SACW - 26 Jan 2017 | Bangladesh: Textbook Changes / India: Social scientist Bela Bhatia threatened ; Mahatma Gandhi's Last Struggle / Indonesian intolerance / Myanmar: Kachin war / Europe: How To Pull The Ground From Under Right-wing Populism / The world in the era of Trump

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 26 Jan 2017 - No. 2925 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Controversial Draft Law Allowing Child Marriage in "special cases" is The Road to Regression
2. Secular Bangladeshis Worried About Textbook Changes
3. India: Hatred Justifies All | Mukul Dube
4. India - Kashmir: Sexism and moral policing behind online intimidation of actress Zaira Wasim
5. India: Social scientist Bela Bhatia threatened, asked to leave Bastar - new reports / commentary and reaction by human rights groups
6. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: RSS and Reservations - This is no off the cuff remark (Faraz Ahmad)
 - India: Tamil Nadu Elites Flirting with Chauvinism (Narayan Lakshman)
 - India - 2017 UP Assembly elections: For BJP, all bets are off in western U.P.
 - India: housing bias turning Indian cities into ghettos - No Muslims, no single women allowed
 - Bangladesh: Textbooks Influenced by the Muslim Right
 - India: excerpt from Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir (Teesta Setalvad)
 - India: RSS: In Search of a Pedigree That It Does Not Have
 - India: Bombay HC expresses dissatisfaction over tardy progress in Pansare, Dabholkar cases
 - Excerpts from . . . Modi Cult Building Is Part Of Hindu Rashtra Building (Shamsul Islam)
 - Hindu nationalism is more Italian and Christian than Sonia Gandhi
 - India: Can governments in secular democracy allot land to religious institutions? Supreme Court to address
 - India: Some Two speakers pull out of Jaipur Literature Festival over inclusion of RSS ideologues
 - India: Office-bearer of RSS history wing set to join Indian Council of Historical Research

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Video Recording: Prof. Dilip Simeon on 'Love at Work: Mahatma Gandhi's Last Struggle'. 
8. Braggarts in the plane | Rafia Zakaria
9. Tribute to Sripati Chandrasekhar: An extraordinary academic | S. Vijayashri
10. Kachin war explodes Myanmar’s peace drive | Bertil Lintner
11. Fake news fuels Indonesian intolerance | Yuli Ismartono
12. The chilling stories behind Japan’s ‘evaporating people’ | Maureen Callahan
13. The world in the era of Trump: What may we expect? | Immanuel Wallerstein
14. For A Democratic Polarisation: How To Pull The Ground From Under Right-wing Populism | Jürgen Habermas
15. Stoetzler on Confino, 'A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide'

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1. Bangladesh: Controversial Draft Law Allowing Child Marriage in "special cases" is The Road to Regression
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In December 2016 the Bangladeshi Parliament discussed the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2016, a bill which reportedly includes a special provision allowing child marriage at any age in “special cases”, such as “accidental” or “illegal” pregnancy, or where a marriage would protect a girl’s “honour”. The current legal minimum age of marriage in Bangladesh is 18 for women and 21 for men. The exception reportedly provides no minimum age. There are fears that such a provision would legitimise statutory rape and encourage the practice of child marriage in a country with one of the highest child marriage rates in the world.
http://www.sacw.net/article13088.html
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2. Secular Bangladeshis Worried About Textbook Changes
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Bangladesh’s Education Ministry was preparing to print the 2017 editions of its standard Bengali textbooks when a group of conservative Islamic religious scholars demanded the removal of 17 poems and stories they deemed “atheistic.”
http://www.sacw.net/article13091.html

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3. India: Hatred Justifies All | Mukul Dube
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A judge of the Bombay High Court recently gave bail to three men who were charged with a murder committed in the presence of eye-witnesses.
http://www.sacw.net/article13090.html

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4. India - Kashmir: Sexism and moral policing behind online intimidation of actress Zaira Wasim
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Kashmiri actress Zaira Wasim for whom the film Dangal was a dream of opportunity responded to the adulation initially with a big smile . . . she has had to change her stance, under pressure and to offer an apology saying that her achievement is a ‘disgrace.’
http://www.sacw.net/article13089.html

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5. India: Social scientist Bela Bhatia threatened, asked to leave Bastar - new reports / commentary and reaction by human rights groups
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Social scientist Bela Bhatia was threatened by a group of men who barged into her home in Bastar on 23 January 2017. Around 30 men arrived at Bhatia’s home in Parpa village and gave her 24 hours to vacate the house.
http://www.sacw.net/article13092.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: RSS and Reservations - This is no off the cuff remark (Faraz Ahmad)
 - India: Tamil Nadu Elites Flirting with Chauvinism (Narayan Lakshman)
 - India - 2017 UP Assembly elections: For BJP, all bets are off in western U.P.
 - India: housing bias turning Indian cities into ghettos - No Muslims, no single women allowed
 - Bangladesh: Textbooks Influenced by the Muslim Right
 - India: excerpt from Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir (Teesta Setalvad)
 - India: RSS: In Search of a Pedigree That It Does Not Have
 - India: Bombay HC expresses dissatisfaction over tardy progress in Pansare, Dabholkar cases
 - Excerpts from . . . Modi Cult Building Is Part Of Hindu Rashtra Building (Shamsul Islam)
 - Hindu nationalism is more Italian and Christian than Sonia Gandhi
 - India: Can governments in secular democracy allot land to religious institutions? Supreme Court to address
 - India: Some Two speakers pull out of Jaipur Literature Festival over inclusion of RSS ideologues
 - India: Office-bearer of RSS history wing set to join Indian Council of Historical Research

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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7. VIDEO RECORDING: PROF. DILIP SIMEON ON 'LOVE AT WORK: MAHATMA GANDHI'S LAST STRUGGLE'.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1XFI58z6fY 

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8. BRAGGARTS IN THE PLANE | Rafia Zakaria
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(DAWN - 25 January 2017)

I KNOW a gentleman who travels frequently between the subcontinent and the US. Each time he makes a trip, he includes a post on Facebook that lets everyone know he is travelling first class. Often, he not only mentions this fact but also takes care to note that while in the terminal he is in one or the other first-class lounge.

In the past year or so, his progeny has begun to engage in the same sort of braggadocio. As they say, the apple does not fall far from the tree; the afflictions of a boastful father have now been duly transmitted to the next generation.

This behaviour, the insistent (and annoying) habit of disseminating the news of one’s first-class status is neither new nor unique; many South Asians are afflicted with the same disease. On any given day, your Twitter or Facebook feeds are likely to be littered with similar ‘check-ins’. Even more annoying are the humble brags; in the case of this particular gentleman, he took to complaining about the poor service in first class, expressing his sympathy for the unfortunate souls in economy who must be having an even tougher time.
In the South Asian obsession with first class is an equal and opposite disdain of equality.

Finally, someone called him out for it and he was brought to public justice in the very forum he used to demonstrate his pomposity. The laughter of the vindicated, that exhausted audience of the conspicuous consumption of others, could be heard in homes far and wide.

While the social media tools via which the boasts are bandied about may be Western inventions, there is something distinctly South Asian about this adulation of first-class travel. It is not surprising. Only a few hundred years ago (and arguably even now), inherited caste determined all the opportunities that one could access in life.

The hierarchy inherent in that system of social organisation — the lower, the higher, the superior and the inferior — has left its seeds in the psyche of those who live today. Nothing, it seems, replicates it quite as literally as the partitioned-off front section of an aircraft. In being seated in first class, those plagued by the inferiority of being lesser in some way can lord it over all those who may be better. They can imagine that sitting in first class on a plane means being first class in life.

The truth of this can be seen in the fact that the sort of shameless bragging about being in first class, or the more creative boast about how even first class is somehow lacking in its ability to satisfy, is rare among Westerners. It is not that the Western world lacks conspicuous consumption or the wealthy or VIPs; it is just that this brand of bragging is not attached, like it is when it comes to South Asians, to a particular pathology regarding class and caste.

It is not just a history of hierarchy and caste that makes South Asians so focused on flaunting their first-class status. Air travel, after all, represents mobility, and mobility suggests the ability to transcend borders, the very markers that constrain and constrict. Most of the wealthy lot in Pakistan, fat and rich on money they have usurped or inherited, have a solid sense of entitlement that largely insulates them from the drudgery of having to stand in line, to wait, and generally to behave.

In taking possession of first-class seats (even when they are on an airline bankrupt in part because it has had to accommodate their free-loading) they not only visibly and literally look down on people walking by into the realm of the commoner, they underscore that like all other rules, those that limit the movement of the ordinary Pakistani, do not apply to them.

Close behind the wealthy are the almost wealthy, who by virtue of jobs abroad or with multinational corporations have ascended to first class. These sorts can be worse, notable only for their wholesale adoption of the condescension of the actually wealthy. In sitting for just a little while on a slightly larger seat, eating a slightly bigger meal, and getting extra servings of juice, they believe they have conquered the world (and of course they want us all to know).

I have never travelled in first class. But many of those who do might believe that those who don’t must be jealous or desperate for more juice and an extra blanket. It does not bother me. In the South Asian obsession with first class is an equal and opposite disdain of equality, frugality and avoidance of waste. When the self-worth of a human being is assessed, as it routinely is in Pakistan, by the size of a house, the make of a car, the number of servants and, of course, whether or not one travels first class, the consequence is moral stagnation.

There are many for whom social media is a forum for self-aggrandisement, and having access to first-class airport lounges and the first-class section of an aircraft provides them with an opportunity to indulge in this exercise. However, they should be aware of a few home truths: the world, or specifically their friends and family who inhabit their newsfeed and who they are out to impress, would not be admiring of them as they believe. In the case of first-class travel, they do not appear superior, but simply as insecure and depending on an airline label for the evaluation of their worth as individuals. The others may have to wait longer, eat less, be more cramped, but they know that they will get to wherever they are going at exactly the same time.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

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9. TRIBUTE TO SRIPATI CHANDRASEKHAR: AN EXTRAORDINARY ACADEMIC | S. Vijayashri
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(The Hindu - January 24, 2017)

The late Dr. Sripati Chandrasekhar 
 
The story of a distinguished Indian scholar in public policy studies

Few Indians know about the huge and poignant tribute that the United States has paid to their distinguished compatriot: the late Dr. Sripati Chandrasekhar (November 1918-June 2001). And, by extension, to India. Indeed, the University of Toledo (UOT), Ohio, has preserved papers documenting Sripati’s life and research for the benefit of other scholars. Sripati’s collection is housed at UOT’s Carlson Library’s Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections.

“Chandra,” as Sripati was known to his friends, wore many hats. A former Vice-Chancellor of Annamalai University, he was a prolific scholar/demographer and wrote 32 books. Indeed, he fell in love with the subject of demography (population studies) as a teenager. He started contributing to The Hindu on Indian demography and other themes. And his undergraduate essay on India’s population problems won the Papworth Prize. He founded the Indian Institute of Population Studies and the academic journal, ‘Population Review,’ which he edited for over 40 years.

As a Cabinet Minister

However, he is best known for his work as Union Minister for Health and Family Planning in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet. In this position, he played an important role in popularising birth control methods, advocating for smaller families, for women’s biological emancipation, and for a cleaner India. Chandra was a charismatic conversationalist, and an eloquent orator. He persuaded President Lyndon B. Johnson to continue supporting India’s family planning programme. This way, he brought the subject to the attention of policymakers abroad, and to the attention of many non-specialists. A passionate social scientist, Chandra was 83 and still working on half a dozen projects, including his autobiography, when he died in La Jolla, California.

How did Chandra’s papers achieve the privilege of being archived at UOT in 2002? Chandra’s family members had previously agreed that they would gift his materials to the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, karmic connections between Chandra and his earnest shishya (student) and colleague, Dr. Daniel Johnson, who at the time of his death was the University of Toledo’s president (vice-chancellor), best explain this.

Karmic ties

But first, a little about Chandra’s karmic ties with the U.S. With Mahatma Gandhi’s blessings, Chandra set sail for the free world at the end of 1940. He took his M.A. in economics from Columbia University, then went to New York University to take his Ph.D. in 1944. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on India’s population problems. His advisers were Professors Harold Hotelling and Henry Pratt Fairchild. In 1945, under the auspices of Pearl S. Buck’s East and West Association, Chandra criss-crossed the U.S., lecturing passionately for India’s freedom. (Founded during the Second World War, the East and West Association sought to mobilise American public opinion in favour of the Allied Powers’ war effort in Asia).

In 1947, Chandra married Anne Downes, an American Quaker, at the St. Peter’s Church in New York. The priest who solemnised his marriage was Mahatma Gandhi’s American disciple. From 1947 to 1994, Chandra lectured at various institutions in the U.S., India, and Europe. Indeed, he is the first Asian scholar that the University of Washington, Seattle, invited to deliver the John and Jezzie Danz lecture on the problem of abortion, with special reference to India. Over the years, Chandra accumulated several awards and honours, including honorary doctorates from the U.S., Hungary, Canada, and India.

Chandra last taught demography from 1993-94, at the University of North Texas, Denton. He was invited by Daniel Johnson, Dean of the School of Community Service at Denton. A distinguished urban sociologist, Johnson had first learned of Chandra when he wrote a paper for an advanced graduate seminar in demography, in which, he compared the populations of India and Japan. However, it was only in 1993 that Johnson first met Chandra, when Professor Vijay Pillai, a mutual friend and colleague brought him to Johnson’s office. “What was intended to be a 10-minute introduction turned into a four-hour conversation about world population,” says Johnson. And it morphed into a lasting and meaningful friendship. This culminated in securing a permanent home for Chandra’s collection at Toledo, since 2002.

The project

Having persuaded Chandra’s family to gift his materials to the University of Toledo, Johnson oversaw the move from start to finish. The Rockefeller Foundation in New York co-funded this project. Barbara Floyd, a veteran archivist, drove to La Jolla to take possession of the library materials and bring them back to Toledo. Floyd, with Kimberley Brownlee, a manuscripts librarian, readied the materials for public use. Chandra’s collection reaches over 78 linear feet. It is a veritable treasure trove. It comprises materials on family planning, birth control, and human rights with special reference to women. It also includes materials on other related subjects, such as migration, Indian culture and history, environmental and health issues, and food production and nutrition. Also included are photo albums documenting special events in Chandra’s life, and audio-visual materials of his speeches with Martin Luther at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and his appearance on the Today Show, the American TV programme. Chandra’s awards, honours, personal papers, and correspondence, including correspondence with public figures, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Hillary Clinton, complete this collection. Finally, at Johnson’s initiative, Chandra’s books, including Hungry People, Empty Lands and Red China: An Asian View, have been re-published.

Chandra was a pioneer in his field, demography. Moreover, demography intersects with many areas including sociology, economics, statistics, global health, human rights, women’s rights, international law, peace and security, and the history of medicine. Small wonder that his collection continues to attract scholars from the U.S., Canada (Professor Ian Dowbiggin) and the U.K. (Rebecca Williams, Warwick University and Cathryn A. Johnston, King’s College, London. The latter’s doctoral dissertation submitted in January 2016 focusses on the “problem of population in India, 1938-74”).

(The author was S. Chandrasekhar’s research assistant in the U.S. and later an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto)

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10. KACHIN WAR EXPLODES MYANMAR’S PEACE DRIVE | Bertil Lintner
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(Asia Times - January 19, 2017)

Myanmar's military has intensified aerial bombardments in an escalating ethnic conflict that belies government claims of pursuing peace

[from]  Chiang Mai, January 19, 2017

While international attention is focused on Myanmar’s evolving Rakhine State crisis and a government bid to forge national peace after decades of civil strife, the autonomous military is waging a less noticed vicious war in northern Kachin State. Battles between government troops and ethnic armed organizations are nothing new in frontier areas — the country’s civil war first erupted shortly after achieving independence from Britain in 1948 — but the military’s recent acquisition of helicopter gunships and jet fighters has added a lethal new dimension to the conflict.

Since hostilities resumed in 2011, breaking a 17-year ceasefire, an estimated 100,000 people have fled their homes and are now living in makeshift camps in Kachin State’s remote mountains, mostly in areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). In recent military attacks near the Myanmar-Chinese border, Myanmar’s Air Force dropped what appeared to be CS/BBF 250 kilogram parachute-retarded bombs, the Chinese version of a lethal device used extensively by Russia during the siege of Syria’s Aleppo, according to eyewitnesses in the area.

During clashes this month near an internally displaced people (IDP) camp along the Chinese border, an estimated 4,000 people tried to flee the fighting into China. The human wave threatens to rile Beijing, which has complained loudly when past military offensives in neighboring Shan State pushed refugees into Chinese territory. “IDPs from the camp scrambled and ran away,” says Gum Sha Awng from the Joint Strategy Team, a civil society organization that is providing humanitarian assistance to the IDPs. “They have been hearing the sound of airstrikes and seeing the explosions for weeks…They don’t feel safe anymore.”

The Kachin IDPs were intercepted by armed Chinese guards at the border and pushed back into the conflict zone, according to eyewitnesses. (China has denied the claim.) Many of the IDPs are now headed towards Laiza, a KIA-controlled town on the border, the witnesses said. Earlier this month the government barred United Nations’ special rapporteur Yanghee Lee from visiting Laiza and Hpakan in western Kachin State, where the military and KIA are now engaged in heavy combat. The lack of international assistance has exacerbated an already dire situation for IDPs and other civilians in the area.

From 1994 to 2011, the KIA maintained a ceasefire agreement with the government that stopped hostilities but never commenced a promised political dialogue on autonomy. That agreement broke down after the Myanmar military launched a surprise offensive in June 2011, just as then president Thein Sein, a former general, launched a “peace process” that aimed nominally to end decades of civil war. While talks were initiated with certain ethnic armies, others came under heavy attack, including the KIA and the Shan State Army (SSA) in northeastern Shan State.

In October 2015, a month before Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy resoundingly won national elections, Thein Sein and eight ethnic groups signed what his government billed as a “nationwide ceasefire agreement.” The pact was hardly a solution to Myanmar’s ethnic strife as only three of the signatory groups, namely the Karen Nation Union, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army and the Restoration Council of Shan State, had forces under significant arms. The other five signatories were small activist groups with only token armies.

None of the major ethnic armed groups in the country’s conflict-ridden north and northeast regions, including the KIA, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, a Palaung group, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in the Shan State’s Kokang region, the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA) in eastern Shan State, and the country’s most powerful ethnic army, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), signed Thein Sein’s ceasefire agreement.

History shows that ineffectual ceasefire agreements are nothing new in Myanmar. The policy was originated by former intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s forged peace with a number of ethnic armies. The aim then was to neutralize as many of the border insurgencies as possible to prevent anti-government linkages between ethnic armed groups and urban Burman dissidents who had fled Yangon and other cities after the military crushed a nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988.

Those ceasefire deals often resulted in lucrative business opportunities for ethnic group leaders in the resource-rich remote areas they controlled. As a result, about two dozen small and major groups accepted the government’s offers, among them the UWSA, MNDAA, NDAA and KIA. The KIA, however, was the only ethnic armed group to insist on a written ceasefire agreement. All of the other groups’ deals were strictly verbal and hence easily changed or violated.
(FILES) This file photo taken October 11, 2016 shows a rebel belonging to the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) ethnic group inspecting seized government weapons following two days of fighting with the Myanmar military near Laiza in Kachin state where rebels said they gathered 20 government firearms, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and recovered bodies of four soldiers.Thousands of people fled heavy fighting on Myanmar's northern border with China overnight, activists said on January 11, 2017, as the government blocked a senior UN official from visiting the area. / AFP PHOTO / HKUN LAT
A Kachin Independence Army (KIA) member inspects seized government weapons in October 2016 following fighting with the Myanmar military near Laiza in Kachin state. Photo: AFP/ Hkun Lat

To guard against more pro-democracy protests and better tackle ethnic insurgencies, Myanmar’s military more than doubled its forces from approximately 190,000 soldiers in 1988 to as many as 400,000 today. Those troops have been supplied with modern weapons, including tanks, field guns, howitzers, helicopter gunships and jet fighters procured from abroad. While stronger, sleeker and more heavily armed than ever before, fighting forces were limited in actual combat due to the ceasefire agreements. Previously the Myanmar Army was poorly equipped but battle-hardened and recognized as a highly efficient light infantry force.

Now, a whole generation of government soldiers has matured without substantial fighting experience. That became painfully obvious when the military’s high command decided to challenge the KIA in 2011, breaking a 17 year ceasefire in difficult mountainous terrain. Military casualties have been heavy in the subsequent fighting, with independent observers estimating the deaths in the hundreds, if not thousands, since hostilities resumed. The military has not publicly released information about the number of casualties it has suffered.

Military commanders have recently deployed superior firepower, both on the ground and from the air, to support their troops. Howitzers and other heavy artillery acquired from China and North Korea are now trained on KIA positions, firing from a safe distance from their targets. Russian-made Mi-35 helicopter gunships and China-made Hongdu JL-8, also known as Karakorum-8, attack aircraft were first used during a major cold season offensive against the KIA from December 2012 to January 2013. More recently, Chinese-made JF-17 and Yak 130 combat aircraft have been spotted at Kachin State’s Myitkyina airport.

Air strikes have gradually been intensified, resulting in a massive air war that has sparked a widening humanitarian crisis in the region. With even the UN’s special rapporteur banned from traveling to the conflict areas— and the government reportedly preventing emergency supplies from reaching IDP camps — there is little the global community can do to help or shield civilians caught in the crossfire. After a 17-year respite and now under an elected government, Kachin State has arguably never witnessed such debilitating and destructive armed combat.

Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and the author of several books on Myanmar. He is currently a journalist with Asia Pacific Media Services.

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11. FAKE NEWS FUELS INDONESIAN INTOLERANCE
by Yuli Ismartono
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(Asia Times - January 24, 2017)

False reports spread on social media have targeted Indonesia's Chinese and other minorities. Official censorship has failed to halt the hoaxes or the violence.

A couple of disturbing incidents last year shocked many Indonesians out of their complacency and delivered new blows to the idea that their country is not quite as tolerant as the foreign media has led them to believe.

One happened in July, when an angry mob set fire to several Buddhist temples in North Sumatra. Five months later, two people were killed and one seriously injured following a brawl in Depok, a conservative Muslim district on the western outskirts of Jakarta.

The two violent attacks against ethnic Chinese minorities had one thing in common: they occurred right after provocative and fake news reports appeared in social media. More recent false news has accused Chinese migrants of importing chili plants tainted with bacteria that was supposedly killing local crops.
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Religious and ethnic intolerance in Indonesia is clearly on the rise, in large part because former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono saw his role as a referee rather than a leader in protecting minority rights. His successor, Joko Widodo, shows signs of heading down the same path.

According to the Setara Institute, a local nongovernmental organization that conducts research on democracy, political freedom, and human rights, the 91 cases of religious violence recorded in 2007 against Christians and two Muslim minorities, Shia and Ahmadiyah, swelled to 264 in 2012 and 220 in 2013.

It dropped back to 134 and 197 over the next two years, but outbreaks of vigilantism have been enough to cause heightened concern given the low base it has come from and the failure of law enforcement agencies to do much about it.

Most of the perpetrators belong to the Sunni majority — and most of them came from such radical groups as the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), which has been playing a leading role in the campaign to head off the re-election of ethnic Chinese Jakarta Governor Basuki Purnama.

More recently, the appointment of a Christian sub-district chief for central Java’s Bantul regency was met with protests by local Muslims. But the Bantul regent stood his ground, citing the constitutionally-guaranteed right of all citizens to work in government.

When Indonesia’s founding fathers drafted the secular 1945 Constitution, pluralism was a key point of deliberation given the diverse number of cultural, religious and ethnic groups across a nation of 17,000 islands. Although 88 percent of Indonesia’s 245 million people are ethnic Malay Muslims, minorities span the gamut from Hindu Balinese to Christian Papuans to animist Dayaks to Buddhist Chinese.

Unity in diversity became the national philosophy and repeated efforts to introduce Sharia law into the constitution have all foundered. Indeed, despite a reluctance to accept the separation of mosque and state, only 12-13 percent of Indonesians have voted for Sharia-based political parties in the past four democratic elections.

Today, however, the future of pluralism in Indonesia hangs in the balance under a renewed threat from modern technology, or to be more specific, from the Internet and social media. The ease of unregulated messaging through cheap and simple-to-use cellular and smart phones has unleashed a torrent of biased, speculative commentaries that have combined to trigger hatred and mistrust across Indonesian society.

“The destructive power of false reports has become increasingly worrying,” the respected Tempo weekly newsmagazine said in a recent editorial, urging the government to address the problem seriously and swiftly.
TO GO WITH Entertainment-Indonesia-Valentine-Facebook-Twitter,FOCUS by Arlina ArshadA young woman enjoys social networking by using her mobile phone devices in Jakarta on February 11, 2012. In Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 17,000 islands -- some without even landlines -- 40 million Facebook users and 20 million tweeters comprise the world's third-largest Facebook community and fifth-biggest on Twitter. AFP PHOTO / Bay ISMOYO / AFP PHOTO / BAY ISMOYO
A young woman uses social networking by using her mobile phone devices in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: AFP / Bay Ismoyo 

Fake news is not new in Indonesia. President Widodo himself was a victim of an online hoax during his 2014 presidential campaign, when he was falsely described as having parents who were members of the banned Communist Party of Indonesia and descendants of ethnic Chinese families.

Only recently reports spread on social media that the economy was tanking and that bank customers should withdraw their cash from ATMs. Had the false reports gained common currency they could have caused a disastrous run on the country’s financial institutions. New rumors may well do so in the future given the government’s poor reputation for public relations.

The Widodo administration’s reaction has been predictable. His government recently created an integrated national cyber-agency to control “the spread of disinformation in cyberspace,” which it deems to be a threat to national security. “The agency will be tasked with monitoring national cyber activities … and identifying those accountable (for false reports) for legal action,” said Wiranto, Indonesia’s political coordinating minister.

The Communication and Information Technology Ministry has for years tried to do just that, weeding out websites and blogs that spread hate speech and other provocative material. In 2015 alone, the ministry reported to have blocked 800,000 websites, though only 85 were related to Islamic radicalism. The rest were blocked for violating anti-pornography and anti-gambling regulations.

As important as it may be in any other circumstances, the censorship is sad commentary for a country where a hypocritical fixation with public morality often takes disproportionate precedence over more pressing issues.

    The ease of unregulated messaging through cheap and simple-to-use cellular and smart phones has unleashed a torrent of biased, speculative commentaries that have combined to trigger hatred and mistrust across Indonesian society.

The country’s mobile phone market has exploded over the past decade: eighty-five percent of Indonesians now own cellular phones. Fully half of those own smart phones. SIM subscriptions stand at 326.3 million, far exceeding the size of its population.

This means each mobile phone user owns an average of two SIM cards. Most users can now access the Internet by using their mobile devices, with mobile phones accounting for 70 percent of web page views compared to 28 percent for laptops and desktops.

Another more complicated barrier for controlling freewheeling social media is the seemingly untouchable law on freedom of expression. When the information ministry or police act to block a website, there is usually a loud outcry from free speech activists.

Educators want the Widodo administration to seriously consider including digital literacy into the curriculum of public schools as one way to begin the fight against disinformation. In the meantime, most hopes lie with the public itself.

Over the past few months, civil society groups have organized themselves into hoax-busting communities which advocate the use of ‘Turn Back Hoaxes’ — an online service to field fake news complaints.

There is general agreement, however, that it is up to the government and its security services to rein in the vigilantism that has called into serious question its commitment to religious and ethnic tolerance.

Yuli Ismartono is a veteran Indonesian journalist

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12. THE CHILLING STORIES BEHIND JAPAN’S ‘EVAPORATING PEOPLE’
by Maureen Callahan
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(New York Post - December 10, 2016)

As a newlywed in the 1980s, a Japanese martial arts master named Ichiro expected only good things. He and his wife, Tomoko, lived among the cherry blossoms in Saitama, a prosperous city just outside of Tokyo. The couple had their first child, a boy named Tim. They owned their house, and took out a loan to open a dumpling restaurant.

Then the market crashed. Suddenly, Ichiro and Tomoko were deeply in debt. So they did what hundreds of thousands of Japanese have done in similar circumstances: They sold their house, packed up their family, and disappeared. For good.

“People are cowards,” Ichiro says today. “They all want to throw in the towel one day, to disappear and reappear somewhere nobody knows them. I never envisioned running away to be an end in itself . . . You know, a disappearance is something you can never shake. Fleeing is a fast track toward death.”

Of the many oddities that are culturally specific to Japan — from cat cafés to graveyard eviction notices to the infamous Suicide Forest, where an estimated 100 people per year take their own lives — perhaps none is as little known, and curious, as “the evaporated people.”

Since the mid-1990s, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually. They are the architects of their own disappearances, banishing themselves over indignities large and small: divorce, debt, job loss, failing an exam.

Modal Trigger

“The Vanished: The Evaporated People of Japan in Stories and Photographs” (Skyhorse) is the first known, in-depth reportage of this phenomenon. French journalist Léna Mauger learned of it in 2008, and spent the next five years reporting a story she and collaborator Stéphane Remael couldn’t believe.

“It’s so taboo,” Mauger tells The Post. “It’s something you can’t really talk about. But people can disappear because there’s another society underneath Japan’s society. When people disappear, they know they can find a way to survive.”

These lost souls, it turns out, live in lost cities of their own making.

The city of Sanya, as Mauger writes, isn’t located on any map. Technically, it doesn’t even exist. It’s a slum within Tokyo, one whose name has been erased by authorities. What work can be found here is run by the yakuza — the Japanese mafia — or employers looking for cheap, off-the-books labor. The evaporated live in tiny, squalid hotel rooms, often without internet or private toilets. Talking in most hotels is forbidden after 6 p.m.

Here, Mauger met a man named Norihiro. Now 50, he disappeared himself 10 years ago. He’d been cheating on his wife, but his true disgrace was losing his job as an engineer.

Too ashamed to tell his family, Norihiro initially kept up appearances: He’d get up early each weekday, put on his suit and tie, grab his briefcase and kiss his wife goodbye. Then he’d drive to his former office building and spend the entire workday sitting in his car — not eating, not calling anyone.

Norihiro did this for one week. The fear that his true situation would be discovered was unbearable.

“I couldn’t do it anymore,” he tells Mauger. “After 19 hours I was still waiting, because I used to go out for drinks with my bosses and colleagues. I would roam around, and when I finally returned home, I got the impression my wife and son had doubts. I felt guilty. I didn’t have a salary to give them anymore.”

    ‘I could certainly take back my old identity … But I don’t want my family to see me in this state. Look at me. I look like nothing. I am nothing.’

On what would have been his payday, Norihiro groomed himself immaculately, and got on his usual train line — in the other direction, toward Sanya. He left no word, no note, and for all his family knows, he wandered into Suicide Forest and killed himself.

Today, he lives under an assumed name, in a windowless room he secures with a padlock. He drinks and smokes too much, and has resolved to live out the rest of his days practicing this most masochistic form of penance.

“After all this time,” Norihiro says, “I could certainly take back my old identity . . . But I don’t want my family to see me in this state. Look at me. I look like nothing. I am nothing. If I die tomorrow, I don’t want anyone to be able to recognize me.”

Yuichi is a former construction worker who vanished in the mid-1990s. He’d been taking care of his sick mother, and the expenses involved — home health care, food, rent — bankrupted him.

“I couldn’t handle failing my mother,” he says. “She had given me everything, but I was incapable of taking care of her.”

What Yuichi did next may seem paradoxical, even perverse — but in Japanese culture, in which suicide is considered the most dignified way to erase the shame one has visited upon their family, it makes sense. He brought his mother to a cheap hotel, rented her a room, and left her there, never to return.

He disappeared to Sanya.

Here, Yuichi says, “You see people in the street, but they have already ceased to exist. When we fled from society, we disappeared the first time. Here, we are killing ourselves slowly.”

“Evaporations” have surged in Japan at key points: the aftermath of World War II, when national shame was at its apex, and in the aftermath of the financial crises of 1989 and 2008.

Modal Trigger

Kabukicho, a red-light district in Tokyo Stéphane Remael

A shadow economy has emerged to service those who want never to be found — who want to make their disappearances look like abductions, their homes look like they’ve been robbed, no paper trail or financial transactions to track them down.

Nighttime Movers was one such company, started by a man named Shou Hatori. He’d run a legitimate moving service until one night, in a karaoke bar, a woman asked if Hatori could arrange for her to “disappear, along with her furniture. She said she could not stand her husband’s debts, which were ruining her life.”

Hatori charged $3,400 per midnight move. His clientele was vast: from housewives who’d shopped their families into debt to women whose husbands had left them to university students who were sick of doing chores in their dorms.

He refused to give specifics to the authors, but he eventually quit; as a child, Hatori himself had disappeared with his parents from Kyoto, after they found themselves in debt. He believes that his former line of work was a kindness.

“People often associate [this] with cowardice,” he says. “But while doing this work, I came to understand it as a beneficial move.”

Hatori wound up serving as a consultant for a Japanese TV show about the phenomenon. “Flight by Night” was a hit in the late 1990s, a fictionalized anthology series based on true vanishings. A company based on Hatori’s, called Rising Sun, was integral to the show’s plot, summarized online:

“Need help managing your finances? Up to your ears in debt? Rising Sun is the consulting firm you need on your side. Too late for stopgap measures? Is running away or suicide the only way out? Turn once again to Rising Sun. By day, Genji Masahiko runs a reputable consulting firm, but by night, they help the desperate find a new life.”
Modal Trigger

In the hangar of a day-labor market, vagabonds are outcast by most and sometimes prisoners of their own madness.Stéphane Remael

Whatever shame motivates a Japanese citizen to vanish, it’s no less painful than the boomerang effect on their families — who, in turn, are so shamed by having a missing relative that they usually won’t report it to the police.

Those families who do search turn to a private group called Support of Families of Missing People, which keeps all clients and details private. Its address is hard to find, and its headquarters consist of one small room with one desk and walls sooty with cigarette smoke.

The organization is staffed with detectives — often with evaporations or suicides in their own family histories — who take on these cases pro bono. They average 300 cases a year, and their work is difficult: Unlike the United States, there is no national database for missing people in Japan. There are no documents or identifiers — such as our Social Security numbers — that can be used to track a person once they begin traveling within the country. It is against the law for police to access ATM transactions or financial records.

“Most of the investigations end partway through,” says Sakae Furuuchi, a detective who serves as the group’s director. He cites the prohibitive cost of hiring private detectives: $500 a day, up to $15,000 a month — impossible for those whose loved one has fled due to debt.

“The people who flee debt and violence change their names and sometimes their appearances,” Sakae says. “The others aren’t thinking people will try to find them.”

Sakae was able to find one young man who disappeared at age 20. He hadn’t come home after taking an exam, and by chance, one of his friends spotted him in southern Tokyo. Sakae wandered the streets until finding the student, who was, Mauger writes, “shaking from shame . . . He had not taken the exam for fear of failing it and disappointing his family. Tempted by suicide, he had not found a way to take his life.”

Another case, unresolved, involved the young mother of a disabled 8-year-old boy. On the day of her son’s school musical, in which he was performing, the mother disappeared — despite promising the boy she’d be sitting in the front row.

Her seat remained empty. She was never seen again. Her husband and child agonize; the woman had never given any indication she was unhappy, in pain, or had done something she thought wrong.
Modal Trigger
The Tojinbo cliffs in Japan are famous for their record suicide rates.Stéphane Remael

Sakae remains hopeful.

“She’s a mother,” he tells Mauger. “Maybe her path will lead her back to her loved ones.”

In many ways, Japan is a culture of loss. According to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization, Japan’s suicide rate is 60 percent higher than the global average. There are between 60 and 90 suicides per day. It’s a centuries-old concept dating back to the Samurai, who committed seppuku — suicide by ritual disembowelment — and one as recent as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.

Japanese culture also emphasizes uniformity, the importance of the group over the individual. “You must hit the nail that stands out” is a Japanese maxim, and for those who can’t, or won’t, fit into society, adhere to its strict cultural norms and near-religious devotion to work, to vanish is to find freedom of a sort.

For younger Japanese, those who want to live differently but don’t want to completely cut ties with family and friends, there’s a compromise: the life of the otakus, who live parallel lives as their favorite anime characters, disappearing from time to time into alternate realities where, in costume, they find themselves.

“Running away is not always about leaving,” a young man named Matt told Mauger. “We dream of love and freedom, and sometimes we make do with a little — a costume, a song, a dance with our hands. In Japan, that is already a lot.”

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13. THE WORLD IN THE ERA OF TRUMP: WHAT MAY WE EXPECT? | Immanuel Wallerstein
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(Agence Global - January 1, 2017) 

Short-term prediction is the most treacherous of activities. I normally try never to do it. Rather, I analyze what is going on in terms of the longue durée of its history and the probable consequences in the middle-run. I have decided nonetheless to make short-term predictions this time for one simple reason. It seems to me that everyone everywhere is focused for the moment on what will now happen in the short run. There seems to be no other subject of interest. Anxiety is at its maximum, and we need to deal with it.

Let me start by saying that I think 95% of the policies Donald Trump will pursue in his first year or so in office will be absolutely terrible, worse than we anticipated. This can be seen already in the appointments to major office that he has announced. At the same time, he will probably run into major trouble.

This contradictory result is the consequence of his political style. If we look back at how he has won the presidency of the United States, he did it against all odds with a certain deliberate rhetorical technique. On the one hand he has constantly made statements that responded to major fears of U.S. citizens by using coded language that the recipients interpreted as support for policies that they thought would alleviate their multiple pains. He did this most often either by brief tweets or in tightly-controlled public rallies.

At the same time, he was always vague about the precise policies he would pursue. His statements were almost always followed by interpretations by major followers, and quite often these were differing, even opposing, interpretations. In effect, he took the credit for the strong statements and he left the discredit for the precise policies to others. It was a magnificently effective technique. It got him where he is and it seems clear that he intends to continue this technique once in office.

There has been a second element in his political style. He tolerated anyone’s interpretation as long as it constituted an endorsement of his leadership. If he sensed any hesitation about endorsing him personally, he has been quick to wreak vengeance by attacking publicly the offender. He required absolute fealty, and insisted it be displayed. He accepted penitent remorse but not ambiguity about his person.

It seems that he believes the same technique will serve him well in the rest of the world: strong rhetoric, ambiguous interpretations by his varied panoply of major followers, and in the end rather unpredictable actual policies.

He seems to think that there are only two countries other than the United States that matter in the world today – Russia and China. As both Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger have pointed out, he is using the Nixon technique in reverse. Nixon made a deal with China in order to weaken Russia. Trump is making a deal with Russia in order to weaken China. This policy seemed to work for Nixon. Will it work for Trump? I don’t think so, because the world of 2017 is quite different from the world of 1973.

So let us look at what the difficulties ahead are for Trump. At home, his greatest difficulty is undoubtedly with the Republicans in Congress, particularly those in the House of Representatives. Their agenda is not the same as that of Donald Trump. For example, they wish to destroy Medicare. Indeed they wish to repeal all social legislation of the last century. Trump knows that this could bring a revolt of his actual electoral base, who want social welfare at the same time that they want a deeply protectionist government and xenophobic rhetoric.

Trump is counting on intimidating Congress and making them toe his line. Maybe he can. But then the contradictions between his pro-wealthy agenda and his partial maintenance of the welfare state will become blatant. Or Congress will prevail over Trump. And he will find that intolerable. What he would do about it is anyone’s guess. He doesn’t know himself since he doesn’t face up to this kind of difficult situation until he has to.

The same thing is true in the geopolitics of the world-system. Neither Russia nor China is ready to back down in the least from their present policies. Why should they? These policies have been working for them. Russia is once again a major power in the Middle East and in the whole of the ex-Soviet world. China is slowly but surely asserting a dominant position in Northeast and Southeast Asia, and increasing its role in the rest of the world.

No doubt both Russia and China run into difficulties from time to time and both of them are ready to make timely concessions to others but not more than that. So Trump is going to find that he is not the alpha dog internationally to whom everyone must give obeisance. And then what?

What he might do once his threats are ignored is again anyone’s guess. What everyone fears is that he will act precipitately with the military tools at his disposition. Will he? Or will he be restrained by his immediate inner group? No one can be sure. We can all just hope.

So there it is. In my view it is not a pretty picture but not a hopeless one. If somehow we reach in the coming year an interim stability within the United States and within the world-system as a whole, then the middle-run takes over analytically. And there the story, while still grim, has at least better prospects for those of us who want a better world than that which we presently have.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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14. FOR A DEMOCRATIC POLARISATION: HOW TO PULL THE GROUND FROM UNDER RIGHT-WING POPULISM | Jürgen Habermas
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(Social Europe - 17 November 2016)

After 1989, all the talk was of the “end of history” in democracy and the market economy and today we are experiencing the emergence of a new phenomenon in the form of an authoritarian/populist leadership – from Putin via Erdogan to Donald Trump. Clearly, a new “authoritarian international” is increasingly succeeding in defining political discourse. Was your exact contemporary Ralf Dahrendorf right in forecasting an authoritarian 21st century? Can one, indeed must one speak of an epochal change?

After the transformation of 1989-90 when Fukuyama seized on the slogan of “post-history” as coined originally within a ferocious kind of conservativism, his reinterpretation expressed the short-sighted triumphalism of western elites who adhered to a liberal belief in the pre-established harmony of market economy and democracy. Both of these elements inform the dynamic of social modernisation but are linked to functional imperatives that repeatedly clash. The trade-off between capitalistic growth and the populace’s share – only half-heartedly accepted as socially just – in the growth of highly productive economies could only be brought about by a democratic state deserving of this name. Such an equilibrium, which warrants the name of “capitalist democracy”, was, however, within an historical perspective, the exception rather than the rule. That alone made the idea of a global consolidation of the “American dream” an illusion.

The new global disorder, the helplessness of the USA and Europe with regard to growing international conflicts, is profoundly unsettling and the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria or South Sudan unnerve us as well as Islamist acts of terror. Nevertheless, I cannot recognise in the constellation you indicate a uniform tendency towards a new authoritarianism but, rather, a variety of structural causes and many coincidences. What binds them together is the keyboard of nationalism and that has begun to be played meanwhile in the West. Even before Putin and Erdogan, Russia and Turkey were no “unblemished democracies.” If the West had pursued a somewhat cleverer policy, one might have set the course of relations with both countries differently – and liberal forces in their populaces might have been strengthened.

Aren’t we over-estimating the West’s capabilities retrospectively here?

Of course, given the sheer variety of its divergent interests, it would not have been easy for “the West” to have chosen the right moment to deal rationally with the geo-political aspirations of a relegated Russian superpower or with the European expectations of a tetchy Turkish government. The case of the egomaniac Trump, highly significant for the West all told, is of a different order. With his disastrous election campaign, he is bringing to a head a process of polarisation that the Republicans have been running with cold calculation since the 1990s and are escalating so unscrupulously that the “Grand Old Party”, the party of Abraham Lincoln, don’t forget, has utterly lost control of this movement. This mobilisation of resentment is giving vent to the social dislocations of a superpower in political and economic decline.

What I do see, therefore, as problematic is not the model of an authoritarian International that you hypothesise but the shattering of political stability in our western countries as a whole. In any judgment of the retreat of the USA from its role as the global power ever ready to intervene to restore order, one has to keep one’s eyes on the structural background – one affecting Europe in similar manner.

The economic globalisation that Washington introduced in the 1970s with its neoliberal agenda has brought in its wake, measured globally against China and the other emergent BRIC countries, a relative decline of the West. Our societies must work through domestically the awareness of this global decline together with the technology-induced, explosive growth in the complexity of everyday living. Nationalistic reactions are gaining ground in those social milieus that have either never or inadequately benefited from the prosperity gains of the big economies because the ever-promised “trickle-down effect” failed to materialise over the decades.

Even if there is no unequivocal tendency towards a new authoritarianism, we are obviously going through a huge shift to the Right, indeed a Right-wing revolt. And the pro-Brexit campaign was just the most prominent example of this trend in Europe. You yourself, as you recently put it, “did not reckon with a victory for populism over capitalism in its country of origin.” Every sensible observer cannot but have been struck by the obvious irrational nature not just of the outcome of this vote but of the campaign itself. One thing is clear: Europe is also increasingly prey to a seductive populism, from Orban and Kaczynski to Le Pen and AfD. Does this mean we are going through a period of making irrational politics the norm in the West? Some parts of the Left are already making the case for reacting to right-wing populism with a left-wing version of the same.

Before reacting purely tactically, the puzzle has to be solved as to how it came about that right-wing populism stole the Left’s own themes. The last G-20 summit delivered an instructive piece of theatre in this regard. One read of the assembled heads of government’s alarm at the “danger from the Right” that might lead nation states to close their doors, raise the drawbridge high and lay waste to globalised markets. This mood embraces the flabbergasting change in social and economic policy that one of the participants, Theresa May, announced at the latest Conservative party conference and that caused waves of anger as expected in the pro-business media. Obviously, the British prime minister had thoroughly studied the social reasons for Brexit; in any case, she is trying to take the wind out of the sails of right-wing populism by reversing the previous party line and setting store by an interventionist “strong state” in order to combat the marginalisation of the “left behind” parts of the population and the increasing divisions within society. Given this ironic reversal of the political agenda, the Left in Europe must ask itself why right-wing populism is succeeding in winning over the oppressed and disadvantaged for the false path of national isolation.
Socially acceptable globalisation through supranational co-operation

What should a left-wing response to the right-wing challenge look like?

The question is why left-wing parties do not go on the offensive against social inequality by embarking upon a co-ordinated and cross-border taming of unregulated markets. As a sensible alternative – as much to the status quo of feral financial capitalism as to the agenda for a “völkisch” or left-nationalist retreat into the supposed sovereignty of long-since hollowed-out nation states – I would suggest there is only a supranational form of co-operation that pursues the goal of shaping a socially acceptable political reconfiguration of economic globalisation. International treaty regimes are insufficient here; for, putting aside completely their dubious democratic legitimacy, political decisions over questions of redistribution can only be carried out within a strict institutional framework. That leaves only the stony path to an institutional deepening and embedding of democratically legitimised co-operation across national borders. The European Union was once such a project – and a Political Union of the Eurozone could still be one. But the hurdles within the domestic decision-making process are rather high for that.

Since Clinton, Blair and Schröder social democrats have swung over to the prevailing neoliberal line in economic policies because that was or seemed to be promising in the political sense: in the “battle for the middle ground” these political parties thought they could win majorities only by adopting the neoliberal course of action. This meant taking on board toleration of long-standing and growing social inequalities. Meantime, this price – the economic and socio-cultural “hanging out to dry” of ever-greater parts of the populace – has clearly risen so high that the reaction to it has gone over to the right. And where else? If there is no credible and pro-active perspective, then protest simply retreats into expressivist, irrational forms.

Even worse than the right-wing populists would appear to be the “contagion risks” among the established parties – and indeed, throughout Europe. Under pressure from the Right, the new prime minister in Great Britain has undertaken a hard-line policy of deterring or even expelling foreign workers and migrants; in Austria the social democratic head of government wants to restrict the right to asylum by emergency decree – and in France Francois Hollande has been governing for nearly a year already in a state of emergency, to the joy of the Front National. Is Europe even alert to this right-wing revolt or are republican achievements being irreversibly eroded?

In my estimate, domestic politicians mishandled right-wing populism from the start. The mistake of the established parties lies in acknowledging the battlefront that right-wing populism is defining: “We” up against the system. Here it matters hardly a jot whether this mistake takes the form of an assimilation to or a confrontation with “right-wing”. Take either the strident would-be French president Nicolas Sarkozy who is outbidding Marine Le Pen with his demands, or the example of the sober-minded German justice minister Heiko Maas who forcefully takes on Alexander Gauland in debate – they both make the opponent stronger. Both take him/her seriously and raise his/her profile. A year on we here in Germany all know the studiously ironic grin of Frauke Petry (AfD leader) and the demeanour of the rest of the leadership of her ghastly gang. It’s only by ignoring their interventions that one can cut the ground from under the feet of the right-wing populists.

But this requires being willing to open up a completely different front in domestic politics and doing so by making the above-mentioned problem the key point at issue: How do we regain the political initiative vis-à-vis the destructive forces of unbridled capitalist globalisation? Instead, the political scene is predominantly grey on grey, where, for example, the left-wing pro-globalisation agenda of giving a political shape to a global society growing together economically and digitally can no longer be distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of political abdication to the blackmailing power of the banks and of the unregulated markets.

One would therefore have to make contrasting political programmes recognisable again, including the contrast between the – in a political and cultural sense – “liberal” open-mindedness of the left, and the nativist fug of right-wing critiques of an unfettered economic globalization. In a word: political polarisation should be re-crystallised between the established parties on substantive conflicts. Parties that grant right-wing populists attention rather than contempt should not expect civil society to disdain right-wing phrases and violence. Therefore, I regard as the greater danger a very different polarisation towards which the hard-core opposition within the CDU is moving when it casts a leery eye on the post-Merkel period. In Alexander Gauland it recognises anew the pivotal figure of the Dregger wing of the old Hesse CDU, or flesh of its own flesh, and toys with the idea of winning back lost voters by way of a coalition with the AfD.
Breeding ground for a new fascism

Even verbally, a lot seems to be topsy-turvy: Politicians are more and more often denounced as “enemies of the people” and openly abused. Alexander Gauland calls Angela Merkel a “dictatorial chancellor”. On the same lines goes the gradual rehabilitation of the “Wörterbuch des Unmenschen” (dictionary of Nazi jargon): Frauke Petry wants to bring the concept of “völkisch” back into everyday speech, Björn Höcke talks of “entartete Politik” (”degenerate politics”) and, thereupon, a Saxon CDU woman MP falls into classic Nazi-speak of “Umvolkung” (de-Germanisation) – and all of this without further consequences.

The only lesson democratic parties should draw as regards handling people who are keen on such terms is: they should stop pussyfooting around with these “concerned citizens” and dismiss them curtly for what they are – the breeding ground for a new fascism. Instead of which, we witness again and again the comic ritual, well-practised in the old (pre-1990) federal republic, of a compulsory balancing-act: Every time when talk of “right-wing extremism” is unavoidable, politicians feel obliged to point hastily to a corresponding “left-wing extremism”, as if they had to escape an embarrassment.

How do you explain the susceptibility to the AfD’s right-wing populism in eastern Germany and the sheer scale of Far Right offences there?

One should, of course, be under no illusions about the strong electoral success of the AfD also in the Western parts of Germany, as shown by the results of the last election in Baden-Württemberg – even if the aggressive affects of Mr Meuthen (of AfD) against the liberal-left legacy of the ’68 generation leave one to suppose not the mentality of a right-wing extremist but a disposition long pertaining in that old federal republic. In the west the right-wing prejudices of AfD voters seem to be filtered in the main through a conservative milieu that had no opportunity to develop in the former GDR. On the west’s account also stand those right-wing activists who, straight after the 1990 turnaround, went over from the old federal republic to the east in their droves and brought with them the required organisational capabilities. However, judging by the well-known statistical data, an “unfiltered” vulnerability to swirling authoritarian prejudices and to the “old continuities” is definitively greater in eastern Germany. Insofar as this potential emerges from former non-voters, it could remain more or less inconspicuous until the catalyst of our recent refugee policy: Up until then, these voters had either been attracted by the politically biased perception and national goodwill of the Eastern CDU or in great part captured by the party of the “Left”. Up to a point that may have served a good purpose. But it is better for a democratic body politic when questionable political mind sets are not swept under the carpet long-term.

On the other hand, the west, i.e. the former government of West Germany, that defined the mode of reunification and reconstruction at the time and that now bears political responsibility for the consequences, might well end up holding the baby in view of how history judges these facts. Whereas the populace of the former West Germany had enjoyed the opportunity under good economic conditions to gradually free itself in decades-long public discussions from the legacy of the Nazi period, from contaminated mind sets and elites continuing in office, the population of the former GDR had no opportunity after 1990 to be able to commit their own mistakes and be forced to learn from facing the Nazi past.

When it comes to federal politics the AfD has pushed the Union (CDU/CSU) above all into strategic turmoil. Recently, therefore, politicians from the CDU and CSU drew up a formal “Aufruf” (mission statement) for a “Leitkultur“, the political slogan for preserving the inherited cultural framework, with the intention of stopping “patriotism from being handed over to the wrong people.” You read there: “Germany has a right to stipulate what should be self-evident.” “Rootedness in a fondly embraced homeland and daily experience of patriotism” is to be promoted. In the (old) federal republic, in the wake of growing acceptance of democracy, the Basic Law acted more and more as the core culture and its recognition became the standard for successful integration. Nowadays, are we experiencing the transition of this constitutional-patriotic core culture into a new mainstream German culture made up of habit and custom, like a duty to shake hands on greeting somebody?

We obviously assumed over-hastily that Merkel’s CDU had left the backwoods debate of the 1990s behind it. Refugee policy has brought to the surface an internal opposition that combines the descendants of the national-conservative wing of the old federal CDU/CSU with the converts of the East-CDU. Their “Aufruf” marks the breakpoint at which the CDU would fall apart as a party if forced to decide between two policy options: to organize the integration of refugees either according to constitutional standards or according to the ideas of the national majority culture. The democratic constitution of a pluralistic society provides cultural rights for minorities so that these gain the possibility of continuing their own cultural way of life within the limits of the law of the land. Therefore, a constitutional integration-policy is incompatible with the legal obligation upon immigrants of a different origin to subject their life-style to an all-inclusive majority culture. Rather, it demands the differentiation between a majority culture rooted in the country and a political culture embracing all citizens equally.

This political culture is, however, still shaped by how citizens and their interpretation of constitutional principles draw upon the historical contexts of the country. Civil society must expect of the immigrant citizens – without being able to enforce it legally – that they grow into this political culture. Here the report that Navid Kermani, a German citizen of Iranian origin, published in Der Spiegel of his visit to the former concentration camp at Auschwitz is a moving and illuminating example: in the language-mix of visitors from many countries he opted to join the silent group of the Germans, hence the descendants of the perpetrator generation. It was at any rate not the German language of the group that moved him to do so.

Given that political culture will not stand still within a living democratic culture of debate, the newly arrived citizens on the other hand enjoy as much as the long-established ones the right to bring their own voice to bear in the process of developing and changing this common political culture. The defining power of these voices is best exemplified for us by the successful writers, film-directors, actors, journalists and scientists from the families of former Turkish “guest workers”. Attempts at legally conserving a national core culture are not only unconstitutional but unrealistic.
The Chancellor’s career as a political poster child

In your latest interview, in Die Zeit of 7 July, you, as a “long-time engaged newspaper reader” criticise a “certain complicity of the Press” without which “Merkel’s blanket policy of dulling everybody to sleep” would have been unable to spread across the land. Clearly, since Merkel’s refugee policy, we’re experiencing a new polarisation. Do you see any chance in this of finally thinking in political alternatives?

Given the fixation on the AfD I rather fear a further levelling of the differences between the other parties. When I spoke about a policy of lulling everyone to sleep I was talking about Europe. Regarding the future of the European Union, nothing has changed meanwhile since Brexit. You read, for example, virtually nothing on the renewed escalation of the conflict between finance minister Schäuble and the IMF that has quit the aid programme for Greece. Without an initiative to change the crippling policy of spending cuts, the readiness inside Europe for co-operation will equally fail to develop in other policy areas.

Wolfgang Schäuble, after Brexit, in an interview with Die Welt, has publicly recanted on his forward-looking proposal for a pro-active core Europe that he and Karl Lamers put together at the start of the 1990s. Angela Merkel whom one has got to know as a pleasantly rational politician in favour of expert pragmatism but also as a short-termist, power-driven opportunist, surprised me with her constructive refugee policy. Her latest trip to Africa shows that she does have the capacity and readiness to act in a strategic and far-reaching manner. But what does it mean when, on the other hand, and this has already been true since 2010, she pursues a policy towards Europe from the narrow perspective of national economic selfishness. Indeed, she seems to think only in terms of national interests in that very policy area where it falls on our government to provide the impulse for building and further developing the EU. Merkel’s short-sighted austerity policy, sticking rigidly to the status quo, has prevented the necessary forward steps and hugely deepened the splits within Europe.

It’s you who has long demanded a trans-nationalisation of democracy, that is strengthening the EU, to compensate for the loss of control within nation states in a highly interdependent global society. Yet, clearly, the longing for a retreat into the cocoon of the nation state is growing more and more. Given the current state of the EU and its institutions do you see even the remotest realistic chance of fighting back against this renationalisation?

The negotiations over Brexit will bring this issue back onto the agenda either way. In fact, I still endorse the internal differentiation between a Political Euro-Union working ever closer together (catchword: Core Europe) and a periphery of hesitant member-states which can join the core at any time. So many political reasons and economic facts speak for this design that I think politicians would be better employed believing in people’s capacity to learn than justifying their abandonment of politically shaping the future with a fatalistic referral to unalterable systemic forces. Angela Merkel’s career offers, with the withdrawal from nuclear energy and her path-breaking refugee policy, two remarkable counter-examples to the thesis of a lack of room for political manoeuvre.

This interview was conducted by and first published in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik. Translation by David Gow.

[Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher.]

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15. STOETZLER ON CONFINO, 'A WORLD WITHOUT JEWS: THE NAZI IMAGINATION FROM PERSECUTION TO GENOCIDE'
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 Alon Confino. A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 304 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-18854-7.

Reviewed by Marcel Stoetzler (Bangor University)
Published on H-Nationalism (January, 2017)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

Why the Holocaust Seemed Like a Good Idea to a Rather Large Number of Germans

Alon Confino’s A World without Jews is an engagingly written interpretative essay that is squarely situated within a now very prominent tradition of Holocaust historiography emphasizing memory, sentiment, and imagination: a number of Confino’s earlier works have in fact significantly contributed to establishing this strand of literature. Confino chiefly aims to explore the role of a general German National-Socialist “world-view”, or “culture,” a concept denoting something less specific and explicit than the more old-fashioned “ideology.” This general approach has evolved from social history’s emphasis on individuals’ agency--which includes that of perpetrators as well as victims and “bystanders”--and the role that the construction of meaning plays for it: people do, or refuse to do, things because they “construct” or “imagine” these things as somehow meaningful, or not, which does not necessarily require them to have adopted or developed anything like a coherent sociopolitical program. This type of social history, articulated in the sign of the “cultural turn” and, more recently, the “history of emotions” and “sensibilities,” has allowed interpreters more easily to take account of contradictions, inconsistencies, and plain irrationality, which earlier historiographies have often, albeit by no means always, tended to downplay. Given that irrationality is a chief characteristic of the Holocaust and, more generally, of antisemitism, it is unsurprising that this historiographical paradigm offers itself to Holocaust studies. A World without Jews is a fine example of this trend, demonstrating the value of a specific, albeit inevitably partial perspective on the Holocaust, namely that of trying to reconstruct why the Holocaust seemed like a good idea to a rather large number of Germans.

Confino mentions at the beginning of the book that writing history has for him something of playing music, and indeed the book is written in a style that sometimes recalls the montage technique of a radio play more than that of a scholarly treatise. Confino interweaves memory narrative with interpretative commentary (although the interpretations are not always strictly interpretations of the narratives) and long lists of anti-Jewish laws (thrown into the mix, in italics, without much comment, often resembling something out of Samuel Beckett), and for good measure, quite a few pictures--again, dropped onto the pages for illustration, but not discussed and interpreted in a more formally scholarly manner (a bit like the photos in W. G. Sebald’s novels).

The book begins with a scene from the pogrom of November 10, 1938, that Confino, like most English-language historians, calls by the absurdly beautifying name contemporaries gave it: the Kristallnacht. As there was nothing crystalline about it, Germans of my generation were taught at university to call this event the Novemberpogrom. The origin of the word Kristallnacht is unclear, but it was probably first an ironic comment on the bombast of Nazi language, the point being that only the Nazis would have referred to broken windows as “crystals.” This is especially true for its more common form, Reichskristallnacht: Nazis loved to elevate anything by prefixing it with “Reichs.” It seems that the word was quickly appropriated by the Nazis themselves, though, minus the irony. I am still puzzled by finding this strange word being used all over the English-language academic literature without pointers to either its (first) bitterly sarcastic or its (subsequent) euphemistic meaning: its unreflecting use obscures what might have been a small element of cultural-imaginary, but ineffective and failed resistance to the event, which is something that to discuss would have fitted well into Confino’s book. I dwell on this detail as an example for some of the ways in which the book could have been sharpened by reflecting more carefully on some of the finer points of the symbolic and linguistic issues it addresses.

In his discussion of the November pogroms Confino highlights as one particularly puzzling aspect the burning of Torah scrolls: “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?” He writes that “this is a good question because in European-Christian civilization the torching of the Bible is bound to be significant” (p. 3), a fuzzy sentence in which the part beginning with “because” does not so much point to a reason but to a conceptual presupposition. Confino’s book does not so much make the argument why this is “a good question” but expects the reader to agree that it is. Those less convinced might wonder how significant it is, and how this argument could be made. He suggests somewhat unconvincingly that extant scholarship had ignored the religious dimension of the Holocaust because of its emphasis on “Nazi racial ideology,” that is, the Nazi aim “to build a racial biological society,” by which Confino probably means a society based on the concept of “race” as understood in biological terms.[1] Conceptually, Confino’s prose is not entirely clear in these matters: he states first that the Hebrew Bible was “a religious, not a racial, symbol” (p. 4), but then (on the same page) argues that “race and religion, which have often been viewed as separate categories, commingled in Kristallnacht”: their “commingling” presupposes obviously that “race and religion” are in fact separate categories, and that the Hebrew Bible is both a religious and a racial symbol at the same time. Further down Confino writes that the Nazi idea of race “was nuanced and multifaceted and went beyond science and biology” (p. 7), for example when they thought of “the Jews” as a “devilish” race: the point is here clearly that they thought about religion in racial terms--which is hardly a shocking discovery--and that the discourse on “race” had social, political, moral, ethical, economical, and indeed theological contents. In this sense the metaphor of the “commingling” is misleading as race and religion are best understood as complementary dimensions of the same set of phenomena: both race and religion are ways in which to speak about and make sense of the social world, and there is overwhelming evidence, also from contemporary affairs, that modern political discourses draw on both of them simultaneously, seamlessly, and unhesitatingly.

In spite of the lack of a more precise conceptual framework, this is in fact implicit in Confino’s argument (e.g., pp. 64, 68, 127, 239): he emphasizes that the larger Nazi project involved the creation of a de-Judaized Christianity, albeit some Nazis surely were enemies of Christianity in any shape or form. The burning of Torah scrolls during the November pogroms was part of an effort to “imagine a Genesis,” namely that of a German Christian civilization in which the Jews never played a role, that is, a re-imagining of the past as much as the present and the future. This concept comes very close to the concept of “palingenesis” (not mentioned by Confino) that is now central to theorizations of the concept of fascism.[2.] Confino argues plausibly that close observation of the behaviors and utterances of individuals involved in the (often carnivalesque) antisemitic actions from 1933 to 1945--the temporal range of the book--shows that they were at least partly aware of the transgression signified by this re-imagining.

Confino points out that one of the inspirations for his book was his reading of Freud, but he hurries to assure that Freud’s method is “a nonstarter for the historian” (p. 22). He takes from Freud the insight in the importance of “the presence of the past,” and picks up the notion that there is something Oedipal about the Son Religion, always already at least latently antisemitic, usurping, drowning out, and trying to murder the Father Religion. It says a lot about the strictness of today’s academic division of labor that even a historian who asks quite theoretical questions on the nature of the civilization that brought forth the Holocaust does not feel obliged to consider who else was inspired by that good old Freudian idea: in the golden age of interdisciplinary social scientific research on antisemitism, the 1940s, psychoanalysis was not so easily dismissed. Confino’s book, which is full of the kind of psychological assumptions that psychoanalysis set out to critically examine, serves very well as an exposition of questions whose more sustained discussion would require the help of more theoretically complex instruments, though. Contemporary historical scholarship should not fall behind what classical texts of the theoretical literature such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946) and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Elements of Antisemitism (1947) achieved, in spite of their far more limited access to sources, in terms of weaving together discussions of race, religion, civilization, culture, the psyche, history, and economy. Perhaps the “cultural turn” is a good opportunity to re-examine some of what the more positivistically oriented scholars of the period after the 1940s chucked out as “non-starters.”

Notes

[1]. Confino’s unconvincing representation of extant Holocaust literature has been criticized by Geoff Eley, review of A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, by Alon Confino, The American Historical Review 119 (2014): 1636-1638; and Jeffrey Herf, review of A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, by Alon Confino, The Journal of Modern History 88 (2016): 484-485.

[2]. Roger Griffin, “Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age: From New Consensus to New Wave?,” Fascism 1 (2012): 1–17.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-nationalism.


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