SACW - 25 Sept 2017 | Pakistan: Terror in Universities / India - Pakistan: visas further out of reach / India: Citizens report on lynchings; mofussil minds / Rohingya refugees / China: surveillance

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 25 Sept 2017 - No. 2954 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pakistan: Deradicalising Our Universities | Pervez Hoodbhoy
2. Statement from People’s SAARC - 14 September 2017
3. China’s dystopian push to revolutionize surveillance | Maya Wang
4. India: Citizen’s Against Hate report on lynchings and religiously motivated vigilante violence
5. India : Time to Debate the Social and Environmental Costs of Development and Big Infrastructure Across the Country - Press Release by NAPM, 22 Sept. 2017
6. India: It saddens me that my marriage, spiritual choice are misused to stoke fear, hatred | Stanzin Saldon
7. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Premchand’s 1934 essay on communalism and culture relevant today
 - ‘Gau Raksha’ group forces meat, fish shops to shut in Greater Noida (in National Capital region of Delhi)
 - India: BJP, In Search Of An Icon - Is Deendayal Upadhyay Party's Mahatma Gandhi? (Subhash Gatade)
 - India: Noted Rationalist Narendra Nayak On the Murder of Gauri Lankesh (Kedar Nagarajan / The Caravan)
 - India: You may get the Tax man's notice if you are involved in spreading message of love & compassion in face of hate & vigilante violence
 - India: leaked memos show various right-wing groups in West Bengal may create communal disturbances during Durga Puja / Muharram fests
 - ‘Stand up for Gauri, Stand up for freedom, Stand up for harmony’ | Sit-ins at Gandhi statues across states of India on 2nd Oct & joint national rally on 5 October 2017 in Delhi
 - Rohingya Crisis: Focus on 'Intolerant Religion' Disregards Complex Moral and Policy Challenges
 - Religion-based education in Pakistan has made universities a fertile ground for extremists | Khaled Ahmed
 - India: After RSS man Rakesh Sinha calling for probe, the Income Tax dept send a notice to Center for Equity Studies run by Harsh Mander
 - India: The Forgotten Riot - Bombay riots of 1992 | Jyoti Punwani
 - India: Census data shows the outcry against Christian missionaries by Hindutva groups is propaganda | Ajaz Ashraf
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8.  No way back for Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees | Bertil Lintner
9.  Pakistan, Let’s Talk About Sex | Mohammed Hanif 
10. Pakistan: Our universities are radically unjust | Ammar Ali Jan
11. Sexual assaults and violent rages... Inside the dark world of Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche | Mick Brown
12. India: Conceits of mofussil minds | Harish Khare
13. Tension between India, Pakistan puts visas a little further out of reach for people | Sowmiya Ashok
14. What the stunning success of AfD means for Germany and Europe | Cas Mudde
15. Review of Kenner, Robert, dir., Command and Control and Schlosser, Eric, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, & the Illusion of Safety
16. Ian Stewart, review of The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839-1939
17. In Russia, It's a Woman's Job to Challenge Soviet-Era Labor Laws | Francesca Visser
18. Happy Birthday CIA: 7 Truly Terrible Things The Agency Has Done In 70 Years | Carey Wedler

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1. PAKISTAN: DERADICALISING OUR UNIVERSITIES
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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Why is terrorism growing by leaps and bounds in Pakistani universities and colleges? Common sense — not rocket science or high erudition — is enough for an answer. What must be done is also pretty clear. First, dismiss the activist preacher-professor. He wields authority over captive audiences and broadcasts his message inside classes and outside. [ . . . ]
http://sacw.net/article13488.html

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2. STATEMENT FROM PEOPLE’S SAARC - 14 September 2017
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We, the members of People’s SAARC met in Kathmandu on 13-14 September 2017 to reaffirm our commitment to human rights, freedom of expression, justice, peace, security, and democracy in the region, for equity for all and to eliminate all forms of discrimination.
http://sacw.net/article13484.html

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3. CHINA’S DYSTOPIAN PUSH TO REVOLUTIONIZE SURVEILLANCE | Maya Wang
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As part of a new multimillion-dollar project in Xinjiang, the Chinese government is attempting to ’build a fortress city with technologies.’ If this sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is. According to the Sina online news portal, the project is supposed to strengthen the authorities’ hands against unexpected social unrest. Using ’big data’ from various sources, including the railway system and visitors’ systems in private residential compounds, its ultimate aim is to ’predict’ individuals and vehicles posing heightened risks to public safety.
http://sacw.net/article13482.html

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4. INDIA: CITIZEN’S AGAINST HATE REPORT ON LYNCHINGS AND RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED VIGILANTE VIOLENCE
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This report by Citizen’s Against Hate is the result of fact finding investigation of lynchings and vigilante violence, conducted through July 2017.
http://sacw.net/article13487.html

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5. INDIA : TIME TO DEBATE THE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF DEVELOPMENT AND BIG INFRASTRUCTURE ACROSS THE COUNTRY - PRESS RELEASE BY NAPM, 22 SEPT. 2017
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This is a report on a public meeting organised in New Delhi by the Delhi Solidarity Group and the National Alliance of People’s Movements titled ‘The Fallacy of Sardar Sarovar Dam and Development Debate Today’. The meeting was addressed by Usha Ramanathan, legal researcher, Sanjay Parikh, Senior Advocate of Supreme Court, Prof K B Saxena, former Secretary, Govt of India, and Medha Patkar, SaraswatiBai, and GokhruBhai of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
http://sacw.net/article13486.html

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6. INDIA: IT SADDENS ME THAT MY MARRIAGE, SPIRITUAL CHOICE ARE MISUSED TO STOKE FEAR, HATRED | Stanzin Saldon
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I will be 30 years old soon. I am an independent and educated woman and I have made all my choices regarding my life by my own free will — a right granted and guaranteed to every citizen of this country by the Constitution of India. The Constitution gives me a right as an adult individual to choose my life partner. I have married Syed Murtaza Agha because I love him. There is absolutely no other reason. The accusation that I have been “lured” or “coerced” by anybody is an insult to my ability to think for myself. The Ladakh Buddhist Association and random strangers are trying to objectify me by demanding my return as if I am their property and not a human being.
http://sacw.net/article13480.html
  
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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - India: Premchand’s 1934 essay on communalism and culture relevant today
 - ‘Gau Raksha’ group forces meat, fish shops to shut in Greater Noida (in National Capital region of Delhi)
 - India: BJP, In Search Of An Icon - Is Deendayal Upadhyay Party's Mahatma Gandhi? (Subhash Gatade)
 - India: Noted Rationalist Narendra Nayak On the Murder of Gauri Lankesh (Kedar Nagarajan / The Caravan)
 - India: You may get the Tax man's notice if you are involved in spreading message of love & compassion in face of hate & vigilante violence
 - India: leaked memos show various right-wing groups in West Bengal may create communal disturbances during Durga Puja / Muharram fests
 - ‘Stand up for Gauri, Stand up for freedom, Stand up for harmony’ | Sit-ins at Gandhi statues across states of India on 2nd Oct & joint national rally on 5 October 2017 in Delhi
 - Rohingya Crisis: Focus on 'Intolerant Religion' Disregards Complex Moral and Policy Challenges
 - Religion-based education in Pakistan has made universities a fertile ground for extremists | Khaled Ahmed
 - India: After RSS man Rakesh Sinha calling for probe, the Income Tax dept send a notice to Center for Equity Studies run by Harsh Mander
 - India: The Forgotten Riot - Bombay riots of 1992 | Jyoti Punwani
 - India: Census data shows the outcry against Christian missionaries by Hindutva groups is propaganda | Ajaz Ashraf

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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8. NO WAY BACK FOR MYANMAR’S ROHINGYA REFUGEES
by Bertil Lintner
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(Asia Times - September 22, 2017)

A military plan to strike a new ethnic balance in Rakhine state's conflict-ridden northwest means a minority of the 420,000 refugees now languishing in Bangladesh will likely ever return home

Rohingya refugees walk on the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh September 11, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi says that her government is prepared to begin taking back Rohingya refugees recently driven into Bangladesh in a national verification process. Suu Kyi said the repatriation can start “at any time” in a speech on September 19, her first since the refugee crisis began in late August after a surge of insurgent attacks and harsh military counter-measures.

The violence has pushed an estimated 420,000 mostly Muslim refugees into Bangladesh, which considers them natives of Myanmar and calls for their full return. While Suu Kyi’s offer to accept “verified” refugees may have aimed to defuse international criticism of military “clearance operations” the United Nations has likened to “ethnic cleansing”, it’s altogether unclear how many of the departed the autonomous armed forces will accept back.

Exactly how many Rohingya live in conflict-ridden western Rakhine state is debatable because Myanmar-conducted censuses don’t recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group. The 1.1 -1.5 million figures quoted in international media reports are made without reference to any official or credible independent source.

According to the most recent 2014 census and UN estimates, the combined population of Rakhine state’s three northwestern townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung – where the conflict is confined – before the recent exodus was around 950,000, of which between 80% and 90% were Muslims. It is uncertain how many of those Muslims would identify themselves as Rohingya – a contested term in Rakhine state where ethnic Kaman and other minority Muslim groups reside – but in any counting the total number of Muslims there is well below one million.

The total population of Rakhine state is 3.2 million with a clear Buddhist majority, according to the latest census. Whatever the correct figure may be, it appears that nearly half of the Muslim population of the three affected northwestern townships have recently been forced to flee into Bangladesh.

Rohingya cross a swollen river at a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 17, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton

Myanmar’s military has deployed more than 70 battalions to Rakhine state to carry out its clearance operations, nominally aimed to flush out insurgents hiding in civilian populations. With both regular and light infantry battalions deployed, security analysts estimate there are between 30,000-35,000 Myanmar troops now on the ground in Rakhine state.

The deployment of that many troops must be motivated by strategic considerations other than suppression of the emergent Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a vicious but small group of rag-tag guerrillas fighting with mostly rudimentary weapons. According to military insiders, the overriding strategic aim is to “balance” the demographic composition of the state’s three Muslim-majority townships.

According to well-placed sources in Yangon, the military aims to reduce the Muslim majority in the northwestern townships to no more than 60%, with Buddhists making up the remaining 40%. Towards that demographic aim, the sources say, the military is now preparing to resettle thousands of ethnic Rakhines and other Buddhists into the Rakhine area’s now abandoned and burned out villages.

The Muslims that are ultimately permitted to return will undoubtedly be put through a deliberately torturous process rooted in deeply contentious history.

Suu Kyi’s reference to a “verification” process harks to an April 1992 joint statement made by then Bangladeshi foreign minister Mostafizur Rahman and his Myanmar counterpart Ohn Gyaw that said Myanmar’s government agreed “there would be no restriction on number of persons [repatriated] as long as they could establish bona fide evidence of their residence in Myanmar.”

A Rohingya refugee waits in a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 17, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton

At that time, an estimated 250,000 Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state had taken refuge in Bangladesh after a border skirmish which had resulted in a military crackdown on the Myanmar side. As with the current humanitarian crisis, the flight of refugees into Bangladesh in the early 1990s also attracted big international media attention and support from the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Prince Khaled Sultan Abdul Aziz, then commander of the Saudi Arabian contingent in the 1991 Gulf War, visited Dhaka and recommended a Desert Storm like (the name of the US-led campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait) action against Myanmar. That multinational offensive never came to fruition, but Myanmar eventually agreed to take back the refugees under United Nations’ pressure and on the terms of its verification agreement with Bangladesh.

Many but not all returned to Myanmar; it was uncertain how many actually stayed in Rakhine state or returned to Bangladesh because little remained of the villages they had left behind. Some had been destroyed while others were populated in their absence by migrants from other parts of Myanmar. The area between Bangladesh’s city of Chittagong and Teknaf on the Naaf river which forms the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar is still full of people who claim they were born and grew up on the Myanmar side.

The early 1990s exodus was the second big movement in modern times. The first came in 1978 when 200,000 Muslims from Rakhine state fled to Bangladesh as Myanmar security authorities carried out an operation against illegal immigrants codenamed Naga Min, or “Dragon King.” That crisis also led to a repatriation agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh signed on July 9, 1978.

That agreement was not different from what was stated in 1992, namely that Myanmar agreed to the earliest repatriation of its lawful residents on the presentation of [Myanmar] national registration cards. Some, but far from all, Muslims in Rakhine’s three northwestern townships have proper government issued identification cards or citizenship papers. Others have been systematically denied such documents and being effectively stateless face restrictions on their movements in Myanmar.

Now as then, Myanmar’s policy remains the same: only those who can produce proof of citizenship or residency will be allowed back. That may not be an unreasonable demand, but it will be a messy and contentious task given the current chaos and deprivation along the border and in refugee camps. It’s unclear how many of the estimated 420,000 refugees Myanmar will actually be taken back and how much international pressure will factor into that human calculation.

Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech on the Rakhine and Rohingya situation, in Naypyitaw, September 19, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

What is clear is that the Myanmar armed forces that carried out the brutal and controversial clearance operations in border areas don’t want the Muslims back as strategic planners aim to rebalance the region’s ethnic demographics.

Judging from anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim demonstrations recently held in Yangon and other Myanmar cities, it’s a stance shared by many Myanmar citizens who don’t consider the Rohingya a national ethnic group but rather illegal immigrants.

Yet another bilateral repatriation agreement will likely be signed in the coming days that allows for some refugees to return to Myanmar to placate both Bangladesh and the international community. But given the deliberately high hurdles to proving Myanmar citizenship or residency, and a military bent on using the crisis as an opportunity to change the area’s demographics, the repatriation will likely be smaller than seen in the late 1970s and early 1990s.

In the meantime, Rakhine state’s once predominantly Muslim region will remain heavily militarized, both to guard against ARSA from carrying out further attacks on undermanned security outposts and to prevent unverified refugees from returning across the border.

Regardless of any new bilateral agreement, recent events will be leveraged to create a new ethnic balance in Rakhine state, one with less Muslims, more Buddhists and over which Myanmar’s military has absolute control. 

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9. PAKISTAN, LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX | Mohammed Hanif 
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(The New York Times, SEPT. 21, 2017

Photo
Children playing among coal mounds in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2016. Credit Shakil Adil/Associated Press

KARACHI, Pakistan — I learned my first lesson about how babies are born from a magazine called Happy Home. It was published by a department of the Pakistani government called the Ministry of Population. The ministry was supposed to encourage people to have fewer babies, and it went about that in a rather coy fashion.

The magazine exhorted people to pace themselves; I remember it used the poetic Urdu phrase, waqfa bahut zaroori hai, “a break is important.” I was about 10, and I remember even more clearly the illustration of a small family, a man and a woman and two chubby children, sitting around a stove and eating. I concluded that babies are conceived by sitting around a stove and eating.

When the provisional results of Pakistan’s most recent census came out last month, after massive delays, they seemed to indicate that the message of Happy Home was lost on most Pakistanis, too. Pakistan’s population now exceeds 207 million, an increase of 57 percent since the last census in 1998. Pakistan has become the fifth-most populous country in the world.

At this rate, the physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has warned, in 150 years Pakistan will be a standing-room-only kind of place. Overpopulation will be a terrible strain on natural resources and state services. Already today, every eighth child in the world who is not in school lives in Pakistan.

I must have read that Happy Home magazine about 40 years ago, but things haven’t changed much here when it comes to conversations about how babies are made. Despite warnings about a population explosion, we still don’t talk about population control. Talking about population control might require talking about sex, and you can’t really talk about sex on prime time TV or the radio, in Parliament or at village gatherings. Ads for condoms are often banned. There’s the occasional valiant attempt — like Clinic Online, a call-in TV show about sexual health — but “sex” remains a dirty word. As if just saying it was the same as doing it. We don’t even talk about sex with the person we’re doing it with.

The Pakistani government could have involved the clergy to dispel the common myth that contraception is somehow un-Islamic, but it hasn’t. There also used to be a myth about the campaign to vaccinate children against polio: That it was a cover for an American conspiracy to sterilize Pakistanis. Then the government got imams to explain on TV that it really wasn’t Allah’s will to cripple the next generation. Yet clerics aren’t preaching that even though God wants you to have good, wholesome sex with your legitimate partner, that shouldn’t stop you from using a condom or taking a birth-control pill.

Pakistan could also have learned from its former sibling Bangladesh, which has had remarkable success at controlling its population by putting women at the center of door-to-door family planning efforts. Bangladesh, which was more populous than Pakistan when it broke away from it in 1971, now has a head count of 163 million — 44 million less than Pakistan. But following Bangladesh’s lead would require acknowledging that women need to be educated about what they can do to not make more babies, and in Pakistan we find it difficult to talk about women’s reproductive health, let alone their sex life.

So most Pakistanis are left to figure things out for themselves. Some believe that children come from God and invoke God’s name to resist contraception. Every baby is born with one mouth and two hands, it’s often said. For the poor, children are a potential source of income; in some families, they are put to work at the age of 5 or 6. Since the state seems to feel little responsibility for the poor, the poor are banking on having more children to improve their lot — hoping those children will rise above poverty and take care of them in old age.

For members of the middle class, on the other hand, kids are an expense. With one eye on their bank balance and the other on their children’s future, they find it difficult to comprehend why people who are far poorer than they are have more children than they do. They don’t understand that the process of making babies, then feeding them and putting them to work is the only choice that many poor people have: Even if the poor had only two children, they would still be poor. And sex may be their only fun.

The middle-class pundits who tell the poor that their lives would be better if they had two kids instead of five are also making a self-serving statement. Their own family is happier not because it only has two children, but because their parents had enough money (inherited, stolen or earned) for them to be born in a private hospital, be sent to private school and hold their birthday parties in private clubs. When they advise the poor to breed less it’s because they worry that those people’s children will consume the water and breathe and pollute the air of their own precious kids.

Two kids or 20, for parents they are all precious. For some, even divine. There are men who believe that by bringing more children into the world they are helping build up the Muslim ummah. Every few years, a silly news story is published about a man with 30 or more children who claims to be having fun doing God’s work. But nobody ever asks the three or four mothers involved in producing all those children if sitting around a stove making food for more than 30 people makes them happy.

Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 22, 2017, in The International New York Times. 

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10. PAKISTAN: OUR UNIVERSITIES ARE RADICALLY UNJUST
Ammar Ali Jan
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(The News, September 20, 2017)

There is growing concern in academic, policy and political circles on the radicalisation in educational campuses. A serious debate is taking place to change the narrative on Pakistan’s history to prevent the proliferation of extremist ideas among the youth. What this debate implicitly acknowledges is that the militant narrative around religion and nationalism imposed on students and faculty by the state is now an existential threat to none except our own society.

Yet, our policymakers continue to provide ‘solutions’ that seem to be lifted directly from the textbook of colonial officials. For example, there will be increased surveillance of campuses to monitor the activities of students and faculty. This measure exposes an anxiety that there is too much freedom on campuses, a rather embarrassing claim since public-sector universities provide few avenues for open debate or even critical discussions. More often than not, administrations intervene to ensure that the debate does not cross the multiple red lines fixed by state authorities.

In fact, the biggest hurdle in developing an ‘alternative’ narrative is that any serious engagement with questions of ideological orientation for society is interrupted through the intervention of university administrations – or at times directly by state intervention. There is constant fear that if students are not discussing their out-of-date textbooks or repeating clichés on religion or nationalism, then they must be conspiring against the administration, or worse still, against the country.

My experience at the previous university where I taught showed that nothing scared administrators more than a group of students sitting together to study on campus, particularly if they are from ‘restive provinces’. Such hysterical behaviour at the sight of young people meeting for study circles leads to comical situations where university administrators clamp down on ‘reading groups’ on campus.

The assumption was that such gatherings, especially if they discuss political texts, can lead to riots on campus. This bizarre equation between texts and riots reveals all that is wrong with the education system. Essentially, most university administrators trust neither students nor the circulation of ideas, with their intersection becoming an explosive combination in their minds. Rather than sites of knowledge production, where critical discussions can take place at a relative distance from the intrusive gaze of power, universities have become sites for managing young minds and bodies through the mastering of surveillance techniques. By asking for more coercive measures on campuses, we demonstrate how in our search for knee-jerk answers to problems, we have forgotten to pose the right questions.

State authorities have little clue about how ordinary people are thinking, and in any case are not interested beyond the repression and manipulation of young minds. But even liberal critiques of state policies often solely focus on the dissemination of ideas as the primary strategy for resisting radicalism among the youth. What such prescriptions miss is the context in which the youth becomes susceptible to extreme views, which goes way beyond the realm of political ideologies.

Consider the state of social sciences in public universities in Lahore. Thousands of students graduate every year in the city, without fully understanding the available career options. This is partly a result of the low-investment in the teaching staff as well as in essential facilities such as computer labs and libraries. Most libraries in the ‘top’ universities of Lahore cannot match those of a small, under-funded community college in the West. Moreover, there is almost little to no guidance when it comes to career-counselling or funding options for education abroad.

The situation is compounded by the fact that a large number of students from all classes and regions across Pakistan are seeking higher education in Lahore. This would be a welcome development if the government had planned for providing adequate resources for their skills enhancement and for creating job opportunities. Yet, after completing a four-year bachelors degree from a university, most students face the harsh reality that their degrees do not have much worth in the market. The better-paying jobs in the NGO-sector and private schools often go to students from elite universities, since the inability to speak or write English fluently becomes a fatal deficit for students from public-sector universities.

Many such students are opting for continuing with higher education, propelling the growth of Masters and Mphil programmes across the city. Teaching a Masters class in the public sector is particularly disturbing, since the students seem disoriented and, consequently, disinterested in the subjects at offer. It almost seems like such programmes have less to do with skill enhancement and are more an excuse to prolong the inevitable fate of unemployment or underemployment for the vast majority of students.

One has to imagine what goes through a young person’s mind as his/her creativity and vibrancy gives way to cynicism and despondency. For students from working class backgrounds, the situation is even worse, since they develop desires of upward mobility. Once those desires are frustrated by the lack of opportunities, they can no longer fall back upon the professions of their parents, since the long journey through the education system was precisely an attempt to escape the fate of their elders. In such situations, not only is their future stolen from them, but their link to the past also melts away. With hatred for the past and little anticipation for the future, we are witnessing an entire generation that is experiencing the dissolution of time itself.

The youth bulge that experts constantly talk about is nothing but the story of such frustrated desires and the growing resentment against the ‘youth culture’ enjoyed by students belonging to the city’s elite. For this reason, the resort to ‘strict’ measures of control is a hopelessly inadequate response to radicalism, since it represents a continuation of the policies that demonise marginalised youth in the city. It is not students who are ‘becoming’ radical. It is the context in which they exist that is radical – ie radically unjust and unsustainable.

What students require in this situation is not more policing, but more empathy, good teachers, better facilities and more job opportunities. Otherwise, the constant transformation of bright minds into unwanted elements by the system will become a time-bomb causing further unrest in society. And if it is the corruption and indifference of this system that is making millions of people redundant and disposable, then we must find the courage to reject such a system. The alternative – of wasting the skills and potential of millions of precious young souls for a broken system – is too high a price for any society and one that we should definitely not have to pay.

The writer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer at the Government College University, Lahore.

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11. SEXUAL ASSAULTS AND VIOLENT RAGES... INSIDE THE DARK WORLD OF BUDDHIST TEACHER SOGYAL RINPOCHE
Mick Brown 
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(The Telegraph [UK], 21 September 2017)

In August last year, Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama whose book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying has sold more than three million copies around the world, and made him probably the best known Tibetan Buddhist teacher after the Dalai Lama, gave his annual teaching at his French centre Lerab Ling.

Sogyal’s organisation Rigpa - a Tibetan word meaning the essential nature of mind - has more than 100 centres in 40 countries around the world, but Lerab Ling, situated in rolling countryside in L’Hérault is the jewel in the crown. Boasting what is said to be the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in the West, it was formally opened in 2008 by the Dalai Lama, with Carla Bruni Sarkozy, then France’s first lady, and a host of other dignitaries in attendance.

Sogyal is regarded by his students as a living embodiment of the Buddhist teachings of wisdom and compassion, but a man who teaches in a highly unorthodox way, known as ‘crazy wisdom’.
 
At Lerab Ling, more than 1000 students were gathered in the temple as he walked on stage, accompanied by his attendant, a Danish nun named Ani Chokyi. Sogyal, who is 70, is a portly, bespectacled man who requires a footstool to mount the throne from which he customarily teaches. Approaching the throne, he paused, then turned suddenly and punched the nun hard in the stomach.

‘I guess the footstool wasn’t in exactly the right position,’ says Gary Goldman, an American student of more than 20 years standing, who was seated in one of the front rows. ‘He had this flash of anger, and he just punched her - a short gut punch. It just stunned me. I thought, what the hell’s that about? Everybody around me kind of sucked their breath in. She started crying, and he told her to leave, get out, and then he started to talk.'

‘To see the master not as a human being but as the Buddha himself,’ Sogyal has often told his students, ‘is the source of the highest blessing.’ Those attending his teachings are cautioned not to be surprised or to draw ‘the wrong conclusions’ about the way he might behave. Apparently irrational, even violent conduct, it is said, should be viewed as ‘mere appearance’.

But punching a nun in the stomach... ‘Afterwards, everybody was trying to make sense of  what had happened,’ Goldman says. ‘People were very upset.’ It was customary for students at the retreat to email any thoughts or questions they might have on the day’s teachings to Sogyal’s senior instructors.

As a young man, Goldman was a US Army Ranger who served in Vietnam. ‘We all wrote something up,’ he says. ‘I said, I understood his methods were unconventional but punching Ani Chökyi was knocking the ball out of the park.

'I’ve seen this kind of thing in the military and we don’t do that anymore - at least not legally. But on the other hand, if this was another part of his ‘crazy wisdom’ teaching, we seriously needed to talk about it...’

The next day, one of the Rigpa hierarchy addressed the doubters. Sogyal, he said, was upset that people should be questioning his methods. If people didn’t understand what had actually happened, then they probably weren’t ready for the promised higher-level teachings, and Sogyal would not teach again during the retreat.

‘This is what he does,’ Goldman says, ‘when something comes up  he’ll very skillfully manipulate his students to get them back in line. I just thought, I’m done with this...’

A catalogue of damning allegations

Largely thanks to the benign, smiling example of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism has grown enormously in popularity in the West over the past thirty years, largely escaping the scandal that has dogged other religious institutions - at least publicly.

Within the Buddhist community, however, Sogyal Rinpoche has long been a controversial figure. For years, rumours have circulated on the internet about his behaviour, and in the 1990s a lawsuit alleging sexual and physical abuse was settled out of court. 
[. . .] FULL TEXT AT: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sexual-assaults-violent-rages-inside-dark-world-buddhist-teacher/

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12. INDIA: CONCEITS OF MOFUSSIL MINDS
Harish Khare
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(The Tribune, September 22, 2017)

The demagogue’s spell is over

A reader is unhappy with the Prime Minister's remarks at the dedication of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Sunday. The dismayed reader writes a letter to the editor (The Tribune, September 20): "The remark was vitriolic and not in harmony with the celebratory occasion….Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as the head of the largest democracy, should forsake the detestable job of a low-level party hatchet man." For the record, the Prime Minister had menacingly remarked that he had access to the "kacha-chitta" of all those who were opposed to the dam. News reports also noted that the Prime Minister pointedly did not mention Nehru, even though it was Nehru who had laid the dam's foundation stone.

Not long ago, there was a time when such cultivated pettiness would have been music to many ears. No longer. Now, it is beginning to jar. There was a time when the country was in need of a catharsis. May 2014 happened.  For a while, very many people found themselves dazzled — especially those who pride themselves on their technocratic detachment — by the sheer political energy, fast-talking, tongue-lashing leadership; the new anti-intellectual strain and invocation of popular nationalism seemed so natural and so very much in order.

A tricked up nation is recovering its breath and its moral certainties. And, the nation no longer feels elevated with such small-mindedness as was witnessed last Sunday. After all, no nation can remain locked in for five years in an abusive moment. For how long can we feel excited about yet another CBI raid on a Karti Chidambaram or an Enforcement Directorate case against a Robert Vadra, or ignore all the evidence of grave damage inflicted by mofussil minds on national economy and national institutions?

Evidence has mounted. The nationwide dislocation of demonetisation; the GST-centric disruption; the marked slowdown in economic growth; the alarming drop in GDP numbers; and, staggering unemployment, all mock at the outsized claims made by limited minds exercising unlimited authority. The unprecedented rise in petrol and diesel prices is justified in a most cavalier manner. All this adds up. 

Charisma has not produced either competence or capacity. While it is possible for a leader to infuse a sense of energy and purpose in a confused society, a personality cult has its definite downside. And, that downside is now taking its toll on the nation's vitality and creativity. We are being asked to close our minds. 

Worse, we now seem to be in thrall of some kind of crony mofussilism. We are weeding out first-rate minds and talent. An internationally respected Raghuram Rajan is replaced by a pliable regulator at the Reserve Bank of India; as an Arvind Panagariya is made to feel that he was no longer welcome, he is replaced by a very ordinary economist, whose first public statement proclaimed that the days of "foreign-trained" economists were over. 

This officially-sanctioned spurning of foreign talent and wisdom is part of a larger, cruder crusade against the so-called Lytton's elite. This assault on the Lytton's elite is seen as integral to the dismantling of the Nehruvian consensus that has kept this nation united and moving and progressing. 

Instead, a tautological argument has been advanced; we are telling ourselves that national greatness has eluded us because we have allowed ourselves to be sucked into "foreign" ideas and arguments; hence, time has come to rediscover and re-install the civilisational essence of 'bharatiyata'. The argument is that we are still prisoners of the colonial mind and colonial outlook. The need of the hour is to de-colonalise our minds for a "new resurgent Bharat." A NITI Ayog member is reported to have formulated, in the presence of the RSS boss, Mohan Bhagwat, this mumbo-jumbo: "India is rising; the country is pulsating; it is overcoming tamas (darkness) and is imbibing rajas (qualitative change)." We are told that we had all the wisdom and knowledge that was to be had; and, all that is needed to become a vishwa guru (world teacher) is to go back to that ancient wisdom. We do not need the Ivy League and its products; our own mofussil universities and their mediocre 'scholars' would do. We can burn down the university libraries and no one will miss them. We have our own glorious past. 

This incestuous conceit should surprise no one. Because the media and the intelligentsia have lost their professional courage to tell off the second-rate performers, there is a new arrogance. We will insist that Deen Dayal Upadhyay has all the answers to all our collective failings. Just because they find themselves moved from the cramped quarters in VP House on Rafi Marg to spacious bungalows with manicured lawns on Safdarjung Road, these mofussil minds feel themselves cockily validated. The new sultanate has devised its own darbari culture. Niti Ayog members write opinion pieces in newspapers exalting the BJP President as the new 'Chanakya'! 

What we are witnessing is a closing of our minds. The personality cult has become institutionalised, and the Great Leader's limits and weaknesses are now drowning out the strengths and assets. The cabinet system of government has suffered in efficacy as it has lost its capacity for collective imagination. The paucity of talent is no longer made up by the Prime Minister's rhetorical prowess, his brilliance in abusing political rivals, his humble origin or his unquestionable dedication to Bharat Mata. He dazzled the nation once; no more. A fatigue has set in as undersized performance has not matched the over-exaggerated promises and claims. 

Meanwhile, the notion of good governance is being redefined by children's deaths in Gorakhpur, Farrukhabad, Nasik Civil Hospital; and, the breakdown in Panchkula. What is more, each spectacular failure is sought to be explained away arrogantly: we are a huge country and there will be breakdowns and collapses. The farm sector remains under distress. After grandly promising to double the farmers' income in five years, the hapless Agriculture Minister has been asked to disown any central responsibility; instead, the states have been asked to do the needful. Such abuse of public confidence and poll promises! Opposition parties and leaders may or may not be able to cobble together a coherent counter-narrative, the citizens are beginning to take note of the insensitive note, so central to crony mofussilism.

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13. TENSION BETWEEN INDIA, PAKISTAN PUTS VISAS A LITTLE FURTHER OUT OF REACH FOR PEOPLE
by Sowmiya Ashok
========================================
(The Indian Express, August 27, 2017)

Every spike in tension between India and Pakistan puts visas just a little further out of reach for people on the two sides. Still, joined by death, birth or marriage, 70 years after Partition, they hope and return. Sowmiya Ashok queues up with them at the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi

The masala dabba has migrated too. It once held Belgian chocolate ice cream made by Delhi’s famous sweetmeat maker ‘Giani’ Gurcharan Singh, who had in the 1950s crossed over from Faisalabad in Pakistan. Reshma, a fruit vendor, dips her thumb and forefinger in to lift a pinch of the tangy mix and sprinkles it on a silver-coloured paper plate of cut fruits — seb, kela, papeeta and nashpati. Sales have dipped on this hot Thursday morning; the ice cream vendor is winning with his orange popsicles.

Reshma, in her 40s, has no association to the Partition of 1947. She hails from Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan, and lives at the jhuggis near the Singapore High Commission — a five-minute walk away. But for two decades, Reshma has sat outside the Pakistan High Commission on Andre Malraux Marg with her basket of fruits, selling fruit chaat for anything between Rs 10 and Rs 20. Only recently, “since maybe three or four years ago”, she has been doubling up as a caretaker of mobile phones and bags for Indians who for a short period disappear behind the high-security walls looking for permission to go across the border.

In the diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri, an affluent neighbourhood in New Delhi synonymous with well-manicured lawns and an unsettling quiet, the stretch bordering the Pakistan High Commission is an anomaly — of the subcontinental variety. It is bustling with fixers, child performers, lazy dogs, and men urinating on walls.

Families get here from across the country, primarily from Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, mimicking migration patterns from 70 years ago, to hand over paperwork to officials inside the building clamped down by blue domes. They come with bundles of clothes, parathas, achaar and namkeen packets — sometimes inflatable pillows — all set for a long haul. They also come with an affidavit on Pakistani stamp paper, sent over by relatives from across the border, as proof of family ties. The documents are mostly stapled to photocopies of Pakistani “bijli ka (electricity) bills”. At the bottom of one such electricity bill is a smiling Fawad Khan, the actor, endorsing bubble-top purified water.
pakistan, visa, visa applicants, pakistan visa, india visa, Pakistan High Commission, india Pakistan High Commission, india news, indian express news Pages from Rehana’s passport (Photographs: Tashi Tobgyal)

Much of the visits to see rishtedar (relatives) are dictated by the cycle of births, deaths and marriages. “I haven’t seen my sisters for a very long time,” Mohammad Ramzan tells The Sunday Express. In his 70s, he has travelled from Muzaffarnagar. If given a visa, he will travel to Khanewal district in the Punjab province of Pakistan. “One of my sisters passed away two months ago. I never got to say goodbye,” he says.

The Pakistan High Commission says it makes the process as “hassle-free” as possible. “We require very few documents. Stamp paper from a relative in Pakistan stating ‘this is my address’ and ‘I am going to be hosting them’ along with a utility bill of an electricity or gas connection,” lists an official.

The two countries have an unusual visa regimen in that they do not issue tourist visas. Instead, as per a 1974 agreement, “visitor visas” are given to those with relatives or friends in the other country. The “visitor visa”, however, is restricted to a maximum of six places, under a 2012 agreement, and at each of these places, the applicant must produce proof of a relative or friend.

The visa policy “does not fluctuate”, the official insists, with “political upheaval or bilateral ties” between the two countries, both of which recently celebrated their 70th birthdays. Yet, the attack at an Indian Air Force Station base in Pathankot in January 2016 and the subsequent ceasefire violations in Kashmir, saw a “minor” reduction — 10 to 20 per cent fall in visas issued by Pakistan. “But it has picked up over the last two or three months,” says the official.

While the Pakistan High Commission refuses to divulge numbers on the visa applicants, the official maintains it issues “more visas than what India issues to Pakistanis”. He claims that in 2016, Pakistan handed out 6,801 visas to Hindus and Sikh yatris for visits to religious places in Pakistan. The ‘religious visits’ are the second highest visa category, behind ‘visit visas’ to see family. “This is compared to less than 950 visas issued in 2016 by the Indian side for Pakistanis,” claims the official.

“On an average, 200 applicants are processed every day. Ninety per cent of the visas are processed within 48 hours. Others may take a few weeks,” the Pakistan High Commission says. “There is no concept of rejection of visas on both the Pakistan and Indian sides. There is reciprocity on this. The only way a visa is left unprocessed is if the applicant chooses to withdraw it,” the official says.

The visa seekers The Sunday Express spoke to, however, never mentioned the word “rejection” but “inquiry mein daal diya (it is under inquiry)” is a frequently used sentence.

*******
pakistan, visa, visa applicants, pakistan visa, india visa, Pakistan High Commission, india Pakistan High Commission, india news, indian express news typists who hold NDMC licences sit in the lane adjoining the high commission and, for a fee, help with filling in visa forms (Photographs: Tashi Tobgyal)

The visa applications of Mohammad Haroon, 59, and that of his mother, Dinni, 80, have been “under inquiry” since November 2016. That is when Haroon first met Reshma, the fruit vendor. “Look, they have asked me to come back later,” he shows Reshma a sticker, as he collects his bag from her. “The process is no faster on the other side,” he tells The Sunday Express, while removing one of his rubber slippers, before placing it on the ground and sitting on it. “My family there keeps attempting to apply for visas. In fact, the reason I am here again is because they recently had visitors from India and said perhaps it was a good time for us to re-apply.”

Haroon was 10 when he last visited relatives in Gujranwala in Pakistan. “It is like our Punjab. Similar food, similar language,” he says, just as a cell phone, hidden in the pile of belongings that Reshma is guarding, goes off, rudely interrupting him. Over the last four decades, he has lost family across the border — deaths he did not witness and condolences he could not share in person. Much like the death of his uncle during Partition that has been told and retold in his family throughout his life. “My nephew here helps me communicate with my nephews there through smartphones,” Haroon says.

If Haroon gets a visa, he and his mother Dinni will travel by bus from Shamli in Uttar Pradesh to Panipat in Haryana, onward by road to the Wagah border.

At Wagah, they will cross over by foot, before a Rs 50 ride by road to Lahore and a further 60-odd kilometre journey would ensure they reach “home” on the other side. “I am quite happy to hear that we might get visas. But if we do, the first thing I will have to do after I cross the border, is to go to the local police station and register my name,” Haroon sighs.

As supporting documents, Rehana Bei’s niece in Karachi has faxed her a copy of her electricity bill for March 2017; it has an outstanding amount of Pakistani Rs 34,000. Rehana’s two children had picked up the fax from Bihar Bhawan, which is down the road. The family had arrived at the Nizamuddin Station in South Delhi at 6 am that morning, travelling 700 km from Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, through Meerut, with a bag full of clothes and food.

“Our applications have been put under inquiry for two months. They won’t accept a fax, they want the originals,” Rehana’s daughter Humera, ‘Umera’ on the affidavit thanks to a spelling error in school documents, says. “I have never been to Pakistan but I have seen the country through video calls. It looks pretty much the same as here,” she adds.

The process is much smoother for Kashmiris, at least four visa seekers who were non-Kashmiri told The Sunday Express. “For Kashmiris, they give visas even without them producing any affidavits,” claims Shakeel Ahmad, a 52-year-old typist who has a licence from the New Delhi Municipal Council to charge a fee for helping people fill visa forms. A young photojournalist from Kashmir who visited the High Commission also spoke of separate queues for Kashmiris inside the premises. The Pakistan High Commission though insists that there is no separate process for Kashmiri visa seekers.

As the High Commission allows in visa seekers only twice during the day — at 9.30 and at 11 — Andre Malraux Marg falls into predictable lulls at other times.
pakistan, visa, visa applicants, pakistan visa, india visa, Pakistan High Commission, india Pakistan High Commission, india news, indian express news Rehana Bei and daughter Humera say their application has been “under inquiry” for two months (Photographs: Tashi Tobgyal)

Mohammad Iqbal, 67, from Pune, who first came looking for a visa in the late ’70s, says, “The queue used to extend to the end of the road. I have seen at least 1,000 people line up here under the sun.” Two enclosures with cement benches and tin roofs, in the space opposite a side entrance to the swanky Australian High Commission, are recent additions, according to him.

He can’t be disheartened, Iqbal adds. “My daughters live in Karachi with their families, so how can I not go see them? Chalees saal se mein yahan chakkar kaat raha hoon (For 40 years, I have been doing the rounds here). The tea seller down the road is a good friend.”

Iqbal, like many others outside the Pakistan High Commission, also laments that visa procedures have tightened over the years due to strained relations between the two countries. “When our daughters come to visit us, my wife declares the day as Eid,” he says.

Behind Iqbal is a fairly empty ‘Counter #1’, reserved solely for Pakistani passport holders. Twenty steps away, a crowd of men in dhotis and long kurtas line up to pay

Rs 120 as registration fees for the visas. This is after an arbitrary amount paid to men who type out the visa forms on typewriters down the lane. “Khulne wala hai? (Is it going to open?)” asks one stranger to another, looking at the door. “Kuch umeed nahin hai. Bahut pareshan kar rahe hain (There isn’t much hope. It’s a lot of trouble),” comes the reply.

It is 11 am, and the queue is already packed neatly in between iron rods leading up to the door in the High Commission’s thick wall. A chit drifts in the breeze from somebody’s passport, a group of people pounce at it to return it to its owner. Paperwork is valuable in this queue.

At a board proclaiming, ‘NO MOBILE AND BAG BEYOND THIS POINT’, a woman in her 50s, an unofficial guide for visa seekers, climbs onto the railing to collect mobile phones from those in the queue. The doors open, momentarily, and at least 30 applicants are allowed entry into the High Commission.
pakistan, visa, visa applicants, pakistan visa, india visa, Pakistan High Commission, india Pakistan High Commission, india news, indian express news Pages from Rehana’s passport (Photographs: Tashi Tobgyal)

Just as the door shuts with a thud, Deepak Chugani, 25, lands up by it. Deepak is at the Pakistan High Commission because he is in love. In the winter of 2016, at a wedding in Ahmedabad, where he is from, Deepak met a girl from across the border. She was a family friend’s daughter who had accompanied his uncle’s family from Pakistan.

For nine years after his birth in 1992, Deepak too was a Pakistani. “But my family migrated to India in 1993 and we opted to switch citizenship in early 2000,” he says. “Now, I am lining up for a visa to visit my grandmother who lives in Pakistan,” he says, before pausing and adding: “Actually, to visit my fiancée. Well, …to get engaged to my fiancée.”

Unlike the others, Zaid Ali, 33, doesn’t want a visa; he is here to renounce his Pakistani citizenship. On its website, the Pakistan High Commission says that those with issues while giving up citizenship can call or email their queries, but Zaid Ali has decided to show up in person to exchange his Pakistani passport for a “renunciation letter” at a fee of Rs 7,600.

For 30 years, he has been living in Aurangabad with his family, with no ties left in Pakistan. “I went across once to get a NORI (No Objection to Return to India) visa,” he says.

Ali’s grandfather migrated to Pakistan during Partition but in 1987, three years after he was born, his parents brought him and his siblings to India. “At heart I am an Indian, by documentation I am Pakistani,” he says. “I have never been able to reveal my identity to anyone except very close friends from school. People would have had questions to ask my entire life,” says Ali, adding, “So, 30 years later, I am applying for an Indian passport.” The only thing pending is a letter from the Pakistan government allowing him to surrender his citizenship.

Just then emerges Akthar Ali from inside the High Commission’s building, with a triumphant smile. From Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, he has received good news, after five attempts over the past year. Settling down next to Haroon, he asks The Sunday Express, “Can I please borrow your phone to make a call?”

When his daughter picks up the other end, he beams. “Visa mil gaya, beta (I got the visa),” he says. “I will come at 10 tomorrow to pick it up. Tell your mother we will leave after Bakrid,” he says, hanging up. “I will only go after Eid. I do not like celebrating Eid in a different country. Apne desh me Eid manaunga. Woh apne desh mein manaenge. Uske baad parivar se milne Pakistan jaoonga (I will celebrate in my own country, they will in theirs. Then, I will go meet my family in Pakistan).”

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14. WHAT THE STUNNING SUCCESS OF AfD MEANS FOR GERMANY AND EUROPE | Cas Mudde
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(The Guardian, 24 September 2017)

The radical right party profited from the fact immigration was the number one election issue. But can its breakthrough last?

In 1991 Belgium had its (first) black Sunday, when the populist radical right Flemish Block gained 6.8% of the national vote. Since then many other western European countries have gone through a similar experience, from Denmark to Switzerland. And now, even the ever stable Germany has its own schwarzer Sonntag, and it’s blacker than most people had expected.

The populist radical-right Alternative for Democracy (AfD) party not only enters the Bundestag, the German parliament, but does so almost certainly as the third biggest party, with a stunning 13.3%, an increase of 8.8 percentage points according to the exit poll. Moreover, both the centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD scored their worst electoral results in the postwar era, with 32.5% and 20% respectively. This means that AfD got two-thirds of the SPD vote, and 40% of the CDU/CSU vote.

Polls from German state TV, showed that AfD has its Hochburge (strongholds) in the former communist east of the country. While it scored on average 11% in west Germany, it got 21.5% in east Germany, more than twice as much. This is in line with its results in the regional state elections, in which AfD also gained its largest support in the east.

    In short, the relationship between AfD and its voters is weak, and is mostly defined by opposition to other parties

AfD got more votes from past non-voters (1.2 million) than from the CDU/CSU (1 million) or SPD (500,000). In many ways this is an anti-Merkel vote, reflecting opposition to her controversial Willkommenspolitik towards refugees, which not only pushed some voters of mainstream parties to switch but also mobilised previous non-voters. The same poll also shows, for example, that 89% of AfD voters thought that Merkel’s immigration policies ignored the “concerns of the people” (ie German citizens); 85% want stronger national borders; and 82% think that 12 years of Merkel is enough. In other words, AfD has clearly profited from the fact that immigration was the number one issue in these elections.

Does this shocking result mean that AfD is going to be the third force in German politics in the future? There are many reasons to doubt this. First of all, the poll showed that a stunning 60% of AfD voters voted “against all other parties” and only 34% voted out of conviction for AfD. This is in sharp contrast to voters of all other parties. More than 70% said that it would be good if you could vote for CSU outside Bavaria – CSU is a much more conservative and rightwing party than Merkel’s CDU, but only contests election in the southern state – while 86% think that the party does not distance itself enough from “extreme right positions”.
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In short, the relationship between AfD and its voters is weak, and is mostly defined by opposition to other parties rather than by support for AfD itself. And beyond its own voters, AfD still seems highly controversial. Only 12% of all Germans were “satisfied with the political work” of Alice Weidel, the co-leader of AfD, with Alexander Gauland. This was by far the lowest of all party leaders; even significantly lower than the 44% for the highly controversial Sahra Wagenknecht, deputy chairwoman of the radical left Die Linke.

On top of that, electoral breakthrough is different from electoral persistence. Most new parties in general, and populist radical parties in particular, find it hard to constitute a big, coherent faction in the national parliament. This is particularly the case for populist radical-right parties in Germany, as we have seen already in state parliaments with Die Republikaner (the Republicans) and the German People’s Union in the 1990s. AfD has also struggled in several state parliaments, with infighting between “moderates” and “extremists”. This will be even worse in their roughly 90-member Bundestag faction, which will house several ideological and regional subfactions, from a few “bourgeois conservatives” to a majority of populist radical rightwingers, and a few extremists.

The German results will fuel a return to the “rise of populism” frame that has dominated 2016 and early 2017, but was somewhat muted by the Dutch and – particularly – French elections. Like all other elections, the German elections are first and foremost national elections, but there are broader lessons to be learned.

First, while populist radical-right parties peaked in the polls in 2016, at the height of the hysteria over the “refugee crisis”, their election results in 2017 are still close to, or even higher than, their historical top scores. This applies to the Dutch Freedom party, the French Front National, and now to AfD in Germany. According to polls, it will also hold for the Austrian Freedom party, which is set to enter the coalition government after next month’s parliamentary elections.
German elections 2017: Angela Merkel wins fourth term but AfD makes gains – as it happened
Exit poll puts Merkel’s CDU/CSU on 32% as AfD set to be first far-right party to enter Bundestag in six decades
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Second, in the past years several rightwing populist parties have radicalised and transformed into populist radical right parties, such as AfD, the Finns party in Finland, and Ukip in Britain. This always leads to internal struggles, and the exit of more “moderate” cadres – who often found their own, new party, while the vast majority of supporters tend to stay with the more radical party; as was also the case with the Front National in the 1990s and Austria’s Freedom party in the early 2000s.

Third, and finally, as populist radical-right parties gain votes and seats in ever more European countries, the mainstream right and – particularly – left parties are slowly but steadily losing them. This means that party systems become more and more fragmented, slightly dominated by one or two medium-sized rather than big parties. In such a fragmented structure populist radical-right parties can become highly influential, although they tend to be more obstructive than constructive, even if they have “only” 10% or 15% of the vote.

At this moment commentators are arguing that German politics has experienced a “seismic shock”. This is true, but the current election result mainly shows de-alignment from the mainstream parties, rather than re-alignment to AfD. For that to happen, AfD will have to build a coherent and cohesive parliamentary faction that has few internal struggles and personal scandals. Based on German history, as well as European precedent, that is highly unlikely.

• Cas Mudde is associate professor at the University of Georgia

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15. DAVID PALKKI. REVIEW OF KENNER, ROBERT, DIR., COMMAND AND CONTROL AND SCHLOSSER, ERIC, COMMAND AND CONTROL: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THE DAMASCUS ACCIDENT, AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY
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H-Net Reviews, September 2017

 Robert Kenner, dir. Command and Control. Based on Best-Selling Book by Eric Schlosser. PBS American Experience Series. Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, 2016. www.shoppbs.org. $19.99. DVD. 210 mins.

Eric Schlosser. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. New York: Penguin, 2014. 656 pp. $18.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-14-312578-5.

Reviewed by David Palkki (Air War College)
Published on H-War (September, 2017)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

The American public and its elected representatives are appallingly ignorant about the US nuclear arsenal. A 2004 poll found that the average American respondent believed that the United States had only two hundred nuclear weapons—a far cry from the correct number at the time of approximately six thousand.[1] President Donald Trump and many congressional representatives seem no better informed.[2] This widespread ignorance is troubling, in part, since policymakers are soon to make key decisions about the size and scope of the arsenal. Knowledgeable leaders have been calling for years for a “national conversation” on whether and how to modernize the US nuclear arsenal.[3] This well-written book and engaging documentary film, which is based on the book, have risen to the occasion.

Eric Schlosser has produced a thoughtful, at times frightening, account of nuclear policies and accidents in the US Air Force (USAF). Much of the book (as well as the movie) is focused on recreating, in minute detail, the story of the September 1980 explosion of a Titan II missile near Damascus, Arkansas. It all started when a young air force technician accidentally dropped a socket wrench that bounced off the ground and pierced the rocket’s fuel tank, causing the highly flammable liquid fuel to leak. Eight hours later, the fuel tank exploded with such force that it launched the missile’s nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead several hundred yards into a ditch.

A key point that the book and movie drive home is that “normal accidents,” with unpredictable consequences, are inevitable in tightly coupled, interactive systems, such as a nuclear weapons system. If we are willing to live with nuclear weapons, this line of reasoning goes, we must be willing to accept the ever-present risk of nuclear accidents. The point isn’t novel. As Schlosser acknowledges, Charles Perrow and Scott Sagan (The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons [1993]) deserve credit for their widely acclaimed scholarship on nuclear accidents several decades ago. This lack of theoretical originality, however, by no means reduces Schlosser’s merit. Beyond what appears to be fine investigative work into the story line surrounding the explosion of the Titan II (and other accidents), Schlosser and Robert Kenner, the director of the film, have done a masterful job of packaging their argument for mass audiences. It is powerful watching footage of Bob Peurifoy, the former director of weapon development at Sandia National Laboratories, and Bill Stevens, the former head of nuclear safety at Sandia, explain how nuclear accidents could have ended with mushroom clouds.

Unfortunately, the power of these interviews is clearly lost on Amazon.com, which may be the largest distributor of the DVD. Amazon delivers a frontal assault on the claim that the explosion of the Titan II missile could have eventuated in a thermonuclear detonation. In Amazon Prime’s “goofs” section for this movie, drawn from the movie reference site IMDb.com, one reads, “Factual Error: It was never possible for an accidental Titan missile explosion to unleash a nuclear detonation. The worst scenario would have been the deaths of the crew in the affected silo.... The premise that a fuel leak at a Titan missile silo could have caused a thermonuclear disaster is both deeply flawed and physically impossible.”[4] No source is provided. By contrast, in the documentary, Peurifoy says very clearly that it was possible. When asked, “Was there a chance that that bomb [near Damascus] could have detonated,” he answers “Yes.” The documentary ends with Peurifoy warning, “Nuclear weapons will always have a chance of an accidental detonation. It will happen. It may be tomorrow, or it may be a million years from now, but it will happen.”

The portions of the book dealing with the Titan II, though nonfiction, are written as an action thriller, with the author taking readers from one character’s experiences and perspectives to the next. Some readers may find this approach disjointed and unsettling, though the author may have done so precisely to elicit a sense of unease with the material at hand. In any case, where else can one read a well-researched, well-written, historical account involving nuclear weapons, accidental explosions, and Arkansas state politics under Governor Bill Clinton? Command and Control, in book as well as in documentary film, will educate a broader swath of Americans than earlier treatises on nuclear accidents. This is important and timely.

Schlosser praises individual airmen in the US nuclear weapons enterprise “who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust,” yet he holds no punches in criticizing the air force more broadly (p. xii). He repeatedly accuses the USAF and Department of Defense of being dishonest about the likelihood of accidental nuclear explosions. Excessive secrecy, he notes, undermined civilian control of Strategic Air Command (SAC) and of the efforts of weapons designers to avert accidents. The US military resisted incorporating permissive action links and various other safety features, he writes, for fear that these might hinder the US ability to retaliate after a Soviet first strike. Readers, particularly newcomers to the study of nuclear weapons, will find his treatment of the always/never debate enlightening and frightening. For instance, he documents how SAC objections to permissive actions links and other safety devices led it in the late 1970s to set the required eight-digit codes at each of its Minuteman sites to “00000000” (p. 371). On the flipside, he writes, at the height of the Cold War, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made its W-47 warheads too safe. A routine examination in 1963 found that roughly 75 percent of these warheads, placed atop the navy’s Polaris missiles, would not work. Livermore tried for four years to fix these warheads, unsuccessfully, before it replaced them (p. 314). I know of no better evidence suggesting the desirability of a US triad (or at least dyad) than this dangerous failure in the navy’s nuclear deterrent.

It is unclear how broadly Schlosser’s and Kenner’s work will influence the public debate, though it has begun making its way into syllabi in civilian academia as well as in the US professional military education system. I assign significant portions of the book and the film to senior military officers at the USAF Air War College, the majority of whom are air force officers and a fair number of whom have worked with nuclear weapons. My students, unsurprisingly, criticize Schlosser for spending so many pages on accidents in the USAF and so few in the navy. They fault him for focusing heavily on accidents in the United States as opposed to a more balanced study including accidents in Russia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. And they wish he had focused more attention on changes within the air force to correct earlier errors. But they enjoy learning from him. Schlosser and Kenner are to be commended for presenting such accessible and important accounts of our nuclear past.

Notes

[1]. Steven Kull with Clay Ramsay, Stefan Subias, and Evan Lewis, “Americans on WMD Proliferation,” The PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll, April 15, 2004, 18-19, www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/WMDProliferation/WMD_Prolif_Apr04/WMDProlif_Apr04_rpt.pdf (accessed June 15, 2017).

[2]. Josh Rogin, “In Debate, Trump’s Lack of Nuclear Knowledge on Display,” Washington Post, September 28, 2016; Lisbeth Gronlund, “How Many Nuclear Weapons Does the U.S. Have? Don’t Ask Congress…,” Union of Concerned Scientists (blog), December 17, 2013, http://blog.ucsusa.org/lisbeth-gronlund/how-many-nuclear-weapons-does-the-united-states-have-347 (accessed June 15, 2017); and “New Video from Global Zero Exposes Widespread Ignorance in Congress about Nuclear Weapons,” Global Zero, June 20, 2013, www.globalzero.org/press-media/press-releases/new-video-global-zero-exposes-widespread-ignorance-congress-about-nuclear (accessed June 15, 2017).

[3]. See, for instance, Mac Thornberry’s statement in Paul D. Shinkman, “Top GOP Lawmaker: US Must Consider Building New Nukes,” U.S. News and World Report, June 23, 2015.

[4]. Amazon Prime app via IMDb.com, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5598206/ (accessed June 16, 2017).

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16. IAN STEWART, REVIEW OF THE RACES OF EUROPE: CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1839-1939
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(Reviews in History - 22 September, 2017)

Book:
The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839-1939
Richard McMahon
London, Palgrave, 2016, ISBN: 9780230363199; 484pp.; Price: £60.00
Reviewer:
Mr Ian Stewart
London School of Economics

The emergence of racial classification in conjunction with the Enlightenment Science of Man in the 18th century is a well-known chapter in the history of European ideas. Far less understood are the ways in which this scientific project carried into the 19th and 20th centuries, the investigation of which is Richard McMahon’s purpose in The Races of Europe. He seeks to illustrate not only how the race sciences operated across Europe from c.1839–c.1939 (though the book is sensitive to the long prehistory of modern racialism), but how ‘national identities’ and nationalist discourses were constructed within them. Obviously the aim is an ambitious one, but McMahon succeeds in providing a useful survey of European race science, punctuated with novel findings from his methodology and case studies. Crucially, the book treats race science on its own terms, historicising the contributions of its practitioners rather than reading them through any particular theoretical lens – postcolonial or otherwise – as has been popular in recent decades.

The book is split into two halves, the first of which provides a kaleidoscopic account of the European network of race classifiers, their interactions and techniques, and the political implications of their work. Case studies of Ireland, Poland, and Romania comprise the second half of the book, and serve to reinforce the interpretation of the overall European picture painted in part one. McMahon presents his work as a ‘transnational history of national identity’ (p. 1), describing how race scientists aimed to reveal the ‘“true” identities of European nations’ through biological racial classification. Despite this framing, the book is not easily classifiable, repeatedly crossing scholarly boundaries, both disciplinary and geographical; this approach should be welcomed as it mirrors the multi-disciplinarity of McMahon’s international subjects, as 19th-century racial classification was spread across various academic disciplines (as they exist today) and most of the European continent.

In part one, McMahon is largely concerned with establishing a geography of racial classification in Europe, where the three ‘core’ nations of Britain, France, and Germany spurred most racial research. However, as the 19th century wore on, classificatory race science expanded outwards from this core, though the three nations remained dominant. Here the author should be commended for going beyond the normal comparative framework of Britain, France, and Germany, instead aiming to provide a true European picture – supported by case studies of the refreshingly novel choices of Ireland, Romania, and Poland. Most intriguingly, as outlined in chapter two, McMahon has constructed his geography through a quantitative database of 126 source texts, from what he identifies as the ‘elite’ of racial classifiers. Aware of the subjective imperfection of his method and of quantitative limitations more generally, McMahon does not rely on the database overmuch. This may be because it seems to prop up findings already more or less known, or at least suspected. For example, few familiar with the field will be surprised that Paris is confirmed by the data to have been the 19th-century racial classification capital (p. 50). More interesting is McMahon’s use of transnational comparison to contribute to the Sonderweg debate, suggesting that German anthropology was more monogenist and egalitarian than the contemporary (Robert Knox-inspired) London Anthropological Society or the Parisian anthropologicals (p. 57). The geographical picture – made clearer by the useful inclusion of 24 maps in the appendix – established early on helps to frame McMahon’s findings through the rest of the book.

A timeline for race science is also established in part one, with an obvious increase in the complexity of racial classification as well as its adaptability through different intellectual paradigms. The most significant change within race science was the shift in the middle of the 19th century from the long-established ethno-linguistic understandings of race to more hard and fast physiological distinctions between nations. Here the established geography repeatedly provides the context for a clash between the waning currents of Enlightened universalism and local national imperatives. Although the community of racial scientists remained internationally focused throughout the 19th century, by the fin de siècle any notion of a common project had collapsed as nationalism overshadowed scientific objectivity. However, for superior races there had to be inferior ones, so to some extent racial classification was always transnational and comparative. In the 20th century European geographical classifications came to replace long-established racial delineations. For example, ‘Nordicism’ encompassed the Germanic-speaking peoples as the Indo-European, or Aryan, idea was set aside in these countries (pp. 171–2).

McMahon explores the relationship between race science and politics in the fourth chapter of the work, foregrounded as a ‘central theme’ in his introduction (pp. 1–2). An obvious factor here is that scientists more or less relied on politicians – via the state – to fund their research, which had implications for the racial narratives they created and against which nations they directed them. But most scientists were also nationalists to varying degrees and so a tension between local imperatives and international scholarly objectivity was also evident across Europe. As the 19th century wore on, universalism mattered less and less as nationalist dimensions took over. The most striking example included here came when the French anthropologist Paul Broca found that his data forced him into the inconvenient conclusion that the majority of Frenchmen were brachycephalic rather than dolichocephalic (round-headed as opposed to long, narrow-headed), the opposite of common assumptions. What could Broca do? Fudge the data? Or reorder craniological hierarchies? Remarkably, he chose the latter, turning the established sequence of craniological prestige on its (broad) head, so that brachycephalic became perceived as the most prestigious skull shape in French racial science. This had wide ramifications as the Slavs were also thought brachycephalic. The French therefore suddenly found they had Celto-Slav relatives, at the same time as the great power politics of France and Russia aligned.

In part two, titled ‘Peripheral case studies’, McMahon seeks to bolster his geography of the three ‘core’ classifying nations in northwest Europe, by showing how ‘peripheral’ race science largely mirrored the established categories and narratives of European race science, forcing their way into European consideration rather than establishing their own racial narratives and traditions. I will here focus on Ireland as it is the case with which I am most familiar, but the case studies of Poland and Romania show similar themes of tension between a reliance on racial ideologies constructed in the three core nations and a nationalist desire to cast their own race as certainly equal and perhaps superior to those in the core nations.

The Irish case study is notable for several reasons, not the least of which – as McMahon points out – is that there is no study of 19th-century Irish race science. A survey of the (few) Irish race scientists – including William Wilde (Oscar’s father) – shows that they essentially transposed a British anthropological framework on top of their origins traditions. But painting a picture as lucid as McMahon’s is no easy task, not only due to a dearth of 19th-century anthropological source material relative to other nations, but because Irish origin stories are a jumbled mixture of native mythology, sacred history, and ideas of descent from the Celts, Scythians, and Phoenicians that were popular across Europe. Mythology continued to shape ideas of the early Irish – particularly the Fír Bolg and Túatha Dé Danann, the ‘gods’ of Irish mythology – through the 19th century. Race scientists were forced to confront these popular myths, and in a sort of national euhemerism tried to discern who these populations were and whence they came. This is emphatically not a story of early Celtic inhabitants being conquered by Anglo-Norman invaders in the 12th century that a reader unfamiliar with Irish origins stories might suppose. Nor was there a straightforward equation of all native Catholic Irish with the ancient Celts, as racial classifiers sought to determine which parts of the population could be physically linked with the numerous invaders. Compounding the fractured picture of Irish race science were Ireland’s close intellectual links to Britain and Germany, all of which McMahon suggests led to Ireland’s racial focus on a vague, spiritual Gaelicism rather than a traditional superior-race narrative.

The book is meticulously researched and, though he makes no claims to be comprehensive, McMahon has gone some way to giving us a much clearer picture of the landscape of European racial science in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, there are some problems. Because of the large amount of synthesis necessary to constructing a clearer account of race science over the entirety of Europe, McMahon relies quite heavily at times on secondary sources, some of which (1) have been challenged and heavily qualified in recent years. McMahon has also had the considerable challenge of finding a vocabulary able to describe a perpetually shifting discipline, operating in different languages across the entire European continent over two centuries. Unfortunately, a phrase like ‘Enlightenment period assumptions of White global racial superiority’ (p. 171) might make sense to modern ears, but was emphatically not the idiom of ‘the’ Enlightenment, where ‘race’ was largely still linked to ethnic descent. The overarching concern of Enlightenment anthropology – most of whose practitioners were Christian and therefore believed in the unity of humanity – was to explain why certain tribes/nations reached a higher level of civilisation than others; in this context, the idea of original racial difference was tentatively floated by a few heterodox thinkers, but the influence of climate remained the salient consideration into the 19th century. ‘Romantic’ and ‘romanticism’ also do a considerable amount of linguistic work, and while every reader will perhaps have some idea of what is meant, it is never quite clear how romantic ideologies changed race science. Finally, given how wide-ranging the book is, a few more dates could perhaps have been given (i.e., the birth and death years of each scientist discussed).

While these shortcomings should be borne in mind, it must be emphasised that the importance of the work as a whole far outweighs any deficiencies. It will sit alongside classics like Leon Poliakov’s Le mythe aryen (2), and add a level of technical sophistication – literally, as McMahon shows the physical construction of racial narratives through data collection and physical measurements – on top of the standard understandings of Celtic, Teutonic, Indo-Germanic, Aryan, Nordic etc. racial narratives. McMahon ranges across the 19th-century disciplines of racial science – philology, ethnology, anthropology, history, and folklore – but seems most at home in the realm of anthropology and the technical discussions of race science. Happily so, as the debates in the latter half of the century are some of the most confused and abstruse; McMahon’s syntheses will therefore aid those familiar with the history of race science as well as newcomers to the field.

The Races of Europe is a unique work that makes a valuable contribution to the histories of ideas and science, while also linking them to the cultural history of national identities. This review can neither do justice to the amount of information corralled nor to the skill involved in weaving widely differing theories into a coherent picture of European race science in a series of intellectually manageable chapters. Scholars interested in the history of race science and racialism more broadly will find it particularly useful, but it will appeal to others across a wide variety of related fields. McMahon ends with an epilogue setting out some of the risks related to the study of genetics and its potential for biological essentialism, warning scientists that how their research is appropriated beyond the academy is largely out of their hands. I think there is also a lesson for the humanities here: as McMahon’s examples repeatedly show, national identity construction from biological evidence was highly subjective and historically contingent, though its practitioners claimed it proved immemorial racial truths. This should be a powerful reminder to those scholars who, though purporting to illuminate the oppression of subalterns, have cast certain ‘identities’ and the power dynamics around them as immemorial without realising the ways in which they echo the racialised discourses they aim to combat.

Notes

1 L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons & Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, 1968).Back to (1)
2 Leon Poliakov’s Le mythe aryen (Paris, 1971)

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17. IN RUSSIA, IT'S A WOMAN'S JOB TO CHALLENGE SOVIET-ERA LABOR LAWS | Francesca Visser
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The Moscow Times - Sep 20, 2017

It took Svetlana Medvedeva five years to fight for her right to become a captain

In Soviet propaganda posters, women feature alongside men as powerful and resolute workers. Forward-looking and muscular, they are portrayed as heroines of the proletariat. It was women workers who in February 1917 started a protest that would evolve into the Russian Revolution.

Today, Russia’s labor legislation is among the most stagnant in the world with women barred from hundreds of professions.

Svetlana Medvedeva had just landed her dream job in 2012 as a captain with a shipping company in southern Russia when it revoked the offer because of her gender.

But Medvedeva contested the move and after a five-year legal battle, won a landmark court case for discrimination this month.

“This is the first victory against the list of banned professions,” Medvedeva told The Moscow Times. She hopes it will pave the way for Russian women who are fighting for a career in so-called “men’s professions.”

A Man’s Job

Medvedeva, 31, spent years studying to become a navigation officer so that she could eventually become a captain. But when three years ago she applied to work with Samara River Passenger Enterprise, a private shipping company, it turned her down, citing Article 253 of the Labor Code and Government Regulation no.162.

The rule effectively bars women from entering 456 professions across 38 different industries, including work as a metro driver, a miner or a firefighter, unless a special committee rules the conditions as safe.

“No one warned me about this list,” Medvedeva told The Moscow Times. “I was only warned about the prejudice that my profession was considered a ‘man’s job.’”

The restrictions were introduced in 1974 and are not unique to Russia. Hundreds of professions are still off-limits to women in Belarus, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Svetlana Medvedeva Personal Archive

The list was originally introduced to protect women’s safety and reproductive health, which was considered vital for a Communist society.

But, Medvedeva argues, the limitations apply to all women, even if they can't give birth or are sterilized.

“It can’t be considered a matter of protecting our reproductive health,” she says. “In my job, there is a risk of becoming deaf, but how that is related to my fertility is not clear at all.”

After being rejected by the shipping company, Medvedeva immediately contested the decision with little success.

She sent letters to numerous ministries but received no response. The St. Petersburg-based Anti-Discrimination Center Memorial (ADC), an NGO that defends the rights of minorities and vulnerable groups, then took up her case.

“In 2012, we filed a lawsuit to the district court to oblige the defendant to employ me and to recognize their initial refusal as a case of discrimination,” Medvedeva told The Moscow Times.

The case was first rejected by a district court in Samara and then by a regional court. One year later, her lawyers filed a complaint to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), to which Russia is a state party.

In March 2016, the UN recognized the company’s refusal to employ her as gender discrimination and the list as a violation of women's rights.

But international recognition didn’t mean the legislation was changed or the list was scrapped. In fact, Medvedeva’s case was once again rejected by the district court in Samara.

That changed last week, when on Sept. 15, after a five-year-long legal battle, the same court recognized her rejection of employment as discriminatory.

“It means a lot to me,” Medvedeva told The Moscow Times. “There are women, who like me, work in the merchant navy and are denied employment because of this list. But now everything will change."

Moral Satisfaction

Medvedeva’s case, her lawyers agree, sets a legal precedent for other women to challenge similar job rejections in court.

“It is symbolically important for fighting gender discrimination in Russia with legal means,” says Sergei Golubok, one of Medvedeva’s lawyers.

But the ban is still in place and the court did not grant the second part of her case obliging the shipping company to hire her. It is unclear what practical impact Medvedeva's victory will have.

“All we have is moral satisfaction,” another lawyer, Dmitry Bartеnev, concludes.

Comrade! Come join us on the collective farm!/ Women Workers! Go to Civil Aviation school / Let's pass the military training exam with flying colors!

Women are still only allowed to work in vessels which are considered safe, explains Bartenev. “Svetlana was denied employment because they considered the working conditions as harmful for her, but acceptable for men,” he says.

Medvedeva found a different job in March this year at a different company. But others are less lucky. Since there are no formal obligations on companies to improve safety — regardless of gender —  for many companies it is simply cheaper to hire men than to upgrade their equipment.

“More should be done to develop safe working conditions,” says Yelena Gerasimova, Director of the Center for Social and Labor Rights in Moscow.

“The state allows companies to continue using risky technologies as long as they are not hiring women,” she adds.

In March this year, ADC Memorial launched a campaign with the hashtag “alljobs4allwomen” to change the legislation, not only in Russia but other post-Soviet countries.

“We believe that women can decide for themselves what is good or bad for them — just like men do,” Stefania Kulayeva, the head ADO, told The Moscow Times.

“These professional bans are rooted in gender-stereotypes that present women first of all as mothers, while men can [pursue their] career and have a choice,” she says.

“Women don't just face discrimination in practice, but also in the law. That has to change."

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18. HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIA: 7 TRULY TERRIBLE THINGS THE AGENCY HAS DONE IN 70 YEARS
by Carey Wedler
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(TheAntiMedia.org, 18 September 2017)

On Monday, President Trump tweeted birthday wishes to the Air Force and the CIA. Both became official organizations 70 years ago on September 18, 1947, with the implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.

After spending years as a wartime intelligence agency called the Office of Strategic Services, the agency was solidified as a key player in the federal government’s operations with then-President Harry Truman’s authorization.

In the seventy years since, the CIA has committed a wide variety of misdeeds, crimes, coups, and violence. Here are seven of the worst programs they’ve carried out (that are known to the public):
1.Toppling governments around the world

The CIA is best known for its first coup, Operation Ajax, in 1953, in which it ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, reinstating the autocratic Shah, who favored western oil interests. That operation, which the CIA now admits to waging with British intelligence, ultimately resulted in the 1979 revolution and subsequent U.S. hostage crisis. Relations between the U.S. and Iran remain strained to this day, aptly described by the CIA-coined term “blowback.”

But the CIA has had a hand in toppling a number of other democratically elected governments, from Guatemala (1954) and the Congo (1960) to the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). The CIA has aimed to install leaders who appease American interests, often empowering oppressive, violent dictators. This is only a partial list of countries where the CIA covertly attempted to exploit and manipulate sovereign nations’ governments.
2. Operation Paperclip

In one of the more bizarre CIA plots, the agency and other government departments employed Nazi scientists both within and outside the United States to gain an advantage over the Soviets. As summarized by NPR:

    “The aim [of Operation Paperclip] was to find and preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons themselves were not enough.

    “They decided the United States needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to the moon.”

They kept this plot secret, though they admitted to it upon the release of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen. In a book review, the CIA wrote that “Henry Wallace, former vice president and secretary of commerce, believed the scientists’ ideas could launch new civilian industries and produce jobs.” 

They praised the book’s historical accuracy, noting “that the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was headed by Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi.” They acknowledged that “General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets, was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.”

Remarkably, they noted that Jacobsen “understandably questions the morality of the decision to hire Nazi SS scientists,” but praise her for pointing out that it was done to fight Soviets. They also made sure to add that the Soviets hired Nazis, too, apparently justifying their own questionable actions by citing their most loathed enemy.
3. Operation CHAOS

The FBI is widely known for its COINTELPRO schemes to undermine communist movements in the 1950s and anti-war, civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s, but the CIA has not been implicated nearly as deeply because, technically, the CIA cannot legally engage in domestic spying. But that was of little concern to President Lyndon B. Johnson as opposition to the Vietnam war grew. According to former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner, as documented in his extensive CIA history, Legacy of Ashes, Johnson instructed then-CIA Director Richard Helms to break the law:

    “In October 1967, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.

    “Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: ‘I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs…’”

Helms obeyed. Weiner wrote:

    “In a blatant violation of his powers under the law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years… Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.”

According to Weiner, “the agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America.” Because they could not draw a “clear distinction” between the new far left and mainstream opposition to the war, the CIA spied on every major peace organization in the country. President Johnson also wanted them to prove a connection between foreign communists and the black power movement. “The agency tried its best,” Weiner noted, ultimately noting that “the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments.”
4. Infiltrating the media

Over the years, the CIA has successfully gained influence in the news media, as well as popular media like film and television. Its influence over the news began almost immediately after the agency was formed. As Weiner explained, CIA Director Allen Dulles established firm ties with newspapers:

    “Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.”

He continued:

    “It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information…The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Life, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.”

The CIA’s influence had not waned by 1977 when journalist Carl Bernstein reported on publications with CIA agents in their employ, as well as “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The CIA has also successfully advised on and influenced numerous television shows, such as Homeland and 24 and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, which push narratives that ultimately favor the agency. According to Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film & Television, a concerted agency effort began in the 1990s to counteract negative public perceptions of the CIA, but their influence reaches back decades. In the 1950s, filmmakers produced films for the CIA, including the 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Researchers Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, whose work has been published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, say their recent Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that the CIA — along with the military — have influenced over 1,800 films and television shows, many of which have nothing to do with CIA or military themes.
5. Drug-induced Mind control

In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with drugs to determine whether they might be useful in extracting information. As Smithsonian Magazine has noted of the MKUltra project:

    “The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.”

Further:

    “The intent of the project was to study ‘the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,’ according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.

    “Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could:’ ‘promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;’ ‘render the induction of hypnosis easier;’ ‘enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;’ produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients– ‘people who could not fight back,’ in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.”

Further, as Weiner noted:

    “Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York Hotel.”

Weiner added that senior CIA officers destroyed “almost all of the records” of the programs, but that while the “evidence that remains is fragmentary…it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s.”

Years later, the CIA would be accused of distributing crack-cocaine into poor black communities, though this is currently less substantiated and supported mostly by accounts of those who claim to have been involved.
6. Brutal torture tactics

More recently, the CIA was exposed for sponsoring abusive, disturbing terror tactics against detainees at prisons housing terror suspects. An extensive 2014 Senate report documented agents committing sexual abuse, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, waterboarding them so severely it sometimes led to convulsions, and imposing forced rectal feeding, to name a few examples. Ultimately, the agency had very little actionable intelligence to show for their torture tactics but lied to suggest they did, according to the torture report. Their torture tactics led the International Criminal Court to suggest the CIA, along with the U.S. armed forces, could be guilty of war crimes for their abuses.
7. Arming radicals

The CIA has a long habit of arming radical, extremist groups that view the United States as enemies. In 1979, the CIA set out to support Afghan rebels in their bid to defeat the Soviet occupation of the Middle Eastern country. As Weiner wrote, in 1979, “Prompted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter signed a covert-action order for the CIA to provide the Afghan rebels with medical aid, money, and propaganda.”

As Weiner detailed later in his book:

    “The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who doled out the CIA’s guns and money favored the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.”

Though some speculate the CIA directly armed Osama bin Laden, that is yet to be fully proven or admitted. What is clear is that western media revered him as a valuable fighter against the Soviets, that he arrived to fight in Afghanistan in1980, and that al-Qaeda emerged from the mujahideen, who were beneficiaries of the CIA’s program. Stanford University has noted that Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian cleric, “established Al Qaeda from the fighters, financial resources, and training and recruiting structures left over from the anti-Soviet war.” Much of those “structures” were provided by the agency. Intentionally or not, the CIA helped fuel the rise of the terror group.

Weiner noted that as the CIA failed in other countries like Libya, by the late 1980s “Only the mujahideen, the Afghan holy warriors, were drawing blood and scenting victory. The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-dollar-a-year-program” and represented 80% of the overseas budget of the clandestine services. “The CIA’s briefing books never answered the question of what would happen when a militant Islamic army defeated the godless invaders of Afghanistan,” though Tom Twetten, “the number two man in the clandestine service in the summer of 1988,” was tasked with figuring out what would happen with the Afghan rebels. “We don’t have any plan,” he concluded.

Apparently failing to learn their lesson, the CIA adopted nearly the exact same policy in Syria decades later, arming what they called “moderate rebels” against the Assad regime. Those groups ultimately aligned with al-Qaeda groups. One CIA-backed faction made headlines last year for beheading a child (though President Trump cut off the CIA program in June, the military continues to align with “moderate” groups).

*  *  *

Unsurprisingly, this list is far from complete. The CIA has engaged in a wide variety of extrajudicial practice, and there are likely countless transgressions we have yet to learn about.

As Donald Trump cheers the birthday of an agency he himself once criticized, it should be abundantly clear that the nation’s covert spy agency deserves scrutiny and skepticism — not celebration.


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