriarchy dictates it’s always the woman’s fault). And in most others, they consist of a demand for immediate capital punishment.

Not justice, mind you. Nobody ever demands an investigation followed by a charge sheet followed by a trial. Just hang them — this has become the norm.

I am not personally against capital punishment but the thing is, it can be only administered by a legal authority after a fair judicial process. Yet, somehow, every time a crime occurs in this country, everyone becomes hell-bent on playing the judge and the jury.

And mind you, the culprit is almost never referred to as a “suspect.” Rather, he/she is simply called the “murderer,” with the adjective “alleged” never being put in front of his/her name. This practice isn’t just done by the aam jonota on Facebook; even respectable media outlets do this.

What’s worse is that nobody bats an eye. Nobody questions the narrative that the media represents. I will admit that there’s something really anomalous (some might even say hypocritical) about debating the objectivity of the media through the media, but I don’t really have a lot of options here. Put it as a paradox: No matter how truthful and sincere I sound, my words shouldn’t be taken as the absolute truth.

    Believing that a person is the hero or the villain as he or she is made out to be and should be treated as such without any further verification is nothing but mob justice, which in itself happens to be a distinctive brand of injustice

How is the discussion on the objectivity of the Bangladeshi media or mine relevant to the attempted murder of Khadiza? To answer that, we would have to travel back in time to 2012.

Some newspapers known for their pro-government stance report a young political cadre belonging to the pro-government student faction getting brutally beaten up by a notorious opposition faction. The attack leads to a piece written by a respected intellectual criticising the aforementioned opposition faction. Pro-government media outlets strongly denounce the attack, and are not the least hesitant to demand justice for the victim.

If this story had been true, I’d have no problem with any of it; the denouncement of violence-loving political factions and the demand of justice would only have been necessary and appropriate. But as reported by a Bengali newspaper, the young political cadre wasn’t beaten up due to his political inclinations.

He had been harassing a young lady he was obsessed with, and during the course of one such incident, the locals had decided that enough was enough and took the law into their own hands: By beating the youth up rather mercilessly.

I’m assuming you guys have correctly guessed the identity of the political cadre and the young lady. You might even know the newspapers which had published the now revealed-to-be falsified story.

But have any of us ever thought that, if this particular young cadre hadn’t been celebrated four years ago as a somewhat hero, would it have been possible for him to climb up the ladders of his political party? Without the “street cred” being donned on him by some parts of the media and intelligentsia, would he have been able to gain the political power that made him feel confident about getting away with his crime, or even allowed him to feel ruthless about committing it?

I have not done the necessary research to present a conclusive answer to these questions, but I think we can safely say that those who had contributed to this false narrative have some blood on their hands. And those among us who believed it don’t have clean hands either.   

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop believing. We’ve taught ourselves not to question the conclusions that are often forced upon us by our politicians, intellectuals, and media. It will take more than just the discovery of one falsified story to shake our beliefs. We’ll continue believing that it was Badrul and Badrul alone who had committed the heinous deed, because that’s what has been reported. And we are so convinced that we don’t hesitate for even a second to demand that Badrul be killed immediately and mercilessly.

It’s probably safe to say that this time, the story isn’t false. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for a proper investigation followed by a credible charge sheet leading to a fair trial whose judgments are supposed to be as truthful and objective as is sanely possible. Believing that a person is the hero or the villain as he or she is made out to be and should be treated as such without any further verification is nothing but mob justice, which in itself happens to be a distinctive brand of injustice.

What also terrifies me is that we look at each and every one of these violent crimes as isolated incidents, and I’m not just speaking on the nature of the crimes such as the one discussed here. Among other things, I’m also referring to the violent political scenario of our country, with the not-so-latest addition of terrorism.

The only conclusion I have is that our society has a morbid fascination with violence which is increasing steadily. And we don’t even want to acknowledge it, much less solve it.   

Fardin Hasin is a freelance contributor.

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8. HOW THE MEDIA IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN CREATED A WAR WHERE THERE WASN'T ONE
by Haroon Khalid
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While the two states never came to blows, the private news channels on both sides of the border launched strike and counter-strike to keep the issue burning.
http://scroll.in/article/818974/how-the-media-in-india-and-pakistan-created-a-war-where-there-need-not-have-been-one

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9. INDIA: SAFFRON LIGHT (Editorial, The Telegraph)
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(The Telegraph - October 13 , 2016)

Editorial
	
Saffron light

The term, "anti-national", has become an ever-expanding hold-all. All that the government and its promoters, stretching from Nagpur to other parts of India, do not like or approve of is branded as anti-national. It is an ineradicable stigma and the saffron parivar's worst form of abuse. Any criticism of the government, its motives, policies and actions, is open to this branding. It is an instrument for isolating individuals and groups and then to direct official wrath or non-official violence against them. Nothing whets the Indian appetite for vengeance more than patriotism. The most telling and appalling display of this has been in the wake of the "surgical strike" by the Indian army against some terrorist camps deep inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It has become impossible even to ask for more details of this action, let alone query its motives and its necessity. To do either of these would be to invite the stigma of being "anti-national". Even the free flow of information is being regulated by the tap of nationalism. Who defines what is national or its opposite? The people in power, of course. Nationalism has become the monopoly of the government, and from this entirely unfounded premise the next step is that the army is above question and criticism. To the Hindu pantheon a new holy cow has now been added.

Very recently, the prime minister's principal cup-bearer, Amit Shah, has complimented the Indian media for being patriotic. Sections of the media might lap this up as praise but in reality there could be nothing more patronizing and therefore humiliating. Why should the media be patriotic or otherwise? The responsibility of the media is to bring information and fact-based analysis before the public without fear or prejudice. If some facts or perspectives do not fit into the cosy boxes of patriotism or nationalism that should not daunt the media. But such is the government's power to manufacture consensus that one well-known television channel has unashamedly announced that it will not show anything that can remotely be construed as being against the armed forces or branded as anti-national. The rest of the media have not been quite so craven but there is a noticeable decline in the number of stories and comments that are critical of the government and of the ideology it represents.

The government of Narendra Modi, even though it professes commitment to the process of liberalization, has significantly enhanced the purview of the State. It has done so directly and implicitly. By remaining silent on various forms of vigilantism - from what people should eat or sell to attacks on minorities and Dalits - Mr Modi has given his tacit consent to various forms of Hindu fundamentalism. He and his supporters have brought into play a most insidious kind of majoritarianism that is slowly strangling dissent. India has entered, without fanfare, an era of undeclared emergency.

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10. INDIA: A COACHING CLASS FOR POLITICIANS - GO SLOW ON NATIONALISM. DON’T MAKE US HANG OUR HEADS IN SHAME
Written by Keki N. Daruwalla 
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(The Indian Express - October 10, 2016)

We all need coaching. When I bowled the outswing, I and others of my vintage who played cricket in the fifties kept the shining side of the ball facing the slips. Now, I am told, it is the other way around. That’s how you get reverse swing. No one told us. If you want to play the IPL, you better forget about the incline of the left elbow. You can’t hit towards mid-wicket or long-on if you are gonna be thinking of your left elbow, buddy — my apologies to Jack Hobbs, Bert Sutcliffe and Sunil Gavaskar.

All walks of life need a coach. You must move with the times. If you drive a tonga, you need to be told you can’t whip your underfed nag the way you used to. Maneka Gandhi’s followers will get you. If you are in accounting, the coach will tell you that you better take a crash course in double book-keeping, or none of our big industrial houses will employ you. Going into banking, are you? Take a lesson in geography, kid. Know where the Channel Islands are, and the Bahamas, and of course, the Alps. If into importing, you must know how to juggle invoices. (Why ain’t there outvoices in this lucrative import-export business, I’d like to know?)

Listen guys, I am going to enter this bijness of opening a coaching class for politicians. Hope it brings me money. The coaching will be on the following lines:

Rule 1: Read, but decent stuff. Avoid the party line like the plague — Amma-worship in Tamil Nadu, 10 Janpath-worship in Congress, bowing to the Badals in the cloud cuckoo land that is Punjab, Modi-worship in the BJP — the youth is getting as addicted to it as the Punjabi is getting hooked on cannabis. No one is infallible.

Rule 2: Don’t get swayed by slogans: Garibi hatao of the original Mrs Gandhi, reform, perform and transform, sabka saath, sabka vikas of the present day. Sabka saath? You can inspect biryanis, but can you inspect a prasad? And don’t forget that the holy grail of the “socialistic pattern of society” only succeeded in bringing the middle class closer to the poverty line. If you fall prey to slogans, it shows there is no depth to you. Look at a slogan as if it was the pitch of an insurance agent or a conman selling potency drugs.

Rule 3: If you have nothing better to read, browse through a party manifesto, but never believe in it. Can you ever renege on Article 370? It is a constitutional impossibility.

Rule 4: Know your limits, you can’t flout the courts. If you do, there will be anarchy. Give the water to the lower riparian. Study the international laws that govern water rights of riparian states. The foremost duty of the state is to keep anarchy away.

Rule 5: Don’t drive out Pakistani actors each time there is a bomb blast in our streets or an attack on Pathankot.

Rule 6: Don’t waste your time changing names. Let Delhi be Delhi and not Moti Lal Nehru Nagar or Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar or Indraprastha. But let me backtrack a bit. Change the names of Indira Chowk and Rajiv Chowk. CP is a circle, not a square, which is what a chowk is. Let’s get back to CP.

Rule 7: Don’t lead self-styled “backward” communities up the garden path. Don’t, for God’s sake, tell the Jats in Haryana, Gujjars in Rajasthan, Patidars in Gujarat and now Marathas in Maharashtra that you will give them reservation. You know you can’t. The courts will strike down your duplicitous bill passed by the assembly. You can’t have more than 50 per cent reservation — thank God. And how about doing away with reservations — especially for the backwards? Seventy years of independence and they are still backward? Think about it.

Rule 8: Be gentle with hide-flayers. In Banaskantha, they are beaten up for not removing a cow carcass. In Una, they are flogged on the spurious charge that they killed a cow to skin it, when actually a lioness had killed the cow. Check your hooligans — that is what the prime minister called them.

Rule 9: Now we come to the serious stuff. We talked of slogans, remember? Nationalism is our war cry these days. “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai”. Go slow on nationalism — it is not a much valued concept anymore. Go slow on Ram Prasad Bismil. To quote Charles de Gaulle: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” Nationalism is no big deal, remember.

Rule 10: And move away from your patriarchal complacency. Change your practices. No touching the feet of your male chauvinist husband on Karwa Chauth. Why not a kick on the fellow’s behind instead? And don’t make stupid statements about women’s attire or make-up to justify rape. Politicians, so-called long-robed “saints” and police chiefs do that all the time. Lately, the chief minister of Haryana stated that the murder and rape of two girls in Mewat (Muslim girls, mind you) was a trivial matter. The real big thing in the offing was the swarn jayanti (golden jubilee) of Haryana as a state. Don’t embarrass us citizens of India, Mr Khattar. Don’t make us hang our heads in shame.

Daruwalla is a poet and writer

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11. WAR OVER WATERS
by Sudipta Bhattacharjee
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(The Telegraph - October 13 , 2016) 	

The river sutra is ingrained in the psyche of a people, so crucial to their existence that the spectre of cross-border conflict is often hinged on this vital resource.

Every year in mid-October, thousands flock to Talacauvery in Coorg, the source of the Cauvery river in Karnataka, to witness the annual spectacle of a subterranean spring gushing forth. This year, the 'miracle' has been scheduled for October 17 amidst the panoramic vista of the Brahmagiri range, 3,000 metres above sea level. The serene locale is, however, distinctly at variance with the inter-state conflagration over the waters of this river.

The stand-off between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu began in August, when Karnataka refused to release water on the grounds that there was an insufficient amount in its reservoirs. This was challenged by Tamil Nadu in the Supreme Court. The apex court directed Karnataka to release 15,000 cusecs of water a day, but by that time their capitals were singed by violent protests.

Similarly, with India and Pakistan at daggers drawn, the Indus Water Treaty is under scrutiny. Analysts warn that once the treaty is revisited, China will be party to it as the Indus originates in Tibet. Being the upper riparian state, it could well dictate the initiative. Also, any adverse development on the Indus treaty could impact India's relations with other riverine neighbours like Bangladesh with which it signed the Ganges Water Treaty in 1996 and is likely to finalize a Teesta pact.

China, which accounts for 8 per cent of the Indus basin drainage and over 50 per cent of the Brahmaputra, announced on October 1 that it has blocked a tributary of the Brahmaputra for a hydel project in Tibet.

This tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo in China, also known as the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, flows into the river known as Brahmaputra in India and the Jamuna in Bangladesh. As a lifeline for communities living along its banks, the very prospect of the red river, with a total drainage area of 573,394 square kilometres, being dammed upstream has evoked concern in India and sparked protests in Assam.

Indeed, the state's emotional bond with this river, which overflows its banks every monsoon, leaving thousands marooned and scores of wildlife dead, is so indelible that Bistirno Parore, a song by the legendary singer, Bhupen Hazarika, addressing the Ganga, echoes in the hearts of all those who live on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Even a literary festival to be held in Assam this month has a cascading metaphor like 'River Talks!'

Such is the paranoia that the Lower Subansiri hydel project, located at Gerukamukh village on the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border, has been stalled since December 2011 owing to opposition from various groups. Authorities recently said that the project is likely to be commissioned between 2019 and 2021, but there has been no headway even after a panel assessed the structural and seismological implications. An NHPC (the implementing agency) official said that the machinery was getting rusted and that the financial burden on the company is mounting.

The Interstate River Water Disputes Act, 1956, allows for intervention by the Centre, but when the conflict is multi-national, it may help to peruse the Helsinki Rules (on the use of international rivers). For now, one could highlight the Himalayan environment as an area of cooperation between South and Southeast Asian countries that share transborder water resources through a mix of modern research methodology and traditional community-based knowledge systems, with an emphasis on multilateral cooperation.

Meanwhile, with the monsoon having receded and unperturbed by human machinations, quiet flow our rivers.

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12. INDIA - KERALA: WHY VIOLENCE IS THE MAIN POLITICAL NARRATIVE OF KANNUR | Nidheesh M.K.
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(Mint, Oct 17 2016)

To understand Kannur’s politics of violence, we have to understand the class and caste architecture of the region, according to P.K. Yasser Arafath, a DU faculty member

Nidheesh M.K.

Bengaluru: A spate of political murders, including two last week, has put the spotlight back on north Kerala’s Kannur district. The casualties belong to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, which is ruling the state under chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).

In a phone interview with Mint, P.K. Yasser Arafath, faculty at Delhi University’s history department, explained the complexities of deep-rooted political violence in Kannur.

Arafath has been working on this subject over the last two decades and has published papers in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). Edited excerpts:

What’s so wrong with Kannur?

Kannur lives with violence. Everywhere else in Kerala, political violence is limited to small pockets. But across the length and breadth of Kannur, violence can spread within minutes. Violence is the main political narrative of the region.

The individual and the party have become almost inseparable in Kannur. The region acts like a human embedded party-body. For them, RSS or CPM is not organizations anymore. They are separate forces.

Multiple kinds of intimacies run between an individual and the party, making a multi-layered social cohesion defined by caste, class and kinship. The party-body defines or regulates the economy too, providing and assisting in everything from birth to death.

What political mileage parties expect to get by such violence and by killing the innocent?

This is the most fascinating part. Many people are often surprised when people get randomly killed in Kannur, or when people who have never participated in violence, the so-called innocent ones, get murdered. What they don’t understand is that there are no innocents in Kannur. The idea of innocence—a person who does not belong to any party—was killed a long time ago.

It’s a very rare political structure. The initiation to the party is almost natural. If you are born to a CPM family in Kannur, it doesn’t matter whether you vote for the party or not, you will be considered as belonging to the party. It’s similar to the way social initiation by birth happens in the case of religion.

After a person is initiated, he becomes a part of the party-body. The reason why it is possible for the party to murder randomly and still be seen as making a statement is because of this de-individualisation of violence. What makes Kannur unique, from say Naxalite areas, is this multi-layered emotional architecture which emphasizes group affiliation and makes the violence de-individualized. You will not be able to put an address to the violence. There is only the addressee. The violence has the faces of victims, or martyrs, alone. The perpetrators are faceless. That’s the dynamics it creates. It makes the job tougher for the police. They cannot anticipate who is going to get killed next.

How did this metamorphosis happen?

To understand Kannur politics, we have to understand the class and caste architecture of the region. The lower caste Thiyya community is the predominant demographic constituency in Kannur with which both parties are trying to engage. Unlike other parts of Kerala, Kannur is, perhaps, the only region where the RSS has managed to systematically engage with the OBC community in Kerala. Both parties employ continuous and almost equal pressure tactics to engage with the same community, which makes clashes inevitable.

There is also a class angle. Which explains why the violence spiked towards the end of the last millennium. From 1920s to early 1980s, the RSS was only having capital engagements in the region, rather than a strong political engagement. You can call it a bourgeois engagement. The reason why we didn’t see that much of a clash between the RSS and the CPM during this period is that the engagement space of two parties was different. The engagement space of the RSS was urban or mofussil areas, while that of the CPM was largely rural population. After the ’90s, as part of its new identity and communitarian formation nationally, the RSS got into engaging with the rural constituency in Kannur. This was also the time when the CPM started looking to expand to urban areas.

The closer they tried to engage the same class and caste, the higher the friction became. The CPM sees it (BJP-RSS) as an urban bourgeois party trying to colonize their last party body. So the violence is not only physical, but also ideological.

That is also why you see a gradual spike in violence, and murders becoming more like a spectacular event. It started with the murder of Sudheesh, a leader of Students’ Federation of India, CPM’s students’ wing, in 1994. He was hacked to death, bearing 32 wounds. They could’ve murdered him with just one deep stab. But that wouldn’t have made the point. Each incision counts. Each wound is a statement to the other party. The more the number of wounds, the greater the visualization, bigger the news, the longer the memory.

What’s the way out?

It’s gone beyond the control of the police or the political leadership now. Even they can’t anticipate who’s going to get killed next. So it may not be possible to end it anytime soon. But by rephrasing the political narrative, it could be slowly reduced. The violence comes from excessive pride. Only excessive shaming will contain it.

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13. A COMMUNAL BILL - DON’T GRANT CITIZENSHIP ON RELIGIOUS LINES, IT GOES AGAINST THE IDEA OF INDIA (Editorial, The Times of India)
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The Times of India, October 17, 2016

A communal bill: Don’t grant citizenship on religious lines, it goes against the idea of India
 in TOI Editorials | Edit Page, India | TOI

Government is considering amendments to the Citizenship Act, 1955, to grant citizenship to religious minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. A joint committee of parliamentarians is already examining the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 which seeks to grant Indian citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists from neighbouring countries who have been residing in India for at least six years. This is problematic on several levels. In fact the basic premise of the Bill violates the fundamental constitutional principle of secularism, as it appears to equate citizenship with specific religions only.

While government may argue that the religious denominations mentioned in the Bill correspond to minorities in neighbouring countries who have faced religious persecution, the message that goes out is that India is willing to provide shelter to all except Muslims. If this isn’t the case, then why shouldn’t Rohingya Muslim refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar be added to the list? Besides, how would government determine religious persecution in foreign countries? Does it really have the wherewithal to discriminate between those facing genuine religious persecution and economic refugees pretending to be persecuted for their religion? And what if Pakistan announces a similar citizenship proposal for Indian Muslims who may feel discriminated in this country?

The proposed citizenship amendments are therefore both impractical and suffering from a warped perception of the Indian identity. They disregard the fact that unlike say Israel, which offers a home to all the Jews of the world, India is a secular state which doesn’t discriminate between religious denominations. A rational and sophisticated citizenship programme for refugees needs to be egalitarian and operate on a case-by-case basis. A policy that favours specific religious denominations reeks of the discredited two-nation theory.

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14. CHINA: THE VIRTUES OF THE AWFUL CONVULSION
by Ian Johnson
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(The New York Review of Books - October 27, 2016 Issue)
	
The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China	
by Guobin Yang
Columbia University Press, 262 pp., $60.00

The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976	
by Frank Dikötter
Bloomsbury, 396 pp., $32.00

Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism	
edited by Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 468 pp. $49.95

“Bianyuanren” Jishi [A Record of “Marginal People”]
by Yang Kuisong
Guangzhou: Southern Publishing Media, 364 pp., 56 yuan

Secret Archives of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi
edited by Yongyi Song et al
Mirror Media Group, thirty-six-volume e-book, $16.67 per volume, $600 for all thirty-six volumes

[PHOTO] 
Li Fanwu, the governor of China’s Heilongjiang province, being denounced and tortured at a rally in Red Guard Square, Harbin, August 1966. One of his alleged crimes was political ambition, evidence for which was found—according to the photographer Li Zhensheng’s book Red-Color News Soldier (2003)—‘in his hairstyle, which gave him an ill-fated resemblance to Mao and so was said to symbolize his lust for power.’ Two Red Guards chopped and tore out his hair, after which he was made to bow for hours. The banner behind him reads, ‘Bombard the Headquarters! Expose and denounce the provincial Party committee.’
Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images


1.

For decades, Beijing’s Beihai Park has been one of the city’s most beloved retreats—a strip of green around a grand lake to the north of the Communist Party’s leadership compound, its waters crowded with electric rental boats shaped like ducks and lotus flowers. A former imperial garden, Beihai is home to stone screens, temples, and steles from as far back as the Mongolian occupation of China, but it also has reminders of more recent conquests. On its western shore is one of the oddest: a life-size bronze sculpture of three children rowing a boat through a wave of musical notes. Next to the boat, three more children sit attentively as a soldier on a stool recounts a story. Surrounded by shrubs and flowers, the boat and the children point out toward the lake, as if readying for an idyllic day in the park.

The sculpture of the children was put up in 2013 to honor one of the most influential movies in Chinese film history: Flowers of the Motherland, released in 1955 as one of the first children’s movies made by the People’s Republic. It tells the story of a fifth-grade class with two rebellious children. Unlike the other thirty-eight children, they refuse to join the Communists’ Young Pioneers, even after hearing a stirring lecture from two demobilized soldiers. But eventually a flood of good deeds by the Communist children convinces the two recalcitrants to put on the red scarf, and everyone happily rows across Beihai’s lake to the words of the song “Let Us Paddle”:

    After we’ve finished our day’s homework
    We come to enjoy ourselves.
    I ask you dear friends
    Who gave us this happy life?

The answer, of course, is the Communist Party and Chairman Mao, a message drilled into children of all generations. Even today, the song is part of the national music curriculum. Its effect was strongest in those earlier decades, when the Party had a monopoly of information and entertainment. Little wonder that the old people who gather in Beihai and other parks sing these songs of their youth. Their generation had no real folk songs or pop music, let alone outside sources of information; instead they heard only a mind-numbing glorification of the Party and the great leader.

In his new book, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, Guobin Yang describes this movie as part of a propaganda barrage that laid the foundation for the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and lasted until 1976. A professor of communication and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Yang writes how the Party’s control of information and images created

    a world of enchantment, mesmerization, and danger, one that combined a sense of infinite possibilities and hopes with a sense of danger and threat. It was this world that gave reality, urgency, and potency to the political culture of that historical era.

Yang is aware that generations are difficult to define and he is careful with his words. Roughly speaking, these people were born around the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, and for them, joining the student units known as Red Guards was central to their lives. In China, few use the term “Red Guard generation” because the guards are seen negatively—they were the young people whipped up by Mao and the Party to attack, often viciously, educated people and the government, as well as books, temples, churches, and anything that seemed old. Most people of that generation prefer to be called zhiqing, or educated youth, a much broader term for any young person sent down to the countryside after Mao decided that the Red Guards had gotten out of control. This emphasizes their transformation into victims; but Yang’s choice is a good one because it focuses attention on the astounding outburst of violent politics fifty years ago, from 1966 to 1967, when the Red Guards were at their peak.

Yang starts his book with a chapter on armed violence in Chongqing in 1967 when Red Guards fought bloody battles with knives, pistols, machine guns, and even floating artillery platforms from which they bombarded their enemies while sailing on the Yangtze River. As Yang makes clear, these battles were reenactments of the films and stories they had been shown and told about the revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. The Red Guards sent themselves off to battle with slogans drawn from war movies, and wrote moving eulogies for the hundreds killed that echoed the rhetoric of the Communist wartime myths.

But Yang is interested in showing more than how young people were conditioned to accept violence and obedience. He also wants to explain how they broke free of this straitjacket. One way was to use the sudden, if limited, freedom that Mao had given them to think and argue. It is well known that Red Guards pasted posters around towns denouncing their imagined enemies, but many also wrote thoughtful criticisms of the system. One was Yu Luoke, who attacked the idea that children of the revolutionary elite were the only youth who deserved to be Red Guards—the so-called bloodline theory.

Surprisingly, much of this debate was initially encouraged and even subsidized by the state, which allowed Red Guard publishing houses and newspapers to print essays like Yu Luoke’s. The response was phenomenal. Yu’s publisher was so flooded with mail that the post office refused to deliver it, insisting that the publisher come by and pick up the sacks that arrived every day.

Yang then goes on to show the uprising in underground culture that occurred toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the gradual dawning of China’s dissident movement during that decade. This was the result, in part, of the Red Guards’ experience of China’s poverty when they were exiled to the countryside. Most of the principal journals published in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 and 1979—in which many documented their experiences during the Cultural Revolution on posters on the Xidan Wall in Beijing—were by former Red Guards, such as Wei Jingsheng, Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Xu Wenli. These people were also a link to the 1989 Tiananmen protesters, who, although younger, echoed the desire of the Red Guard generation for martyrdom and grand gestures.

As they grew older, the Red Guard generation engaged in new battles—over memory. These reflected many of the factional lines from the 1960s. The initial group of privileged Red Guards made themselves out to be pure of heart and ultimately victimized, and blamed the violence on the lower-class participants—often subsequently known as the “Rebels”—who joined later. Even today these divisions are crucial to understanding China. As an offspring of the first revolutionary generation, the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, runs the country as part of a coalescing aristocracy. In other words, the “bloodline” theory that Yu Luoke criticized is still very influential today.

Yang presents his interesting ideas sharply, yet one must say that some of his work revisits a record that will be familiar to scholars of the Cultural Revolution. He has done much original research, especially in finding reminiscences by Red Guards in the 1990s, and he has combed through hundreds of memoirs and diaries. But ultimately each chapter—the violence in Chongqing, the Red Guards’ upbringing, their link to the dissident movement—is based on fairly well-known historical episodes.

What makes his book important is that Yang draws these points together to create a nuanced portrait of the Red Guard generation. His own depth of understanding enables him to show that Red Guards were not all storm troopers or crazed youth. They were constantly subjected to propaganda, but also had the capacity to learn, to grow, and to change.

In a way, one can see the Red Guards as similar to the generation of Germans who came of age in the Hitler years. These young Germans participated in the war, suffered a crushing defeat, but later many of them helped build democracy and liberalism in West Germany. In both countries many of the supporters of dictatorship did not recant, but enough did to create something important and lasting—in China’s case people like Wei Jingsheng: people who helped create a new generation of critical thinkers who continue to influence China today.

In reminding us of this, Yang has done a great service during the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966. In August we saw the anniversary of Mao’s blessing of the Red Guards—the start of a period so bloody that it is often referred to as Red August. During this period, Red Guards ran rampant, killing more than 1,700 people in Beijing, including one of China’s most famous authors, Lao She. When we see images of Red Guards humiliating and torturing their elders, it is worth remembering how many of them also tried to break free of their upbringing.
2.

For a clear and strongly written acount of the Cultural Revolution in a broad perspective we now have Frank Dikötter’s new book, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976. A professor of humanities at Hong Kong University, Dikötter has made a reputation for writing provocative histories, including groundbreaking work on the history of race in China. He has also written a series of historically grounded but polemical books that aim to make sure we understand just how horrific the Mao years were. In a way, Dikötter is fighting an old battle: during the Mao years, many on the left in the West challenged the conventional wisdom that Mao should be rejected as a Communist dictator. Instead, his rule was explained as inevitable, or as better than what preceded it, or as something that at least got China on the right track. Starting forty or so years ago observers like Simon Leys revealed the emperor’s clothes and discredited the left’s relativism and illusions.1 Dikötter is following in this vein.

While Dikötter’s works are sometimes celebrated for providing bracing correctives to fuzzy thinking about the Mao era, a significant number of specialists in the field have argued that it is more prosecutorial than historical. His new book is quieter in tone. The result is a much more successful blending of his brisk writing and his ability to unearth fascinating new information from the archives.

Dikötter, for example, convincingly evokes the paranoia that Mao and his circle felt in the early 1960s. Drawing on previously classified provincial archives, he provides evidence that after the Great Leap Famine, beginning in the late 1950s, opium was being grown again, religion was on the rise, and former officials of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party were running local governments. These were the kinds of reports that probably caused Mao to feel that the Cultural Revolution was necessary.

Dikötter also very effectively describes Red Guard violence and provides fresh examples of the effects of China’s destruction of its traditional culture. In one telling section he uses archives to show how thousands of people engaged in producing statues, incense, and other objects used in religious worship were thrown out of work when religion was effectively banned.

Still, some of the same problems arise in Dikötter’s book that are to be found in other historical work on China. We sometimes lose track of the fact that officials write reports for all sorts of reasons, with reporting the truth rarely among them. When Communist officials report that Nationalists have infiltrated the Party, one is not sure that this really is the case. Perhaps a score is being settled. In one respect it doesn’t matter: if Mao read the report and believed it, then its veracity is secondary. But Dikötter does not discuss such nuances, giving the impression that these reports are facts.

Dikötter might also have said more about the basis of his contrarian views. He writes, for example, that literacy and public health declined during the Mao period. This runs against many opposing accounts showing that they rose during the Cultural Revolution.2 Dikötter could usefully have acknowledged the other viewpoint and shown why it was wrong. Instead, one isn’t sure if he is unaware of other analyses (which is unlikely) or simply disagrees with them to such a degree that he can’t be bothered to address them (more likely).

Dikötter calls his book a “people’s history” and he culls many interesting anecdotes from daily life, but this is not the story of ordinary people at the grassroots; instead it is a fairly conventional history illustrated with colorful anecdotes. His version of events differs little from other histories of the Cultural Revolution, such as the more definitive and evenhanded—albeit weightier and less readable—Mao’s Last Revolution (2006) by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals.3 For all the talk of archival treasures, the real archives we need—for example the records of such major events as the death of Mao’s designated successor, Lin Biao—are under Communist Party control, meaning they are just as inaccessible now as they were a decade ago.
A poster for the 1955 film Flowers of the Motherland, about Chinese children joining the Young Pioneers
A poster for the 1955 film Flowers of the Motherland, about Chinese children joining the Young Pioneers

At the same time, Dikötter makes relatively little use of recent alternative histories of local events. He acknowledges their existence in the foreword, but the book relies heavily on well-known sources such as The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994), the revealing memoirs of Mao’s doctor,4 and English-language memoirs such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991).5 Nor does Dikötter take account of the ways the Cultural Revolution and Mao became global catchwords, with Black Panthers reading Mao and Maoist guerrilla movements active in countries on faraway continents. Also, the impact of the Cultural Revolution on today’s politics in China is hardly explored. Dikötter draws on work by political scientists such as Kate Xiao Zhou, whose book How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (1996) made the case that Mao’s policies were so disastrous that they led to today’s economic reforms allowing family farming. But he goes no further and the story stops in 1976. An afterword on the Cultural Revolution’s meaning today would have made this book much more relevant for many readers.

All this said, every era interprets great historical events like the Cultural Revolution in its own way. Dikötter’s strongly written book captures the current tone of disappointment with China in the West—including both its problems of growth and its authoritarianism—and so it can be read as a reflection of the West’s ongoing engagement with China, just as the starry-eyed reports from half a century ago echoed that era’s obsessions.
3.

Of all the books on the Cultural Revolution that have appeared during this anniversary year, I was most intrigued by those that told detailed local stories to illustrate the larger history. This drew me to Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism, a volume edited by Jeremy Brown of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Matthew D. Johnson of Grinnell College. In their introduction, Brown and Johnson make it clear that they want to broaden our understanding of the Cultural Revolution and the period that preceded it:

    We are…making a statement—that the story of change in post-1949 China is more than a story of policy implementation via relentless group mobilization, or of chaos and terror unleashed by factional infighting in Beijing.

One of the many laudable features of the book is that it combines the work of Western and Chinese scholars. So often these two groups are opposed; scholars based in the West, including those born in China, are sometimes critical of their Chinese counterparts for withholding negative comments or not being up on the latest theoretical advances, while those in China may feel that Western-based scholars don’t respect their work. This volume shows what can be accomplished when both sides are represented. It is filled with memorable essays, including two on the surprising resiliency of religious life, as well as in-depth profiles of ordinary people, such as a teenager who described his frustrations at growing up in a repressive society and the sad story of a factory worker persecuted for his homosexuality.

The author of that article is the Shanghai historian Yang Kuisong, who also published this year his own book on grassroots China, A Record of “Marginal People,” a fine series of eight profiles drawn from papers and files that he found in antique markets and archives, and through his personal connections. Unfortunately this book has not been translated into English, but the stories give fascinating insights into the tumult faced by ordinary people during the Mao period, especially the Cultural Revolution.

Many of these books owe a debt to the heroic work of several US-based Chinese scholars, especially Yongyi Song, an independent historian and librarian at California State University–Los Angeles, and Guo Jian, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Among their invaluable contributions to studies of the Cultural Revolution is The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, which was compiled and edited by a team of seven scholars led by Song. It contains 40,000 documents, including internal papers, speeches, confessions, suicide notes, and appeals by ordinary people, with 40 million Chinese characters. Another resource by the team is The Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, written by Guo, Song, and Yuan Zhou.

In June, these epic works were supplemented with 13,000 more pages of classified documents that Song, Guo, and their team members recently obtained. Entitled Secret Archives of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, this e-book series provides the full text of an official eighteen-part report made from 1986 to 1988 under the instructions of reformist Party leader Hu Yaobang.

Although some of these documents were known previously in sketchier forms, the new authoritative material shows that during the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi—a province on the Vietnam border—302 people were cannibalized and about 90,000 people (excluding missing ones) perished; there are many grotesque examples of rape and murder. Party leaders killed opponents, including students exiled to Guangxi by Mao, in some cases cutting out their livers and eating them. Such extreme behavior was relatively scarce, but it reflected a broader attitude cultivated during the Mao years that opponents were beasts, not humans.

Obtaining this sort of material can be a laborious process, as I found when I went with a Chinese scholar of the Cultural Revolution to explore the Panjiayuan antiques market on Beijing’s east side. Most of this vast market is given over to selling reproductions of Ming vases and Chairman Mao statues, but one row of fifty or so stalls has something more valuable: old books, magazines, newspapers, and handwritten material of all kinds—diaries, notebooks, and sometimes even just loose sheets of hastily scribbled notes.

We spent a Saturday morning rummaging through notebooks filled with math and physics equations, as well as a draft of an unfinished novel from the 1950s. Four hours later, the researcher had spent $500 of his own money on hundreds of sheets of paper, diaries, and jottings from government officials. He would spend the week digesting them and then come back the next Saturday for more sinological scavenging.

All this paper was the detritus disgorged by the dying and dead men and women who won China’s civil war, founded the People’s Republic, grew up as the flowers of the nation, were persecuted, and then regained power; their scribblings are now being thrown out by their children or grandchildren. Sold mostly as scrap paper, some of them have been identified by crafty garbagemen as valuable and offered to the Panjiayuan merchants. In the past, so many diaries and notebooks were thrown out that Western libraries built entire collections based on them. Now, as the older generations fade, the flood is slower but it still casts new light.

Best of all, local historians continue to defy the government by plowing through this material. Many cannot get their work past the censors so they self-publish online. Their work is also sometimes censored, but an amazing amount still gets through. In May, on the first day of this year’s anniversaries for the Cultural Revolution, I opened my WeChat social media account and found half a dozen unofficial articles commemorating the dead and condemning the culpable. I also found a new edition of the biweekly underground journal Remembrance, with over eighty pages of articles on Mao, his security chief, the students, and the youth.6 With much still to be learned, the period of the Cultural Revolution continues to fascinate and reveal itself as a touchstone for understanding China’s past and its present.

Other Materials Consulted

Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
by Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan Zhou
Rowman and Littlefield, second edition, 542 pp., $130.00

The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database
edited by Yongyi Song and others
Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, third edition, CD–ROM, $300.00

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis
by Wu Yiching
Harvard University Press, 368 pp., $52.50

    1 See especially his book excerpts in these pages, “Chinese Shadows,” May 26 and June 9, 1977. 
    2 See Richard Curt Kraus, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012). Another very worthwhile short history, not yet published in English, is Die Chinesische Kulturrevolution, 1966–1976 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016) by the American scholar Daniel Leese, who teaches history at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg.  
    3 Reviewed by Jonathan Spence in these pages, September 21, 2006.  
    4 Reviewed by Jonathan Mirsky in these pages, November 17, 1994.  
    5 Reviewed by Jonathan Mirsky in these pages, March 5, 1992.  
    6 For more on Remembrance, see my two-part article in these pages, “China’s Brave Underground Journal,” December 4 and December 18, 2014. 

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15. INDONESIA: GRINDR AND DOZENS OF OTHER GAY-NETWORKING APPS
by Feliz Solomon
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(Time. Sept. 16, 2016)

The ban targets apps that promote “sexual deviancy”.

Indonesia is planning to ban gay-networking apps, in the latest demonstration of the country’s growing intolerance toward the LGBT community.

A government official confirmed that authorities are already moving to block at least three apps — Grindr, Blued and BoyAhoy — after a request from police, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

But the ban could be much broader. According to BuzzFeed, more than 80 websites and applications geared toward sexual and gender minorities could fall under the injunction.

“We are starting to block LGBT applications,” AFP cited Communications Ministry spokesperson Noor Iza as saying, adding that the move was intended to target services that promote “sexual deviancy.”
Read More: LGBT Rights in Indonesia Are Coming Under ‘Unprecedented Attack’

The spokesperson said that letters had been sent to three online service providers requesting that the apps be blocked, but it is unclear whether they will adhere to the bid.

Google and Apple are reportedly among the private companies that will be asked to remove the apps from their digital stores. Neither company immediately responded to TIME’s request for comment.

Those who support the ban claim that apps geared toward the LGBT community are prone to hosting pornography and other content viewed as inappropriate for Indonesia’s conservative society.

The recent bust of a pedophile ring allegedly linked to Grindr and several other networking apps was reportedly the chief impetus for the ban, but rights advocates believe that officials used the operation as a convenient excuse to advance a discriminatory agenda.

The decision to ban the apps, which BuzzFeed reports was made during a closed-door meeting of government officials on Wednesday, is the latest move in what is viewed as an unprecedented crackdown on the LGBT community in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation.

Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, but calls for criminalization and “cures” have gained public support throughout what Human Rights Watch said has been a year of regression on LGBT rights in the country.

“This ban on what Indonesian authorities called ‘LGBT applications’ is discriminatory online censorship, pure and simple, and yet another blow against the rights of LGBT persons in the country,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of HRW’s Asia division, tells TIME in an email.

In a damning report published in August, HRW said that 2016 saw a “combination of government officials, militant Islamists and mass religious groups stoking anti-LGBT intolerance.”

Feliz Solomon
@felizysolo

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16. THE CRUSHING OF INDEPENDENT PRESS IN HUNGARY
by Hidvégi-B. Attila and Alexandra Barcea 
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(Open Democracy - 11 October 2016)

October 8, 2016 will go down in Hungarian history as the day when the ideals of the 1956 revolution (when Népszabadság was established) were finally betrayed by Hungary's autocratic government.

Demonstration in support of Népszabadság held in front of the Hungarian Parliament, 8 October 2016. Photo by the authors.Imagine a situation where you woke up in the UK and discovered that the Guardian newspaper had overnight shut down all operations, that its paper version was never to be published again and that its decade old internet archive was unavailable to the public.

For all those citizens who rely on high quality investigative journalism, and the institutions that represent it, this would be an unimaginable situation, and it is very likely that the UK government of the day would have to step in in support of the venerable paper, even if its demise were the result of a problem of liquidity or dwindling circulation.

But if such a scenario would happen in any democratic country and there was even the slightest whiff of political wrong-doing that led to the disappearance of one of the country’s main news portals, heads would immediately roll and the scandal would reverberate for decades to come.

Yet that is exactly the situation in which Hungarian civil society found itself on Saturday morning, October 8, 2016, when everyone’s Facebook pages erupted with the news that Népszabadság, the main opposition daily with a circulation of over 30,000 copies (in a country of under 10 million people), was no more. You might have been forgiven for clicking on the link above under the paper’s name (http://nol.hu/) to find out more about it.

Yet in a cynical and unforgivable move, not only did the paper’s owner, Mediaworks (whose own webpage couldn’t look better) use the excuse of an office move to freeze out Népszabadság’s whole staff from their own email accounts, their computers and offices, it also blocked the 60-year old national institution’s digital archive.

The reasons it cited were ‘economic’ – but nobody believes that lie, and as many have shown, it does not stand up to scrutiny in any way at all. So it happens that October 8, 2016 will go down in Hungarian history as the day when the ideals of the 1956 revolution (when Népszabadság was established) have been finally betrayed by an autocratic government that believes in nothing other than its own corrupt advancement.

For the whole opposition, political and civil society (including on this occasion the far right Jobbik party) is agreed that Népszabadság had to go because it had started to expose too many of the FIDESZ and Viktor Orban-led government’s wrongdoings.

From government ministers using dubious funds to make sure they got places on time by helicopter, to government stooges promoting their favourite personnel in an effort to bring banks and government departments uncomfortably close together, the list of corruption scandals that Népszabadság was pursuing in the valiant tradition of the best investigative journalism is long. 

The moment of the newspaper’s demise seems to have been well-timed and brings to mind a well-rehearsed scenario to shock the public into not noticing a number of other political events happening almost simultaneously.

On October 2, in a press conference that journalists were not allowed to attend, Prime Minister Orbán declared a toxic referendum campaign on migrant quotas a major success, in spite of the fact that the referendum at just over 39 percent participation did not reach enough voters to make it valid.

The very next day, Népszabadság reported that the prime minister would use the referendum result to (yet again) modify the Constitution in ways as yet unknown, citing only that the new wording would take into account the interests of the Hungarian people and not allow the settlements of groups of migrants – all refugee and migration requests would be investigated individually. With the disappearance of the main opposition daily, the Hungarian people will find it much more difficult to follow the debate around the proposed constitutional changes. 

Although sadly, contrary to a call published in the New York Time’s op-ed, voters will not be allowed any chance at a debate, let alone ‘reject that approach [to amend the constitution]’, given that for years the governing party has been demolishing democracy to a level where it can pass any legislation at any time without opposition. 

Relatively smaller, but just as important matters were also lost in the torrent of negative news. The week before the referendum, the attentive citizen could also find out that virtually all the major Roma civil society organisations in Hungary, including the valiant Roma Press Centre, had to close their operations around the same time, because government support had for years been channeled to other organisations, many of them so close to the government as to be unrecognizable as independent bodies.

Another news portal demonstrated beyond any doubt that a famous witch-hunt against civil society in 2014 was authorised by Prime Minister Orban himself. The articles written by Népszabadság on these themes may now be forever lost to the public, and that public will be denied yet another opportunity of a wider understanding of the complex political landscape in today’s Hungary.

Yet, in spite of or because of the dire political situation, civil society and a number of press portals have rallied almost immediately around the Népszabadság staff, joining them in their mission to contest the decision to stop the paper, and engaging in countless acts of solidarity that have the potential to snowball into a virtuous circle of resistance.

On the very evening after the announcement of the coup against the progressive daily, a relatively big crowd of over 4,000 people protested and got organized to carry on supporting the cause of press freedom. Immediately, many other news portals offered support and practical ideas for the way forward.

RomNet, one of the two major Roma news portals in Hungary, called the silencing of Népszabadság a political assassination and expressed its solidarity in no uncertain terms:

‘RomNet’s staff were shocked to find out about the silencing of one of Hungary’s most read daily newspaper, and equate this act with an attempt to bury the whole freedom of the press in Hungary. We judge the information published by the owners of the newspaper [Mediaworks] as one huge lie and diversion, especially as access to the newspaper’s online archives [blocked since Saturday morning] should not be affected in any way by economic considerations. It is impossible to believe that the costs incurred by keeping the server going were too high to merit the limitation of a priceless database of information and earlier articles.’

Many in the Hungarian press, including other mainstream daily newspapers like Magyar Nemzet, news portals such as 444.hu or anti-corruption organisations like atlatszo.hu believe that doing away with Nepszabadsag was a model punishment meted out upon the newspaper by the government for its investigative journalism, and a sign that this government is perfectly capable of grinding into the dust any number of Hungarian traditions and institutions, if they interfere with its selfish goals.

A sign that any critical voice aimed at the discovery of the truth is a threat to the propaganda machine, a grain of sand in the gears of the rather simplistic bombastically entitled Program of National Cooperation, adopted by the Hungarian Parliament in 2010 with a 2/3 FIDESZ majority and stating among other things that: ‘Hungarian voters have sent the message to all of us that national unity has prevailed, and the duty of the winner is to defend and represent national unity and the truth of such, and to overcome any circumstance, force, and endeavour which repudiates or endangers it.’  

In this context, Népszabadság for many decades has pursued its independent program of credible, professionally informed and detailed journalism. It was for example one of the few publications that reported truthfully and impartially on the living conditions of Hungary’s Roma minority, and the issues most important to them. It was one of the instruments that was given to the voices of the oppressed such as Roma to make themselves heard and communicate a real image of themselves to the majority society, thus gradually breaking down the walls of prejudice.

On many occasions Népszabadság collaborated well with Roma and other news portals, reprinting in a professional and impartial way not only good news but also articles about issues of corruption for example in the Roma Minority Self-Governments, to make sure that no cases of misuse of funding, whether engaged in by majority or minority society, were left unreported. It’s time to return that favour.

Now a new wall has gone up and a big abyss has opened. This wall too needs to be broken down, and this abyss needs to be bridged through citizen solidarity, in a way that no government or political faction can attack and bring down.

One of the way that we see to express solidarity with Népszabadság is to follow the example of the already mentioned anti-corruption network atlatszo.hu and Romnet who have offered to regularly host contributions from Népszabadság free of charge on their own portals, in the interests of continuing in particular the series of searing exposes about the government’s corrupt practices started by Népszabadság, but also in the wider interests of press freedoms.

Both portals are committed to this course of action, and Atlatszo is even planing a crowdfunding campaign, as they recognize not only that Népszabadság would do the same for them, would the situation be reversed, but also that the fight for democratic rights must go on.

We call on openDemocracy and other progressive news sites to support this action of solidarity by contacting Népszabadság staff and offering them support such as editorial space. Let’s see if we can make this an international campaign for the freedom of the press. 
About the authors

Hidvégi-B. Attila is editor of RomNet.

Alexandra Barcea is a contributor to the Bright-Green blog.

========================================
17. USA: THE WHITE FLIGHT OF DEREK BLACK
by Eli Saslow
========================================
(Washington Post - October 15, 2016)

Derek Black, 27, was following in his father’s footsteps as a white nationalist leader until he began to question the movement’s ideology. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Their public conference had been interrupted by a demonstration march and a bomb threat, so the white nationalists decided to meet secretly instead. They slipped past police officers and protesters into a hotel in downtown Memphis. The country had elected its first black president just a few days earlier, and now in November 2008, dozens of the world’s most prominent racists wanted to strategize for the years ahead.

“The fight to restore White America begins now,” their agenda read.

The room was filled in part by former heads of the Ku Klux Klan and prominent neo-Nazis, but one of the keynote speeches had been reserved for a Florida community college student who had just turned 19. Derek Black was already hosting his own radio show. He had launched a white nationalist website for children and won a local political election in Florida. “The leading light of our movement,” was how the conference organizer introduced him, and then Derek stepped to the lectern.

“The way ahead is through politics,” he said. “We can infiltrate. We can take the country back.”

Years before Donald Trump launched a presidential campaign based in part on the politics of race and division, a group of avowed white nationalists was working to make his rise possible by pushing its ideology from the radical fringes ever closer to the far conservative right. Many attendees in Memphis had transformed over their careers from Klansmen to white supremacists to self-described “racial realists,” and Derek Black represented another step in that evolution.

He never used racial slurs. He didn’t advocate violence or lawbreaking. He had won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Fla., where Trump also had a home, without ever mentioning white nationalism, talking instead about the ravages of political correctness, affirmative action and unchecked Hispanic immigration.

He was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him “the heir.”

Now Derek spoke in Memphis about the future of their ideology. “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.”

A few people in the audience started to clap, and then a few more began to whistle, and before long the whole group was applauding. “Our moment,” Derek said, because at least in this room there was consensus. They believed white nationalism was about to drive a political revolution. They believed, at least for the moment, that Derek would help lead it.

“Years from now, we will look back on this,” he said. “The great intellectual move to save white people started today.”

***

Don Black poses for a portrait earlier this month in Crossville, Tenn. Black established the white nationalist website Stormfront, which has grown to more than 300,000 users. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Eight years later, that future they envisioned in Memphis was finally being realized in the presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump was retweeting white supremacists. Hillary Clinton was making speeches about the rise of white hate and quoting David Duke, who had launched his own campaign for the U.S. Senate.

White nationalism had bullied its way toward the very center of American politics, and yet, one of the people who knew the ideology best was no longer anywhere near that center. Derek had just turned 27, and instead of leading the movement, he was trying to untangle himself not only from the national moment but also from a life he no longer understood.

From the very beginning, that life had taken place within the insular world of white nationalism, where there was never any doubt about what whiteness could mean in the United States. Derek had been taught that America was intended as a place for white Europeans and that everyone else would eventually have to leave. He was told to be suspicious of other races, of the U.S. government, of tap water and of pop culture. His parents pulled him out of public school in West Palm Beach at the end of third grade, when they heard his black teacher say the word “ain’t.” By then, Derek was one of only a few white students in a class of mostly Hispanics and Haitians, and his parents decided he would be better off at home.

“It is a shame how many White minds are wasted in that system,” Derek wrote shortly thereafter, on the Stormfront children’s website he built at age 10. “I am no longer attacked by gangs of non whites. I am learning pride in myself, my family and my people.”

Derek Black, at age 9, at a gathering in Jackson, Miss., of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens. He is pictured with then-Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice. (Courtesy of Derek Black)

Because he was home-schooled, white nationalism could become a focus of his education. It also meant he had the freedom to begin traveling with his father, who left for several weeks each year to speak at white nationalist conferences in the Deep South. Don Black had grown up in Alabama, where in the 1970s, he joined a group called the White Youth Alliance, led by David Duke, who at the time was married to Chloe. That relationship eventually dissolved, and years later, Don and Chloe reconnected, married and had Derek in 1989. They moved into Chloe’s childhood home in West Palm Beach to raise Derek along with Chloe’s two young daughters. There were Guatemalan immigrants living down the block and Jewish retirees moving into a condo nearby. “Usurpers,” Don sometimes called them, but Chloe didn’t want to move away from her aging mother in Florida, so Don settled for taking long road trips to the whitest parts of the South.

Don and Derek always stayed on those trips with Don’s friends from the white power movement, and soon Derek had heard many of their stories. There was the time his father, then 16, was shot in the chest while working on a segregationist campaign in Georgia. There was the day in 1981 when he and eight other extremists made plans to board a boat stocked with dynamite, automatic weapons and a Nazi flag. Their plan, called Operation Red Dog, was to take over the tiny Caribbean island nation of Dominica, but instead Don had been caught, arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He learned some computer programming in federal prison and eventually launched Stormfront in 1995 under the motto: “White Pride World Wide.”

Over the years, his website attracted all kinds of extremists: skinheads, militia groups, terrorists and Holocaust deniers. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch group, a handful of the people who posted on Stormfront had gone on to commit hate crimes, including killings. One message board user shot and wounded three children at a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles in 1999. Another killed his Jewish neighbor in 2000 in a town near Pittsburgh. “We attract too many sociopaths,” Don posted, and he decided that more moderation would give Stormfront greater mainstream credibility.

By then Stormfront had become his full-time job, even though he wasn’t making much money and the family was getting by on Chloe’s salary as an executive assistant. Each morning, she would go to work, and Don would go to his crowded desk in their single-story house, where he recruited authors and academics from the alternative right to post on his site.

In 2008, he banned slurs, Nazi symbols and threats of violence, even as other parts of his own language remained unchanged. He didn’t have friends so much as “comrades.” Everyone was either “with us” or “against us,” “sympathetic” or an “enemy,” so Derek strengthened his relationship with his father by becoming his greatest ideological ally.

Derek learned Web coding and designed the Stormfront site for children. He was interviewed about hate speech on Nickelodeon, daytime talk shows, HBO and in USA Today. “The devil child,” was how Don sometimes referred to him, with pride and affection.

But Don also read through nasty emails his son received from strangers who were offended by the Stormfront children’s page, and he began to worry about a 13-year-old who was becoming so familiar with the two-way transaction of prejudice and hate.

“You will rot in hell,” read one email, in 2002.

“I WISH you were in the same room as me right now,” read another. “You would have to eat through a straw, you low life scumbag.”

Don told Derek to stop checking his messages. He would later remember wondering: “Did I foist this onto him? Is he just doing this for me?” He asked Derek whether he wanted to shut down the children’s page, but Derek said the emails didn’t bother him. That was the enemy. Who cared what they thought?

***

Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Don Black, center, at the cross-burning climax of a Klan recruitment rally in 1982. Black would later leave the Klan and begin describing himself as a “white civil rights advocate” or a “racial realist.” (Bettmann Archive)

After that, Don began to see something different when he looked at his son: not just a child born into the movement but also an emerging leader, with drive and conviction that seemed entirely his own. Don had spent more than four decades waiting for whites to have a racial awakening in America, and now he began to think that the teenager living in his house could be a potential catalyst.

“All of my strengths without any of my weaknesses,” Don would later say about Derek back then. “He was smarter than me. He had more insight. He never held himself back.”

So many others in white nationalism had come to their conclusions out of anger and fear, but Derek tended to like most people he met, regardless of race. Instead, he sought out logic and science to confirm his worldview, reading studies from conservative think tanks about biological differences between races, IQ disparities and rates of violent crime committed by blacks against whites. He launched a daily radio show to share his views, and Don paid $275 each week to have it broadcast on the AM station in nearby Lake Worth. On the air, Derek helped popularize the idea of a white genocide, that whites were losing their culture and traditions to massive, nonwhite immigration. “If we say it a thousand times — ‘White genocide! We are losing control of our country!’ — politicians are going to start saying it, too,” he said. He repeated the idea in interviews, Stormfront posts and during his speech at the conference in Memphis, when he was at his most certain.

Derek finished high school, enrolled in community college and ran for a seat on the Republican committee, beating an incumbent with 60 percent of the vote. He decided he wanted to study medieval European history, so he applied to New College of Florida, a top-ranked liberal arts school with a strong history program.

“We want you to make history, not just study it,” Don and Chloe sometimes reminded him.

New College ranked as one of the most liberal schools in the state — “most pot-friendly, most gay-friendly,” Don explained on the radio — and to some white nationalists, it seemed a bizarre choice. Once, on the air, a friend asked Don whether he worried about sending his son to a “hotbed of multiculturalism,” and Don started to laugh.

“If anyone is going to be influenced here, it will be them,” he said. “Soon enough, the whole faculty and student body are going to know who they have in their midst.”

***

At first they knew nothing about him, and Derek tried to keep it that way. New College was in Sarasota, three hours across the state, and it was the first time Derek had lived away from home. He attended an introductory college meeting about diversity and concluded that the quickest way to be ostracized was to proclaim himself a racist. He decided not to mention white nationalism on campus, at least until he had made some friends.

Most of the other students in his dorm were college freshmen, and as a 21-year-old transfer student, Derek already had a car and a legal ID to buy beer. The qualities that had once made him seem quirky — shoulder-length red hair, the cowboy hat he wore, a passion for medieval re-enactment — made him a good fit for New College, where many of the 800 students were a little bit weird. He forged his own armor and dressed as a knight for Halloween. He watched zombie movies with students from his dorm, a group that included a Peruvian immigrant and an Orthodox Jew.

Maybe they were usurpers, as his father had said, but Derek also kind of liked them, and gradually he went from keeping his convictions quiet to actively disguising them. When another student mentioned that he had been reading about the racist implications of “Lord of the Rings” on a website called Stormfront, Derek pretended he had never heard of it.

Meanwhile, early each weekday morning, he would go outside and call in to his radio show. He told friends these were regular calls home to his parents, and in a way, that was true. Every morning, it was Derek and his father, cued in by music from Merle Haggard’s “I’m a White Boy.” Derek often repeated his belief that whites were being wiped out — “a genocide in our own country,” he said. He told listeners the problem was “massive, nonwhite immigration.” He said Obama was an “anti-white radical.” He said white voters were “just waiting for a politician who actually talks about all the ways whites are being stepped on.” He said it was the “critical fight of our lifetime.” Then he hung up and went back to the dorm to play Taylor Swift songs on his guitar or to take one of the college’s sailboats onto Sarasota Bay.

He left after one semester to study abroad in Germany, because he wanted to learn the language. He kept in touch with New College partly through a student message board, known as the forum, whose updates were automatically sent to his email.

One night in April 2011, Derek noticed a message posted to all students at 1:56 a.m. It was written by someone Derek didn’t know — an upperclassman who had been researching terrorist groups online when he stumbled across a familiar face.

“Have you seen this man?” the message read, and beneath those words was a picture that was unmistakable. The red hair. The cowboy hat.

“Derek black: white supremacist, radio host…new college student???” the post read. “How do we as a community respond?”

***

Derek Black speaks shortly after his election to the Republican Party’s executive committee in Palm Beach County, Fla. (Richard Graulich/The Palm Beach Post)

By the time Derek returned to campus for the next semester, more than a thousand responses had been written to that post. It was the biggest message thread in the history of a school that Derek now wanted badly to avoid. He returned to Sarasota, applied for permission to live outside of required student housing and rented a room a few miles away.

A few of his friends from the previous year emailed to say they felt betrayed, and strangers sometimes flipped him off from a safe distance on campus. But, for the most part, Derek avoided public spaces, and other students mostly stared or left him alone, even as their speculation about him continued on the forum.

“Maybe he’s trying to get away from a life he didn’t choose.”

“He chooses to be a racist public figure. We choose to call him a racist in public.”

“I just want this guy to die a painful death along with his entire family. Is that too much to ask?”

“I’d like to see Derek Black respond to all of this. …”

Instead of replying, Derek read the forum and used it as motivation to plan a conference for white nationalists in East Tennessee. “Victory through Argumentation: Verbal tactics for anyone white and normal,” he wrote in the invitation. He had spoken at several conferences, including the one in Memphis, but only now did he feel compelled to create another event as white nationalism continued to spread. The white genocide idea he had been championing had finally become a fixture of conservative radio. David Duke had started trying to build a relationship with “our friends and allies in the tea party.” Donald Trump had riveted the alt-right with his investigation into Obama’s birth certificate, and one Gallup poll suggested that only 38 percent of Americans “definitely” believed Obama was born in the United States.

“A critical juncture to keep increasing the profile of our movement,” Derek said on the radio, so he registered 150 attendees and scheduled speeches by his father, Duke and other separatist icons.

Another New College student learned about the conference and posted details on the forum, where gradually a new way of thinking had begun to emerge.

“Ostracizing Derek won’t accomplish anything,” one student wrote.

“We have a chance to be real activists and actually affect one of the leaders of white supremacy in America. This is not an exaggeration. It would be a victory for civil rights.”

“Who’s clever enough to think of something we can do to change this guy’s mind?”

One of Derek’s acquaintances from that first semester decided he might have an idea. He started reading Stormfront and listening to Derek’s radio show. Then, in late September, he sent Derek a text message.

“What are you doing Friday night?” he wrote.

***

Matthew Stevenson had started hosting weekly Shabbat dinners at his campus apartment shortly after enrolling in New College in 2010. He was the only Orthodox Jew at a school with little Jewish infrastructure, so he began cooking for a small group of students at his apartment each Friday night. Matthew always drank from a kiddush cup and said the traditional prayers, but most of his guests were Christian, atheist, black or Hispanic — anyone open-minded enough to listen to a few blessings in Hebrew. Now, in the fall of 2011, Matthew invited Derek to join them.

Matthew had spent a few weeks debating whether it was a good idea. He and Derek had lived near each other in the dorm, but they hadn’t spoken since Derek was exposed on the forum. Matthew, who almost always wore a yarmulke, had experienced enough anti-Semitism in his life to be familiar with the KKK, David Duke and Stormfront. He went back and read some of Derek’s posts on the site from 2007 and 2008: “Jews are NOT white.” “Jews worm their way into power over our society.” “They must go.”

Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him. “Maybe he’d never spent time with a Jewish person before,” Matthew remembered thinking.

It was the only social invitation Derek had received since returning to campus, so he agreed to go. The Shabbat meals had sometimes included eight or 10 students, but this time only a few showed up. “Let’s try to treat him like anyone else,” Matthew remembered instructing them.

Derek arrived with a bottle of wine. Nobody mentioned white nationalism or the forum, out of respect for Matthew. Derek was quiet and polite, and he came back the next week and then the next, until after a few months, nobody felt all that threatened, and the Shabbat group grew back to its original size.
Matthew Stevenson, left, and Derek Black met at New College, in Sarasota, Fla. Stevenson eventually invited Black to join a diverse group for Shabbat dinners. (Matthew Stevenson photo)

On the rare occasions when Derek directed conversation during those dinners, it was about the particulars of Arabic grammar, or marine aquatics, or the roots of Christianity in medieval times. He came across as smart and curious, and mostly he listened. He heard a Peruvian immigrant tell stories about attending a high school that was 90 percent Hispanic. He asked Matthew about his opinions on Israel and Palestine. They were both still wary of each other: Derek wondered whether Matthew was trying to get him drunk so he would say offensive things that would appear on the forum; Matthew wondered whether Derek was trying to cultivate a Jewish friend to protect himself against charges of anti-Semitism. But they also liked each other, and they started playing pool at a bar near campus.

Some members of the Shabbat group gradually began to ask Derek about his views, and he occasionally clarified them in conversations and emails throughout 2011 and 2012. He said he was pro-choice on abortion. He said he was against the death penalty. He said he didn’t believe in violence or the KKK or Nazism or even white supremacy, which he insisted was different from white nationalism. He wrote in an email that his only concern was that “massive immigration and forced integration” was going to result in a white genocide. He said he believed in the rights of all races but thought each was better off in its own homeland, living separately.

“You have never clarified, Derek,” one of his Shabbat friends wrote to him. “You’ve never said, ‘Hey all, this is what I do believe and this is what I don’t.’ It’s not the job of someone who’s potentially scared/intimidated by someone else to approach that person to see if they are in fact scary/intimidating.”

“I guess I only value the opinions of people I know,” Derek wrote back, and now he was beginning to count his Shabbat friends among those he knew and respected. “You’re naturally right that I deemphasize my own role,” he wrote to them.

He decided early in his final year at New College to finally respond on the forum. He wanted his friends on campus to feel comfortable, even if he still believed some of their homelands were elsewhere. He sat at a coffee shop and began writing his post, softening his ideology with each successive draft. He no longer thought the endpoint of white nationalism was forced deportation for nonwhites, but gradual self-deportation, in which nonwhites would leave on their own. He didn’t believe in self-deportation right now, at least not for his friends, but just eventually, in concept.

“It’s been brought to my attention that people might be scared or intimidated or even feel unsafe here because of things said about me,” he began. “I wanted to try to address these concerns publicly, as they absolutely should not exist. I do not support oppression of anyone because of his or her race, creed, religion, gender, socioeconomic status or anything similar.”

The forum post, intended only for the college, was leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which kept a public “Intelligence File” on Derek and other racist leaders, and the group emailed Derek for clarification. Was he disavowing white nationalism? “Your views are now quite different from what many people thought,” the email read.

Derek received the message while vacationing in Europe during winter break. He was staying with Duke, who had started broadcasting his radio show from a part of Europe with lenient free-speech laws. “The tea party is taking some of these ideas mainstream,” Duke said on a broadcast one morning. “Whites are finally coming around to my point of view,” he said another day, and even if Derek now thought some of what Duke said sounded exaggerated or even alarming, the man was still his godfather. Derek wrote back to the SPLC from Duke’s couch.

“Everything I said (on the forum) is true,” he wrote. “I also believe in White Nationalism. My post and my racial ideology are not mutually exclusive concepts.”

***

Former Ku Klux Klan leader and current U.S. Senate candidate David Duke campaigns in Louisiana. Duke acted as a godfather and a mentor to Derek Black during his rise in white nationalism. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

But the unstated truth was that Derek was becoming more and more confused about exactly what he believed. Sometimes he looked through posts on Stormfront, hoping to reaffirm his ideology, but now the message threads about Obama’s birth certificate or DNA tests for citizenship just seemed bizarre and conspiratorial. He stopped posting on Stormfront. He began inventing excuses to get out of his radio show, leaving his father alone on the air each morning to explain why Derek wouldn’t be calling in. He was preparing for a test. He was giving those liberal professors hell. Except sometimes what Derek was really doing was taking his kayak to the beach, so he could be alone to think.

He had always based his opinions on fact, and lately his logic was being dismantled by emails from his Shabbat friends. They sent him links to studies showing that racial disparities in IQ could largely be explained by extenuating factors like prenatal nutrition and educational opportunities. They gave him scientific papers about the effects of discrimination on blood pressure, job performance and mental health. He read articles about white privilege and the unfair representation of minorities on television news. One friend emailed: “The geNOcide against whites is incredibly, horribly insulting and degrading to real, actual, lived and experienced genocides against Jews, against Rwandans, against Armenians, etc.”

“I don’t hate anyone because of race or religion,” Derek clarified on the forum.

“I am not a white supremacist,” he wrote.

“I don’t believe people of any race, religion or otherwise should have to leave their homes or be segregated or lose any freedom.”

“Derek,” a friend responded. “I feel like you are a representative of a movement you barely buy into. You need to identify with more than 1/50th of a belief system to consider it your belief system.”

He was taking classes in Jewish scripture and German multiculturalism during his last year at New College, but most of his research was focused on medieval Europe. He learned that Western Europe had begun not as a great society of genetically superior people but as a technologically backward place that lagged behind Islamic culture. He studied the 8th century to the 12th century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. “We basically just invented it,” he concluded.

“Get out of this,” one of his Shabbat friends emailed a few weeks after Derek’s graduation in May 2013, urging Derek to publicly disavow white nationalism. “Get out before it ruins some part of your future more than it already irreparably has.”

Derek stayed near campus to housesit for a professor after graduation, and he began to consider making a public statement. He knew he no longer believed in white nationalism, and he had made plans to distance himself from his past by changing part of his name and moving across the country for graduate school. His instinct was to slip away quietly, but his advocacy had always been public — a legacy of radio shows, Internet posts, TV appearances, and an annual conference on racial tactics.

He was still considering what to do when he returned home to visit his parents later that summer. His father was tracking the rise of white nationalism on cable TV, and his parents were talking about “enemies” and “comrades” in the “ongoing war,” but now it sounded ridiculous to Derek. He spent the day rebuilding windows with them, which was one of Derek’s quirky hobbies that his parents had always supported. They had bought his guitar and joined in his medieval re-enactments. They had paid his tuition at the liberal arts college where he had Shabbat dinners. They had taught him, most of all, to be independent and ideological, and to speak his beliefs even when doing so resulted in backlash.

He left the house that night and went to a bar. He took out his computer and began writing a statement.

“A large section of the community I grew up in believes strongly in white nationalism, and members of my family whom I respect greatly, particularly my father, have long been resolute advocates for that cause. I was not prepared to risk driving a wedge in those relationships.

“After a great deal of thought since then, I have resolved that it is in the best interests of everyone involved to be honest about my slow but steady disaffiliation from white nationalism. I can’t support a movement that tells me I can’t be a friend to whomever I wish or that other people’s races require me to think of them in a certain way or be suspicious at their advancements.

“The things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent, activists striving for opportunity and fairness for all. I am sorry for the damage done.”

He continued to write for several more paragraphs before addressing an email to the SPLC, the group his father had considered a primary adversary for 40 years.

“Publish in full,” Derek instructed. Then he attached the letter and hit “send.”

***

Don Black poses for a portrait at a park Oct. 2, 2016, in Crossville, Tenn. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Don was at the computer the next afternoon searching Google when Derek’s name popped up in a headline on his screen. For a decade, Don had been typing “Stormfront” and “Derek Black” into the search bar a few times each week to track his son’s public rise in white nationalism. This particular story had been published by the SPLC, which Don had always referred to as the “Poverty Palace.”

“Activist Son of Key Racist Leader Renounces White Nationalism,” it read, and Don began to read the letter. It had phrases like “structural oppression,” “privilege,” “limited opportunity,” and “marginalized groups” — the kind of liberal-apologist language Don and Derek had often made fun of on the radio.

“You got hacked,” Don remembered telling Derek, once he reached him on the phone.

“It’s real,” Derek said, and then he heard the sound of his father hanging up.

For the next few hours, Don was in disbelief. Maybe Derek was pulling a prank on him. Maybe he still believed in white nationalism but just wanted an easier life.

Derek called back, and this time his mother answered. She said that she didn’t want to speak to him. She handed the phone to Don, and his voice was shaky and tearful. Derek had never heard him that way. “I can’t talk,” Don said, and he hung up again.

Later that night, Don logged on to the Stormfront message board. “I’m sure this will be all over the Net and our local media, so I’ll start here,” he wrote, posting a link to Derek’s letter. “I don’t want to talk to him. He says he doesn’t understand why we’d feel betrayed just because he announced his ‘personal beliefs’ to our worst enemies.”

For the next several days, Don couldn’t bring himself to post anything more. “I was a little depressed anyway, but at that point I wanted to quit everything,” he said later, remembering that time. “What’s the point? I didn’t do much of anything for probably 10 days. It was the worst event of my adult life.”

He logged back onto Stormfront a week later. “After a miserable seven days, I feel the need to vent,” he wrote. “I only know what Derek tells me, which has been baffling. I’ve decided he really believes this crap. Derek repeated his belief that family ties are separate from politics. I said that obviously wasn’t true with a family centered around political activism.”

Hundreds of posts quickly followed. Some offered Don condolences. Others said that Derek was a traitor or that Don could no longer be trusted, either. Don wrote a few posts in response, sometimes defending Derek and other times distancing himself, until after a few weeks it all hurt too much.

“I’m closing this thread,” Don wrote, finally, describing it as an “open wound.”

***

Derek returned home a few weeks later for his father’s birthday, even though his mother and his half-sisters had asked him not to come. “I think I might be getting disowned,” Derek had written to one college friend. But he was about to leave Florida for graduate school, and he wanted to say goodbye.

He arrived at his grandmother’s house for the party, and he would later remember how strange it felt when his half-sisters would barely acknowledge him. His mother was polite but cold. Don tried to invite Derek inside, but the rest of the family wanted him to leave. “I got uninvited to my own party,” Don later remembered. “They said if I wanted to see him, we both had to go.”

They left and went for a drive, first to the beach and then to a restaurant, where they sat at a booth near the back. Derek still had his dry sense of humor. He still made smart observations about politics and history. “Same old Derek,” Don concluded, after a few hours, and that fact surprised him. His grief had been so profound that he’d expected some physical manifestation of the loss. Instead, he found himself forgetting for several minutes at a time that Derek was now “living on the other side.”

Don asked Derek about the theories that had emerged on the Stormfront message thread. Was he just faking a change to have an easier career? Was this his way of rebelling?

When Derek denied those things, Don mentioned the theory he himself had come to believe — the one David Duke had posited in the first hours after Derek’s letter went public: Stockholm syndrome. Derek had become a hostage to liberal academia and then experienced empathy for his captors.

“That’s so patronizing,” Derek remembered saying. “How can I prove this is what I really believe?”

He tried to convince Don for a few hours at the restaurant. He told him about white privilege and repeated the scientific studies about institutionalized racism. He mentioned the great Islamic societies that had developed algebra and predicted a lunar eclipse. He said that now, as he recognized strains of white nationalism spreading into mainstream politics, he felt accountable. “It’s not just that I was wrong. It’s that it caused real damage,” he remembered saying.

“I can’t believe I’m arguing with you, of all people, about racial realities,” Don remembered telling him.

The restaurant was closing, and they were no closer to an understanding. Derek went to sleep at his grandmother’s house. Then he woke up early and started driving across the country alone.

***

Derek Black is pictured Sept. 25, 2016. “It’s scary to know that I helped spread this stuff, and now it’s out there,” he told a friend, alluding to the ideology he once promoted. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Every day since then, Derek had been working to put distance between himself and his past. He was still living across the country after finishing his master’s degree, and he was starting to learn Arabic to be able to study the history of early Islam. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in white nationalism since his defection, aside from occasional calls home to his parents. Instead, he’d spent his time catching up on aspects of pop culture he’d once been taught to discredit: liberal newspaper columns, rap music and Hollywood movies. He’d come to admire President Obama. He decided to trust the U.S. government. He started drinking tap water. He had taken budget trips to Barcelona, Paris, Dublin, Nicaragua and Morocco, immersing himself in as many cultures as he could.

He joined a new online message group, this one for couch surfers, and he opened up his one-bedroom apartment to strangers looking for a temporary place to stay. It felt increasingly good to trust people — to try to interact without prejudice or judgment — and after a while, Derek began to feel detached from the person he had been.

But then came the election campaign of 2016, and suddenly the white nationalism Derek had been trying to unlearn was the unavoidable subtext to national debates over refugees, immigration, Black Lives Matter and the election itself. Late in August, Derek watched in his apartment as Hillary Clinton gave a major speech about the rise of racism. She explained how white supremacists had rebranded themselves as white nationalists. She referenced Duke and mentioned the concept of a “white genocide,” which Derek had once helped popularize. She talked about how Trump had hired a campaign manager with ties to the alt-right. She said: “A fringe movement has essentially taken over the Republican Party.”

It was the very same point Derek had spent so much of his life believing in, but now it made him feel both fearful for the country and implicated. “It’s scary to know that I helped spread this stuff, and now it’s out there,” he told one of his Shabbat friends.

He also wondered whether he would ever be able to completely detach himself from his past, when so much about it remained public. He was still occasionally recognized as a former racist in graduate school; still written into the will of a man he had befriended through white nationalism; still the godson of Duke; still the son of Chloe and Don.

Late this summer, for the first time in years, he traveled to Florida to see them. At a time of increasingly contentious rhetoric, he wanted to hear what his father had to say. They sat in the house and talked about graduate school and Don’s new German shepherd. But after a while, their conversation turned back to ideology, the topic they had always preferred.

Don, who usually didn’t vote, said he was going to support Trump.

Derek said he had taken an online political quiz, and his views aligned 97 percent with Hillary Clinton’s.

Don said immigration restrictions sounded like a good start.

Derek said he actually believed in more immigration, because he had been studying the social and economic benefits of diversity.

Don thought that would result in a white genocide.

Derek thought race was a false concept anyway.

They sat across from each other, searching for ways to bridge the divide. The bay was one block away. Just across from there was Mar-a-Lago, where Trump had lived and vacationed for so many years, once installing an 80-foot pole for a gigantic American flag.

“Who would have thought he’d be the one to take it mainstream?” Don said, and in a moment of so much division, it was the one point on which they agreed.


Eli Saslow is a reporter at the Washington Post, where he covered the 2008 presidential campaign and has chronicled the president’s life inside the White House. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his year-long series about food stamps in America.
Follow @elisaslow


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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/

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