SACW - 22 Nov 2016 | Sri Lanka: Threats to women activists / India and Pakistan: Continuing tension / Bangladesh: Minorities; Free Speech / Pakistan: Blasting away culture / India: De-monetisation Disaster / USA: Trump's Victory / Fascist Hybridities / Russia’s Patriotic Summer Camps

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 22 Nov 2016 - No. 2918 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Attacks on minorities in Bangladesh: No longer a "communal issue" | Taj Hashmi
2. Pakistan: Blasting away culture | Kamila Hyat
3. Sri Lanka: Citizens statement against threats against women activists who have been involved in recent campaigns to reform the Muslim personal laws
4. Sri Lanka: Attack on Services to People | Shamala Kumar
5. Video: UN Live Panel Panel Discussion on Access to remedy - Forum on Business and Human Rights 2016
6. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: RSS Gives Ideological Colour to Demonetisation Debate
  - India: M.G. Vaidya’s argument reeks of Muslim-baiting, openly canvasses for a ‘Hindu’ democracy (Suhas Palshikar)
  - Bangladesh: ‘No Hindus will be left after 30 years’
  - Sri Lanka: Tamil Family in Colombo Suburb Suffers Terrible Ordeal at the Hands of a “Religious Mob”
  - India: My religion is nobody else’s business, says Chief Justice of India T S Thakur
  - Is there undeclared emergency in India
  - India: Bombay's Christian Right and the demand for ban on the 'blasphemous' decor of Goregaon Social
  - India: RSS may have cash donation problem ?
  - India: BJP's Real Top Brass Cartoon in The Times of India (14 September 2016)
  - India: Demonetisation may help saffron surge past red in Bengal’s green bowl
  - India: Gun-toting Hindu Mahasabha preahcer shoots wedding guests
  - Transnational white supremacist communities - White Power Music and the Future of Democracy (Nancy S. Love)
  - India: Sangh, Simon and the Question of Rationality (Shrikant Wad)
  - India: Education ministry should stop the RSS from furthering its ideological agenda in schools (Editorial, Hindustan Times)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Select Editorials
8. India - Pakistan: Continuing tension
9. At the Dhaka Literary Festival, Restrictions on Free Speech Will Be the Elephant in the Room | David Bergman
10. Fighting radicalism in Bangladesh: Investing heavily in secular education is the key to reversing the tide of Islamism | Rudroneel Ghosh
11. Sri Lanka: Paracheriweli and the Jaffna Muslims’ struggle to return | Swasthika Arulingam
12. India: Consequences of the demonetisation shock | Sudipto Mundle
13. How a Nation Lost Its Mind | P. M. Candler Jr.
14. USA: The myth of Donald Trump’s white working-class support | Vito Laterza and Louis Philippe Römer
15. US elections 2016: Donald Trump’s victory is a disaster for modern masculinity | Jacqueline Rose
16. French politicians are now marching to Marine Le Pen’s immigration tune | Philippe Marlière
17. Global Climate Justice Movements Refuse to Be Overshadowed by Election of Climate Change Denier to US Presidency
18. Trump, RSS and blissful coexistence | Manu S. Pillai
19. US women and children are the NRA’s new targets | Fisun Güner
20. The Rise of Russia’s Patriotic Summer Camps
21. Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto. Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini. 

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1. ATTACKS ON MINORITIES IN BANGLADESH: NO LONGER A "COMMUNAL ISSUE" | Taj Hashmi
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In the backdrop of the growing intolerance towards Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh, politicians, intellectuals, and people from every walk of life should resist the manifestation of intolerance and racism in any form. They eventually lead to totalitarian governance or fascism.
http://sacw.net/article13030.html

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2. PAKISTAN: BLASTING AWAY CULTURE | Kamila Hyat
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Attempts to gun down guardians of the Sufi tradition, notably in interior Sindh, is an example of the determination to silence the followers of Sufism and create a situation where they are less significant in the country.
http://sacw.net/article13033.html

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3. SRI LANKA: CITIZENS STATEMENT AGAINST THREATS AGAINST WOMEN ACTIVISTS WHO HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN RECENT CAMPAIGNS TO REFORM THE MUSLIM PERSONAL LAWS
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A cross section of Muslims have banded together to unequivocally condemn the recent threats against women activists who have been involved in recent campaigns to reform the Muslim personal laws
http://sacw.net/article13032.html

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4. SRI LANKA: ATTACK ON SERVICES TO PEOPLE | Shamala Kumar
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It’s less than two years ago that a sustained campaign was fought to rid this country of the tyranny of the previous regime. Under the platform of a government of the people, ‘yahapaalanaya’ won, rejecting the unilateral, anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic nature of the government that was then in place. Teachers, lawyers, students, fishers, garment factory workers, farmers, artists, women and men from urban centres and villages, ordinary people from everywhere left their daily lives to campaign for a government that would represent their needs. The 2017 Budget is a slap in the face for all those people.
http://sacw.net/article13031.html

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5. VIDEO: UN LIVE PANEL PANEL DISCUSSION ON ACCESS TO REMEDY - FORUM ON BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2016
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Panel:
    Karamat Ali, Pakistan Institute for Labour Education and Research (PILER)
    Aruna Chandrasekhar, Independent researcher (India)
    Richard Meeran, Partner, Leigh Day
    Purarama Pradhan, Posco Pratirodh Sagram Samiti (PPSS)
    Nazia Riaz, victim, Ali Factory fire (Pakistan)
http://sacw.net/article13027.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India: RSS Gives Ideological Colour to Demonetisation Debate
India: Cartoon by Sunil Sam following the violent attacks on JNU students by lawyers in Delhi courts (February 2016)
India: M.G. Vaidya’s argument reeks of Muslim-baiting, openly canvasses for a ‘Hindu’ democracy (Suhas Palshikar)
Bangladesh: ‘No Hindus will be left after 30 years’
Sri Lanka: Tamil Family in Colombo Suburb Suffers Terrible Ordeal at the Hands of a “Religious Mob”
India: My religion is nobody else’s business, says Chief Justice of India T S Thakur
Is there undeclared emergency in India
India: Bombay's Christian Right and the demand for ban on the 'blasphemous' decor of Goregaon Social
India: RSS may have cash donation problem ?
India: BJP's Real Top Brass Cartoon in The Times of India (14 September 2016)
India: Demonetisation may help saffron surge past red in Bengal’s green bowl
India: Gun-toting Hindu Mahasabha preahcer shoots wedding guests
Transnational white supremacist communities - White Power Music and the Future of Democracy (Nancy S. Love)
India: Sangh, Simon and the Question of Rationality (Shrikant Wad)
India: Education ministry should stop the RSS from furthering its ideological agenda in schools (Editorial, Hindustan Times)
India: Fire of Una Ignites Saffron Udupi (Anand Teltumbde)
India: BJP raises pitch of Hindutva rhetoric in Karnataka
India: A Hundred and forty thousand (1.4 lakh) students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
India: increase in donations to temples after demonetization
Citizenship Act: BJP's religion-based amendment threatens the secular fabric of India (Garga Chatterjee)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. SELECT EDITORIALS
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Dhaka Tribune - November 12, 2016

SANTAL RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

Editorial

The evictions of Gaibandha’s Santal people from their land shows an alarming trend of growing hostility toward ethnic and religious minorities in the country.
While Bangladesh still recovers from the waves of attacks on the Hindu community, the Santals of Gaibandha have been dealt a blow from which they may not recover.
Why are we failing so miserably to protect our marginalised and vulnerable communities?
After driving some 1,200 families out of their land, police are now confining the Santals to three villages of Sapmara union, where they live in appalling conditions, a clear violation of human rights.
It is not acceptable for the government to expect these Santal people to live without proper employment, and without access to food and medicine.
It is the solemn duty of the authorities to take human rights into account when dealing with them.
The technicalities behind the ownership of the land are not the most pressing concern — the Santal people of the area have been lied to and betrayed by the local authorities. Both the UP chairman and the local lawmaker are guilty of doling out false promises to the Santal people, making assurances that their land and homes would not be taken away from them.
The most urgent need of the hour is to come up with a proper solution for Santals — to help them get back on their feet, and to compensate for the displacement, hardship, and trauma they have endured.
Santals have the same basic human rights as the rest of the country’s citizens.
It is totally unacceptable to steamroll over minority groups simply because they lack the power to fight back effectively.
We must stand with the Santals in their hour of need, and work towards giving them back their lives.

o o o

Dawn - November 19, 2016

LACK OF INTERNET FREEDOMS
Editorial 

IT is an indictment, but an unsurprising one. According to the Washington DC-based research firm Freedom House, Pakistan is at the lowest tier of its Freedom on the Net 2016 index. It stands in the company of several countries that have earned notoriety for tight controls over the dissemination of information and access to the online world, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. With a zero ranking signifying greatest freedoms and 100 the least, Pakistan is placed at a depressing 69. The report notes that internet penetration stands at only 18pc; there have been several instances where content has been blocked and social and political commentary censored. Further, it points out that the passage of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act this year, despite strong objections from civil society, contains clauses enabling censorship, surveillance and rights violations. Pakistan’s ranking would have been even worse, but the end of the years’-long ban on YouTube affected the overall score.

The sad reality is that the voices of a handful of internet activists notwithstanding, the impediments to online freedoms have become so entrenched as to have been rendered ‘normal’. There is the tug of war over the control of narrative, with laws continuing to refer to nebulous concepts such as the ‘national interest’. Then there are hurdles of a technical nature, such as the reliance on mobile technologies as opposed to the more reliable broadband internet. In view of this, the very least that needs to be done is to ensure greater transparency in the decision-making process of blocking content, which at the moment is arbitrary; and greater heed should be paid to the reservations of activists. Further, there must be more reflection on the fact that no one is disputing the need for a law such as the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, but the latter remains seriously flawed. As the primary piece of legislation regulating the online world, all subsequent legislation will rest upon its failings.

o o o

The Guardian - 17 November 2016

THE GUARDIAN VIEW ON INDIA’S DEMONETISATION: MODI HAS BROUGHT HAVOC TO INDIA

Editorial

Trump’s svengali, Steve Bannon, saw Hindu nationalism as part of a ‘great revolt’. The way things are going, the resistance might begin at home

On the night Donald Trump was elected the next US president, one of his fellow nationalist populist politicians chose to implement chaos in a land not famed for order. In a surprise TV address Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, announced that all 500- and 1,000-rupee notes would be withdrawn immediately from circulation. At a stroke Mr Modi rendered 86% of currency worthless outside a bank branch. Old notes would have to be exchanged for limited supplies of new currency. It was justified as a move designed to fight corruption and target people who have been dodging taxes by holding stockpiles of cash, known in India as “black money”.

Many initially saw the withdrawal of banknotes as a price worth paying to eliminate graft. The short-term impact of “demonetisation” has been dramatic: the $2 trillion Indian economy will shrink. The rich will not suffer, as corruptly acquired fortunes have almost all been converted to shares, gold and real estate. But the poor, who make up the bulk of the nation’s 1.3 billion people, will lose out. They don’t generally have bank accounts and are often paid in cash. For them, getting to a bank and queueing for hours will cost money and time they don’t have. In less than a week the policy has reportedly claimed more than a dozen lives. The government says that it will take weeks to sort out the problems.

Demonitisation is not new in India, which last tried it in a smaller way in 1978. The result then was higher bank deposits and a bump in the tax take. Yet the scale and speed of Mr Modi’s scheme has more in common with the failed experiments of dictatorships which led to runaway inflation, currency collapse and mass protests. While Mr Modi campaigned to end corruption, it would have been better if the government had updated its antiquated tax system to realise such a task.

But slower, incremental reforms do not make headlines. They do not instantly hit the war chests of political rivals in upcoming state polls. Mr Modi, a Hindu nationalist, was for a decade an international pariah over his alleged role in the mass murder of Muslims in a region he once administered. He wants to be known for something else. President-elect Trump offers an opportunity to recast himself. Two years ago Mr Trump’s svengali, Steve Bannon, described Mr Modi’s victory as part of a “global revolt”. But a looming cash crunch and an administrative crisis makes it look like the revolt might start at home.

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8. INDIA - PAKISTAN: CONTINUING TENSION
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PAK-INDIA TENSIONS
Editorial — Dawn Nov 21, 2016
http://www.dawn.com/news/1297563/pak-india-tensions

PAKISTAN EVACUATES THOUSANDS FROM KASHMIR AMID ESCALATING VIOLENCE
By Juliet Perry, CNN (November 17, 2016)
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/16/asia/india-pakistan-evacuations-kashmir/

PAK. CONDUCTS MILITARY EXERCISE CLOSE TO INDIAN BORDER
Special Correspondent (November 17, 2016)
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pak-conducts-military-exercise-close-to-indian-border/article9354224.ece

o o o

Kashmir Times - 20 November 2016

AS THE LOC HEATS UP, BORDER VILLAGES FEAR THE REPEAT OF A DEADLY HISTORY
by Anam Zakaria	

In the summer of 2014, my husband and I decided to celebrate our first anniversary in Neelum Valley in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, known as Kishanganga in India. I had heard about the breathtaking beauty of Kashmir since I was a child. My father had been posted there in the 1980s while serving in the Pakistan army. The family of our cook who lived with us were Kashmiri. Every summer they would return home to visit their relatives and return to Lahore with vivid memories of mountains, rivers, walnuts and apple trees.

During the 1990s, I recall my mother begging them not to go for there was news of cross-Line of Control firing. They refused, insisting that Kashmir was home and they had to go back. Telephone lines would not work and we would have to wait for several weeks before getting news of whether they had made it there alive. Close to 3,000 people died in Neelum Valley alone during the 1990s, with thousands more received life-altering injuries and psychological scars. During my visit to Kashmir in 2015, I met a young boy who was caught in the middle of mortar shelling when he was six months old. In the frenzy to get inside the bunkers to save their lives, his family accidentally left him lying outside on a charpoi. As the mother wailed to be let out to get her child, others in the bunker held her back to save her life. They thought the baby wouldn't have survived. As luck would have it, he did and is now a teenager. But he cannot say a word even all these years later for he is mute. Some tell me he lost his mind that day, as a six-month-old baby, never able to recover from the loud sounds of the mortar shelling and the screams of his family.

When India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire in 2003, thousands of families rejoiced at the prospect of peace. And peace did come. Since 2003, Neelum Valley has largely been spared from violence even when other parts of the LoC have remained active due to ceasefire violations. Though occasional post-to-post firing has taken place in Neelum Valley, the civilian population has been pardoned. As a result, the Valley has developed as one of the most popular tourist destinations for Pakistanis. Kashmiri journalist Ershad Mahmud reports, "Since 2003, more than 500 hotels, motels and guesthouses have been established in the region. Since 2010, the Neelum Valley has received an average of 300,000 tourists every year, facilitating thousands of local people to earn their livelihood…tourism share in the local economy has reached up to 40%."

My husband and I were one of these tourists in 2014. We had stayed at a local rest house in Keran, situated on the banks of the Neelum river, which serves as the LoC in the area. From where we sat, we could see the Indian side. A mosque situated across the LoC would serve as a call for prayer to both sides. Young girls and boys could be seen roaming around across from us. If they yelled, we could hear what they said. I am told that after the ceasefire, many divided families would sit by the river and talk to each other. The river, which was meant to divide, became their only source of connection with each other.

As we were having dinner one night, near silence engulfed us and all we could hear was the river gushing beside us. Across, we could see the Indian post, lit up; behind us, the Pakistani post. In the middle was the resort and hundreds of homes. My husband and I discussed how frightening it would be if firing began at that moment. Out of the piercing silence would come a deafening blast and a blinding orange-ish light, annihilating everything in its way. It was a disturbing thought but one that we knew had few prospects of coming true, given the relative peace in the area.

As India-Pakistan relations took a turn for the worse this year, in late October, two years after our visit, a mortar shell hit the tourist resort in Keran where I had spent my first anniversary. Two tourists from Lahore were injured. Since then all hotels and resorts have shut down, stifling the bustling tourist industry. The bunkers that had turned rusty after not being used for over a decade are now being restored. A generation that had only heard about the firing is now a witness to it. As in the 1990s, people are leaving their homes and livelihood behind and trying to move to cities like Muzaffarabad, further away from the LoC. Rent prices are high, availability of rooms low. Some have resorted to staying at local darbars, others have moved in with relatives for a few nights. They don't know when they will be able to go back home. Last time, the period of war in the Valley lasted 14 years. Children did not go to school for over a decade; a whole generation remained uneducated. Some wonder if this is a repeat of that time. Uncertainty looms in the Valley. One man has already died; he was running to seek shelter during the firing when a mortar hit near him. Just hearing the all too familiar sound was enough to startle the life out of him; he died immediately of a heart attack.

Those who have nowhere to move and no place to go are adamant to keep the peace alive in their area. Dozens of women have come out in protests, telling both governments to stop the firing. These are the same women that many hold responsible for bringing peace back to the Valley after the intense period of shelling in the 1990s. I met with some of these women in 2015 and they explained, "During the 1990s, the passion for securing freedom had reached new heights. As refugees poured in from across the border, we opened our doors to them, we gave them warm clothes and meals. We told them we were with them in their struggle, they were our brothers and sisters. But what happened? We were unable to get Kashmir after all the fighting. We lost so much in the process. We lost our sons, we lost our homes, we lost out livelihoods…our children could not go to school…our men could not go to work. We just wanted peace. So we would march in great numbers to the commanding officer in the area and tell him to bring peace at all costs. If the men protested, they would be beaten up but with us women they couldn't do that. We had more power in that way."

Over the years, whenever the women heard of rumours of infiltration across the LoC, they would come out to protest. They would lead marches, insisting that the Pakistan army must come down hard on any militants trying to cross over and creating trouble for the locals in the area. In 2013, the BBC documented these protests and published an article titled 'Housewives take on Militants in Kashmir'. In the hopes of securing peace once more, the women have come out again. They have become a force of resilience and strength in the area. One of my contacts in Kashmir, who works closely with the women, told me over a phone call a few nights ago, "In the 1990s, the locals, including these women, had supported the idea of an armed struggle. There were camps all around; even I had wanted to pick up arms. The atmosphere was such. Today, the environment is very different. We have all lost too much. No one is willing to sacrifice everything again. We just want peace and that's what the women have come out to demand."

Meanwhile, my cook's son is getting married. He has been saving up to make clothes and jewellery for his soon-to-be wife for a year. However, when the time came to leave for his wedding ceremony earlier this month, he began to cry. He did not know if he would make it there alive. "They're hitting cars," he wept. My mother asked him to delay the marriage. He insisted he had to go. "My fiancé's family is there, my grandparents are there, my relatives are there. It is my home. How can I stay away?"

The begging, the crying, the fears and protests are an eerie reminder of the 1990s, a decade that no Kashmiri nor no Pakistani or Indian can afford to revisit but many are bent on reenacting.

Anam Zakaria is the author of Footprints of Partition: Narratives of four generations of Pakistanis and Indians.


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9. AT THE DHAKA LITERARY FESTIVAL, RESTRICTIONS ON FREE SPEECH WILL BE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
by David Bergman
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(The Wire - 18 November 2016)

Given that it is in effect state sanctioned, the ‘festival of writing’ will not see discussions on the restrictive and censorious environment Bangladeshi writers are forced to work in.
V.S. Naipaul inaugurating the Dhaka Literary Festival 2016. Credit: Twitter

V.S. Naipaul inaugurating the Dhaka Literary Festival 2016. Credit: Twitter

For English-speaking residents living in Bangladesh’s capital city, the Dhaka Literary Festival, which started on Thursday, has become a very welcome institution, bringing writers of all kinds – novelists, poets, historians and journalists – from all around the world to this bustling metropolis.

In a city where cultural opportunities of this kind are rare, there are few things more pleasant than to sip a latte in the gardens of the Bangla academy having just heard the quiet words of Nayantara Sahgal, about to hear the jestful opinions of Shobhaa De and needing to choose between listening in on the political view of Jon Snow or the quirkiness of writer Marcel Theroux – all speakers at the festival last year. Choices like this don’t come often to Dhaka.

Yet, whilst there are many positive aspects to this year’s festival, it is nonetheless a rather peculiar affair. This ‘festival of writing’ ignores the elephant in the room for Bangladeshi writers – the highly restrictive and censorious environment in which they are forced to work.

Unreasonable restrictions on the freedom of speech and writing have existed in Bangladesh under all regimes, but arguably since the country’s independence, under no previous non-military regime has freedom of expression become as restricted as it is now.

Newspapers have been closed down or curtailed. TV stations have been taken off air and talk shows controlled. Many editors, journalists and ordinary writers have been arrested and some remain in detention. Writing the wrong thing in Bangladesh can be dangerous.

The festival’s failure to engage with this issue is not necessarily the fault of the organisers.

In order to hold such an event, significant compromises no doubt need to be made – and not riling the government is one of them. While the organisers might not wish to acknowledge this, like many other civil society events in the country, this festival is in effect state sanctioned, with the government as a ‘special partner’ to the festival and not one but two ministers speaking at the inaugural session.

As a result, while there will no doubt quite rightly be mention at the festival of the seven atheist writers and their publishers killed by Islamic militants between February 2015 and April 2016, there will be very little (if any) mention of the longer term and more significant government restrictions on writing in Bangladesh.

Attacks on newspapers and editors

Just over a year ago, in August 2015, the army’s intelligence agency ordered the country’s largest companies to stop advertising in Prothom Alo and the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s most popular newspapers in Bangla and English respectively.

As a result, overnight the two papers lost about 30% of their advertising income, putting their very existence under threat. This unwritten and unlawful ban continues to this day, with reportedly over 20 companies ordered not to advertise in the papers.

The trigger for this ban was the publication of a story in both papers on the army’s killing of five men in the Chittagong Hill Tracts – but it is likely to really be about payback for the newspapers’ independent reporting on the failure of the ruling Awami League to hold free and fair elections in 2014 as well as the government perception that during the 2007-09 emergency government both papers had supported the removal of the two leaders of the country’s main political parties, including current prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

Such governmental action not only intimidates these two papers, but also the rest of the country’s media, none of whom dared to even report on the advertising ban.

And the attack on the Daily Star did not stop there.

Following an interview in February 2016 when the editor of the paper, Mahfuz Anam said that he regretted having published uncorroborated intelligence agency reports in the 2007-09 emergency period – a common practice of newspapers during that period which continues today in many papers – Hasina called for him to resign and her son (and chief communications advisor) called for his prosecution for treason.

Awami League activists then filed 62 cases of criminal defamation and 17 cases of sedition against Anam in 53 different courts in the country, requiring him to travel the country. Civil suits totalling £11.8 billion were also filed against him.

Such actions are far from anomalous. They follow earlier restrictive measures on newspapers and TV stations.

In April 2013, Mahmudur Rahman, the editor of Amar Desh, the main newspaper opposing the Awami League government, was arrested on charges involving criminal defamation in the publication of leaked transcripts of judicial conversations. The newspaper has not been able to publish since then and he remains in prison, with many other cases also filed against him.

A month later, in the wake of their coverage of the police action following the rally of the Islamic fundamentalist organisation Hefazet (where Human Rights Watch reported that “at least 58 people” were killed), two TV stations, Islamic TV and Diganta TV, were also forced to close and have not yet gone back on air.

And in January 2015, the police arrested Abdus Salam, the chairman of one of the most popular television stations, Ekushey TV (ETV) on charges of pornography. His arrest took place one day after the station carried a speech critical of the government and the country’s independence leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is also the father of the prime minister, which was given by Tarique Rahman, a Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader and the son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, who has been living in London since 2008. Salam remains in jail and his TV station has been taken over by a pro-government businessman.

Attacking journalists and other critics

There has also been direct prosecution of journalists and other individuals who have written critically about the government or its members, or in a way that the government dislikes.

The cases are mostly filed under the Information, Communication and Technology Act 2006, which allows a person to be prosecuted for publishing material online or in a digital form which is considered amongst other things to “prejudice the image of the State” or “a person”. This is very wide language, allowing the possibility of prosecution for any criticism of the government or its members.

On August 8 this year, three journalists belonging to an online newspaper were arrested for publishing a correction to a false rumour circulating on the internet relating to an air crash involving Hasina’s son.

A couple of weeks later, Dilip Roy, a student leader at Rajshai University was arrested  for writing ‘derogatory’ remarks about the prime minister and her policy on the establishment of a power station close to the Sundarban mangrove forest.

And a few days into September, Siddique Rahman, an editor of a specialist education website, was arrested for defaming a former senior educational bureaucrat who is the sister of a minister and is also married to a member of parliament.

Cases of this kind, which can result in heavy punishments, act as a significant deterrent effect for anyone who might seek to write critically about the government.

Indeed, two years ago, 25-year-old Tonmoy Malick, an electronics shop owner in the southern district of Khulna was sentenced to seven years in prison under the ICT Act for defaming Hasina.

Malick was accused of digitally storing and distributing a song that parodied Hasina and her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence in 1971 and is revered by many as a founding president. It included the lyrics “Sheikh Hasina and her father have sold out the country, they are causing damage to the country, they think the country belongs to them”.

New laws

As though the ICT Act 2006 was not enough, the government has enacted or is planning to enact a number of laws with further censoring provisions.

The Foreign Donations (Voluntary Activities) Regulation Act 2016, which was enacted in parliament last month without debate, allows the NGO bureau – a body that operates under the supervision of the prime minister’s office – the power to suspend the registration of an NGO or to close it down if it makes any “derogatory” remarks about the constitution or “constitutional bodies”. Constitutional bodies in Bangladesh include the parliament, the election commission, the comptroller and auditor general, the attorney general’s office, the public service commission and the judiciary.

“The clause in the law is a way of intimidating NGOs working on governance and human rights,” Iftekharuzzaman, the head of Transparency International, has said.

In addition, in late August the cabinet agreed in principle to enact the Digital Security Act that would make it an offence to spread ‘propaganda’ against the ‘spirit’ of the 1971 war that resulted in the country’s independence or against its independence leader Rahman.

The government is also considering enacting another law, the Bangladesh Liberation War (Denial, Distortion, Opposition) Crime, drafted by the Law Commission, that would criminalise the “inaccurate” representation of the 1971 war or any “malicious” statements in the press that “undermine any events” related to the war. “Propaganda about the trials that deals with these crimes” committed during the war would also be an offence.

Writing about the 1971 war or about the country’s independence leader – in the form of a novel, history or journalism – will become practically impossible unless ones follow the expected narrative of the government of the day.

And back to the festival

Ironically, of course, the festival does have sessions dealing directly with censorship in two other South Asian countries.

There is a session called ‘Can India speak?’ and another one dealing with the closure of the magazine Himal in Nepal. There is, however, no similar event dealing with the situation in Bangladesh.

So enjoy the festival. Gossip at the food court. Delight in the speakers. But don’t forget that there is a Bangladesh elephant out there that needs to be seen, talked about and confronted. And events like this festival of writing should not take the easy route and ignore it.

David Bergman is a writer based in Bangladesh. He also runs the Bangladesh Politico and Bangladesh War Crimes blogs. Follow him on @davidbangladesh 

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10. FIGHTING RADICALISM IN BANGLADESH: INVESTING HEAVILY IN SECULAR EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO REVERSING THE TIDE OF ISLAMISM
by Rudroneel Ghosh
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(The Times of India - November 15, 2016)

In a development that hasn’t got much attention in India, on October 30 in neighbouring Bangladesh’s Brahmanbaria district’s Nasirnagar upazila, a mob of 100 to 200 people ransacked and looted at least five temples and more than hundred houses belonging to the Hindu minority community. The nature and scale of the attack suggest that it was pre-planned and may have even had the support of local authorities. Since the first attack on October 30, several smaller attacks have taken place in the same locality. In fact, just this last weekend a Hindu house was set on fire despite the presence of additional security forces in the area.

While the mastermind and the main perpetrators of the attacks are yet to be identified and arrested, the rioting, vandalism and looting started when two Islamist groups, Touhidi Janata and Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, were protesting against an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post uploaded by a Hindu youth. The said youth has since been arrested in spite of his claim that he hadn’t uploaded the offending post and that his Facebook account had been misused by someone. It will be recalled that in 2012 similar rioting had taken place against the Buddhist community in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar over claims that a Buddhist youth had insulted Islam over Facebook.

What’s has happened in Nasirnagar is something that has been happening to Hindus and other minority groups in Bangladesh for decades. While Bangladesh attained its independence from Pakistan in 1971 after defeating Islamist forces that were hell-bent on eradicating religious minorities from what was then East Pakistan, these fundamentalist forces have continued to operate even after four decades.

The Bangladeshi Constitution of 1972 envisaged secularism, democracy, Bengali nationalism and socialism as fundamental principles. However, after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975, secularism was expunged from the Constitution. In subsequent years, Islam was even recognised as the state religion of Bangladesh. It was only when the current Awami League dispensation came to power in 2009 that secularism was restored as a Constitutional pillar.

However, the ground reality is that Bangladeshi society today has been Islamised to a large degree. This is different from having a Muslim-majority nation that protects its religious minorities. Islamist groups operating at the grassroots level, especially in rural Bangladesh, have been slowly marginalising non-Muslims through force and intimidation. In many parts of Bangladesh, religious minorities live in constant fear. They are repeatedly attacked and looted with their homes and places of worship frequently destroyed. And unfortunately in most cases the miscreants get away with impunity because local authorities, politicians and Muslim residents covertly support them.

This is because they see Hindus and other minorities as easy targets who can be dispossessed of their property and their girls forcibly converted to Islam and married off. And the covert social support for such deplorable activities shows that the entire atmosphere has been Islamised in Bangladesh. In such a scenario, minorities have been relegated to second-class status.

Of course, on paper they continue to enjoy equal rights as Muslim Bangladeshi citizens. And we also have parties like the Awami League courting the minority vote. But this doesn’t improve the situation of minorities. At the ground level, they continue to be threatened and intimidated. One way to address this situation is for Bangladesh to revert back to its 1972 Constitution and denotify Islam as the state religion. However, a petition to this effect was dismissed by the Bangladeshi high court earlier this year – again confirming the Islamised atmosphere prevailing in Bangladesh today.

This leaves us with only one option – to de-Islamise Bangladeshi society by investing heavily in secular education. It’s a fact that the education system in Bangladesh is far from satisfactory. A significant proportion of the country’s students study in madrasas. True, in Bangladesh these madrasas can be categorised as ‘quomi’ (private, unaided) and ‘aliyah’(government-aided). The latter follow a government-crafted curriculum and offer secular subjects such as maths and science in addition to religious teaching. Together, quomi and aliyah madrasas account for 10.3% of primary and 21.2% of secondary enrolment.

But a 2009 survey that was supported by the World Bank not only found learning levels in aliyah madrasas in secular subjects to be extremely poor, but also discovered that in general schools religious learning (Islam) of the students was more than satisfactory. In other words, madrasas are doing a poor job of imparting secular education, while secular schools have students well-versed in religious pedagogy. This needs to be corrected if Bangladeshi society is to reverse the Islamist trend. And this can only be done by investing heavily in general schools to expand their geographical reach and dramatically improve their standards in secular subjects.

In fact, the Bangladeshi government should aim to get the madrasa students into general schools. That’s the only way in which it can hit out at the root of Islamism in that country. And this is a project that must be undertaken in earnest. For, the rising tide of Islamism not only threatens Bangladesh’s minorities but also creates fertile grounds for Islamist terror groups – the Dhaka café attack in July exemplifies this point. Given demographic evidence, Bangladesh will remain a Muslim-majority country. But it needs to be a secular Muslim-majority country where all Bangladeshis are equally protected and the state is blind to religion.

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11. SRI LANKA: PARACHERIWELI AND THE JAFFNA MUSLIMS’ STRUGGLE TO RETURN
by Swasthika Arulingam
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(Daily FT - 19 November 2016)

In July this year, a conference on social justice was held at the Jaffna Public Library.  Amongst the many topics discussed in the conference were the social and economic challenges faced by the Jaffna Muslims amidst an incomplete and flawed process of resettlement. 

Badusha Rameez, an activist and a returnee Muslim, spoke at the conference. She spoke of her struggles to resettle in Jaffna and secure a safe environment to live in. She said her story like many other Muslims have been that of discrimination and degradation by the authorities in Jaffna. The message was clear to her community from the bureaucracy. Go elsewhere. Do not come back here. 

Two weeks after Badusha spoke at the conference a case was filed against her and two other Muslim women by the Department of Agrarian Development. They were charged for building houses on paddy land without obtaining permission from the Department. 

Bureaucratic barricades to housing grants    

Badusha is from one of the 2,115 Muslim families who registered to return to Jaffna after the war in 2009. The Government at that time had put an advertisement in the newspaper calling all families to return. However, due to lack of assistance in rebuilding houses and livelihood opportunities, almost 90% of the families remain a floating population between their districts of displacement and Jaffna. 

When the 50,000 Indian Housing scheme was implemented in 2012, less than 30 Jaffna Muslims were approved for housing even though more than 300 applied. Only after protests and heavy lobbying was the number increased to about 50. Following this another 10,000 houses were granted by the Resettlement Ministry to the war-affected districts. Out of this only 74 slots were allocated to returnee Muslims in Jaffna and that too again after considerable pressure was applied on officials in Colombo.

Hundreds of Muslim applicants were rejected in the last seven years by the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat’s Office on grounds of not having proper title to land and not showing proof of continuous residence in Jaffna. The Muslim families have consistently claimed that it is not possible for urban families like themselves to live in temporary shacks for years while waiting for permanent houses. Lack of sanitary facilities, unclean environment and security concerns have pushed these families to live in a state of limbo between Jaffna and other districts since 2009. 

The Jaffna bureaucracy has taken this as a criterion to adjudge that the returnee families have permanent houses elsewhere. In line with this thinking, sudden spot checks were done during the day time to see if families are present in their temporary residence, when a list of eligible recipients were prepared for the Indian Housing project. Families stated that if the house was empty at the time of visit by an official, they were automatically rejected from the housing grant.  There were no further efforts to verify claims by the returning Muslims. 

Unused paddy land 

Prof. Shahul Hasbullah of Peradeniya University, in an advocacy document, has identifies at least 800 plots of readily available land in Jaffna, which can be used for housing for returnee Muslims. One such area is Paracheriweli a coastal land which officials claim is a paddy land. However according to the Farmers’ Organisation and locals this land has not been used for cultivation at least since the 1980s. 

Before their displacement in 1990, Muslim and Tamil families had bought plots of lands in this area and were converting them in to a small community settlement. Foundations of houses and a bakery, wells and broken walls of a mosque are the only remaining signs of the old settlement. Everything else was destroyed due to heavy shelling of the area before and after 1990. 

Paracheriweli was already a settlement area for returnee Tamil families when Badusha together with four other families came to resettle in 2013. However three families opted to stay in nearby rented houses till they obtained housing assistance. 

Badusha, who could not afford to pay rent, constructed a temporary shack and resided in that area. It was only when she became eligible for the Indian Housing Scheme and sought permission from the Municipal Council and the Department of Agrarian Development to build a house, did the authorities intervene and prohibit construction.

According to sources, out of the 26 applicants (21 Tamil families and five Muslim families) who sought permission to build houses in Paracheriweli in 2014, 18 Tamil families were granted permission by the Department of Agrarian Development. Two Muslim families appealed directly to the Commissioner General of the Department in Colombo and obtained permission. It was only six families who were refused permission. 

Many reasons were given by the officials for denying permission. One official told the families that the authorities have plans to recommence cultivation. Another said Jaffna rain water recedes into the sea through this area and hence housing construction will block the water flow. 

A recent report prepared by the Government Agent of Jaffna on 10 October claimed amongst other reasons that this area functions as a water catchment area needed to preserve the ground water in Jaffna. This report also advised that it was unwise to continue settlements in light of the harm which may ensue to the families in that area and in adjacent areas. 

However none of these concerns seem to have prevented the authorities from allowing 20 families to build houses on the same land. Nor were they compelling enough for the authorities to prevent new constructions coming up as late as 2014. 

Northern Provincial Council resolution    

The urgency to resolve the resettlement issue of the Jaffna Muslims have been highlighted by different Government officials and agencies attached to the Central Government. In 2015, the Northern Province Governor wrote a letter addressing the Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture requesting these lands to be allocated for housing. Over the last year, the Office of National Unity and Reconciliation, headed by Madam Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge, also took an active role in advocating with relevant officials to resolve this matter. 

The Northern Provincial Council which had until recently maintained silence on the issue of Muslim resettlement passed a resolution on 27 October. This resolution requested the Government Agent of Jaffna and the Department of Agrarian Development to convert paddy lands found in the Pommaweli and Paracheriweli areas into high lands for the purpose of Muslim resettlement.  It is to be noted that this resolution was passed few weeks after the Government Agent’s report had recommended not to settle persons until further study has been conducted. 

Central Government apathy towards Muslim resettlement  

The Governor’s letter and the Northern Provincial Council resolution highlight the unsuitability of the Paracheriweli land for cultivation due to high saline content in the soil. Both documents also stress that the land has not been used for cultivation for decades. Yet the Agrarian Development Act No. 46 of 2000 has brought a land unsuitable for paddy cultivation under its purview. In addition, the Jaffna town area with an expanding population and dense housing spaces is short on housing land and the Government Agent’s rationale for using an area of land amounting to as much as 12 acres for drainage seems illogical. 

Furthermore, all six families who were refused permission in 2013 by the Department of Agrarian Development commenced construction without permission. And yet it is only the three Muslim families that have been brought to Courts for violating the law.

Badusha and her community find themselves trapped in a grey area between the biases of the administrators and the rigidity of the law. They find themselves at the mercy of a handful of administrators who have selectively used the law. This naturally raises questions about the racial biases of the bureaucracy in Jaffna. 

The Central Government has been churning out policies on resettlement year after year since the war ended. However, it is neither the lacuna in the policy, the lack of resources nor the complexity or sensitivity of the case that are preventing the Government from taking concrete action. It is the lack of political will and indifference that not only undermines reconciliation between Tamils and Muslims but also leads to a politically voiceless community to live in disarray and continue to suffer without proper shelter for years after the war.

(Swasthika Arulingam is a lawyer and has been working with the Jaffna Muslim community since 2015.)

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12. INDIA: CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMONETISATION SHOCK | SUDIPTO MUNDLE
========================================
(Live Mint - Nov 18 2016)

We are likely to see a significant dip in economic activity till January or even till the end of the financial year because of this disruption


The images on television are troubling. Harassed people queuing for hours. An elderly man, obviously quite sick, crying helplessly. The hospital wouldn’t admit him for the required surgery nor would the chemist sell him the drugs he needed because his money had ceased to be legal tender. A lady crying, her husband had just died because no hospital would admit him. The treatment money she had had suddenly become worthless. Frustration is widespread, patience is running thin, and there are worrying reports about incidents of violence, fortunately still isolated. It is a challenging moment for the country. It is a pity that instead of empathizing with the people in the queues, some TV panellists are dismissing their plight or even provocatively asserting that all complainants must be black-money wallas or terrorist sympathizers. Let’s step back from emotion and dispassionately consider the consequences of the demonetization shock.

In tune with Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction”, disruptive technologies and events are now considered to be good things, the forces that drive competitive capitalism. The demonetization shock is certainly disruptive. Eighty-six per cent of the money in circulation has been extinguished at a moment’s notice. It had to be done suddenly, without warning. Otherwise, its whole purpose would have been defeated. But is it good for Indian capitalism? What are likely to be its immediate and longer term consequences?

In addressing these questions, we must first recognize that the big fish who have amassed huge wealth from black money, i.e., tax-evaded income, hold most of it as real estate, gold and other real assets. Some of it is also held as assets abroad. None of these will be affected by demonetization. A relatively small portion is held as non-bank money to finance “black” transactions. This component is the target of demonetization.

However, black money cannot be easily separated from white money. It depends on whether or not a particular transaction generated any tax-evaded income. Some portion of such black money flows from criminal activities such as drug peddling, human trafficking or worse. But most of it is generated from normal economic transactions.

Thus, you may purchase something from your tax-reported income, i.e. from white money. But if the shopkeeper doesn’t report the transaction, the money now becomes black money. If he then spends it on something with tax-compliant billing, the money is transformed back into white money. Alternatively, he could under-report your transaction by, say, 50%. In which case half of the transaction is white money and the other half is black. Thus, the same Rs 1,000 note is white at some stage of its circulation and black at another, or a part of it is white and the other part black! It is therefore extremely difficult to estimate how much of the money in circulation is white or black or, for that matter, how much of India’s national income is white and how much is black.

Without getting into technicalities, let it suffice to say that black money is so intermingled with white money and so widespread that any attempt to curb it sends shock waves through the system. The shock can have both negative and positive effects.

The largest adversely affected group, numerically, is the working class. Casual workers are at the bottom of the working-class hierarchy. Their incomes are the lowest and least secure. They spend the money as they earn it. Those paid in old Rs500 or Rs1,000 notes would have had to lose a day’s wage to queue up at banks to convert their money. If the cash ran out, they would have had to lose another day’s wage. Meanwhile, they would have had no money to buy food, medicines or other essentials, and God help them if they had a medical emergency. In the towns and cities, these workers are queueing up at banks. What about unbanked villages? The banks have reportedly despatched armies of mobile-banking correspondents to service such villages. How that is working out on the ground I have no idea.

Next, there are the medium-skilled blue- and white-collar workers in the unorganized sector and contract workers in the organized sector. Finally, there are the regular organized-sector workers, the most skilled and the best paid. All of these wage/salary recipients would have received their wages shortly before the demonetization. They too would have had to miss work and queue up at banks or ATMs to convert their money. Without conversion, they would have had no usable money for food, medical expenses and other essentials.

The entire working class adds up to about 400 million persons. Most of them are unlikely to have any tax-evaded income because their annual incomes would be below the income-tax-exemption threshold. They and their families are bearing pain for the sins of others. Hopefully, the pain will be short-lived and the working class will be back to business as usual once the demonetized notes are replaced by new notes and normal money supply is restored.

The next major group adversely affected are the small-medium enterprises in services and industry, especially wholesale and retail traders. Cash transactions are an integral part of their daily operations, especially for traders. Their range of goods includes everything from raw materials to intermediate inputs to food items and other consumer goods. Numerically, this class is not as large as the working class, but their impact on economic activity is very large. Demonetization is a bit like a car running out of fuel in their case. Their businesses have been severely disrupted. Those with substantial stocks of black money are also probably taking large haircuts. We are likely to see a significant dip in economic activity till January or even till the end of the financial year because of this disruption.

The third group adversely affected are the self-employed professionals, for example, doctors, lawyers, accountants. It has been suggested that the incidence of tax-evaded income is high among this group, many of whom are high net-worth individuals. Their wealth portfolios would be similar in structure to those of the “big fish” even if not quite as large. For both groups, the large non-monetary component of their wealth would be unaffected, but the monetary component will be extinguished to the extent that demonetization forces the unloading of hoarded black money.

For all the three groups above, the impact would probably be quite short-lived. But for a fourth category, the real-estate industry, the disruption is likely to be quite severe and long lasting. This sector is the destination where large proportions of black-money flows are converted into real assets, and black-money transactions are all-pervasive. The sector has already been in the doldrums for the past couple of years and transactions are likely to remain frozen for quite a while, with corresponding downstream effects in cement, steel and other construction materials.

Turning to broader macroeconomic implications, let’s first look at the fiscal impact. Of the large deposits flowing into banks every day, if a significant component turns out to be tax-evaded income, it will generate an incremental flow of direct-tax revenue and penalties. On the other hand, as mentioned above, we are likely to see significantly reduced economic activity during the next few months, and that will reduce the flow of indirect-tax revenue. Clearly, no hard estimates of the net effect is possible at present. But my judgement is that total tax revenue will be well below budget projections, leading to an increase in the fiscal deficit.

On the monetary side, a very interesting phenomenon is playing out. On the one hand, 86% of currency in circulation by value has been extinguished in one shot, delivering a huge negative monetary shock. On the other hand, there is a massive increase in bank deposits. Essentially, a part of the money supply that was taken out of the banking circuit has been brought back into it, i.e., from the black economy to the white economy. The large growth of bank deposits will enable the enhanced flow of bank credit. Whether that actually happens or not will depend on the banking sector’s other problems, particularly the dire stressed assets situation in public sector banks. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has provided some accommodation on that front by recently easing its asset classification norms.

Thus, there will be two forces acting to increase aggregate demand. The increased fiscal deficit and, possibly, the increased flow of bank credit. Whether this will be enough to offset the immediate negative impact of the monetary shock on economic activity is a judgement call. My own guess is that on balance, we will see a reduction in economic activity over the next few months.

Will demonetization curb the growth of the black economy, its main goal? This question has to be addressed in the larger context of an evolving policy environment. The legislation on benami transactions is now in place. So is the bankruptcy code. Demonetization is forcing the declaration of hoarded black money. The goods and services tax will also tilt the scale against tax evasion. With the overall tightening of the regulatory environment, tax evaders and wilful defaulters may consider changing their game.

Describing this as a possible paradigm shift in the policy environment, former RBI governor Y.V. Reddy mentioned in a recent conversation that action may gradually shift to the courts as tax evaders and wilful defaulters look for legal protection. Whether or not measures like demonetization can clean up Indian capitalism will depend ultimately on how effectively the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and RBI cooperate in the joint campaign against black money.

Sudipto Mundle is emeritus professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, and was a member of the Fourteenth Finance Commission.

o o o 

[See also:

A nation disrupted: Demonetisation is not a visionary scheme. It is a dereliction of duty.
by Randeep Singh Surjewala | Updated: November 21, 2016
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/demonetisation-narendra-modi-black-money-economy-impact-liberalisation-currency-notes-ban-4386346/

Interview: Demonetisation is a large shock to the Indian economy – with little impact on black money
http://scroll.in/article/821913/interview-demonetisation-might-have-little-impact-on-black-money-but-will-hurt-the-indian-economy

Usha Ramanathan offers the most radical hypothesis of the note ban yet
Suhas Munshi
http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/usha-ramanathan-offers-the-most-radical-hypothesis-of-the-note-ban-yet-1479754933.html/fullview

4.5 million trucks stranded on Indian roads, says transporters' union
Piyush Rai | TNN | Nov 19, 2016
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bareilly/4-5-million-trucks-stranded-on-Indian-roads-says-transporters-union/articleshow/55517440.cms

The 1991 Monetary Reform in the Soviet Union
https://sputniknews.com/business/20110202162419049/   ]

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13. HOW A NATION LOST ITS MIND
by P. M. Candler Jr.
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(Los Angeles Review of Books - November 20, 2016

SKIES BREAK over Nuremburg, gabled rooftops of the great medieval city radiant in autumn light. Orderly columns of troops march over the Pegnitz River. We see his winged chariot, a Junkers Ju 52, land without a sound. Then we see him. He alights on the tarmac, heils of glee. Legions of fans — children, adults — line the streets as the procession winds through the old city. There are thousands of them. We are with him, and he is with us.

The opening scene in Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious film about the 1934 National Socialist Party rally, Triumph of the Will, is replete with the mythical, symbolic, and rhetorical elements that would become boilerplate throughout Third Reich: the appearance of voluntary mass consent, the awakening from dark slumber to a sunlit future, the glorious restoration of a great civilization, and, above all — Lo! he comes on clouds descending — the mythical evocation of a messianic hero. In making Triumph, the paradigmatic exemplar of propaganda film, Riefenstahl claimed merely to have done her job, which was to make art. With her help, as Nicholas O’Shaughnessy argues in his lucid new book Selling Hitler: Propaganda & the Nazi Brand, Adolf Hitler “owned the means of vivid communication necessary to bequeath an imagistic legacy to history like no other” and conducted “the most comprehensive public relations operation in history.”

Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” Politics, for the Nazis, was both coerced assent and internal persuasion.

Selling Hitler tells the story of the latter half of that two-pronged stratagem: the Nazis’ phenomenal rise to power and subsequent political successes in capitalizing on the malaise of the German people after the failure of Weimar and the embarrassments of World War I, especially the Versailles Treaty, which provided “an inexhaustible supply of rhetorical points for beer hall meetings as the victimhood of Germany was rhetoricised into outrage through the beery haze of tribal sentimentality.”

Hitler knew how to seize upon the shame of Versailles and exploit a populace eager to “make Germany great again.” That sentiment obviously comes with a strong dose of presentism. But the similarities between the National Socialist Party and the American right-wing populist revolt in 2016 are not always as one-to-one as some readers might wish them to be. The shoot-from-the-hip Twitter politics and traveling improv show of Donald Trump cannot compare with the extensive forethought and theorizing that went into the Nazi propaganda machine. If anything, Hitler tended to think before he spoke.

In the enormous and ever-expanding scholarship on Nazi Germany, originality is increasingly hard to come by. The novelty of Selling Hitler consists in its claim that not Goebbels but Hitler “was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich — its editor and its first author.” The argument is not entirely convincing, however. Goebbels (and other propagandists like the lesser-known Walther Schulze-Wechsungen) gets most of the zingers in this volume and emerges as the more sophisticated theorist of Nazi propaganda. Hitler was a catalyst more than an innovator, and O’Shaughnessy shows how deeply invested Hitler was in image production, chiefly his own, from the very beginning of his career: “Hitler’s first, regularly paid employment in the period after the First World War was as a professional propagandist.”

Whether Hitler or Goebbels was the ur-propagandist of the Third Reich may not ultimately matter to the reader, or to the argument of Selling Hitler (the book is forceful enough without this claim). It is enough to be reminded of the ways in which encoded political message-events form and inform us, and of the amount of effort it requires in an even more media-saturated era for consumers of information to remain attentive to the subtle transformations of desire and will that are being enacted through us, with or without our help:

All of [the Nazis’] junior myths were successful because the first and greatest myth — i.e. the invincibility of Adolf Hitler — was never interrogated or negated in the minds of the German people. Hyperbole replaced reason, feeling substituted for analysis and visceral emotion saturated popular consciousness.

The Nazis were arch instrumentalists: pilfering, proof-texting, plagiarizing, and conscripting from philosophy, science, myth, history, tradition, anything that might serve their own metanarrative. And when those instruments proved problematic, they ditched them and revised the narrative again. For example, the Gothic script with which Triumph of the Will opens was replaced in 1941 as the official typeface of the Nazi regime by the more “Latin” Antiqua style, not because it was easier to read, but because it was determined that “Gothic script had been polluted by Hebraic writing.”

Propaganda is often understood as a sort of ornament for political action: the sauce for the goose step, so to speak, but

[w]hat made the Nazis special was their pursuit of propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government […] but as the totality, the idea through which government itself governed. They saw public opinion as something that could be created, commodified and re-made.

They did not distinguish between “policy and propaganda: the two were the same instrument, the one unintelligible without the other.”

Playing it fast and loose with history, philosophy, and even fairy tale (one Nazi film version of “Little Red Riding Hood” depicts a dagger-wielding SS soldier as the benevolent savior of Little Red) was advantageous to a regime for which “the colonization of the German mind represented the first of the Nazi invasions.” It was also payback. As Heinrich Himmler said, “Our teaching of German origins has depended for centuries on a falsification. We are entitled to impose one of our own at any time.”

The Nazis loved the mutability of movies, and not just documentaries like Triumph of the Will and Riefenstahl’s earlier film, The Victory of Faith. The message in these films is unambiguously forceful — swastikas, iron crosses, blackshirts — but permeated with an appeal to charm. Nazi Germany is portrayed as the true heir of classical Greece, its ideals of beauty, heroism, and strife.

Goebbels’s own strategy in film production mirrored the shifting nemeses of the regime. In 1933, a trio of films (S.A.-Mann Brand, Hitler Youth Quex, and Hans Westmar) anathematized the party’s early opponents: communists and liberals. By 1940, the films The Rothschilds, Jud Süß, and The Eternal Jew reflected a singular focus on the Jewish “internal enemy,” the label under which every menace was exclusively consolidated, even in light entertainment in which the anti-Semitic messages of the Reich could be encoded and digested virtually unawares. Up to the last film to be made under Goebbels’s direction, the 1945 Kolberg, the regime “sought its own immortality in celluloid.”

Hitler and Goebbels spared no expense to Leni Riefenstahl, who maintained her artistic purity in spite of being morally compromised by her art. They gave her everything she wanted, and ultimately protests of innocence were useless. Despite her prodigious talents as a filmmaker, her career never recovered from her associations with the Nazi elite. It does not matter how pure your devotion to cinema is when Adolf Hitler owns the studio.

Film was only one flank of the Nazi propaganda offensive, however. From architecture to typography, propaganda was “ubiquitous and embossed on every surface.” Goebbels once remarked that “the moment one becomes aware of propaganda, it loses its effectiveness.” “We cannot,” he said, “be satisfied with just telling the people what we want and enlightening them as to how we are going to do it.”

The effectiveness and uniqueness of Nazi propaganda was its insistence that consent could not solely be compelled or coerced, but had to be motivated from within. Therefore, the Reich “represents the evolution of a partnership between masses and demagogue, a co-production.”

Hitler was a genius at seizing upon the fears of a defeated populace, nativist xenophobia, and nostalgia for a mythical golden age, in order to sell a story of the German future that proved overwhelmingly persuasive. It sold in part because of artists like Riefenstahl, co-illusionists who helped to construct a monstrous mythology by confidently maintaining a cool detachment from political entanglements. Her naïve view of pure art proved a readymade tool for the propagandist.

Selling Hitler is not the work of an historian but of a professor of communication whose previous work includes studies of propaganda and marketing in public policy. The first section (“Narratives and Theories”) rehearses the early enthusiasm and late fatigue of Nazi propaganda, and his marshaling of resources sometimes shies away too quickly from close attention to primary sources. In the second half of the book (“A Propaganda Trinity”), O’Shaughnessy seems on much more comfortable terrain. This, the richest section of Selling Hitler, illuminatingly treats the Third Reich’s deployment of myths, symbols, and rhetoric with the eye and ear of a theorist keenly tuned to the subtle plays of power and desire within the manufacture of the “spiritual-religious idea” that is Nazism.

A fresh take on an area of scholarship dominated by historians, Selling Hitler teems with insight into the subtle ways in which a subliminally reinforced political message can become consciously internalized and defended by well-intentioned citizens. It could have been strengthened by the use of images and more helpful endnotes, and if it feels rushed at times, it is clearly no accident that this book was released in the United States during the final months of a presidential campaign that has shattered all previous records for absurdity. That timing is not coincidence but marketing, the theme of Selling Hitler.

It is impossible to read O’Shaughnessy’s timely book without thinking of Donald Trump. But Trump is nothing if not a protean master of branding with a flair for optics. His particular self-concocted myth is supposed to be a symbol of the American Dream, of what you can achieve if you just work hard enough. It has proven a seductive and very successful illusion, suitable for an age of short attention and blissful insouciance toward history.

We see his winged chariot, a Boeing 757, land without a sound. Then we see him. He alights on the tarmac, whoops of glee. Legions of fans — children, adults — fill the hangar where he will promise to “make America great again.” There are thousands of them, eager to touch the hem of his garment. He has his own airplane.


P. M. Candler Jr., a former associate professor of theology at the Honors College of Baylor University, is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina.

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14. USA: THE MYTH OF DONALD TRUMP’S WHITE WORKING-CLASS SUPPORT
by Vito Laterza and Louis Philippe Römer
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(Africa is a Country - November 17, 2016)

Whiteness is the biggest single factor that emerges from the US presidential election. The majority of white voters across gender and most income groups who went to the polls voted for Donald Trump, someone who does not hide his white supremacist views, condones sexual assault, and built his campaign on openly anti-immigration, anti-Latino and anti-Muslim themes.

Yet sectors of the Euro-American left adamantly stress the role of the white working classes in facilitating Trump’s victory, and dismiss race as “identity politics”, not completely explaining the Trump phenomenon.

Two leaders of the left, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, were quick to frame this election as a kind of “popular revolt” – very much like they did with Brexit a few months ago. For them, progressives should pay attention to Donald Trump’s anti-establishment narrative, so that we can offer alternatives without the “divisive rhetoric”. Sanders went as far as offering to collaborate with Trump on select issues that will help people come out of the crisis, as long as the president-elect does not engage in racism, sexism and xenophobia. Trump has just announced that he will immediately deport three million migrants, but that has not weakened the Vermont senator’s resolve. Influential commentators say that the anti-establishment left alternative to Trumpism should begin from white workers who supported Trump.

This story of an aggrieved “white working class” who joined Trump in huge numbers to rebel against neoliberal elites and neglectful Democrats is less an objective appraisal of working class voting trends, than a reflex of leftist common sense, inflected perhaps by a yearning for the heyday of (white) union solidarity in the Rust Belt.

Add to this the vicissitudes of the electoral college, and it is no wonder that some on the left focused on the behavior of about four hundred thousand voters in the Great Lakes region –Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and ignored the rest of the country. Closer analysis reveals that Republican support in the Midwest grew predominantly in rural areas, and in areas where whites are the overwhelming majority – these include both low and middle income areas. From our own data analysis in the three states above, Donald Trump’s growth compared to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012 is significantly higher in counties with the biggest concentration of white residents than in the most racially mixed ones. This is not surprising, because negative attitudes toward immigration, non-white populations, gender, and LGBT issues are highest when whites live in racially homogeneous communities, and support for racism and anti-immigrant views are the strongest predictors for support for Trump.

Although the ballots are still being tallied, it looks like Hillary Clinton – the establishment candidate – will be receiving the third highest number of votes in the political history of the United States. People of color voted for Clinton. Moreover, Clinton won the support of most voters earning under USD$50,000 a year. Far from a popular rebellion against a neoliberal establishment, then, a vast majority of voters who have endured structural economic and political disenfranchisement as well as the negative effects of the recent economic crisis, chose Clinton – the “establishment” candidate. Surely, they too have economic anxieties and grievances about the system, but did not vote for Donald Trump.

The gender dimension is also glossed over. The vitriolic sexist rhetoric Clinton has had to face is easily dismissed. Women have suffered from the recent financial crisis too, and like all disadvantaged groups, they bear the brunt of it more than better positioned groups. White women supported Trump by a smaller majority than white men, and women of color voted for Clinton more than men of color, but these trends are largely ignored. Not to mention, an estimated 30 to 40 million US residents are politically disenfranchised and could not vote.

These larger facts are important context for interpreting Trump’s decisive but marginal gains in a few key states. But commentators downplay them both to bolster a tidy narrative of working class rebellion, and to dismiss the importance of race and gender. This story veers dangerously close to the long-standing caricature of the “poor white,” which elites have used to avoid a reckoning with their own complicity with economic and racial inequalities. This dismissal disregards the suffering of groups who have experienced centuries of structural discrimination and marginalization, both in the US and abroad. It reinforces racial, ethnic and gender divisions, and thus undermines the possibility for broader solidarities.

What is also left out is that many whites – many of whom are not impoverished working classes – now feel under attack as “whites.” The election of Barack Obama, the first African- American president, contributed to a feeling that the world is becoming hostile to their very existence. Some believe that a conspiracy of minorities, leftists, feminists, and multi-billionaires, often Jewish, have allied to marginalize the “common white folk.” White racial anxiety is not a new problem in the history of American politics. Even perceptions of economic insecurity are filtered by racial anxieties, which makes race and economics impossible to separate. Racism is neither false consciousness nor mere bigotry, but an ideological and material structure that confers social privilege and material benefits onto a group, and mobilizes that group against any attempt to take away their benefits.

Disregarding the advances made by queer, feminist and critical race theories and social movements, many (mostly white) leftists do not recognize that racism and sexism are structures that regulate the distribution of economic, social, educational and other resources. Instead, they treat racism as rhetorical baggage left-over from the bad old days of colonialism and Jim Crow, allegedly used by elites to “mislead” the working classes. Workers who are white must be included into a wider coalition, but to think that a mere change in messaging will do the trick vastly underestimates the forces that the left is up against. Proposals cannot avoid tackling white and male privilege simply because “that’s our base”.

Nobody doubts that the establishment is in crisis, and something must change. But why is it this is becoming common sense only now when it is affecting white Americans and Europeans? Why should a core of emboldened Trump supporters be the starting point for constructing a broad alliance against the devastating effects of a racial and gendered capitalist world order?

The role of the left should not be to focus its efforts on bargaining with the often misrepresented and caricatured concerns of a small sector of the working classes. It is to mobilize a broader intersectional alliance that can effectively tackle various forms of discrimination, and that addresses the differential levels of discrimination and exclusion experienced by various groups.

Framing the Trump phenomenon as the wrong response to the right concerns goes in the opposite direction. Knowingly or not, it feeds the growing wave of white nationalism and xenophobia that is taking America and Europe by storm.

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15. US ELECTIONS 2016: DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY IS A DISASTER FOR MODERN MASCULINITY
by Jacqueline Rose
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(The Guardian - 15 November 2016)

Nostalgia for sexual certainties won the election. But it’s just as oppressive for men as it is for women
Donald Trump autographs woman's chest on the campaign trail
Donald Trump makes his mark on the campaign trail. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP


As the reality of the US election sinks in, perhaps our biggest mistake was to see simplicity in the crass figure who will now “lead” the free world. In fact he tapped into the deepest, most disturbing strata of the human mind. And men, as well as women, will be the casualties.

One of the most important achievements of feminism over the last half-century, as even Donald Trump must somewhere know, has been to get men, or at least some men, to think critically about, even to reject, the crassest version of masculinity on offer. To ask themselves what they in fact have to gain from a way of being a man in the world that harms women, but which also – since it is as ridiculous as it is cocksure – leaves all men vulnerable to exposure. (Trump will surely go down in history as the first presidential candidate to boast of his penis size).

When Trump parades his assaults on the dignity of women as a source of pride, it is therefore disastrous for women, but no less so for any man who has come to see this caricature of masculinity as a travesty. Where do such men turn now? What are they, and their sons, meant to make of the strutting, grimacing Trump, who will grace all of our TV screens and the front pages of newspapers by the day? How do men and women relate to one another, and how do men relate to other men, if the man who gets the biggest prize of all regards women as subhuman?

That sexuality has been at the core of this election is clear: whether Trump’s boastful groping and denied assaults on women, Bill Clinton’s own sexual history, or the crass, illegal sexting of a 15-year-old girl by Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. It has been one of the cruellest injustices of the campaign that the Weiner scandal affected Clinton herself. As if the perversions of her aide’s husband were somehow her fault, instead of it being a reason to admire her that she remained loyal to another woman whose husband had, to put it kindly, let her down.

This is an old story. Even when it is the men who are behaving abominably, everything wrong in the world of sexuality is laid at the woman’s door. Hillary Clinton was guilty by association – which might partly explain the endless, and groundless, charges of criminality against her. The image of Trump supporters chanting, “Lock her up,” arms crossed at the wrist as if in handcuffs, will take a long time to fade. That is why his acknowledgement of her achievements in his acceptance speech rang so hollow. Whatever his more sober inclinations might be (and that is the optimistic version), we all now face the question: what on earth is Trump going to do with what he has unleashed in his followers?

One female Trump supporter, when asked on the eve of the election how she could vote for a man who treated women with such disrespect, shrugged her shoulders and replied: “Well, I am a woman and he is a man.” If Trump’s populism relied on nostalgia – making America great again, restoring jobs and communities felt to be lost – nostalgia for sexual certainty, however oppressive, violent or degrading, was one of the most powerful cards that he played. One tweet read: “If you want a country with 63 genders vote Clinton; if you want a country where men are men and women are women, vote Trump.” This at least has the benefit of clarity.

Seen in this light, Trump’s insulting behaviour towards women does not matter; in fact it is a small price to pay for doing away with any possible confusion about sexual identity, for allowing us to hold on to the illusion that, deep in our sexual being where nothing in fact can be certain, we all know unequivocally who and what we are. The rising tide of male sexual violence against women across the world could then be seen as serving a similar purpose: a type of marching order, a way of pinning down, with no room for dissent or struggle, the sacred, absolute difference between women and men.

Perhaps – we can dream – the opposite might just happen. Perhaps as the worst stereotypes start to bite, women and men will find themselves having to think and live outside a box of sexual categories as fragile as they can be dangerous.

There is a​ problem with the tendency among those of us opposed to Trump to disparage his supporters as mere bigots – misogynists, racists, “deplorables” in Clinton’s unfortunate expression – even if, or especially if, somewhere that also feels true. This tendency makes the mistake of claiming possession of the house of reason, as if no ugly thought or hateful impulse has ever entered our own hearts and minds. It makes a false claim of innocence. It consigns swaths of the US population to darkness, repeating in that moment its own version of the crude, exclusive, denigrating polarities from which we all have most to fear. After all, it is the rhetoric of innocence – only the other is to blame, we have done nothing – that gives licence to kill, as we have seen so starkly since the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were set off in response to 9/11.

Our mistake was to think that the ugliness would finish Trump; now we can see that the worse he was, the more assured his path to the White House became. As the right has always been so skilled at doing, Trump has licensed the obscenity of the unconscious. He has set the worst human impulses marching. But there are no clean slates in the unconscious. Not for any of us. At the very moment we galvanise politically, we must remain as vigilant of ourselves as of everyone else. Otherwise, before we know where we are, we will simply have joined in the murderous rhetoric of hatred.

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16. FRENCH POLITICIANS ARE NOW MARCHING TO MARINE LE PEN’S IMMIGRATION TUNE | Philippe Marlière
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(The Guardian - 20 November 2016)

As the mood darkens in Europe, French opposition to migration now extends to a category of EU worker

Marine Le Pen is moving on in the presidential polls while the main contenders play catch-up. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP
 
The first round of the French presidential election is five months away, yet France is already in political turmoil. There are several reasons. First, François Hollande, the incumbent president, is so weak and discredited that some expect him to pull out of the race altogether. This would be an unprecedented move for a president in office.

Second, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, is going from strength to strength. She is consistently polling at more than 20% of the share of the vote (against 17.9% in 2012) and seems guaranteed to make it to the second and decisive round of next year’s presidential elections. What’s more, Le Pen’s rise has been directly affecting her opponents across the political spectrum.

Rather than pushing back against her ideas, mainstream politicians have opted to emulate some of her key policy proposals. This is not a question of a left and right divide. Most high-profile politicians of all stripes have embraced Le Pen’s agenda: they promise tough law-and-order solutions; they constantly talk about “national identity”; they defend “republican values under the threat of Islam”; and they promote an exclusive if not discriminatory brand of secularism (laïcité). Last but not least, they insist that immigration, the FN’s pet topic since the 1980s, has to be curbed.

Anti-racist associations apart, the French public has shown little support in general for economic and political migrants. There have been situations of tension, in Calais notably, between migrants and the local population. In an October 2015 poll, 67% of the French population declared that family and housing state subsidies should only apply to EU migrants and 61% would like the government to scrap medical assistance for illegal migrants.

A September 2016 poll showed that 62% opposed welcoming in Europe migrants and refugees who sail to the Italian or Greek coasts. Notably, the level of support for migrants has decreased across voters of all political inclinations

The key question to ask on immigration, especially in the light of the Brexit vote, is: are there signs of the aversion to non-European migrants and lack of support for refugees extending to EU migrants?

Unlike in Britain the French population has not tended to direct its anger at EU workers. There could be a practical explanation. Tony Blair’s government enthusiastically opened up Britain’s borders to eastern European workers from 2004, the year of accession of 10 new member states. France, instead, restricted dramatically the conditions of access to its internal markets. Since then, the French government has fully adopted EU legislation, although it has never “caught up” with Britain on the number of eastern European migrants who work and live there.

A majority of French and British voters share the same dislike for EU bureaucracy, its byzantine legislation and the feeling of loss of “sovereignty”, which has to be “regained”. In France, there are also similar issues of racism and xenophobia, but these tend to focus on French citizens of foreign descent, notably from former colonies in North Africa.

So, for the moment, no mainstream politicians in France challenges the principle of free movement in the EU. Discussing Brexit in the British press recently, Nicolas Sarkozy warned Theresa May that no European government could agree to grant the United Kingdom free access to the single market if Britain does not accept free movement.

For a majority of French politicians, immigration is a problem, but it is essentially an extra-communitarian one. Manuel Valls, the prime minister, stressed the importance for Europe “to take urgent action to control its external borders… otherwise our societies will be totally destabilised”.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy delivers a speech during an election campaign rally in Nimes last week. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

Despite a steady increase in Euroscepticism in France, the underlying principle of free movement of people across the EU remains broadly undisputed. Apart from in one telling area. There is growing evidence of opposition towards EU migrants and the notion of freedom in what has become known as “social dumping”. This relates to “posted workers”, employees sent by their employer to carry out a service in another EU member state on a temporary basis. Those EU workers do not integrate in the labour market in which they work.

Hence, “social dumping”, where foreign service providers undercut local service providers because their labour standards are lower (in terms of pay and social protection). Interestingly, the most staggering attack against posted workers has come not from the far right, as one would expect, but from the radical left.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an MEP, a presidential candidate in 2012 and running again in 2017, has singled out posted workers in a speech at the European parliament last July. He declared that “posted workers took the bread out of French workers’ mouths”. Part of the French left was stunned by words that could have easily been uttered by Marine Le Pen.

It is undeniable that economic migration in France and in the UK has been, in some circumstances, poorly planned and has put a strain on public service provisions (schools, nurseries, hospitals). But still the prevailing view in France would be that EU migrants themselves are not responsible for the situation.

Our governments, it follows, have let people down by underinvesting in public services, by decisions they have taken in the first place: in 2004, the decision to enlarge Europe and the dismantling of the welfare state.

Economic migrants have become a convenient scapegoat, but by launching unprecedented austerity policies our governments have created a situation in which national states cannot cope with the sudden influx of EU workers at times of economic recession.

Sarkozy and Le Pen aim to take away immigrants’ rights and social protection that might not even be reallocated to nationals because of further spending cuts. But, at least for the moment, they don’t have EU migrants in their sights.

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17. GLOBAL CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENTS REFUSE TO BE OVERSHADOWED BY ELECTION OF CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER TO US PRESIDENCY
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We the undersigned organisations, networks, and movements gathered in Marrakech at COP22 issue the following collective statement in support of communities and movements around the world in response to Donald Trump becoming President-Elect of the United States of America and its potentially devastating implications for the cause of climate justice.

Record breaking global temperatures are already threatening staple crops in many regions, bleaching the world's coral reefs, decimating ecosystems, and driving killer droughts and floods that have devastated the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, fanning the flames of every existing inequality.

All around the world, people are taking action to stop this climate crisis from worsening. We are protecting and defending the places we love-waterways, forests, mountain ranges, our homes and our communities-and building the world we want: a clean, safe and more equal world.The fossil fuel special interest groups looking to take advantage of this election cannot stop this irresistible transformation.

Donald Trump is the face of the broken economic system that has caused climate change-the concentration of wealth, lobbyists and corporate interests. Big business will have a seat at the White House for the next four critical years, threatening the lives of people in the U.S. and around the world.

We all have a responsibility to show President-elect Trump and right-wing populists everywhere that we as climate justice groups and movements stand in solidarity with all people threatened and impacted by his Presidency. Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, elitism, and climate denialism are an insult and threat to us all.

We are determined not to allow our governments to normalise or accept such a destructive- agenda. They must act in the global public's interests and protect all of our futures by opposing the planet and people-wrecking policies espoused by Donald Trump.

Governments must begin by committing to their fair share of ambitious action needed to realise the Paris Agreement's goal of preventing a breach of the 1.5°C target, which would result in catastrophic climate change. We also know that the Paris Agreement alone will not get us off this destructive course. To confront this global crisis we must:

    End all coal, oil, and gas extraction;
    Commit to 100% renewable energy, encouraging decentralised energy, owned and built in our own communities;
    Create a just and equitable transition to a low carbon and more equal economy that protects those already marginalised and impacted by the failed globalised economy as well as those whose livelihoods depend on extractive industries;
    Act as a global community and welcome migrants, refugees and climate displaced people seeking the right to a safe and dignified life;
    Win back power for people over big business and ensure they are held accountable for their actions.

We urge U.S. state, city, and local governments to act to confront the climate crisis and confront Donald Trump head-on. The views of one man neither change how the rest of the world sees the climate crisis, nor can they change the reality of what needs to happen to keep temperature rise to a minimum, below 1.5°C . The rest of the world will go on with climate action, thanks to our incredible pressure as global movements and communities at the frontline who are building power.

We call on world leaders to fulfil their fair share of climate action, including delivering climate finance and transferring technology, and prove that they take the crisis seriously. Action is needed now, in the next 4 years-rich countries must ramp up their short-term 2020 targets in line with science and fairness, and support poorer countries to prosper cleanly.

In the international negotiations countries should put an end to the toxic influence of the U.S. which pushes for weak and toothless emission reduction targets. The global community, including governments, must forcefully apply political, legal and economic pressure with real consequences on the U.S. to do its fair share of action.

As global citizens we commit to build a climate movement, whose beating heart is justice, that can break out of its silo and create a broad based progressive movement alongside Black Lives Matter, Indigenous movements, women's movements, student movements, LGBTQI communities, migrants movements, labour movements, and local movements against corporate power and the fossil fuel industry that work together to address the inequalities and injustices that blight our world.

We stand in solidarity with Indigenous land and water protectors in Standing Rock, and climate justice and environmental justice movements that have been rooted in communities across the U.S. as they resist President-Elect Trump's attempt to back more fossil fuel expansion which will poison our environment, our air and our water. In our communities around the world we will mobilize against Trump everywhere he goes and hold our own governments to account for their fair share of climate action including blocking their plans for fossil fuel expansion.

Now is a moment of great fear and uncertainty, but we cannot give in to despair. People power has resisted great threats and transformed the world before-we must stand together once again for a just and liveable world for all.

Initial list of signatories

Action Aid International | Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt & Development | Center for Biological Diversity | Centre for Environment Justice Zambia | Climate Justice Project (US) | Corporate Accountability International | Corporate European Observatory | Earth in Brackets | Ecology Collective Association (Turkey) | Ecological Society of the Philippines | Ecologistas en Accion (Spain) | Engajamundo | Equity BD | Fairwatch (Italy) | Friends of the Earth Bosnia and Herzegovina | Friends of the Earth England, Wales, and Northern Ireland | Friends of the Earth International | Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives | Grassroots Global Justice | Human Nature | IBON International | Indian Social Action Forum | Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program | Join the Dots UK | LDC News Service | LDC Watch | Movimiento Ciudadano frente al Cambio Climático Peru | National Hawkers Federation India | Oil Change International | Oil Vay: Jewish Climate Action UK | Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance | Peoples Front Against IFIs India | Philippine Movement for Climate Justice | P3 Foundation | SustainUS | Tipping Point Collective | The Climate Justice Project | UK Youth Climate Coalition | Worldview-The Gambia | Young Friends of the Earth Europe | 350.org 

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18. TRUMP, RSS AND BLISSFUL COEXISTENCE
by Manu S. Pillai
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livemint.com - Nov 18 2016

Can any good come out of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti’s unevolved statements on marriage and marital rape, asks Manu S Pillai

Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the women’s wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Photo: Shankar Mourya/Hindustan Times

The victory last week of Donald Trump in America petrified masses of people who happen to not be men or white or Christian or straight in that country. But it also petrified this columnist, who suddenly felt immense amounts of pressure to reflect on the decline of The World As We Know It and the rise of a wild strongman to the throne in Washington. Then, however, comments emerged from a strongwoman (of the subcontinental variety) on another matter altogether, and suddenly my column was saved. With much relief, I cast aside Trump and the prospect of contributing a furious denunciation and chewed with gratitude on column fodder supplied, instead, by a distant associate of his in the universe of the political right.

“There is nothing called marital rape,” was the opening insight supplied by the general secretary of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (a women’s body, which, like its guiding organization, becomes “RSS” in acronym). No marks for originality to the general secretary, though—after all, she and I live in a country where successive governments have defended this line of policy with nervous pronouncements about “Indian culture” and “the institution of marriage”, both of which are apparently so fragile that an acknowledgment of violence would invite catastrophe. There is nothing called marital rape in our law books, and to that extent the general secretary is not wrong. But law books can, she should know, reside in the Stone Age—I happen to be named after a character who supposedly authored, in 2,684 verses, one such prototype called the Manusmriti. Fortunately, it was so bad that most people had the good sense to ignore it.

“Marriage is a sacred bond,” came next in the RSS secretary’s comments, which my venerable ancestors in Kerala would have dismissed—no offence—as balderdash. They were matrilineal Nairs, among whom it was the bond between brother and sister that was sacred; husbands and wives were dispensable. My great-great-grandmother’s first husband was not up to the mark and was dismissed, despite his many tears, from her presence in 1883. She then married my great-great-grandfather, who in turn had dissolved one previous marriage. They then went on to produce a man who successively espoused three women in the 1910s, before confirming the fourth. All of these people were pious, orthodox, “good” Hindus, but in their cultural context, marriage was most definitely not “sacred”. It was an arrangement, which could last a lifetime in cases, but was by no means binding on either party.

All that was needed for the wedding ceremony was an oil-lamp and the exchange of a piece of white cloth. If the lady accepted, the sambandham (relationship) had commenced. Indeed, so effortless was the process that when a governor of Madras in the 19th century, after a conversation on textiles with a Nair lady, offered to “send her a cloth” as “a specimen of the handiwork executed there”, the woman coyly replied that while she was “much obliged”, she was “quite satisfied with her present husband”. And all that was needed for divorce was for the cloth in question to be torn (or if one wanted to be direct, for the husband’s things to be left by the door—Malayalees were thrifty with time).

It was morality imported by Bible-wielding missionaries that converted marriage into a “sacred” affair, encouraging Nair women to forfeit sexual independence in return for patriarchal conformity as “good” wives. “Women, instead of fighting for rights, should focus on their duties, on how they can hold the society together, impart patriotism to their children and family members,” the RSS general secretary had declared in August. Apart from an unnecessary “the”, this line would comfortably gel into the propaganda unleashed in Kerala in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to persuade women to accept marriage as “sacred”, by men who reacted to Western criticism of their customs by ingesting that criticism.

I must confess I am not optimistic that this lesson in history will persuade the general secretary to change her mind because according to her, “social evils in our society are due to (foreign) invasion of 1,000 years. It will take time for society to come out of it.” In other words, if strange customs existed to demonstrate that a number of Indians did not treat marriage as sacred, they must have been perverted by influences from elsewhere (and I am tempted here to tell her the tale of the Kerala princesses who surprised an Italian in the early 17th century by showing up topless at court—he wondered why these women had such an abbreviated sense of dress, and they were puzzled, in return, by the layers of fabric with which he was encumbered—but I shall leave this story for another occasion).

Now, we turn to the final segment of the general secretary’s remarks: “Coexistence should lead to bliss. If we are able to understand the concept of this bliss, then everything runs smooth.” With this I have no disagreement, absolutely, for who does not want things to run smooth. In fact, it is my sincere hope that the good lady will forward this sentiment to president-elect Trump, who most certainly would benefit from lessons in the bliss of coexistence now that he can stick his thumb on nuclear buttons. Some good, then, may come out of the sum of her otherwise unevolved statements on marriage and marital rape.

Manu S. Pillai is the author of The Ivory Throne: Chronicles Of The House Of Travancore. Medium Rare is a weekly column on society, politics and history. 
 
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19. US WOMEN AND CHILDREN ARE THE NRA’S NEW TARGETS
by Fisun Güner
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Sharp shooters: women-only gun clubs – in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/sharp-shooters-women-only-gun-clubs-in-pictures

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20. THE RISE OF RUSSIA’S PATRIOTIC SUMMER CAMPS
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(New Republic - November 18, 2016)

Last year, the Kremlin called for an increase in patriotic youth—children who would grow up to be soldiers—by sending them to camp.
By The New Republic Staff
November 18, 2016

https://images.newrepublic.com/8352e574efc1eab8960824500f69ec894091b84b.jpeg?w=1000&q=65&dpi=1&fm=pjpg&fit=crop&crop=faces&h=667
Photograph by Sarah Blesener

Location: Borodino, Russia
Date: July 25, 2016

Each summer, thousands of boys and girls between the ages of eleven and 18 travel from all over Russia to attend patriotic summer camps near Moscow. They sleep in tents, play volleyball, and climb rocks. They also learn to fire guns, throw knives, and lob grenades.

Not since the Soviet era, when children enlisted as Young Pioneers, have patriotic summer camps been so popular in Russia. Last year, as Vladimir Putin flexed his muscles in Syria and the Baltic, the Kremlin called for an 8 percent increase in the number of patriotic youth—and a 10 percent increase in recruits for the Russian armed forces.

Sarah Blesener, an American photographer, traveled to Russia last summer to photograph the paramilitary camps. In Borodino, a small town where Russian and French troops clashed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Napoleonic Wars, two girls learn to fire handguns as part of their tactical training. They are dressed in the traditional uniform worn by Russian Airborne Troops: striped shirts, military fatigues, blue berets. Founded last year in response to the Kremlin’s call to arms, the camp promises to “awaken in the younger generation a keen interest in the history of the Fatherland, the glorious deeds of our ancestors.” Some campers can dismantle an AK-47 in under a minute.

Those involved in the camps see themselves as part of a national campaign to restore Russia’s military might. “We have no secrets from the world,” one tactical instructor told Blesener. “We don’t want war, but we are prepared for it.”

Starting November 18th, follow Sarah Blesener as she takes over the @NewRepublic Instagram account to share more photographs from her photo essay ‘Toy Soldiers’.

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21. ROSETTA GIULIANI CAPONETTO. FASCIST HYBRIDITIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF RACIAL MIXING AND DIASPORA CULTURES UNDER MUSSOLINI. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 199 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-137-48184-9.
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Reviewed by Beatrice Sica (University College London)
Published on H-Nationalism (November, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

As the subtitle indicates, Fascist Hybridities deals with the “representations of racial mixing and diaspora cultures under Mussolini.” In particular, as Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto explains in the introduction, “Fascist Hybridities examines how Italian literature and cinema of the 1930s are traversed by the hybrid figures of meticci and Levantines” (p. 4). Drawing on a number of studies on Italian colonialism, Fascist racism, the representation of black and meticci people in Mussolini’s Italy, and the presence of Italian Levantines in Egyptian Alexandria, and using in particular Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, Caponetto sets out to analyze the relationship between “narrative strategies” of the works she considers “and the political climate of the time” (p. 4). Her aim is to “reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity” by bringing “to light how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize colonial meticci and Levantines often undermine themselves” and to show “how certain images pressed into ideological service escaped their initial purposes, releasing unintended meanings” (p. 5). Chapter 1 provides an overview of Italy’s colonial history and legislation on interracial unions and biracial offsprings and focuses on three (children’s) colonial novels, Rosolino Gabrielli’s Il piccolo Brassa (1928) and Arnaldo Cipolla’s Balilla regale (1935) and Melograno d’oro. Regina d’Etiopia (1936). Chapter 2 addresses the figure of the Levantine and the “dissident literature of Fausta Cialente and Enrico Pea” (p. 18). Chapter 3 deals with propaganda cinema and examines Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (1936) and Guido Brignone’s Sotto la croce del sud (1938). Chapter 4 goes beyond Fascism, looking at Levantines and biracial offspring in postwar Italy.

The work is well grounded on historical studies on Fascist colonialism and racism, but for a book devoted to narrative strategies in the literature and cinema of the period, the number of primary sources that have been used seems too limited. Moreover, the kind of works analyzed do not seem always in line with the conclusions drawn, or these are drawn too hastily based on those works. For example, in order to illustrate the colonial novel, Caponetto uses three novels for children and young readers, but does not clarify her use of this particular subcategory. Instead, she moves from her analysis of the three examples within this subcategory to making points on the colonial genre as a whole and on literature in general under Fascism (see pp. 42-43; “The children’s colonial novel, like its adult counterpart,” p. 44; pp. 49-50; “A reading of colonial novels like Il piccolo Brassa and Melograno d’oro clearly shows how Fascist propaganda literature …,” p. 53; “a close reading of these novels reveals that the literature affiliated with the Fascist regime failed to condemn misgeneation,” p. 53). Likewise, discussing Pea’s and Cialente’s works that depict the lives of Italian characters in the cosmopolitan Egyptian Alexandria only to argue that “the phenomenon of Italians ‘going native’ undermined the unspoken goals of the demographic colonization in Ethiopia” (p. 65) seems out of focus. The author herself recognizes that “Alexandria was not an Italian colony but an Italian emigrant destination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 66), so why choose these works? Studies of Italian literature under Fascism have clarified how varied the picture of Italian literature was under Mussolini’s rule, so it is not a big surprise to see that alongside the Fascist (children’s) colonial literature there was also space for Pea’s and Cialente’s narratives: the two were just two different literary products (not to say that in the eyes of the regime’s censors, depicting the unhappy existence of Italians living outside Italy and its colonies might have appeared beneficial to the Fascist cause).

One way for the author to make her points stronger would have been to look at how the works she analyzes were received and at the circulation and reviews that they had. But Caponetto does not delve into this kind of evidence, which somehow undermines her argument (“it is unclear if the authors truly succeed in encouraging their Italian characters and readers to feel superior to the black protagonist and preventing them from realizing that they do not correspond to the ideal image constructed by the plot,” p. 43). Only for Brignone’s La croce del sud Caponetto reports that “the film received significant criticism in Fascist circles for its ambiguous portrayal of the character of Paolo” (p. 121), but here she relies on secondary sources and does not give examples of this heated debate, which would have provided a good example of anxieties and negotiations in Fascist Italy on these issues.

Overall, the reader of this study is presented with a flattened idea of literature and cinema. While it is true that propaganda works generally do not offer many nuances to their readers/viewers and divide the world into black and white, it is also true that narrative works come with their own devices and strategies to capture the readers’ attention, and these become apparent especially in a popular/children/propaganda context. Thus, although the regime preached that Fascist men should control their erotic desires, we know that, as Caponetto herself recognizes, there is always “the pleasure derived from transgression” (p. 52), so how can we be so sure that, for example, “Cipolla’s narrative strategy unintentionally transforms the reader into a voyeur” (p. 52)? It seems likely that Cipolla did want the desire to see the Ethiopian girl Melograno to remain central to the text. In sum, the book addresses an important issue--the visibility and representation of meticci and Levantine characters in narrative works produced under Fascism--but would have benefited from a wider range of sources and a more nuanced picture of the actual literary and cinematic production in Italy in the interwar years.

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