SACW - 13 Feb 2017 | Bangladesh: draft Citizenship Bill 2016 / Traumatised Pakistani Refugees In Sri Lanka / India: Post-truth History Textbooks under BJP / France’s Outsider Candidates in 2017 Presidential Poll / Serbia’s Lying Problem

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 13 Feb 2017 - No. 2927 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Disquiet over draft Citizenship Bill 2016 | Commentary and Review
2. India Post-truth History Textbooks under BJP: Rajasthan ministers want a new ending for the battle of Haldighati - Editorials
3. India: An Interview with Bela Bhatia After the Attack on her Residence in Bastar - A video recording by Indian Cultural Forum
4. India: Remembering Deepak Roy
5. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: Education Or Religious, Political Propaganda? (Darshan Mondkar)
 - India: Casteism and communalism are delegitimising the institutions that have built JNU
 - India: A time to seek ‘closure’ of 1984 . . . (Harish Khare)
 - India: Uma Bharati a minister in the Modi govt dishonours the oath of office
 - ‘Alif’ a Bad film but pushes for secular education
 - What’s in a (Place) Name, Mohan Bhagwat? (Sandip Roy)
 - Tired of hatred, of vicious communal propaganda - coming back home to a secular India (Sandipan Sharma)
 - India: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seems to have really trained our Prime Minister well in, is brazenness
 - India: Ex-ABVP Activists Recount How the ABVP Orchestrated Events of 9th of Feb 2016 in JNU
 - India: Title changed & author name Mahadev Desai removed name from the version of Bhagwad Gita presented to Obama by Modi
 - India: Narendra Modi’s errors stem from his insincerity (Salil Tripathi)
 - No Curbs on foreign-based Hindutva outfits that can to send funds for hate campaigns in India: USCIRF (report in The Citizen)
 - India: Rajasthan history textbooks seeing big changes under the BJP led govt
 - India - UP assembly election campaign: The demonetisation gambit has backfired for the BJP says Ajay Bose
 - India: Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and RSS Outfit ABISY in tango “to build the spirit of nationalism”
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
6. Bangladesh: Reject Rohingya Refugee Relocation Plan - Provide Protection, Not Isolation on Flooded Island - Statement by Human Rights Watch) 
7. Bangladesh: Hefazat-e-Islam wants the Supreme Court to remove the sculpture of Lady Justice – the ancient Greek Goddess of justice
8. No Escape For Traumatised Pakistani Refugees In Sri Lanka
9. India: Attacks on academics show the cultural life of the Hindi heartland is becoming dangerously narrow | Apoorvanand 
10. India - 2017 Punjab Assembly Elections: Two Commentaries
11. France’s Outsider Candidates Seize the Presidential Race | Elisabeth Zerofsky
12. US visitors may have to reveal social media passwords to enter country | David Kravets 
13. The Female Resistance | Sławomir Sierakowski
14. When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig | George Prochnik
15. Serbia’s Lying Problem | Vesna Pešić and Charles Simic

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1. BANGLADESH: DISQUIET OVER DRAFT CITIZENSHIP BILL 2016 | COMMENTARY AND REVIEW
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For people who were born abroad to Bangladeshi parents, for people who have a parent who isn’t Bangladeshi, things are about to change, and given the way our nation operates, probably not for the better.
http://sacw.net/article13106.html

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2. INDIA POST-TRUTH HISTORY TEXTBOOKS UNDER BJP: RAJASTHAN MINISTERS WANT A NEW ENDING FOR THE BATTLE OF HALDIGHATI - EDITORIALS
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The proposal to amend ’history’ in the textbooks of Rajasthan University (RU) was made by Mohanlal Gupta, a BJP MLA who is also a government nominee in the RU syndicate.
http://sacw.net/article13107.html

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3. INDIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH BELA BHATIA AFTER THE ATTACK ON HER RESIDENCE IN BASTAR - A VIDEO RECORDING BY INDIAN CULTURAL FORUM
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http://sacw.net/article13103.html

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4. INDIA: REMEMBERING DEEPAK ROY
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Deepak Roy,(1949-2017) was a talented, committed documentary film maker of the old school. His best films combined with perception, content with a sureness of technique. His Docu-feature in 1997-‘’Dhanna” won him the National Award for Best Film on Social issues. It was about a specially- abled boy Dhannaraj who brings water to his parched village in Madhya Pradesh.
http://sacw.net/article13104.html

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5. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: Education Or Religious, Political Propaganda? (Darshan Mondkar)
 - India: Casteism and communalism are delegitimising the institutions that have built JNU
 - India: A time to seek ‘closure’ of 1984 . . . (Harish Khare)
 - India: Uma Bharati a minister in the Modi govt dishonours the oath of office
 - ‘Alif’ a Bad film but pushes for secular education
 - What’s in a (Place) Name, Mohan Bhagwat? (Sandip Roy)
 - Tired of hatred, of vicious communal propaganda - coming back home to a secular India (Sandipan Sharma)
 - The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seems to have really trained our Prime Minister well in, is brazenness
 - India: Ex-ABVP Activists Recount How the ABVP Orchestrated Events of 9th of February 2016 in JNU
 - India: Title changed & author name Mahadev Desai removed name from the version of Bhagwad Gita presented to Obama by Modi
 - India: Narendra Modi’s errors stem from his insincerity (Salil Tripathi)
 - No Curbs on foreign-based Hindutva outfits that can to send funds for hate campaigns in India: USCIRF (report in The Citizen)
 - India: Maharana Pratap vs. Akbar - Rajasthan history textbooks seeing big changes under the BJP led govt
 - India - UP assembly election campaign: The demonetisation gambit has backfired for the BJP says Ajay Bose
 - India: Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and RSS Outfit ABISY in tango “to build the spirit of nationalism”
 - India: RSS leader arrested for murder of convert in Kerala
 - India: RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat visits Betul jail to pay tributes to Golwalkar
 - India: 'We need to tell our leaders that they cannot sow bitterness and hatred' - Apoorvanand
 - India: The Long struggle of Muzaffarnagar gang rape survivors (Aarefa Johari / scroll.in)
 - France: How Leftists Learned to Love Le Pen (Katy Lee, Claire Sergent)
 - India: JNU invites Troll-in-chief i.e. BJP’s IT-cell chief to lecture on Digital Literacy
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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6. BANGLADESH: REJECT ROHINGYA REFUGEE RELOCATION PLAN
Provide Protection, Not Isolation on Flooded Island - Statement by Human Rights Watch)
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(Human Right Watch - February 8, 2017)

(New York) – The Bangladeshi government should immediately drop its plan to transfer Rohingya refugees to an uninhabited, undeveloped coastal island, Human Rights Watch said today. Relocating the refugees from the Cox’s Bazar area to Thengar Char island would deprive them of their rights to freedom of movement, livelihood, food and education, in violation of Bangladesh’s obligations under international human rights law.

Between 300,000 and 500,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees, most of them unregistered by the authorities, are in Bangladesh after fleeing persecution in Burma dating back to the 1990s. Since October 2016, nearly 69,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State in Burma have entered Bangladesh to escape attacks by Burmese security forces, including unlawful killings, sexual violence and wholesale destruction of villages.

Rohingya refugees look on inside their house at Balukhali Makeshift Refugee Camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, February 8, 2017. 
© Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain

“The Bangladesh government is making the ridiculous claim that relocating Rohingya refugees to an island with absolutely no facilities that is deluged at high tide and submerged during the monsoon season will improve their living conditions,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “This proposal is both cruel and unworkable and should be abandoned.”

The plan to move long-term refugees to Thengar Char was first suggested in 2015, but was shelved after widespread condemnation.

A 2015 letter from the Bangladeshi government on the appropriate location to relocate the refugees stated that it must “minimize conflicts between Bangladeshis and Rohingya.” Thengar Chor was apparently chosen because of its distance from inhabited areas – it is 30 kilometers from the populated Hatiya island and a long journey from existing Rohingya camps. 

The government revived the plan in late January 2017 following the new influx of Rohingya refugees.  Officials contended that the new arrivals pose a law and order and a public health problem, but have produced no evidence to support this claim. In addition, the government has issued warnings against new arrivals mixing with the general population and established committees  to increase security around the camps to prevent refugees from exiting the camps or “intermingling” with Bangladeshi citizens.

A cabinet order, passed on January 26, 2017, is unclear as to whether all Rohingya in Bangladesh would be transferred or only new arrivals.  However, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Mohammad Shahriar Alom has said that, “The Rohingya will live [in Thengar Char] temporarily and our desire is that the Myanmar [Burma] government will take them back as soon as possible.”

Journalists who have visited Thengar Char island, which emerged from river silt deposited in the Bay of Bengal just a decade ago, describe it as empty and featureless, subject to cyclones and flooding. During monsoon season, the island is submerged; anyone living on the island will have to be evacuated, and any infrastructure would be damaged. The government announced that it will build embankments around the island to stave off the constant flooding, but similar islands along the coast have long faced flooding and frequent evacuations despite government interventions. One government official from the area, speaking anonymously to the BBC, said that sending people to live there was “a terrible idea,” noting that the island is "only accessible during winter and is a haven for pirates."

    Instead of dumping Rohingya on a flooded island, the government should be seeking immediate donor support to improve existing conditions for the refugees. 

Brad Adams
Asia Director

Aid agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which administers the refugee camps, expressed alarm over the revival of this plan, and said that any relocation of the refugees to Thengar Char must be voluntary, and be done through a consultative process after a feasibility study has been completed.

Human Rights Watch regards Rohingya people who flee from Burma to Bangladesh to be prima facie refugees for four reasons. First, the Burmese government has effectively denied its Rohingya minority citizenship, failing to protect them and itself perpetrating rampant and systemic violation of their human rights, including restrictions on movement; limitations on access to health care, livelihood, shelter, and education; arbitrary arrests and detention; and forced labor. Second, because of Burma’s discriminatory citizenship policies, it also refuses to cooperate in the repatriation of Rohingya, itself a denial of the human right of any person to return to their country, and the basis for a sur place claim to refugee status. Third, Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and has neither registered Rohingya as refugees since the early 1990s, nor allowed them to lodge asylum claims, thereby abdicating its responsibility to determine their status. Finally, a person does not become a refugee because of recognition, but is recognized because they meet the refugee definition, so refugees in Bangladesh do not forfeit their rights as refugees simply because the authorities have not recognized their status.

“The Bangladeshi government needs to treat the persecuted Rohingya humanely, but they shouldn’t have to go it alone,” Adams said. “Instead of dumping Rohingya on a flooded island, the government should be seeking immediate donor support to improve existing conditions for the refugees.”

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7. BANGLADESH: HEFAZAT-E-ISLAM THREATENS TO LAUNCH A MASSIVE MOVEMENT IF THE SCULPTURE OF LADY JUSTICE – THE ANCIENT GREEK GODDESS OF JUSTICE IS NOT REMOVED FROM THE SUPREME COURT PREMISES
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(Dhaka Tribune - February 07, 2017)

Hefazat: Remove Greek idol from Supreme Court

Tribune Desk

Radical Islamist platform Hefazat-e-Islam has threatened to launch a massive movement if the sculpture of Lady Justice – the ancient Greek Goddess of justice Themis holding a scale and a sword – being erected on the Supreme Court premises is not removed immediately.

Earlier, other religion-based parties including Olama League, Khelafat Majlish Bangladesh and Islami Andolon Bangladesh protested the government move to install a “Greek idol,” terming it anti-Islamic.

Shah Ahmad Shafi, ameer of Hefazat, a Qawmi madrasa-based group eyeing Shariah Law in Bangladesh, in a statement on Monday said the Lady Justice statue was not in cohesion with the country’s culture, was contrary to religious beliefs.

“Ideological aggression is going on against Islam and the Muslims of Bangladesh in the name of secularism,” Shafi said, demanding stern punishment to those evil quarters.

If anyone wants to set up sculpture in Supreme Court premises, that will have to be similar with the ideals of the country, according to Shafi.

Islami Andolon Bangladesh chief, better known as Charmonai Pir, Mufti Rezaul Karim warned that the people would create a “river of blood” if the sculpture was not removed.

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8. NO ESCAPE FOR TRAUMATISED PAKISTANI REFUGEES IN SRI LANKA
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(The Sunday Leader - February 12, 2017)

* Many people leave, seeking a better life elsewhere
* Negombo, today looks like a mini-Pakistan
* Some have been here for 10 years

Young choir members sing hymns in Sri Lanka’s southern city of Negombo. They are singing for strength and patience in difficult times. Unlike Sinhala or Tamil, the languages spoken on this island nation, they’re singing in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

There are Christians who fled Pakistan to seek asylum in Sri Lanka. One woman, who asks that I don’t use her name, tells me a story about being united in love but divided in faith.

A Muslim woman, she married a Christian man — a taboo in Pakistan. The decision outraged her family and even sparked calls to have her husband killed. In Pakistan, interfaith marriages are rare, and even rarer these days, with growing religious intolerance.

Fearing for their safety, the couple fled to Sri Lanka three years ago. Thousands of people from religious minorities in Pakistan – Christians, Shiites and Ahmadiyas – flee persecution and discrimination by the Sunni Muslim majority.

Militant groups linked to Taliban and Al-Qaeda have openly attacked their houses of worship, killing hundreds and injuring many more.

It’s why many people leave, seeking a better life elsewhere. They come to places like Negombo, which today looks like a mini-Pakistan, with hundreds of Pakistanis living here quietly, almost unnoticed. Most of them don’t want to be identified.

Jessica William, 50, arrived here with her four children and two grandchildren in 2012. “My son worked as male nurse and he used to visit some Muslim patients in their homes,” she told me. “One day, he was taking a patient to the doctor when they came under armed attack. My son was also shot. Later, he found out that those people had links with terrorists. He was so scared that he left the job and left the country. Those people started searching for my son and harassed the family. So, we also left our home,” she recalled. Colombo has enjoyed good diplomatic relations with Islamabad, which helped it end violence by Tamil militants, who were allegedly supported by India. But things dramatically changed two years ago when Sri Lankan authorities, fearing an influx of terrorists, stopped issuing visas on arrival to Pakistanis.

Some 100 migrants, mostly men, were forcibly sent back. Political observers say New Delhi was putting pressure on Colombo to counter the growing influence of Islamabad on the island nation. The move has left hundreds of asylum seekers stranded and scared.

During my visit to the city, four Pakistani bishops attending the International Bishops Conference in Colombo met frustrated families.

The migrants pleaded to the bishops to press America or European countries to take them in. People like Jessica are angry and fed up. “We cannot work, whatever we can we do secretly because we have to pay thousands for rent. Let alone food and other things. We spend life in constant fear. I worked as head of a charity organisation that helped and sheltered children with special needs. I used to clean and care for the children of others. But, today there is no one to protect my children,” she said.

Sri Lanka might be an attractive place for tourists with its lush-green mountains and beautiful temples but the life of migrants is another story, she said.

“We have no access to the hospitals, schools or jobs. We are forced to secretly work to buy food and pay rent. I’ve one piece of advice for you son! Think of yourself before thinking of anyone else,” she told me.

Following criticism from UN’s refugee agency, the Sri Lankan government has stopped deportations. However the lengthy asylum process is still testing the patience of migrants from Pakistan.

Some have been here for 10 years. Their asylum requests denied, they are in hiding.

(Courtesy World Crunch.com)

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9. INDIA: A BESIEGED LIFE OF THE MIND - ATTACKS ON NIVEDITA MENON, RAJSHREE RANAWAT SHOW THE CULTURAL LIFE OF WHAT IS KNOWN AS THE HINDI HEARTLAND IS BECOMING DANGEROUSLY NARROW
BY APOORVANAND 
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(The Indian Express - February 10, 2017)
 
The reports of attacks and a hate campaign in the form of agitations and police reports against academic Nivedita Menon of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Rajshree Ranawat of the Jai Narain Vyas University (JNVU), Jodhpur, must concern us all. We cannot simply shrug it off when the university administration itself is filing criminal reports against academics for their “anti-national” remarks on its premises. FIRs have a life of their own and can have serious consequences. Books have been pulped, recalled from shelves, writers and artists have apologised for something they have not done, jobs have been lost. So, it is not amusing to learn that teachers are facing a “popular” agitation, bad press and possible arrests for their scholarly work, be this in a lecture at a seminar, an article or a book.
This attack is not an exception. A similar assault had taken place at the Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, some time ago when the organisers and speakers of a seminar in the department of philosophy were targeted with criminal cases and a “popular” agitation. The case of the teachers in Haryana Central University, attacked for staging a play, is still fresh in our minds.
In these cases, nationalism is used as a weapon against knowledge and free enquiry. This article, however, is not an attempt to defend Nivedita Menon and Rajshree Ranawat or the English department at JNVU, which invited Menon to speak at a conference on “History Reconstructed Through Literature: Nation, Identity, Culture”, where she made allegedly “seditious” remarks questioning India’s claims over Kashmir.
Menon has since clarified, in great detail in a post on Kafila.online, that statements attributed to her are falsehoods and half-truths. She is not a coward, so she does not disown her remarks. But clearly, most of what is being blamed on her is not what she said but what the agitators imagined she had. This is an occasion to deliberate on the sad decline of state universities, the perversion of student politics and the irresponsible reporting by the Hindi media, which borders on instigation and hate campaigns.
We know the sad story of the destruction of the once-outstanding Jodhpur and Jaipur Universities. They have been killed by starving them of funds and the non-appointment of faculty. Reduced to examination machines, they lack even the ambition of contributing to knowledge creation.
The divide between the state universities and central educational institutions, in terms of finances and knowledge, is huge and daunting. The sheer insensitivity of state governments and political parties towards the young is demonstrated in the way they treat and maintain universities. Vice chancellors are selected not for their ability
in academic leadership, but their loyalty to the government of the day. Departments are empty, libraries impoverished and laboratories non-functional.
In such a dismal scenario, conferences like the one Ranawat and her colleagues organised are audacious acts, pulled off in extremely adverse situations. They also serve as oases, a rare opportunity for students and faculty to be exposed to and interact with the best minds in the academic world. Such conferences provide an opportunity to the faculty and students to break free from mechanical, examination-driven classes. But it is clear that the university authorities are ready to sacrifice them at the very first provocation.
The quality of the corporate life of a university is something we need to think about. When unions of teachers and non-teaching staff members turn against their own colleagues, it gives a signal to other teachers that they cannot be adventurous and would be left alone to fight their battle. The behaviour of the ABVP, in such cases, has been
uniform. Instead of engaging intellectually with its ideological opponents, its members have indulged in threats, physical attacks, destruction of public property and public agitation. One expects student organisations to promote a culture of dialogue. It is disappointing to see some of them using their physical prowess and proximity to power to make their point.
The role of the Hindi media in the JNVU and other such cases has been dangerous. It does not engage in a balanced reporting of the facts. A team from the editors’ guild, which investigated Hindi media’s role in the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, found that it has turned into a propaganda machine for Hindu right-wing politics. The reader and viewer solely dependent on Hindi media are not only malnourished, they are being fed intoxicants in the name of news and opinion.
The cultural life of what is known as the Hindi heartland is becoming dangerously narrow. This is definitely a loss for teachers, but more so for young minds. As socioloist Satish Deshpande argues, universities are the only spaces, in our otherwise highly segregated and hierarchical society, where the youth get a chance to participate in intellectual discourse in an egalitarian manner. This is an opportunity for them to experience a freedom which is unavailable in wider society. This applies especially to first-generation college and university goers.
To restrict or close down such spaces is to deprive them of their only source of intellectual and cultural nourishment. Here, they learn the art of dealing with differences and the art of persuasion. When a Rajshree Ranawat organises such a conference, or a Nivedita Menon speaks in it, they do not do so merely to exercise their right to free speech, but more out of their sense of responsibility towards the youth. They are being told that this is a soldierly duty, fraught with real risk, that they have been in the line of fire from the enemies of intellect, who, by being so, become enemies of equality, freedom and humanity.
The writer teaches at Delhi University

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10. INDIA - 2017 PUNJAB ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS: TWO COMMENTARIES
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(The Tribune, February 7, 2017

CHALLENGE OF A THIRD PLAYER IN PUNJAB POLITICS
by Pritam Singh

In Punjab, the AAP has risen as a third alternative on the ruins of Punjab's parliamentary Left, the brutal suppression of the Naxalite movement in the early 1970s and the Sikh militant movement in the 1990s. The AAP has given a political platform to those who were alienated from both the Congress and the SAD.

POLL FURY: AAP supporters during a roadshow while campaigning in Amritsar. Tribune Photo: Vishal Kumar
PUNJAB’S election scene was both annoying and fascinating. It was annoying because confronted with the enormity of the task Punjab faces due to its stunted development, we saw cheap tricks, theatrics and personal insults in the course of electioneering. One must appreciate at least two political leaders, Parkash Singh Badal and Dharamvir Gandhi, who  thankfully stuck to civilised language and decorum during campaigning for the polls. 

Despite this annoyance, the election scene was still fascinating because for the first time, the duopoly of political rule in Punjab has been challenged by a third player, that is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).  This will, hopefully, strengthen democracy by enabling Punjabis to widen their political choices and not be forced to choose only between two rivals — the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Congress party.

Historically, once there did emerge the possibility of a Left alternative, in the 1950s and in a modified form until 1980. In the 1957 assembly elections in the erstwhile Punjab, 13.6 per cent voters had voted for the Communist Party and 1.3 per cent for the Praja Socialist Party, thus taking the combined Left vote to 15 per cent. If we confine ourselves only to the constituencies which fall in the present-day Punjab, this vote was around 25 per cent. Every fourth voter had then voted for the Left.  

Outside parliamentary politics, the Naxalite movement in Punjab in the late 1960s and the early 1970s attracted the brightest and idealistic Punjabi youth to its fold. The parliamentary Left too maintained a good position so much so that for the Assembly elections in 1980, the Akali Dal-CPI-CPM combine narrowly missed capturing power in Punjab. It is tempting to imagine that had that coalition won, the politics of Punjab might have followed a different historical course with  consequences for Indian politics. Until then, the Punjabi Leftists were reasonably successful in combining their roots in Punjab's egalitarian Sikh traditions with modern socialism.  The parliamentary Left damaged itself after 1984 when instead of following its reputable political philosophy of standing with the oppressed; it became an ally of the establishment while there were massive human rights violations taking place in the rural areas of Punjab. Every movement has its soul and when that soul is lost, the death of the movement is inevitable. The degeneration of the parliamentary Left leadership led to its two elected CPI MLAs in 2002 being lured into the Congress by the then Chief Minister Amarinder Singh. The final demise of this Left alternative was symbolised by its complete absence in the Punjab legislature since 2007.

The AAP has risen as a third alternative in Punjab on the ruins of Punjab's parliamentary Left and the brutal suppression of the Naxalite movement in the early 1970s and of the Sikh militant movement in the 1990s. It is this specific Punjab link that is central to resolving the puzzle that a party with no Punjabi in its central leadership managed to win 4 out of 13 Lok Sabha seats from Punjab in 2014. It not only lost every seat it contested elsewhere in the country but 414 out of the 434 candidates fielded forfeited their security deposits. This stunning performance in Punjab also contributed significantly to its spectacular success in the Delhi Assembly elections in February, 2015. Then Left sympathisers and Sikh activists had actively campaigned for the AAP in Delhi.

The suppression of the Naxalite movement in Punjab involved physical liquidation of nearly 100 activists in “encounters” and imprisonment, torture, abuse, harassment and monetary exploitation of thousands of sympathisers. The suppression of this movement left thousands of families broken, discontented, helpless and angry. This network of families and activists had virtually no political home in the existing political parties. The rise of the AAP since 2013/2014 has provided them a platform of hope. Unleashing of the dormant energies of these activists had played a crucial part in the AAP's electoral victories in 2014, particularly in the Faridkot and Sangrur constituencies and to a lesser extent in the Patiala constituency where Dr Gandhi defeated the Congress candidate Perneet Kaur. These constituencies formed areas where the Naxalite movement had had a substantial following, especially among the youth.

The suppression of the Sikh militant movement in the 1980s and 1990s was even wider and deeper than the Naxalite movement. It affected hundreds of thousands of families whose members were liquidated by the security forces or tortured, humiliated or subjected to extortion. A substantial section of the Sikh population was disgruntled and rebellious but without an obvious political home. At one stage, these angry masses supported the Simranjeet Singh Mann-led Akali Dal candidates, leading to massive victories of those candidates to the Lok Sabha in 1989. However, Mann’s inability to organise this support in a sustainable manner led to this discontented mass migrating almost  en bloc in its support to the AAP. The election in 2014 of Harinder Singh Khalsa from Fatehgarh Sahib showed the strength of this stream of the AAP’s support base.

The other components in the AAP's support base include idealistic youth opposed to corruption from the urban Hindu middle class, a section of the Dalits and the diaspora. The AAP's potential as a third alternative has been weakened by its organisational blunders such as expelling its founding Punjab convener Chhottepur and political blunders such as superimposing the image of the jharoo over that of Golden Temple in its publicity material.  Despite these blunders, the AAP remains a substantial player in Punjab's electoral politics. It does not have the organisational network that the Akali Dal has but it has fully exploited the Akali Dal's vulnerability on the government's mishandling of the desecrations of Shri Guru Granth Sahib. As far as the Congress is concerned, it has nothing to show except Amarinder Singh as a popular leader.

One significant political outcome from the AAP's foray into Punjab is that the issue of Punjab politics being governed by Punjab politicians and not Delhi-based centralised leaders has acquired a level of importance never seen before. All political parties are being forced to underplay the role of their central leaders and to project greater decision-making powers to their state-based leadership. Irrespective of the outcome of this Assembly election, the lasting and valuable contribution of the highly centralised AAP to Punjab would be, paradoxically, to strengthen the regionalisation of Punjab politics.

The writer is a Professor of Economics at Oxford Brookes University, UK

o o o

(The Times of India - February 9, 2017)

PUNJAB’S POST-TRUTH POLITICS: IN FAKING IT FOR POLITICAL EFFECT, APPEALS FOR VOTES IN PUNJAB HAVE SURPASSED CHICANERY IN AMERICA
by Robin David

Wouldn’t it be just ‘huuuge’ to know what President Donald Trump thinks of Shiromani Akali Dal’s manifesto promise of acquiring one lakh acres of land in foreign countries, including the US, and settle Punjabi farmers there? At a time when the American president is threatening to shut out almost all immigration, Punjabi farmers will simply saunter through LaGuardia, do some bhangra on the Golden Gate Bridge, drink some lassi-shassi in front of the White House and grow wheat next to Mount Rushmore!

If you thought that only American politics was a reflection of the post-truth world we are living in, think again. The entire campaign for the Punjab assembly election was a messy collection of emotional appeals and unrealistic promises. In fact, just before Punjabis voted on February 4, a concerted attempt was made to spread fake news, clearly establishing that we are as much post-truth as in America.

Shiromani Akali Dal doesn’t have a monopoly on making ‘huuuge’ promises. Besides, making outlandish promises is not even new to Indian politics. But some of the campaign pledges this time are so far away from logic that it is shocking.

For instance, both Congress and AAP have promised to end the narcotics menace in Punjab within one month of coming to power. The US couldn’t end the problem in 50 years despite running a sustained war on drugs with the resources of the most powerful country in the world. But Congress and AAP are dead certain they can end the menace in 30 days flat. The details of how they will do it are as hazy as a drug-filled high.

Thankfully, we already have a pretty long fence along the Pakistan border or both parties would have run a campaign to build a wall there and have Pakistan pay for it!

In March last year, three months before ‘Udta Punjab’ was released, then President Barack Obama had told the National Prescription Drug Abuse Heroin Summit in Atlanta that it was time to stop looking at addiction through the lens of criminal justice. He wanted the focus to shift to reducing demand and providing treatment.

In Punjab, however, Arvind Kejriwal is making recorded phone calls to voters telling them that to end the drug menace quickly, his first step would be to jail a few politicians. It is ridiculous to think that jailing someone would end Punjab’s drug problem when you consider that All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi’s survey last year had estimated that in a population of around 2.77 crore people, Punjab had an estimated 1.23 lakh heroin-dependent people.

These are, of course, facts. But in the age of post-truth, facts don’t matter. Feelings do. So, finger pointing is more effective than building political consensus to end a menace that has the capacity to destroy an entire generation.

To ensure that all the characteristics of post-truth politics were played out in Punjab, attempts were also made at spreading fake news. Just before votes were cast, a letter ostensibly written in Hindi by AAP’s Punjab affairs in-charge Sanjay Singh was circulated on social media. Written on the official AAP letterhead, it asked Kejriwal to start maintaining a distance from the Punjab campaign just in case the party loses, as Congress’s popularity was growing.

Singh categorically denied writing any such letter. By evening, another fake letter was doing the social media rounds. Making almost the same argument in English, it had Prashant Kishor writing to Sonia Gandhi asking her to stay away from Punjab. Both letters have now reached the Election Commission.

And that wasn’t all. A colour-coded map, allegedly prepared by Punjab police’s intelligence wing, was the hottest forward on WhatsApp a week before polling. It gave a massive majority to one of the opposition parties. It is extremely unusual for intelligence officers to give out such maps with their official stamp, making many wonder if it was yet another attempt at fakery.

Then on February 3, another fake letter was circulated. This time it was on the letterhead of the highest temporal seat of Sikhism – the Akal Takht – asking people not to vote for Akali Dal for taking support of Dera Sacha Sauda in Sirsa. It was quickly refuted by both the high priests and Akali Dal leaders.

It is now clear that political parties and their supporters have mastered the social media and know exactly how to let loose a balloon with nothing but gas to get people chattering on a particular issue or subject. You can project patent lies and half-truths as absolute truth and there will be enough people to believe in it just because it went viral. Viral trumps veracity (the pun is intended).

By the time people realise that what they gulped down was fake, they will be in no position to regurgitate it. And by then a mood, a sentiment, a perception will be created and veracity will no longer be relevant.

You can crib about fake news and false promises, but we have created the sentiment we need ahead of a crucial election – that seems to be the strategy. Facts can wait, feelings can’t.

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11. FRANCE’S OUTSIDER CANDIDATES SEIZE THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
By Elisabeth Zerofsky
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(The New Yorker - February 8, 2017
   
Marine Le Pen (above), of the far-right National Front, and Emmanuel Macron, an independent, have emerged as the front-runners in France’s Presidential election.
Marine Le Pen (above), of the far-right National Front, and Emmanuel Macron, an independent, have emerged as the front-runners in France’s Presidential election.PHOTOGRAPH BY AURELIEN MORISSARD / IP3 / GETTY	

The public gymnasium across the street from my Paris apartment, in an unassuming neighborhood of the Nineteenth Arrondissement, has become an effigy for the city’s political class. One morning a few weeks ago, posters went up announcing a rally for Arnaud Montebourg, a former minister and perennial Presidential candidate, his bland smile stamped in rows across the building’s façade. A few days later, the French voted him out of the Presidential race. The posters were, inevitably, defaced. A strip torn from one of them ripped right through Montebourg’s teeth.

After Montebourg, there were torn posters for former Prime Ministers Manuel Valls and François Fillon. So far this election cycle, French voters have been vicious in throwing out the symbols of entrenched power. In November, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was humiliated when his carefully calibrated comeback earned him a distant third place in the primary of the center-right Republicans; in December, François Hollande was pressured into becoming the first sitting President of the Fifth Republic not to run for reëlection. At the end of January, Valls was defeated in the Socialist Party race by Benoît Hamon, a dapper frondeur, a member of a rebel faction.

Fillon, Sarkozy’s former Prime Minister, managed to circumvent public ire when he triumphed over his boss in the Republican primary; a stern, traditional conservative, his win was attributed to a surprise showing from France’s “zombie Catholics.” The faithfully observant, who live largely in exurban areas, are, after decades in which public expression of religion was taboo, beginning to assert their identity. But as soon as Fillon took over the Party apparatus he was subject to the French rage toward the establishment. In late January, Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical paper with a penchant for going after stodgy men, revealed that Fillon’s wife, Penelope, had received five hundred thousand euros in compensation from the Parliament over five years for her work as an assistant (Fillon has held positions intermittently in both chambers since 1981). Hiring family members is standard practice in the insular world of French élites (an estimated twenty per cent of parliamentarians do it), but Penelope Fillon’s remuneration was remarkably high for an assistant, especially since she had declared, in 2007, that she had “never actually been his assistant or anything like that,” referring to her husband, and told the press last fall that she had “never been involved” in his political life. Her income was soon discovered to add up to nearly a million euros over fifteen years, and the dragnet expanded to include Fillon’s children, who were paid amply for brief periods of work. Investigators searched François Fillon’s office, and police questioned the couple for five hours.

One of Fillon’s campaign promises had been to abolish five hundred thousand civil-servant positions. Le Gorafi, France’s version of the Onion, came up with an alternative proposition: “François Fillon will condense 500,000 civil servant positions into one single position, and it will be for his wife.” At a press conference on Monday, Fillon maintained that everything he’d done had been perfectly legal, but he acknowledged that the public had grown intolerant of the political class’s behavior, saying that “what was acceptable yesterday . . . no longer is today.” The left rejoiced at what it predicted would be Fillon’s downfall. But it was a pitiful kind of schadenfreude. “Penelope-gate is not good news,” a French documentary-photographer friend, Vincent Jarousseau, wrote on Facebook. “It is just one more expression of a democracy that is running on empty.” Jarousseau has spent the past few years working on a book that has just come out, “L’Illusion Nationale,” about the former mining and industry towns in the north, which are desolated and impoverished, and increasingly voting for the far-right National Front. He told me of a family of seven that was living on a monthly government check of eleven hundred euros. In the family’s town, Denain, on the Belgian border, the life expectancy is fifty-eight—the same as Mali. “What becomes clear by the end is terrible—the incompetence of politicians, the contempt that results from broken promises and successive lies,” he wrote on Facebook. “These people have been used, and they know it. They are angry, very angry.”

The conventional wisdom holds that what’s bad for Fillon is good for Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front. Fillon found himself, oddly, to the right of Le Pen on many social issues, and stood to steal some of her voters. But as an economic “liberal,” who wants to gut social security, expand free-trade pacts, and deregulate, Fillon is a poor match for the moment; Le Pen’s sovereign protectionism is more in vogue. Polls currently show Le Pen safely winning the first round of the election in late April, which will advance her to a runoff against the second-place finisher. The début of the Trump Administration, however, has brought a sense of reality to her candidacy that cuts both ways. Le Pen has long vowed to end “uncontrolled” immigration to France. But after the chaos that accompanied Trump’s executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim countries and refugees from entering the U.S., Le Pen’s campaign director told Le Monde that such a move “is not a priority” for the National Front. “Everything is imaginable if particular needs justify it,” he said, “but our priorities are reëstablishing our borders, closing mosques that preach radical Islam, and destroying ISIS.”

The candidate who stands to gain the most from Fillon’s scandal could be the former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who is running as a non-party-aligned centrist. When Macron, thirty-nine, declared his candidacy as an independent, in November, he was clearly looking at polls showing that only eight per cent of French citizens trust the political parties. It may turn out to be a brilliant gamble. Alternately called a “traitor,” an “opportunist,” and “Brutus” for overtaking his political patron, Hollande, he now stands to pick up voters who find Fillon too conservative or corrupt, Hamon too quixotic, or the National Front too nationalist. Macron’s critics are many, but they ignore that he is doing the dull, plodding work of actual politics. Last spring, long before the campaign season had started, he launched a new “movement” that sent volunteers across France to talk with citizens about what troubled them most. He is now seeking candidates to run in the legislative race, which comes a month after the présidentielle and determines the efficacy of an administration. Macron is requiring that candidates on his ticket be free of legal run-ins—another novelty in a country where half the candidates on the right and a smattering on the left have been investigated for corruption. Macron is responsive to public sentiment, and he is building political infrastructure.

Little attention has been paid to the Socialist Party, which, after five years under a terrifically unpopular President and an immobilizing internal conflict between liberals and the hard left, had been declared dead. The nomination of Hamon, however, has energized many, who see the candidate as bringing the “old left” into the twenty-first century. Hamon has launched a semi-serious discussion of universal basic income, and he eschews the eternal back-and-forth of the French laïcité debate, which has become fixated on whether Muslim women should be permitted to cover their heads in public, in favor of new ideas. He has called for a corpus of “inspectors” who will be dispatched to insure that businesses and institutions are not discriminating based on faith, in the spirit of the original 1905 law. The intellectual left was, like the Party, considered shrinking and demoralized, but Hamon has pulled some of its proposals back into the public debate. “There is an intruder that has glided onto the platform of nonstop politics: the dream,” Daniel Schneidermann wrote in Libération. “Through what window did it come? We thought it was murdered, trampled, buried, thrown in the dungeon, at least since 1981.” Hamon’s poll numbers are rising, but he has a significant gap to make up.

When I asked my photographer friend how he thought the race would turn out, he laughed and said that, with all the chaos, anyone who says he knows what will happen is not to be believed. But as Fillon’s numbers sink—he is now running behind Le Pen and Macron, with eighteen and a half to twenty per cent of the vote—it is increasingly probable that, for the first time in decades, the second round of the election could be a runoff between two non-mainstream parties. Surely, this kind of repudiation, should it come to pass, is clear as can be.

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12. US VISITORS MAY HAVE TO REVEAL SOCIAL MEDIA PASSWORDS TO ENTER COUNTRY | DAVID KRAVETS 
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(arstechnica.com -  2/8/2017)

"If they don't want to cooperate, then you don't come in."

US Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has informed Congress that the DHS is considering requiring refugees and visa applicants from seven Muslim-majority nations to hand over their social media credentials from Facebook and other sites as part of a security check. "We want to get on their social media, with passwords: What do you do, what do you say?" he told the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday. "If they don't want to cooperate, then you don't come in."

Kelly was referencing Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen, citizens of which were barred from entering the US by President Trump's executive order. That order, however, remains in legal limbo after a federal judge blocked its enforcement. The Trump administration urged a federal appeals court on Tuesday to overturn the lower court's ruling.

Kelly told the House panel that the idea was among "the things we're thinking about" to bolster border security. Another form of vetting under consideration, he said, is demanding financial records. "We can follow the money, so to speak. How are you living, who's sending you money?" he said. "It applies under certain circumstances, to individuals who may be involved in on the payroll of terrorist organizations."

The Obama administration had considered—but passed on—demanding social media passwords from visitors entering the US. However, the Obama administration did adopt a plan to ask the millions of tourists entering the country each year to reveal their "online presence," such as social media identities. The government announced the plan in June in a bid to give the DHS "clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections."

That plan adds a line to the paper form and to the online Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application that US-bound visitors must fill out if they do not have a visa and plan on staying for up to 90 days for vacation, business, or other affairs. Under this security feature, the agency had said travelers coming to the US under the Visa Waiver Program would not be forced to disclose their social media handles. Instead, the government said, revealing passwords was "optional."

Secretary Kelly, a Trump appointee, cautioned that his ideas on immigration security were not set in stone, have not been adopted, and were subject to change.

David Kravets
The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper. 

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13. THE FEMALE RESISTANCE
by Sławomir Sierakowski
========================================
(Social Europe - 9 February 2017)

Antagonism is mounting between today’s right-wing populists and a somewhat unexpected but formidable opponent: women. In the United States, much like in Poland, women’s rights have been among the first targets of attack by populist leaders. Women are not taking it lying down.

Traditional conservatism in the West has largely come to terms with the need to grant women broad reproductive freedom. Today’s right-wing populist administrations, by contrast, are downright pre-modern in this regard, attempting to reverse reforms championed not just by the left – and long accepted by the conventional right.

It is no secret that the mainstream consensus is a source of contempt – and success – for the modern populist, and not just on women’s rights. Donald Trump’s first acts as US President show an eagerness to reject longstanding norms in many other areas as well, including foreign affairs and economic policy.

But it is the attack on women’s rights that is receiving the most powerful pushback. Poland’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has retreated politically only once since his party’s return to power in 2015. Last October, when thousands of women of all ages took to the streets in the “black protest,” his government was forced to withdraw from its plan to introduce a total ban on abortion. (Under the current law, abortion is allowed in the event of rape, severe fetal defects, or a threat to the health of the mother.)

Similarly, of all the sources of opposition to Trump, only women have been able to organize quickly and efficiently. Last month’s Women’s March on Washington boasted a turnout some three times larger than Trump’s own inauguration the previous day. In other words, Trump began his term with a symbolic defeat at the hands of American women.

Trump’s subsequent reinstatement of the “global gag rule,” which undermines women’s health in developing countries by defunding organizations that provide abortion counseling, could not obscure that loss, nor could his pledges to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers reproductive-health services in the US. Instead, women continued to resist – for example, by creating the #DressLikeAWoman hashtag on Twitter, to shine a spotlight on Trump’s sexist demand of female staffers.

As women have stood in the path of the populists, mainstream political leaders and parties have practically cowered; unsurprisingly, they continue to lose ground. But women have not been entirely alone. NGOs and other kinds of social movements have also stepped up. Even the media have helped the cause; though they are not accustomed to such a blatantly political role, circumstances – such as Trump’s “war” on them – have forced their hand.
Attack on liberalism

The composition of the resistance actually makes considerable sense. Right-wing populism is, at its core, an attack on liberalism, not necessarily on democracy. Separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, and free trade are liberal ideals; they are not democratic. Women have stood above the rest in the opposition, because they are, in many ways, the antithesis of right-wing populism, support for which comes primarily from poorly educated white men – the demographic cohort with the least comprehension of feminism.

The question now is whether women can win the battle against the populists. While the answer is not yet clear, they do have a few powerful weapons in their arsenal.

For starters, women are more numerous than any other single social group, including blacks, Latinos, the left, the right, liberals, conservatives, Catholics, and Protestants. There are more women than there are white men in the US – or in Poland, for that matter. And, most important, women far outnumber populists. (Women must fight for their rights as if they were a minority, though they are a majority, and as if they lacked human capital, though, in the West, they tend to be better educated than men.)

Moreover, women are everywhere, and discrimination, to varying degrees, is part of all women’s experiences. This makes women something of a revolutionary class, in the Marxist sense. It also makes it relatively easy for women to build solidarity.

During Poland’s black protest, thousands more people protested in solidarity, from Berlin (where several thousand took to the streets) to Kenya (where about 100 people demonstrated). During the Women’s March on Washington, up to two million people marched in solidarity around the world. Clearly, women are a global force. Who better, then, to resist the likes of Trump, Kaczyński, and other right-wing populists, as they launch an assault on globalism?

Perhaps the most important weapon in women’s arsenal is that they are unashamed. While the twentieth century was characterized by discipline through fear, the twenty-first century has been characterized by repression through shame. Unlike fear, shame can be hidden – and that’s the point.

Whereas one can feel fear without losing one’s dignity, shame arises from feelings of inferiority. That is what women are rejecting in their anti-populist protests. Defending the rights of women to choose whether to have an abortion – particularly in places where abortion is still relatively accessible – amounts to defending women’s dignity and autonomy.

Mainstream political parties, however, still experience shame, as do other traditional organizations like trade unions. They have scruples, and are concerned about how they are perceived. That makes them poorly equipped to stand up to the most shameless group of all: the populists.

The likes of Kaczyński and Trump have benefited massively from their lack of shame, saying and doing whatever wins them the support of their political base. But women aren’t having it. They are throwing off the shackles of the shame that has long been used to repress them, and fighting fire with fire. Can the populists take the heat?

Copyright: Project Syndicate 2017

Sławomir Sierakowski is founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw.

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14. WHEN IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP FASCISM, ACCORDING TO STEFAN ZWEIG | George Prochnik
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(The New Yorker, February 6, 2017)

Stefan Zweig in Ossining, New York, in 1941, seven years after he fled the ascendant Nazism of Europe.PHOTOGRAPH BY ULLSTEIN BILD / GETTY	

The Austrian émigré writer Stefan Zweig composed the first draft of his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” in a feverish rapture during the summer of 1941, as headlines gave every indication that civilization was being swallowed in darkness. Zweig’s beloved France had fallen to the Nazis the previous year. The Blitz had reached a peak in May, with almost fifteen hundred Londoners dying in a single night. Operation Barbarossa, the colossal invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, in which nearly a million people would die, had launched in June. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, roared along just behind the Army, massacring Jews and other vilified groups—often with the help of local police and ordinary citizens.

Zweig himself had fled Austria preëmptively, in 1934. During the country’s brief, bloody civil war that February, when Engelbert Dollfuss, the country’s Clerico-Fascist Chancellor, had destroyed the Socialist opposition, Zweig’s Salzburg home had been searched for secret arms to supply the left-wing militias. Zweig at the time was regarded as one of Europe’s most prominent humanist-pacifists, and the absurd crudity of the police action so outraged him that he began packing his things that night. From Austria, Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, went to England, then to the New World, where New York City became his base, despite his aversion to its crowds and abrasive competitiveness. In June of 1941, longing for some respite from the needs of the exiles in Manhattan beseeching him for help with money, work, and connections, the couple rented a modest, rather grim bungalow in Ossining, New York, a mile uphill from Sing Sing Correctional Facility. There, Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like “seven devils without a single walk,” as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, “that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.” For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.

Zweig noted that he could not remember when he first heard Hitler’s name. It was an era of confusion, filled with ugly agitators. During the early years of Hitler’s rise, Zweig was at the height of his career, and a renowned champion of causes that sought to promote solidarity among European nations. He called for the founding of an international university with branches in all the major European capitals, with a rotating exchange program intended to expose young people to other communities, ethnicities, and religions. He was only too aware that the nationalistic passions expressed in the First World War had been compounded by new racist ideologies in the intervening years. The economic hardship and sense of humiliation that the German citizenry experienced as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty had created a pervasive resentment that could be enlisted to fuel any number of radical, bloodthirsty projects.

Zweig did take notice of the discipline and financial resources on display at the rallies of the National Socialists—their eerily synchronized drilling and spanking-new uniforms, and the remarkable fleets of automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks they paraded. Zweig often travelled across the German border to the little resort town of Berchtesgaden, where he saw “small but ever-growing squads of young fellows in riding boots and brown shirts, each with a loud-colored swastika on his sleeve.” These young men were clearly trained for attack, Zweig recalled. But after the crushing of Hitler’s attempted putsch, in 1923, Zweig seems hardly to have given the National Socialists another thought until the elections of 1930, when support for the Party exploded—from under a million votes two years earlier to more than six million. At that point, still oblivious to what this popular affirmation might portend, Zweig applauded the enthusiastic passion expressed in the elections. He blamed the stuffiness of the country’s old-fashioned democrats for the Nazi victory, calling the results at the time “a perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.’ “

In his memoir, Zweig did not excuse himself or his intellectual peers for failing early on to reckon with Hitler’s significance. “The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,” he wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement . . . would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”

Zweig recognized that propaganda had played a crucial role in eroding the conscience of the world. He described how, as the tide of propaganda rose during the First World War, saturating newspapers, magazines, and radio, the sensibilities of readers became deadened. Eventually, even well-meaning journalists and intellectuals became guilty of what he called “the ‘doping’ of excitement”—an artificial incitement of emotion that culminated, inevitably, in mass hatred and fear. Describing the healthy uproar that ensued after one artist’s eloquent outcry against the war in the autumn of 1914, Zweig observed that, at that point, “the word still had power. It had not yet been done to death by the organization of lies, by ‘propaganda.’ “ But Hitler “elevated lying to a matter of course,” Zweig wrote, just as he turned “anti-humanitarianism to law.” By 1939, he observed, “Not a single pronouncement by any writer had the slightest effect . . . no book, pamphlet, essay, or poem” could inspire the masses to resist Hitler’s push to war.

Propaganda both whipped up Hitler’s base and provided cover for his regime’s most brutal aggressions. It also allowed truth seeking to blur into wishful thinking, as Europeans’ yearning for a benign resolution to the global crisis trumped all rational skepticism. “Hitler merely had to utter the word ‘peace’ in a speech to arouse the newspapers to enthusiasm, to make them forget all his past deeds, and desist from asking why, after all, Germany was arming so madly,” Zweig wrote. Even as one heard rumors about the construction of special internment camps, and of secret chambers where innocent people were eliminated without trial, Zweig recounted, people refused to believe that the new reality could persist. “This could only be an eruption of an initial, senseless rage, one told oneself. That sort of thing could not last in the twentieth century.” In one of the most affecting scenes in his autobiography, Zweig describes seeing the first refugees from Germany climbing over the Salzburg mountains and fording the streams into Austria shortly after Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship. “Starved, shabby, agitated . . . they were the leaders in the panicked flight from inhumanity which was to spread over the whole earth. But even then I did not suspect when I looked at those fugitives that I ought to perceive in those pale faces, as in a mirror, my own life, and that we all, we all, we all would become victims of the lust for power of this one man.”

Zweig was miserable in the United States. Americans seemed indifferent to the suffering of émigrés; Europe, he said repeatedly, was committing suicide. He told one friend that he felt as if he were living a “posthumous” existence. In a desperate effort to renew his will to live, he travelled to Brazil in August of 1941, where, on previous visits, the country’s people had treated him as a superstar, and where the visible intermixing of the races had struck Zweig as the only way forward for humanity. In letters from the time he sounds chronically wistful, as if he has travelled back to before the world of yesterday. And yet, for all his fondness for the Brazilian people and appreciation of the country’s natural beauty, his loneliness grew more and more acute. Many of his closest friends were dead. The others were thousands of miles away. His dream of a borderless, tolerant Europe (always his true, spiritual homeland) had been destroyed. He wrote to the author Jules Romains, “My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile.” In February of 1942, together with Lotte, Zweig took an overdose of sleeping pills. In the formal suicide message he left behind, Zweig wrote that it seemed better to withdraw with dignity while he still could, having lived “a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth.”

I wonder how far along the scale of moral degeneration Zweig would judge America to be in its current state. We have a magnetic leader, one who lies continually and remorselessly—not pathologically but strategically, to placate his opponents, to inflame the furies of his core constituency, and to foment chaos. The American people are confused and benumbed by a flood of fake news and misinformation. Reading in Zweig’s memoir how, during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, many well-meaning people “could not or did not wish to perceive that a new technique of conscious cynical amorality was at work,” it’s difficult not to think of our own present predicament. Last week, as Trump signed a drastic immigration ban that led to an outcry across the country and the world, then sought to mitigate those protests by small palliative measures and denials, I thought of one other crucial technique that Zweig identified in Hitler and his ministers: they introduced their most extreme measures gradually—strategically—in order to gauge how each new outrage was received. “Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest the dose,” Zweig wrote. “The doses became progressively stronger until all Europe finally perished from them.”

And still Zweig might have noted that, as of today, President Trump and his sinister “wire-pullers” have not yet locked the protocols for their exercise of power into place. One tragic lesson offered by “The World of Yesterday” is that, even in a culture where misinformation has become omnipresent, where an angry base, supported by disparate, well-heeled interests, feels empowered by the relentless lying of a charismatic leader, the center might still hold. In Zweig’s view, the final toxin needed to precipitate German catastrophe came in February of 1933, with the burning of the national parliament building in Berlin–an arson attack Hitler blamed on the Communists but which some historians still believe was carried out by the Nazis themselves. “At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed,” Zweig recalled. The destruction of a symbolic edifice—a blaze that caused no loss of life—became the pretext for the government to begin terrorizing its own civilian population. That fateful conflagration took place less than thirty days after Hitler became Chancellor. The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.

George Prochnik is the author of “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” and “Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem,” which is out in March from Other Press.

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15. SERBIA’S LYING PROBLEM | Vesna Pešić and Charles Simic
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(NYR Daily - February 6, 2017)

The Age of Total Lies

Marko Djuric/Reuters
A mural of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, Belgrade, Serbia, December, 2016

Abetted by fake news stories, manipulation of social media, and continual lying, the coming to power of Donald Trump has raised the question of whether other countries’ populations might be susceptible to the same level of deceit. An interesting case is Serbia, whose current prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, a former ultranationalist who served as an information minister in the late 1990s, when newspapers were fined and shut down in order to muzzle dissent as Slobodan Milošević fought a war with NATO over Kosovo.

The following commentary by the Serbian opposition politician and human rights activist Vesna Pešić describes the tricks Vučić and his party use to rule the country these days. A woman of extraordinary personal courage and integrity, she has continued to criticize Serbia’s leadership in her columns in Peščanik, an online magazine, despite efforts by the government to silence her. She was recently sued by the Police Minister for inflicting “mental pain” on him by describing his stupidity as beyond compare and wondering why he was assigned the role of being the dumbest in the present government. Here is a translation of her article, along with excerpts of a recent conversation I had with her about the implications of rule by lies and the similarities between the Serbian and American situations.

—Charles Simic

In my last article I wrote about strategies of covering up the truth. Now, I would like to go one step further and raise the issue of ruling by lies. It is worth asking whether there can be a theory of total lying, or at least an attempt to explain it. A situation of total lying happens when a culture of lies becomes dominant in a society, as a result of the reinvention of reality and the denial of facts. In such a situation, the facts are imprisoned and put out of reach. In Serbia, the shift toward counter-factual culture took place when the High Court ruled that Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić’s brother does not own a company called Asamacum, although it was duly registered in his name, in what was a clear case of nepotism and conflict of interest. The court did so under pressure from the government, accepting its fabrications that the brother’s identity, ID, and signature had been stolen. It was one of the first blows against common sense. The court upheld that lie and, thus undermined its status as an independent branch of the government.

The law was similarly suspended and facts distorted to justify issuing permits to demolish buildings in Belgrade after masked men in the night between April 24 and 25 tore down part of Savamala quarter where a controversial government project is to be built, and thus we stepped into a world of blunt power and manipulation.

Politicians are, of course, always promising more than they can achieve; demagogues didn’t appear yesterday. But where did this deliberate and constant lying come from? It appears to have become a prerequisite for holding a state office, especially for the position of a minister in Vučić’s government. Vedran Dzihic, a scholar at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, argues that the aim is to make it impossible to distinguish facts from lies. This phenomenon is spreading throughout the world and is not specific to Serbia. Dzihic calls this post-factual politics. He believes that those bewildering stories we hear about spies, traitors, and coups d’état are meant to inflate Serbia’s mythical sense of importance and “throw dust in the eyes of the public.”

The fact that Donald Trump has won the US election thanks to his skillful management of lies confirms that there is some truth to the theory of post-factual politics. He unstintingly gave false promises in order to get the votes of those who had been “forgotten,” who were happy to be remembered—even if only to be lied to. That low-paid workers believe they will be rescued by a billionaire who does not pay taxes and who is the king of reality shows (false reality) is simply a result of downright deception. This will become evident very soon. Trump will cut taxes for those who already have too much money, but he won’t be able to give factory workers well-paid jobs, because it is impossible to do that in an advanced post-industrial society. Yet the angry and the poor continue to believe that a rich showman will start a fight against the very establishment that has marginalized them and impoverished them. And this is not just happening in the US, but also in France, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere. In fact, super-wealthy right-wing demagogues have formed coalitions with the poor all over the world, using post-factual and deceitful politics. By taking over the abandoned working class and relying on nationalism, which always wins in times of crisis, these new leaders are threatening Western liberal democracies. We are, in fact, dealing with an advancing form of social fascism—the most dangerous enemy of democracy, equality, and freedom.

It is clear that Serbia is a case in point, at least at first glance. We are led by a right-wing demagogue, a great manipulator who, while supported by the poor, is prone to authoritarianism and nationalism. But let’s not kid ourselves, our working class and other citizens won’t have it like in the US or France (if a right-wing demagogue wins the election there this spring). In underdeveloped countries such as ours, things are much worse, because here one can lie to infinity with impunity. This is because citizens are poorer, less educated, more prone to authoritarianism, more powerless, and more suspicious of democracy; while our institutions are battered and fragile, the media weak, and the economy frail. And our demagogue is not the same species as Trump. He is not rich, but belongs to a political mafia that intends to get rich by running the country. This distinction is crucial simply because such a government must hide what it is really doing. When all is hidden, a collective denial of facts occurs, leading to a culture of chronic rumors. Only the most diligent can learn a thing or two about what the ruling mafia is really doing. And that’s how it has to be, since its wealth has been obtained through corruption and crime).

In order to successfully hide their actions, our leaders bury the populace in lies, and in order to do so successfully, they have to undermine the state and its institutions, intimidate the media, and pay off people, which they do relentlessly. These are the weapons our leaders use to undermine critics and the opposition, and to fiercely protect the government and all its corrupt mess. Public opinion is manipulated to oppose the formally proclaimed pro-European policy, just as conflicts with neighboring nations and countries are encouraged, while stability is proclaimed. This is how such double politics is implemented: one for the nation, and the other for the rest of the world.

In a society as weak as Serbia’s, a lie is not used for ideological seduction, but to reinforce the reliance on authoritarian government. This dependency has always been there and explains why democratic and liberal-minded parties face an almost impenetrable wall. Their ideas are unable to reach a majority of voters because much of the population has already been converted to authoritarian rule and is not attracted to Western liberal principles. And the opposition parties themselves are under pressure from the regime. The current government chooses its ministers, MPs, and the editors of the pro-government media by how brutal and willing to lie they are. This is best seen in the three kinds of people in Vučić’s cabinet: the minister-boxers, who are willing to lie, babble, attack at his whim, and follow his commands blindly; those who are obedient and less visible to the public; and a third group that is “nice,” “pro-Western,” and “modern,” and is given the task of pouring lies about the great achievements of Serbia that are now within reach. “And we plan to catch up with the leading countries, such as the USA and China, in two years,” one of them tweeted, while another announced that our spacecraft will land on Mars by 2018. By saying that the EU has yet to do what Serbia is ready to do now, the new leadership has confirmed that our politics of manipulation is without parallel.

Vesna Pešić

Charles Simic: I’ve been often struck reading your pieces over the years, including this one, by how much your observations on Serbia apply to American politics too. Now that we have Trump for president, I feel we are even closer.

Vesna Pešić: When Western democracies are shaken, peripheral countries often offer an early prophecy about the direction things are going. Those similarities don’t occur because the outskirts are the ones to create new global trends, but because they are the first to crumble as soon as the crisis sets in. The Serbian prime minister outdoes himself everyday with the lies he keeps telling us. Trump, too, has brought the usual practice of political spin to a whole new level. Neither of them has been hurt by their lies and fabrications. Serbian populists simply love Trump, they rooted for him passionately, marched the streets with photographs of him and demanded that Serbs in the US vote for him. They love how he attacks globalization and the fact the he is focused on the sovereignty of the nation. They feel that this kind of authoritarian turn will contribute to the fulfillment of Serbian nationalist dreams. They are convinced that Russia supports Serbia and that Trump’s “soon to be great again America” will soon join us. Lucky us!

When one hears the phrase “total lying” one thinks of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Mao’s China, but today we’re witnessing a growing contempt for truth in countries that are ostensibly democracies.

Contempt for the truth in democratic countries is not an entirely new phenomenon. But it is suddenly recognized for what it is after the Brexit referendum and Trump’s electoral campaign. This has nothing to do with the totalitarian history you’ve mentioned. Those leaders weren’t lying, they really believed in their messianic ideologies. The post-factual world imposes a new challenge: how to differentiate truth from intentional lies. European politicians are worried about fake news, disinformation, and hacker attacks attributed to Russia. The problem is that no one knows how seriously to take all this, or whether what we are hearing is the truth or a lie.

How do you explain that the poor are joining forces with billionaire leaders to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer?

The welfare state was destroyed by globalization, de-industrialization, and the growing domination of corporations and the financial sector. Left-wing parties and left-wing criticism of capitalism is almost gone; the leftists have sided with neoliberalism, unions have been weakened or destroyed. Even when the banks collapsed in 2008, nothing changed. Taking over the problems of immigration and terrorism, right-wing politicians promised to “protect” citizens by spreading xenophobia, fear, and nationalism. They have risen to power by presenting themselves as the guardians of an abandoned working class, making appeals to nationalism and patriotic selfishness, and promising to kick the immigrants out.

Your pieces also have their moments of humor. I once reviewed a posthumous collection of political writing by Stojan Cerović and remember feeling that I was reading a diary of a sane human being who had found himself in a madhouse.

We are a small society and the progressive intellectuals all know each other. Our mischief is truly humorous, or, as we like to say, tragicomic. In the end, everything turns into a farce; although the consequences are actually tragic. Often I fall into humor, almost by accident, because the things our leaders say are sometimes hilarious. Stojan Cerović was a very dear friend of mine, I loved him very much. It’s funny how a backward society manages to nurture such talented people. Now we have remarkable caricaturists, even stand-up comics—an American invention. They are under heavy government censorship, and some shows have even been banned. But we still have to fight for democracy and freedom: we’re a minority, but we’re still here.

—Translated by Marijana Simic


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
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