SACW - 8 Oct 2017 | Don't erase History / Imagining Climate Change ? / Imagining Climate Change ? / Fake News / Germany: What Happens Next?

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 Oct 2017 - No. 2956 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. India’s Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) Warmly Welcomes the Award of the Imagining Climate Change ?
2. Imagining Climate Change ? LA Review of Books Conversation with Amitav Ghosh
3. India: Press Statement by SAHMAT on Threats To Prof. Kancha Iliah Shepherd
4. Our Gauri: A documentary film | 2017 , 67 mins
5. Australian TV documentary digs into the business practices of India’s Adani Group
7. Religious Majoritarianism and Commercial Interests drive the attack against the Rohingyas - Statement from New Trade Union Initiative
8. Lesson from Pakistan: Don’t erase history | Ammar Rashid
9. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - BJP’s denial of refugee status to Rohingyas is in line with the (flawed) logic of Partition | Vikas Rathee  
 - India: Right wing propaganda overdrive - A film about the 1946 Kolkata riots with SP Mookerjee as the hero
 - India: Communal tension in Haridwar Rishikesh area (Oct 2017) - links to news reports
 - India: Why the iconic Taj Mahal is a victim of prejudice | Karan Thapar
 - India: Godse killed Gandhi, 'don't take that away from us' - Hindu Mahasabha
 - India: Photo of 2008 Invitation letter from Gujarat CM Modi to Hindu Janjagruti Samiti - a branch Sanatan Sanstha
 - India: Gujarat HC Allows Zakia Jafri to Appeal for New Probe in Modi’s Role in 2002 Riots
 - India - Karnataka: Mangaluru sees uptick in vigilante violence as politically-backed Hindutva fringe groups multiply
 - India: Tweedledee, tweedledum Lines between Congress and BJP are regularly crossed in Gujarat. | Jaffrelot and Verniers
 - India: Nagaland town adopts resolution to keep illegal Bangladeshi immigrants away
 - India: Religious rites versus ecological responsibilities
 - India: The offence industry springs to action; court must outrightly dismiss case against Prakash Raj
 - India - Gauri Lankesh’s murder: Key suspects are linked to the right-wing Sanatan Sanstha organisation
 - Open letter by the eminent philosopher Akeel Bilgrami to Chief Minister of Kerala on the Hadiya case
 - Can Science Survive the Onslaught of Blind Faith?
 - India: Faith and Fear - Sangh Parivar's narrow definitions of faith, and the purveying of fear | Teesta Setalvad
 - India: DU's Sanskrit Department leads the Hindutva charge to reimagine India’s ancient history | Shoaib Daniyal
 - Manipur Christian group’s denial of burial rights to woman reflects growing intolerance in India | Nandita Haksar
 - India: Lingayat leap of faith | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Is Rohingya crisis changing West's 'romanticized' view of Buddhism? a shift in thought | Harry Bruinius
11. Sri Lanka: Recollections of the families of the disappeared in Kilinochchi - Where are they | Kamanthi Wickramasinghe
12. The Case For Colonialism? | Daanish Mustafa
13. Obituaries: Tom Alter, Blue-Eyed Star of Bollywood Films, Dies at 67 | Amisha Padnani
14. India’s millions of new Internet users are falling for fake news — sometimes with deadly consequences | Vidhi Doshi
15. On Violence and students protest in Bananas Hindu University
16. The Next Arab Spring? Women’s Rights | Kamel Daoud
17. ‘Repression ships’: Catalonia dockworkers refuse to serve Madrid police vessels
18. Beware the red peril: Indonesia still fighting ghosts of communism | Kate Lamb
19. Germany: What Happens Next? | Claus Offe
20. Fitch on Gisèle Sapiro. The French Writers' War, 1940-1953

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1. INDIA’S COALITION FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT AND PEACE (CNDP) WARMLY WELCOMES THE AWARD OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE TO ICAN
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The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) with a deep sense of solidarity, warmly welcomes the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
http://www.sacw.net/article13510.html

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2. IMAGINING CLIMATE CHANGE ? LA REVIEW OF BOOKS CONVERSATION WITH AMITAV GHOSH
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The evidence of climate change is all around us — record temperatures, superstorms, the crack in the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The news keep getting grimmer, and once you really take in the worst-case scenarios of the next few decades, it’s hard not to feel numb. But if global warming is the most pressing problem facing the planet, why do we see so few references to it in contemporary novels, apart from post-apocalyptic science fiction? Where is the great Climate Change Novel?
http://www.sacw.net/article13507.html

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3. INDIA: PRESS STATEMENT BY SAHMAT ON THREATS TO PROF. KANCHA ILIAH SHEPHERD
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Civil society must stand up against this goondaism and demand for security for Prof Kancha Iliah as well as punishment to those issuing open threats, before we have another Gauri Lankesh.
http://www.sacw.net/article13505.html

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4. Our Gauri: A documentary film | 2017 , 67 mins
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A documentary film on the life and work of Gauri Lankesh, the journalist and secular activist who was assassinated in Bangalore in September 2017. The was directed by Deepu and produced by Pedestrian Pictures
http://www.sacw.net/article13502.html

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5. AUSTRALIAN TV DOCUMENTARY DIGS INTO THE BUSINESS PRACTICES OF INDIA’S ADANI GROUP
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’Digging into Adani - Four Corners’, Full Documentary on the dubious dealings of India’s corporate colossus. When Four Corners travelled to India to investigate the activities of the giant Adani group, they soon discovered the power of the company. The program analyses the Adani Group’s opaque financial operations and investigates the ramifications for their Australian operations.
http://www.sacw.net/article13501.html

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6. INDIA: WHY DOES ’BIG DAMS’ MODEL PREVAIL DESPITE ADVERSE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS ?
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Since Independence, between 25 and 60 million people have been displaced from their homes and uprooted for India’s development projects. Most end up living in abysmal poverty and deprivation. That we do not even know the exact numbers of those affected — in a country that prizes bureaucratic record keeping — is a clear indication of the callous disregard we have for these lives. Big dams such as the Sardar Sarovar have been built on an obsolete belief that the benefits of hydropower outweigh its other costs. But we now know that this is no longer the case
http://www.sacw.net/article13479.html

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7. RELIGIOUS MAJORITARIANISM AND COMMERCIAL INTERESTS DRIVE THE ATTACK AGAINST THE ROHINGYAS - STATEMENT FROM NEW TRADE UNION INITIATIVE
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his visit to Myanmar from 5-7 September 2017 assured India’s support to the government of Myanmar despite the continuing government and army driven ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, the majority of whom are Muslims. The Government of India has also labelled the 40,000 Rohingyas as illegal immigrants in India calling them a threat to national security and hence to be deported.
http://www.sacw.net/article13513.html

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8. LESSON FROM PAKISTAN: DON’T ERASE HISTORY | Ammar Rashid
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Pakistan shows that the disfigurement of our collective history to create exclusionary imagined communities can leave a bloody imprint for generations.
http://www.sacw.net/article13512.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - BJP’s denial of refugee status to Rohingyas is in line with the (flawed) logic of Partition | Vikas Rathee  
 - India: Right wing propaganda overdrive - A film about the 1946 Kolkata riots with SP Mookerjee as the hero
 - India: Communal tension in Haridwar Rishikesh area (Oct 2017) - links to news reports
 - India: Why the iconic Taj Mahal is a victim of prejudice | Karan Thapar
 - India: Godse killed Gandhi, 'don't take that away from us' - Hindu Mahasabha
 - India: Photo of 2008 Invitation letter from Gujarat CM Modi to Hindu Janjagruti Samiti - a branch Sanatan Sanstha
 - India: Gujarat HC Allows Zakia Jafri to Appeal for New Probe in Modi’s Role in 2002 Riots
 - India - Karnataka: Mangaluru sees uptick in vigilante violence as politically-backed Hindutva fringe groups multiply
 - India: Tweedledee, tweedledum Lines between Congress and BJP are regularly crossed in Gujarat. | Jaffrelot and Verniers
 - India: Nagaland town adopts resolution to keep illegal Bangladeshi immigrants away
 - India: Religious rites versus ecological responsibilities
 - India: The offence industry springs to action; court must outrightly dismiss case against Prakash Raj
 - India - Gauri Lankesh’s murder: Key suspects are linked to the right-wing Sanatan Sanstha organisation
 - India: Hindu nationalist government of the Uttar Pradesh starving the Taj Mahal of funds and pushing religious tourism instead
 - Open letter by the eminent philosopher Akeel Bilgrami to Chief Minister of Kerala on the Hadiya case
 - Can Science Survive the Onslaught of Blind Faith?
 - India: Faith and Fear - Sangh Parivar's narrow definitions of faith, and the purveying of fear | Teesta Setalvad
 - India: DU's Sanskrit Department leads the Hindutva charge to reimagine India’s ancient history | Shoaib Daniyal
 - Manipur Christian group’s denial of burial rights to woman reflects growing intolerance in India | Nandita Haksar
 - India: Lingayat leap of faith | Pratap Bhanu Mehta

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. IS ROHINGYA CRISIS CHANGING WEST'S 'ROMANTICIZED' VIEW OF BUDDHISM? A SHIFT IN THOUGHT | Harry Bruinius
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The Christian Science Monitor, 28 September 2017

When it comes to religious extremism, Buddhism has mostly escaped the scrutiny that Muslim militants, fundamentalist Christians, and Hindu nationalists in India have faced, observers say.

September 28, 2017 NEW YORK—For many Americans, popular images of Buddhism have often included those of monks in saffron-colored robes, meditating peacefully on windswept mountains, revering all forms of life while seeking higher states of enlightenment.

In the context of such clichés, it has been jarring, many say, to see very different images coming out of Myanmar. Many monks, barefoot and clothed in the traditional robes of Burmese Buddhist monasteries, have been at the forefront of the violent repression of the Rohingya Muslim minority, which the United Nations has characterized as ethnic cleansing.

Over the past month, more than 400,000 Rohingya have fled their homes in what United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Sunday called “the most urgent refugee emergency in the world” right now. Often spurred on by Buddhist monks, local mobs and government forces have reportedly burned hundreds of Rohingya villages to the ground in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, slaughtering many of their Muslim inhabitants as hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Bangladesh. 

Many of the country’s Buddhists are afraid their own faith is in jeopardy, viewing the Rohingya Muslims as a threat. The military, as well as many monks, have used this fear to stoke a “Buddhist nationalism” that combines religious and civic identities.

The mix of faith and nationalist politics has been combustible for many religions and societies. Religious leaders seek government backing, and governments use the imprimatur of religion to justify killing. And as with most religions, religious scholars point out, there’s the spiritual ideal and then there’s what happens among the less-than-faithful.

“Everywhere there are human beings, you find political violence,” says Joshua Schapiro, senior lecturer at Fordham University in New York and an expert in Buddhist intellectual history. “So it shouldn’t be surprising that in various cases there are both Buddhists and human violence.”
Could you pass a US citizenship test? Find out.

When it comes to religious extremism, in fact, Buddhism has often escaped the scrutiny faced by other groups: Muslim militants, fundamentalist Christians, and Hindu nationalists in India, observers say.

“There is a romantic, more often than not, Western and academic vision of Buddhism as pacifist,” says Scott Davis, professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

That romanticism brings with it, not only a disconnect between the violence on the news and Hollywood portrayals of the religion, but deeper consequences. Middle Eastern scholars point out that the world's reaction would likely be very different if Myanmar's Muslims were the ones doing the oppressing, rather than being oppressed.

Hollywood celebrities have taken up Buddhist practices, cultivating friendships with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. Films like “Seven Years in Tibet,” which starred Brad Pitt as an Austrian mountain climber who became friends with the Dalai Lama at the time of China's takeover, often emphasize such romanticized views, notes Daniel Stevenson, professor of religious studies and historian of Buddhism at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

“There’s a scene in which the Tibetan monks are plowing the ground and moving rocks, careful to remove the worms underneath and not cause any harm to them,” says Professor Stevenson, noting the popular images in other US media. “It’s this archetypal image of the life-loving Buddhist monk, careful and meticulous not to harm any creature.”
Reverence for life

In the US, romantic ideas of Buddhism have a long history. The blueblood Buddhist convert, Henry Steel Olcott, a Civil War veteran and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in New York City, once proclaimed, “As far as we know, [Buddhism] has not caused the spilling of a drop of blood.”

In his 1881 “Buddhist Catechism,” he described the practices he embraced as “a religion of noble tolerance, of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice,” without a taint of “selfishness, sectarianism, or intolerance.”

In fact, the first of Buddhism’s Five Precepts is indeed a commitment to undertake training to refrain from taking the life of any living creature, Buddhist thinkers say. And in some ways, its injunctions against killing are similar to Jewish and Christian traditions, which share the 7th of the 10 Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” In Islam, too, the Quran proclaims that if anyone kills a person, “it is as though he has killed all mankind.”

In the Abrahamic faiths, however, the divine injunction against killing is mostly limited to other human beings. And the commandment has to do with the murder of innocents, not evildoers who wreak havoc in a community, or in what theologians later articulated as a defensive “just war.”

“But as I give as an example in my classes, look, one of the primary teachings of Jesus in the Gospels is to turn the other cheek,” says Dr. Schapiro. “So when confronted with explicit violence, what is the Christian thing to do if you’re following the teachings of Jesus?”

“So the project of awakening, or liberating one’s self from the daily forms of suffering and committing one’s self to refrain from killing, is a major part of Buddhist teachings and a facet of the lives of some Buddhists,” he continues. “But that does not stop Buddhists at large from being human beings and living in a society.”

Romanticizing the religion can have deeper consequences, too, observers say.

“Just imagine, for a minute, if it were Jews or Christians, or else the ‘peaceful Buddhists’ who were the subjects of Muslim persecutions,” wrote Hamid Dabashi, professor of Middle Eastern and Asian studies at Columbia University in New York, in an op-ed in Al Jazeera earlier this month.

“Compare the amount of airtime given to murderous Muslims of ISIL as opposed to the scarcity of news about the murderous Buddhists of Myanmar,” he continued. “Something in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination is cancerously callous. It does not see Muslims as complete human beings.”

Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, too, have fomented violence against Hindu Tamils in recent years, citing scriptures to assert their primacy as “sons of the soil.” In Thailand, Buddhist monks in the 1970s offered religious justification for the mass killings of communists.

And from the Tibetan King Asoka in the 3rd century BC to medieval China and Japan, Buddhism has played a role in justifying violence and killing. “In almost 2,500 years of development in South and East Asia, the urge to protect the community and disseminate the teachings has been tied to the use of military force,” says Professor Davis.
'Saffron Revolution'

The jarring images coming out of Myanmar, too, seem ironic, since Buddhist monks have been one of the primary forces of democratic change. In 2007, many helped lead what is now known as the “Saffron Revolution,” a movement of mostly nonviolent protests against Myanmar’s long-standing military dictatorship.

Nearly a decade later, their efforts helped Aung San Suu Kyi, the dissident who spent years under house arrest and who won the Nobel Prize in 1991, to become the country’s first democratically-elected leader in 2016. Now the State Counsellor, she shares power with the Myanmar military.

Yet as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled the country during the recent brutal campaigns, human rights and other global leaders have criticized the Nobel laureate, who has appeared to downplay, if not justify, the Rohingya pogroms.

Indeed, for decades, the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, who make up about 4 percent of the population, have been viewed as foreign outsiders.

Practicing a mystical Sufi form of Islam, many Rohingya trace their origins to waves of immigration dating as far back as the 15th century. Others, however, arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants who arrived as part of the colonial bureaucracy in Rakhine, when the state was under the jurisdiction of British India.

This has placed the Rohingya within the crosshairs of lingering anti-colonial resentments. And many of the same politically-active monks behind the push for democracy have embraced a strident ethnic and religious nationalism seen in other religions in other areas of the world. Proclaiming that their religious traditions and culture are under siege, they often cite Islamic conquests from centuries past in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other regions.

“Buddhism will never die!” proclaimed one leader of Ma Ba Ta, a radical group of Buddhist monks, at recent rally in Mandalay, reported by The Guardian. “This is our cause!” the crowd responded.

“Those who insult our religion,” the leader shouted, “are our enemies!” the crowd returned.

When Burma became independent in 1948, successive governments denied full status to the Rohingya, denying their historical claims and refusing to even consider them as one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups – each a branch of one of the “8 Major National Ethnic Races,” Myanmar officials say.

In 1982, the Rohingya were officially denied citizenship. During the 2014 census, too, most were forced to be identified as “Bengali” – in essence, unofficial resident aliens denied status, effectively stateless. The UN has called the Muslim minority population in Myanmar as “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
Is it fair to judge a faith by its violent fringe?

Even so, other Myanmar monks have resisted the deeply embedded prejudices against the nation’s Muslim minority. Experts caution that Buddhism, like other faiths, has a wide diversity of interpretations and its adherents are hardly monolithic. The actions of an unfaithful cadre of any religious group, many argue, should never be seen to represent the deeper fullness of a major global religion. 

“It seems unhelpful to characterize an entire society based on the behavior of a fringe element,” says Doug Carnine, professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Oregon, and a lay Buddhist minister. He and his wife, also a Buddhist minister, taught English to the monks at the Thone Htat Monastery in Myanmar, and he says they experienced a culture of compassion and peace.

“The male monks, children and adults, eat only what is given when they do their alms rounds, so sharing is deeply embedded in the culture,” Professor Carnine says. “Some radical anti-Muslim Buddhist sects do not believe in sharing with Muslims – but other Buddhist groups do feed poor Muslims at the end of Ramadan.”

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11. SRI LANKA: RECOLLECTIONS OF THE FAMILIES OF THE DISAPPEARED IN KILINOCHCHI - WHERE ARE THEY
by Kamanthi Wickramasinghe
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(Daily Mirror, 2 October 2017)

It takes a lot of courage to live in despair. Emotional despair gets even worse, when a loved one is dead or not to be found. Speaking about the latter, 
Sri Lanka once had a record for the second highest number of missing persons as reported by the UN in a study done back in 1999. As the war became tense, the numbers increased and by 2016 the number has exceeded 65,000 persons. 

Many of the disappearances happened during the ethnic conflict and the JVP Insurrection where thousands of people were kidnapped by armed men without a trace. 
Several years later, when the Good Governance regime came into power, the Office of Missing Persons was proposed and signed. However the physical establishment of this office is still in limbo. 

During a recent visit to Kilinochchi, the Daily Mirror  met the families of disappeared persons in the area. Inside their tent, hundreds of photos of missing family members have been mounted on its sides, some faded and some still in good condition. A few chairs dispersed here and there and a few bed sheets on the ground coupled with their levels of hopelessness made us realise what they were going through. Although they were reluctant to speak to us at first, a few mothers came to us with signs of hope in their faces and related their stories as follows : 

Daughter was handed over to the Army near the Vattuval Bridge 
-Kulasingham Saundalai

Kulasingham Saundalai’s daughter was handed over to the Army near the Vattuval Bridge in Omanthai on May 21, 2009. 
“That was the last time I saw,” says Saundalai as she sat down to share her story with the Daily Mirror.

    "As soon as the war ended I was asked to hand her over to the Army"

 “As soon as the war ended I was asked to hand her over to the Army and I was promised that she would return. But to date I’m still waiting for her. I didn’t get any compensation and no ‘Missing Certificate’ or anything. I only have her photo. I don’t know what her value is, so giving money wouldn’t make me satisfied unless I see her again. We staged this protest a few days back and we will continue until some sort of action is taken. In an earlier instance we also voiced our sorrows to the President himself, when he visited Kilinochchi but so far nothing has been done. I remember him telling us that he will probe into the matter but there’s no solution as yet. If you look around, we all are catching up with age and one day when we all die, who will be there to voice out against those who went missing?”
 
Son missing since March 25, 2009.
-Kalyaranjani Yogarajah

Kalyaranjani Yogarajah’s son has gone missing on March 25, 2009.
“He was in the Pulmodai hospital and was recovering from injuries. So I went and met him that day but I never knew that was the last day I got to see him. I searched in all the camps for the past eight years but had no luck. Sometime back, some people claiming to be from the Police came to my house and got his details including the NIC number, address and phone number. They said that they are getting these details because my son is still alive. If so they could show them to us. 
At least if we could see them and guarantee that they are safe, we can be happy. We started this protest from May 23 this year and as a result we were able to meet the President. When we met him he concluded the meeting by promising us that he would get a name list of all missing person, that he would allow us to visit the detention camps, that he will release all those who have been imprisoned for political reasons and that we would provide the infrastructure during resettlement. But have these promises been fulfilled? Not at all. 

    "So I went and met him that day but I never knew that was the last day I got to see him. "

What we want is to spend at least one day with our children and make sure that they are alive and safe. The President accepted the fact that our children have been enforced to disappear but the office is only for missing persons. 
We even tried to get the attention of the international community but it was just a waste of time. We neither want money or a death certificate, but just send our children whom we handed over to the Army back then.”

Father weeping for his lost child
 -M. Theiventhiram

    "He was injured at the time. I took him to hospital on June 22, 2008 and that was the last day I saw him although we searched we had no luck.."

Among the mothers we also came across a father who was weeping for his lost child. M. Theiventhiram is also a resident in Kilinochchi whose son was taken away by the Army while he was in the LTTE. 
“He was injured at the time. I took him to hospital on June 22, 2008 and that was the last day I saw him. My son-in-law was an ambulance driver and I asked him to check if my son was in the hospital. He returned with a bad news and although we searched we had no luck. 
Why do I need money or a piece of paper when I very well know that my son is alive? Nothing can replace him.”  He then pulled out a heap of letters addressed to various authorities including the Prime Minister and the President, requesting the release of his son. “I have submitted enough and more letters to all commissions and authorities,” said Theiventhiram, showing us all the letters one by one. None of these attempts succeeded. But I still have some faith and I know that one day I will be able to see him.”

Four family members are still missing 
-Kandasamy Ponnamma
 
The story of Kandasamy Ponnamma is even more heart-wrenching as four of her family members are still missing 
to date. 
“My son-in-law was working with the LTTE but on May 18, 2009 they asked me to hand over him as well as son, daughter and granddaughter. On two occasions they came and showed me my son-in-law while in Vavuniya but I never saw the rest of them to date. As far as I know they were sent to the Chettikulam refugee camp. 
 
    "Our children and spouses went missing after we handed them over to the forces. It’s not like they went missing during the war."

They did give some compensation but I refused to take it because my family members are priceless and they just can’t get away with showing us some money. It’s alright if they want to keep the LTTE person with them but why did they take my two children and the granddaughter? They deserve to live. Our children and spouses went missing after we handed them over to the forces. 
It’s not like they went missing during the war. When we met the President three months ago he asked the authorities to publish a list of names of those who were missing but that too fell on deaf ears. When he was coming into power, this was one of the promises he made. 
But what has he done so far? There’s no point setting up an office because by the time it’s setup this will be a lost cause. I always remember my children and please tell how a mother could simply forget their children or even assume that they are dead?”
 
Handed over son at Puthumathalan Camp
-T. Mangaleshwari
 
    "He was sent to the Chettikulam refugee camp but that was the last day I saw him. Some families of missing persons were resettled..."

 
Holding an almost faded photograph of her son was T. Mangaleshwari from Kilinochchi. 
“My son used to work in the Paranthan LTTE camp and on March 27, 2009 he was handed over to the Puthumathalan Army camp. Thereafter I was told that he was sent to the Chettikulam refugee camp but that was the last day I saw him. Some families of missing persons were resettled, some were given compensation but that will not end their long-lasting sorrows. It has been eight years and still we live in hope.” With tearing eyes, Mangaleshwari said that she doesn’t need money or anything else.
 “I only need my son. Once we were told that one day our children will return but when will that day come?  Various commissions were setup but none of them work independently. The President gave us many promises but how many of them have been fulfilled? If they are so worried about us creating issues, they can dump our children at a kovil or a nearby place and leave. We won’t create any trouble.”

The debate on ICPAPED Bill should be taken out of Parliamentary Agenda
-G. L Pieris

Recently the debate on the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons of Enforced Disappearances (ICPAPED) Bill was postponed as several factions including the Joint Opposition (JO) protested against it. Speaking to the Daily Mirror  Prof. G. L Pieris former minister said that they the Joint Opposition strongly opposed the Bill. 

“The countries that insist that we sign the Bill have themselves not signed it. The claim by the PM that it doesn’t apply to the past should be rejected. There are reasonable grounds that Sri Lanka’s armed forces should be held responsible for the disappearances. Hence there’s nothing to do with a hypothetical war in future. Action has already been filed against Jagath Jayasuriya for what he has allegedly done in the past and not in the future. Field Marshall Sarath Fonseka admitted that war crimes have happened and in these circumstances we will have to fight for an international judicial tribunal. Therefore we suggest that the debate of this Bill should be taken out of the Parliamentary Agenda because those who are hunted down are those who have saved the country from terrorists.” 
 
The media and public should look at the brighter side of things as well
-Mano Ganesan

In his comments to the Daily Mirror, Minister of National Co-existence, Dialogue and Official Languages Mano Ganesan said that they are very concerned over the establishment of the OMP. 
“The OMP Bill has been passed and it has been gazetted. We are now awaiting the physical establishment of the office. There’s a reaction for the postponement of the ICPAPED Bill but in practice, the Government too has several issues to address.” When asked about the link between NGOs and these families he said that NGOs have been playing various roles during the post-war period and even before. 
“We need their support because they are members of the civil society and they are giving us a hand because they have realised the change. While criticising us on what we haven’t done, we would like to ask from the media as well as the public to look at the brighter side of things as well. We have achieved a lot when compared to where we were and we still have a long way to go.”

It is a gross misinterpretation to say that they are being paid
-Dr. Jehan Perera

When we visited the families who were protesting at the Kilinochchi town, we realised that they were giving information to various individuals claiming to be representatives of various NGOs. But what information these individuals require and for what purposes remain a question. The Daily Mirror  also learned that several NGOs allegedly have financially supported protesters as means of encouraging them to continue it. On one occasion we were told that each individual is paid Rs. 1,000 per day for sacrificing their day in the scorching heat inside a dust-filled tent.

According to Dr. Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, the families were eagerly waiting to see the response from the government. 
“They know about the Office and that it has been signed but I think that the immediate thing that should happen is to appoint a Commission. They should then appoint commissioners who have confidence in the matter. 
“I would like to see at least one or two people representing the victim community being appointed as commissioners because they know the issues well. If so, the victims will also have some confidence in the process. We also need a public education campaign to explain to the masses that this is something that should be done. People think that the setting up of the OMP would lead to a war crimes trial. The Army Commander himself has set a good standard and if anyone has violated human rights, then it becomes a crime. There’s nothing to be whitewashed and therefore the standards need to be followed up. Therefore it is important to setup a commission as quickly as possible and also send out a message of care for these families. They should be given compensation because even if they refuse to take it, if that’s what the government could do best, then they should do it.”
When asked about the allegations vested upon NGOs, Dr. Perera further said that the people who protest are very poor and there’s no one to support them. 
“Therefore someone has to take the initiative to support these families. They too have children who need to survive. So, if someone is giving them money,  that is only to sustain them and not to make them rich. It is not fun to be sitting in the sun and voicing out their concerns all day. Therefore it is a gross misinterpretation to say that they are being paid, but actually they are being supported to do what they really want to do and seek justice.” 

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12. THE CASE FOR COLONIALISM? | Daanish Mustafa
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(The Daily Times, 21 September 2017) 

Colonialism may have ended politically and directly but indirectly it is quite alive — from the madaris of Banori Town to the leafy Aitchison College, Karachi Stock Exchange and Peshawar Cantonment
 

In its most recent issue, the academic journal Third World Quarterly (TWQ), published an article title, “The Case for Colonialism” by who else? A political scientist named Bruce Gilley of Portland State University. The article is in the finest tradition of excremental scholarship, sadly more pervasive than we academic would like to acknowledge. Most of my colleagues are surprised at the ignorance, arrogance and sloppiness of the article. But they are more surprised by the fact that it has been published in TWQ, which has been at the forefront of publishing critical literature on post-colonial theory and developmentalism, for almost forty years. Yet here is an article arguing that Colonialism was an unmitigated blessing for the colonised, and the post-colonial world’s salvation lies in embracing its legacy. In fact, the third world should offer itself for recolonisation for its own good, otherwise the Europeans may proceed to recolonise them anyway, Bruce Gilley opines.

The journal is almost certain to get a barrage of rebuttal articles and critique for even publishing such nonsense in the first place. The TWQ has in fact, published a brief response, spinelessly hiding behind academic freedom, and the rigour of the review process as the justifications for publishing the article. But publishing in a journal of TWQs stature is not a right, it is a privileged acknowledging the evidentiary rigor of the scholarship and its engagement with the literature in the field. The ‘Case for Colonialism’ article does not even begin to come close to anything that could called scholastic or even deals with 99 percent of the scholarship on the topic. The smug argument of academic freedom does not stand in this case, just as it won’t stand for any, so called, scholarship, trying to establish; the flatness of the Earth, the legitimacy of race or racism, or that Imran Khan is an alien from Uranus.

    It is a dirty little secret of our society that colonialism despite the customary nationalist chest thumping is often spoken of approvingly by the uncle and aunty brigade in the drawing rooms of Pakistan

I am not even going to bother to write a rebuttal here, being that many of my colleagues in academia will do a more competent job of it, and are doing it as we speak. Also, so cartoonesque is the argument that one doesn’t even know where to begin. I will however, offer three propositions to consider when confronted with this precolonial nonsense.

First, Western colonialism was an inherently racist project in its very genus. It was qualitatively different from the earlier routine of empires and conquest, in that it didn’t have loot plunder, or the glorification of the empire as its prime objective. It’s not that European colonisers were not interested in loot and plunder — they were very fond of it, but it was not their prime objective. European colonialism was different insofar as it was predicated on a supposedly universalist claim to natural privilege based upon skin colour. Biology has established beyond a shadow of scientific doubt that there is no such thing as race despite differences in skin colour. If you believe that skin colour can be the basis of privilege then by all means wish for colonialism.

Second, colonialism was specifically targeted not only towards appropriation of the productive capital of the colonised society, but also towards systematic undermining of its cultural memory, pride and sense of history. In this colonialism succeeded beyond its intent. It succeeded in making entire civilisations feel like lesser human beings and to look upon their own selves with either contempt, or to reinvent new mythologies in the modernist idiom to catastrophic ends. The present day stories of militant nationalism or religion, I have argued elsewhere, are cases in point.

Thirdly, colonialism may have ended politically and directly but indirectly it is quite alive, from the madaris of Banori Town, to leafy Aitchison College, to Karachi Stock Exchange to Peshawar Cantonment. Our whole idiom of understanding ourselves, our spirituality and our world is deeply colonial, as are our visions of development, and our relation to the global political economy through which, we hope to achieve those visions.

It is a dirty little secret of our society that colonialism despite the customary nationalist chest thumping is often spoken of approvingly by the Uncle and Aunty brigade in the drawing rooms of Pakistan. Such thinking is also quite common, particularly in the political science, economics and sociology departments in the West. So in a manner of speaking Bruce Gilley has really articulated what is stewing in the intellectual cesspool of popular and academic, neo-colonial imaginaries. So ignorant is Gilley that he is calling for the return of something that never left. So stupid is he that he deems colonial rule to be superior to the rule by the post-colonial elites — which are incidentally the most enduring legacy of colonialism. I suspect Bruce Gilley studied Homeopathy in Princeton and Oxford. Having more of what afflicts you will set you right!

The writer is a reader in Politics and Environment at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London. His research includes water resources, hazards and development geography. He also publishes and teaches on critical geographies of violence and terror

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13. OBITUARIES: TOM ALTER, BLUE-EYED STAR OF BOLLYWOOD FILMS, DIES AT 67
by Amisha Padnani
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The New York Times, OCT. 6, 201

Tom Alter in 1989. An incongruous figure in Bollywood who spoke Hindi and Urdu fluently. Credit Sanjoy Hazarika
Tom Alter, an Indian-born character actor of American descent who spent his career playing Westerners in Bollywood films, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Mumbai. He was 67.

His daughter, Afshaan Alter Burtram, said the cause was squamous cell carcinoma, a skin cancer.

With light skin, blue eyes and blond hair, which later turned bright white, Mr. Alter was an incongruous figure in Bollywood. But he spoke Hindi and Urdu fluently, making him a natural fit for roles like slick diplomats, British colonials, priests and police officers.

“You name it, I’ve played them all,” he told The New York Times in 1989.

He appeared in more than 300 films and a handful of television shows and plays. He was Lord Mountbatten in “Sardar,” a 1993 film about Sardar Patel, the freedom fighter who unified India as the country broke away from British colonization. In Satyajit Ray‘s 1977 “Shatranj Ke Khiladi” (“The Chess Players”), he was the introspective Captain Weston, who, with his love for Urdu poetry, sympathizes with the very rulers of India he is faced with overthrowing as the confidential assistant to a general played by Richard Attenborough.


Scene from 'The Chess Players' (1977) - Satyajit Ray Video by david saksena
Mr. Alter and Mr. Attenborough crossed paths again in the Oscar-winning “Gandhi” (1982), directed by Mr. Attenborough, in which Mr. Alter played the British doctor who whispers to Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) that his wife has died.

On television, he was known for his role as the mob boss Don Keshav Kalsi in the 1990s series “Junoon” (“Obsession”), which, he told the newspaper The Hindu in 2005, was “by far my best role in front of the camera.” In 2008 he was given the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honors, for his contribution to the arts. And earlier that decade he gave himself the role he always wanted — a native Indian — when he performed a solo play in Urdu called “Maulana Azad,” in which he portrayed the Indian freedom fighter of that name.

Thomas Beach Alter was born on June 22, 1950, in Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand), in northern India. He and his older brother and sister were the third generation of Alters to live in India; his grandparents were Presbyterian missionaries who had moved from Ohio. His parents, James Payne Alter and the former Barbara Beach, were also missionaries.

Mr. Alter graduated from the Woodstock School, an international boarding school near the Himalayas, in 1968. He then attended Yale, but dropped out after a year and a half to move back to India.

He taught at a school in Jagadhri, a city in the northern India state of Haryana, and spent his evenings at the cinema with friends watching Hindi movies. It was Rajesh Khanna‘s performance in the 1969 drama “Aradhna” (“Worship”), about a woman who is forced to give up her son at birth, that inspired him to become an actor. (Mr. Khanna played the boy’s father and later the boy himself as an adult.)

“I knew instantly that this was, above all, what I wanted to do,” he told The Times. “I wanted to act and act in Hindi movies.”

He attended the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, which had just opened, and graduated in 1974. His first major role was as a customs officer trying to break up an Indian drug ring in Ramanand Sagar’s “Charas” (1976).

In 1978 he married Carol Evans, who survives him. Besides her and their daughter, he is survived by their son, Jamie; his brother, John; his sister, Marty Chen; and a grandson.

In addition to acting, Mr. Alter wrote for several newspapers and published three books.

After he finished acting school, he decided to renounce his American passport to prove he was serious about his career in India.

“You have to be truly committed to this country,” he told The Times. “Otherwise you don’t get respect or acceptability.”

But he still faced questions about his heritage, and he publicly lamented having to answer them.

In 2013, at a news media event for the mini-series “Samvidhaan: The Making of the Constitution of India,” in which he portrayed Maulana Azad, a journalist asked him how he was able to speak Hindi so well.

“Friend, for 40 years I’ve been answering this question,” he replied angrily. “For 40 years I’ve told everyone that I was born here.”


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14. INDIA’S MILLIONS OF NEW INTERNET USERS ARE FALLING FOR FAKE NEWS — SOMETIMES WITH DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
by Vidhi Doshi
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(The Washington Post, October 1, 2017)

NEW DELHI — One recent Wednesday afternoon, monsoon rains were lashing office windows in Mumbai. Inside, screens were lighting up with messages announcing the arrival of Cyclone Phyan.

Employees of a start-up called Little Black Book, an online city guide, started panicking. Some went home early after receiving messages on their phones that roads were being closed. Others passed the message on to loved ones in Phyan’s path. Jayati Bhola, a 24-year-old writer at Little Black Book, was organizing a charity music show that evening and feared that the warning may put off her guests. She quickly checked the weather online and then sent around a message: “We’re still on guys! Rain or Shine.”

As it turns out, Cyclone Phyan never came to Mumbai that evening, Sept. 20. In fact, it had already happened — eight years earlier, 1,400 miles away, in Sri Lanka. “That rumor about the cyclone has been going around for years,” said Pankaj Jain, founder of SMXHoaxSlayer.com, a website that fact-checks circulating rumors on social media in India. 

While fake news in the United States is said to have contributed to President Trump’s election victory, in India, a nation with 355 million Internet users, false news stories have become a part of everyday life, exacerbating weather crises, increasing violence between castes and religions, and even affecting matters of public health.

“Common sense is extinct,” Jain said. “People are ready to believe anything.”

Last week, newspapers here carried full-page advertisements by Facebook that explained how to spot false news. Minister Raj­nath Singh, who oversees home affairs, addressed members of the armed border forces in New Delhi, advising them not to believe everything on social media.

Much of India’s false news is spread through WhatsApp, a popular messaging app. One message that made the rounds in November, just after the government announced an overhaul of the country’s cash, claimed that a newly released 2,000 rupee bank note would contain a GPS tracking nano-chip that could locate bank notes hidden as far as 390 feet underground. Another rumor, about salt shortages last November, prompted a rush on salt in four Indian states. In southern India, a rumor about a measles and rubella vaccine thwarted a government immunization drive. 

Many false stories have led to violence. In May, rumors about child abductors in a village triggered several lynchings and the deaths of seven people. In August, rumors about an occult gang chopping off women's braids in northern India spread panic, and a low-caste woman was killed.

Some stories exacerbate India’s rising religious and caste tensions. This week, for instance, images purportedly showing attacks against Hindus by “Rohingya Islamic terrorists” in Burma circulated on social media in India, stoking hatred in Hindu-majority India against Muslim Rohingya.

“There was one video with two people being beheaded, and the text was saying these were Indian soldiers being killed in Pakistan. When I found the original video, it was actually taken from footage of a gang war in Brazil,” Jain said. “They’ll tell you this is fresh, these are images the media is not showing you, if you’re a true Indian patriot, you will forward this message.”

The rumors have resulted in a small industry of fact-checkers who are setting up websites to debunk myths circulating online. Pratik Sinha is a former software engineer who started Altnews.in, a fact-checking website. “The number of fake news stories is so high that we can’t compete on the quantity of fact checks we do,” he said. “We focus on quality.” 

The fact-checkers come from various backgrounds — some are former journalists, others are software geeks, and some are just concerned citizens. Many fake news stories appear to support India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its right-wing Hindu nationalist agenda, said Jency Jacob, managing editor for boomlive.in, a fact-checking website. “If we don’t do something, it will be too late,” Jacob said. “Political parties would love to use this for their own benefit and we need to intervene.” 

The scrutiny has led to some triumphs. Ministers have deleted misleading tweets and posts after being fact-checked online; in one instance, a government ministry launched an inquiry after Altnews pointed out that an image it had used in a report to show floodlights on India’s border was actually from the Spanish-Moroccan border. 

In September 2016, India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched an ultra-cheap mobile network service, Jio. The new network brought millions of Indians online for the first time. Jio’s cheap plans increased mobile data use more than sixfold between June 2016 and March 2017, according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2017 report.

India’s first-time users are particularly susceptible to rumors doing the rounds on social-media websites, Jacob said. “The U.S.A. is a more mature market. In India, these forwards take on a life of their own,” he said, referring to chain messages on social media. 

Asavari Sharma, a Mumbai resident, was one of many who posted images of rainy streets on Facebook. She added a caption that read “CYCLONE PHYAN REACHING US: Hope all the good souls on my list are safe.” 

“Honestly, I never believe in weather news because every time they show, something never really occurs,” Sharma said. This time they had shown a “few horrible images projected straight from the satellite. So I had to upload to Facebook.”

By noon, rumors about Phyan had reached authorities. Mumbai’s Disaster Management Unit tweeted, “As informed by IMD [India Meteorological Department] there is no cyclone warning for Mumbai. Citizens r requested not to spread & trust rumour.” 

Jain says the rise of false rumors worries him. “Basically, somebody’s making money out of all this,” he said, saying that clicks on fake news websites are supported by advertisements. “Ultimately, people are being conned.”

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15. ON VIOLENCE AND STUDENTS PROTEST IN BANANAS HINDU UNIVERSITY
========================================
BHU crackdown: Police hooliganism on campuses must stop
Editorial, Hindustan Times, Sep 25, 2017
The police’s conduct in BHU is disgraceful. But such actions have now become par for the course in the country. Thanks to weak and politicised university administrations --- be it at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jadavpur University, Hyderabad Central University, and now at BHU --- policemen now have a free hand to act against students who are perceived to have overstepped the limits set by the authorities
http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorials/bhu-crackdown-police-hooliganism-on-campuses-must-stop/story-JXDhAPSadbQrKlnVKFemAJ.html

FIR against 1000 students for BHU violence
PTI | Updated: Sep 25, 2017
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/fir-against-1000-students-for-bhu-violence/articleshow/60828156.cms

Symbols of a deeper stirring: on the protests at BHU
Krishna Kumar 
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/symbols-of-a-deeper-stirring-on-the-protests-at-bhu/article19814386.ece

o o 

When can women in Indian universities have ‘minds without fear’?
Vidya Subramanian
Hindustan Times - Oct 03, 2017
http://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/when-can-women-in-indian-universities-have-minds-without-fear/story-9UbaSYqbAv2D4NgXnmY6NJ.html

o o

The Telegraph - October 2 , 2017

Ferment in Banaras - Students are at the forefront of a new resistance
Manini Chatterjee

Narendra Modi, who makes a fetish of being a workaholic, packed a very busy schedule during his trip to Varanasi on September 22 and 23. It was the prime minister's first visit to his Lok Sabha constituency since the Bharatiya Janata Party's sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh six months ago.

In between inaugurating as many as 17 projects and schemes, Modi also found time to visit temples and take part in elaborate rituals which were dutifully beamed live by obliging television channels.

But an otherwise omniscient prime minister either did not know or did not care about a much graver development taking place during his two-day visit in an institution that is almost as famous as the temples and the ghats of the holy city: the Banaras Hindu University.

On September 21 evening, a BHU student of the Arts Faculty was allegedly harassed by three men on a motorcycle inside the campus when she was returning to her hostel. Her hostel warden did not take it up with the university authorities nor show her any support or sympathy. Instead, the student was reprimanded for being out late.

With girl students - who now number nearly 18,000 in BHU - chafing for long against the university's discriminatory attitude towards them in matters of food, timings and library access, the incident triggered a spontaneous protest. Hundreds of students, reports said, sat on dharna at the main gate of the campus protesting against the lack of safety and alleged victim shaming.

The university authorities did nothing to reach out to the students. But once the prime ministerial visit was over, the authorities literally swung into action. Late on September 23 night, the police entered the BHU campus swinging lathis indiscriminately and injuring several students, some of them severely.

It is not clear who called in the police but the violence took place when some students were prevented from meeting the vice-chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi, at his residence. The police reportedly used batons and pellet guns to disperse the students gathered at the main gate, chased them to their hostels and even entered the rooms.

The vice-chancellor has accused "outsiders" and "criminal elements" of instigating the violence, a charge echoed by the chief minister a few days later. But students as well as faculty members have dismissed this as a concoction.

The BHU administration immediately advanced the autumn break by a few days, hoping that things will be back to normal when the university reopens in early October. That might be wishful thinking given that FIRs have been lodged against hundreds of students on charges such as rioting and attempt to murder, the vice-chancellor is still pushing the "outsider" angle, and Narendra Modi hasn't said a word so far.

We are by now used to the prime minister's 'strategic' silences after every outrage - be it a lynching or a targeted killing or a suicide. But in the case of BHU, Modi's silence seems strange. The students were seeking a safe campus and were not doing anything that could be dubbed 'anti-national'; they were mostly young girls from small towns, first generation college-goers who form the target base of Modi's 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' campaign, and they were residents of the premier educational institution in Modi's chosen constituency.

For all these reasons, and more, the prime minister could have said a few words after the September 23 outrage, even if he had failed to take note of the anger that preceded it. And he had enough opportunity to do so - through his Mann Ki Baat on September 24, or his address to the BJP national executive on September 25, or on his hyper-active Twitter account through the week.

But the prime minister's silence in this case too may be strategic - aimed at undermining the importance of what the anger in BHU could mean.

The unrest in Banaras Hindu University may be different from the much more overtly political student agitation in Jawaharlal Nehru University; just as the strong Dalit consciousness that animates Hyderabad University is different from the battle for free speech in colleges of Delhi University; and the sporadic, less publicized struggles being waged by students and faculty in lesser known educational institutions scattered across this country.

Yet, if there is one set of Indians that is standing up to authority today, it is the student community. The students' movement in India over the last three years may be nebulous, amorphous, disjointed. But it is after a long time that students are taking the lead in fighting for causes, standing up for ideals that had been lost in the quagmire of individual advancement and careerism for the last few decades.

Students were at the forefront of social, cultural and political battles from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s in both the West and in India. And the struggles always started small, by a few people, on one or two campuses. Berkeley may have been the starting point in America before they spread across campuses and fused into a mighty anti-Vietnam war movement, just as Sorbonne was the epicentre of the upsurge that took all of France by storm in 1968, inspiring students across Europe to protest on the streets - not merely for better food in their canteens, but a more just and peaceful world.

In India, students have played a catalytic role at crucial junctures in history - the radical Left upsurge of the 1960s followed by Gujarat's Nav Nirman and Bihar's Chhatra Sangharsh which fused into the JP movement in 1974.

In a thoughtful essay on the student movements in the West in the 1960s and early 1970s, the British sociologist, Colin Barker, noted, "Student movements do not develop in isolation from wider social conflicts. To be sure, they may possess their own specific dynamics, as a product of their particular social composition and the situations of their emergence. But they are anything but immune to larger tendencies of development, to which they make their own contribution."

India's ruling regime would like to believe that the central ideological fault line today is between 'nationalists' and a handful of 'anti-nationals'. But for an increasing number of citizens, it is more a conflict between freedom - with all its attendant chaos and contradictions - and a regimented, one-dimensional code of thought and behaviour. And the campus is becoming the central site for this battle - not least because students are more idealistic and unafraid than their older brethren who are prone to succumb before the blandishments and the threats of the new 'nationalists'.

This ferment in campuses may not lead to any immediate political change. Yet, it is of enormous significance in intangible ways. The last major phase of student activism in the 1970s gave India a number of political leaders across parties. This phase may bring up many more - and serve as the best antidote to dynastic succession in the long run.

But more important, even apolitical students who participate in big movements get radicalized by the experience and become more conscious and conscientious citizens, refusing to accept injustice in the name of 'order', or bow to 'authority' unquestioningly.

Umberto Eco was speaking not just of Italy when he was quoted as saying: "Even though all visible traces of 1968 are gone, it profoundly changed the way all of us, at least in Europe, behave and relate to one another. Relations between bosses and workers, students and teachers, even children and parents have opened up. They'll never be the same again."

A BHU girl's demand for freedom of mobility may have a different impulse than Kanhaiya Kumar's cry for azadi or Rohith Vemula's despair at its absence in his world. Yet, separately and together, these young men and women are forming a new paradigm of hope and resistance that could have as profound an impact on India as 1968 did on Eco's world - even if the MP from Varanasi chooses to ignore it.

o o 

The Times of India - October 2, 2017

Distrusting the Young?
by Santosh Desai

Does the Modi government have a fundamental problem with universities and the young people studying there? The recurring episodes of unrest at different University campuses seem to point in that direction. The specific causes that spark off the problem might be different in each case, but by now, a pattern is emerging in the way in which the state reacts to these incidents.

Often, what triggers unrest has a strong political dimension. In the case of JNU, the stoking of the unrest may have been deliberate for it helped serve the party’s strategic ends in adding flesh to the nationalism discourse. But in Rohith Vemula’s case, the party, through its response to the suicide, tied itself in knots, trying all kinds of maneuvers- bullying, bluster, obfuscation, counter-attacking, denial (challenging Vemula’s caste), and ended up with a protracted and extremely messy fall-out.

But beyond politics, there is deeper discomfort. Nobody can claim that BHU is a hotbed of communists, but the fact that a case of molestation ballooned into a confrontation between students and the authorities reveals something about the kind of attitude that this regime harbours when it comes to the youth. At its core, beyond the specific political dimensions of these episodes, there lies a more fundamental disconnect that the party has with the idea that young people have a mind of their own.

The paternalistic grounding of the Sangh cannot but show itself in such situations. The young are meant to learn and obey. They should study, follow rules and respect tradition. Young people cannot be trusted to take decisions about their lives. Parents are right and know better (unless you are Jayant Sinha and your father is a pesky remnant of the old guard). If the young make mistakes, they need to be punished. If elders do something wrong, it must be respectfully ignored. Young followers who add muscle to the cause are welcome, but the idea that they can ask any kind of questions is a source of great discomfort.

The attempted recasting of Valentine’s Day as ‘Parents’ Respect Day is particularly telling. It seeks to replace the fantasies of the young with those of the old. A world where children revere and pay ritual obeisance to their parents, head bowed in supplication. Initiatives like Anti-Romeo squads are another manifestation of the suspicion with which the desires of the young are viewed- the idea being that those that seek the freedom to mingle with the other sex outside the institution of marriage or the supervision of elders are fair game for self-appointed guardians of morality.

The situation becomes even more pronounced when it comes to young women, as can be seen from the words uttered by none else than the Vice Chancellor of BHU, who said that in trying to talk about sexual harassment, the girl students “have put their modesty in the market”. The fear of female independence and the desire to exercise control over their movements and speech is visible in the words and actions of many different party and Sangh functionaries.

The BJP lives in a world of paternalistic certitude. Even within the Cabinet, the code is of unquestioning obedience and frequent invocation of loyalty to the leader. There is little room for dialogue, and feedback too is sought within a tightly regulated space. The PM’s unwillingness to answer questions but otherwise communicate profusely in one direction only come from this mindset. A device like Mann ki Baat, which is again kindly and avuncular in tone underlines the fact that the dispensing of wisdom to those who don’t know better is seen to be a key part of the role that leaders must play.

But if this is so, what explains the fact that PM Modi and the BJP are in general quite popular with the youth? How does this hypothesis sit with the fact that this government is an avowed believer in technology and the answers it can provide? Its use of digital media has been pioneering, not just as a way to communicate but also in planning and organizing elections. Does talk of a disconnect with the youth carry any real weight?

This is the paradox at the heart of the issue. The current regime has a problem with young people. Even though young people by and large, may not have a problem with this government. The party cannot handle even the slightest sign of youthful independence and comes down with disproportionate force whenever it happens. If a widespread movement against the government gets triggered by such repeated state overreactions, the responsibility for the same will lie entirely at the government’s doorstep.

There are reasons why this has not happened so far. Foremost, would be Mr. Modi’s personal popularity and his ability to speak in the idiom of the new by embracing the symbols of progress. The use of technology and social media, the reaching out to the world, a great comfort with branding and marketing- he has managed to present an old mindset in a dramatically new form.

The other reason is that the prevalent mood of the young in India is that of pragmatic docility ; they are not particularly keen to rebel. They are looking to be lead, and in 2014, Mr. Modi’s promises created a pathway for their burgeoning aspirations. Besides, the respect for the older generation is genuine and deep, and there is no intrinsic urge to buck tradition. But that does not mean that they will not resent attempts to control them beyond a point.

Given this and the fact that prospects of employment in the future look very gloomy, the chance of a dramatic shift in the mood of the youth is a real possibility at some stage. In Mr. Modi, the BJP has someone who has given them cover and bought them time, but the RSS-driven party cannot change in a hurry, perhaps it cannot change at all, and that might turn out to have material consequences in the future.

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16. THE NEXT ARAB SPRING? WOMEN’S RIGHTS.
by Kamel Daoud
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(The New York Times, Oct. 1, 2017)

ORAN, Algeria — Who is still waging revolution in the Arab world? Not the Islamists, who have trapped themselves in violence or extremism. Not the left-wing elites, now aging, disarmed and discredited after the debacle of their nationalist movements. Not the young bloggers who were at the forefront of various uprisings of the Arab Spring: They are held back, sometimes frozen, by intimidation or censorship (throughout the region), police surveillance (in Algeria, Morocco and Saudi Arabia), prison (in Egypt) or death (in Syria).

The only person who seems exempt from this harsh assessment is an elderly North African, a lawyer by training and a former militant in the anticolonialist movement: Béji Caïd Essebsi, the president of Tunisia. The good Arab revolutionary of the moment is a 90-year-old head of state.

If this statement sounds surprising, it’s because people in the West have yet to take the true measure of this man’s political finesse, including his ability to slowly consolidate a difficult consensus between democrats and Islamists. Tunisia admittedly is experiencing some problems, especially economic ones, as well as an intense controversy about a law — supported by Mr. Essebsi — that grants amnesty to former officials accused of corruption. But the president of Tunisia has also become the leading figure of reformism in the Arab world by advocating equal inheritance rights for Muslim women and their right to marry non-Muslim foreigners.

According to Islamic jurisprudence, barring exceptional circumstances, women heirs have a right to only half the inheritance of men. In Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Arab world, statelegal systems have not dared take on this taboo. Add to these rules a patriarchal structure that systematically dispossesses widows in favor of their brothers-in-law and parents-in-law. Together these practices undermine the independence of women, often reducing them to being dependents for life.

The constitutions of Tunisia, Algeria and other countries in the region may exalt freedom of conscience and of religious choice, but in Algeria, to take one example, a woman’s decision to marry a non-Muslim is still subject to ferociously dissuasive constraints. Her foreign husband must convert to Islam, in front of witnesses, and produce a certificate. Yet in the opposite case — when a Muslim Tunisian man wishes to marry a non-Muslim woman — nothing is required of the lucky lady.

These two sets of limitations have been in place in one form or another for centuries and constitute part of the ideological basis of Muslim society, which remains very rural overall. Virtually no political leader has dared challenge them for fear of losing popular support. (The reform project of Habib Bourguiba, the father of modern Tunisia and its first president, ran aground over fierce opposition from conservatives and zealots.)

Yet in August Mr. Essebsi delivered a speech before the Tunisian government that caused a storm. Even as he stated that he didn’t want to shock the Tunisian people, which is predominantly Muslim, he pointed out that under the Constitution, the Tunisian state was “civil,” and turning to the rights of men and women, added: “We must state that we are moving toward equality between them in every sphere. And the whole issue hinges on the matter of inheritance.”

In mid-September, another bombshell: At Mr. Essebsi’s urging, the government rescinded a 1973 administrative order forbidding Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims. Monia Ben Jémia, the president of l’Association tunisienne des femmes démocrates (The Tunisian Association of Women Democrats), underlined the measure’s significance for the entire Arab world. “Tunisia is becoming a kind of endogenous model of progress,” she said. “This calls out our neighbors in the Maghreb; it’s a very positive thing.”

Islamists of all stripes, well aware of the tremendous implications of Mr. Essebsi’s initiatives, were quick to react. An Egyptian preacher living in Turkey called the old Tunisian, “a criminal, miscreant, apostate and secularist.” In Cairo, the deputy of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni religious authority, declared on his Facebook page that equal inheritance rights “were harmful to women, unjust to them and contrary to Shariah law.” In Algeria, where I live, Islamist newspapers attacked Mr. Essebsi indirectly, echoing critical voices from elsewhere.

For its part, Tunisia’s main Islamist party, Ennahda, adopted an official position of reserve and silence — perhaps reasoning that open resistance would cast it in a bad light even as the country prepares for local elections in a few months. One could call the posture political, or politicking, but that doesn’t make it any less extraordinary: in fact, the reverse, because it privileges politics over ideology.

Mr. Essebsi’s declarations also have the virtue of highlighting what remains to be done in the Muslim world to complete the Arab Spring. It wasn’t enough to bring down dictatorships; now the patriarchy must be toppled. In addition to revising constitutions or imposing term limits for leaders, fundamental rights must be secured, and in practice, particularly those that ensure gender equality.

For the time being, laws throughout the Arab world tend to ratify inequality, especially when it comes to inheritance. In Algeria, despite the struggles of democrats and feminist groups since the country’s independence in 1962, the family code still largely tracks Shariah law: A woman’s choice of husband must be validated by a male guardian. So-called honor crimes — as punishment for adultery, among other things — remain widespread, even in countries deemed to be moderate, like Jordan.

The old Tunisian revolutionary has thus exposed one of the mechanisms that continues to handicap the Arab world: collusion between civil laws and religious laws. The latter overlap with the former and modify them, transforming their spirit, covertly or overtly. At the same time, Mr. Essebsi’s positions also suggest some means of resistance and possibilities for deep reform.

Is this the eve of another Arab Spring? Perhaps. Morocco, Jordan and Lebanon have finally abolished laws that allowed a woman’s rapist to escape prosecution by marrying her. Last week, the king of Saudi Arabia authorized Saudi women to drive cars.

But Saudi women, for example, are still not free to travel or dress as they please. And so it is Mr. Essebsi who has opened an enormous crack in the foundation of Muslim conservatism and set a unique precedent by validating various feminist and intellectual movements.

His stand has yet to be fully appreciated: It is revolutionary — Copernican, even. The president of Tunisia has proclaimed the equality of women in the Arab world, a social universe in which the Earth is still flat.

Kamel Daoud is the author of the novel “The Meursault Investigation.” This essay was translated by John Cullen from the French.


A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 2, 2017, in The International New York Times. 

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17. ‘REPRESSION SHIPS’: CATALONIA DOCKWORKERS REFUSE TO SERVE MADRID POLICE VESSELS
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(rt.com - 22 Sep, 2017 14:22
Edited time: 30 Sep, 2017 14:31)

‘Repression ships’: Catalonia dockworkers refuse to serve Madrid police vessels
"Rhapsody" and "Moby Dada" ferry ships are seen in the port of Barcelona © Albert Gea / Reuters

Madrid has rented three commercial cruisers for police forces sent in as reinforcements to Catalonia, which has been gearing up for an independence referendum. But Catalan dock workers are refusing to serve the vessels “in defense of civil rights.”

Catalonia independence referendum

Tens of thousands gathered outside the high court building in central Barcelona to demonstrate against the arrest of 12 officials and the police seizure of 10 million ballots ahead of the independence referendum, which the central government in Madrid has ruled illegal. © Susana Vera ‘We will vote!’ Thousands protest Catalonia independence referendum ban

"Three ships arrived and will stay in the ports of Barcelona and Tarragona, where police and Guardia Civil forces will stay," AFP cited an unnamed source at the representative office of the central government in Catalonia.

Early Thursday, the ‘Rhapsody’ docked in a terminal in Barcelona, with another vessel, the ‘Moby Dada,’ anchored later in the day. The ‘Azzura’ also arrived in a Tarragona harbor, about 100km away from the Catalan capital. With the capacity of the ‘Rhapsody’ is 2,500 passengers alone, the three vessels combined are said to be able to carry up to 6,600 people.

The fourth vessel was supposed to dock in the port of Palamos, however it was denied access by the Catalan authorities, since the port is administered by the regional government. In the meantime, three others were allowed to moor until October 5, under a ministerial order. Their arrival came as a surprise, as the notifications arrived just minutes in advance.

The cruisers’ arrival follows massive protests which saw thousands take to the streets for two days straight, demonstrating against the arrest of senior officials in police raids during the referendum preparations. In police raids on Wednesday, 14 people, including high-ranking officials, were detained. In addition, police seized nearly 10 million ballots and 45,000 envelopes, intended to notify voters about the referendum, deemed unconstitutional by Madrid. The region’s leader, Carles Puigdemont, declared that the vote scheduled for October 1 would go ahead despite efforts by the Spanish state “to prevent Catalans voting.”

In defiance, the Catalan dockworkers decided to stand up for “civil rights defense.” Deriding the cruisers as “repression ships,” the Organization of Port Workers of Barcelona (OEPB) announced they wouldn’t serve the vessels.

“As long as this exceptional situation lasts, we will not attend the ships that are selected to respond to this situation,” the OEPB’s secretary, Josep Maria Beot, said, as cited by El Diario. Stevedores in Tarranoga also supported the move.

"Many civil rights are being violated, and as stevedores we are affected," Gabriel Jimenez, a member of the OEPB, said, El Pais reported. So far, the ships have not requested any service, which Jimenez says is unusual for such large vessels. 

The decision to house hundreds of law enforcement agents aboard the boats came last Monday, as the Interior Ministry faces strained accommodation options in Catalonia, high prices and public pressure from locals who live near the forces already deployed in the region.

The central government is planning to increase the police and National Guard presence in the region to more than 16,000 officers by the October 1 secession vote, according to El Pais. 

On Friday, the Interior Ministry also said it was sending further police forces, without detailing the exact number.

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18. BEWARE THE RED PERIL: INDONESIA STILL FIGHTING GHOSTS OF COMMUNISM
by Kate Lamb in Bali
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(The Guardian - 1 October 2017)

National paranoia resurfaces for anniversary of failed 1965 coup, with anti-communist film revived and mobs rallying against invisible threat

Protest outside parliament in Jakarta coinciding with the anniversary of a failed coup that was blamed on communists. Photograph: Mast Irham/EPA

Beware the evil communists, warn fearful hoax messages spreading on WhatsApp. Should people come to your village offering free blood tests, they are really trying to infect you with HIV.

In some circles in Indonesia it is like the cold war never ended. Even the military is on board with a paranoid campaign against the old red peril.

This month the Indonesian army announced the Suharto-era propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, or “Betrayal of the Communists”, would be screened across the country.

In the lead-up to 30 September, the anniversary of a failed 1965 coup that was blamed on Indonesia’s then communist party, the army said the screenings were crucial to ensure people understood the “correct” version of history.
Indonesia urged to hold truth and reconciliation process over massacres
Read more

The epic 1984 propaganda film, which depicts communists as violent savages, is being played in villages, mosques and to the military. During the Suharto era it was mandatory viewing – aired on state television every 30 September until his downfall in 1998.

As part of this latest offensive the military has also issued an internal memo to its troops to restrict screenings of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2014 documentary film The Look of Silence. That film depicts a rather different version of events – one that explores the violence of the Indonesian state.
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According to historians, in 1965-1966 Islamic youth and paramilitary groups with military backing massacred between 500,000 and one million suspected communists across the country.

More than half a century later that bloody purge remains deeply sensitive. No one has ever been held to account. It is why the military is attempting to limit Oppenheimer’s film, and why the ghosts of communism continue to be dredged up even though the ideology has been outlawed here since 1966.

“It is this peculiar situation in that communism has been exterminated, has been extinct in Indonesia since 1965, and yet it is a country in which communism never really died,” says Oppenheimer of recent events. “They are stuck in evoking or conjuring the spectre of communism to keep people silent and afraid.”

Back in 1965, a time when the “domino theory” on the global spread of communism loomed large, Indonesia’s Communist party (PKI) was the third-largest of its kind in the world. This time 52 years ago, a group calling themselves the 30th September Movement kidnapped and murdered six generals. Blamed on the communists, the event led to the rise of Indonesia’s strongman ruler Suharto and the mass bloodletting that ensued.

Each year there are incidents that expose Indonesia’s ongoing communist phobia – the arrest, for example, of unaware tourists detained for wearing T-shirts with the hammer and sickle logo.

But the anti-communist paranoia has surged significantly in the past month. Behind it, say analysts, is the military jockeying for political gain in the lead up to the 2019 presidential election.

“The military always tries to paint themselves as politically neutral,” explains Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer at General Achmad Yani University in Bandung of the decision to run the public screenings. “But now you have the head of the military basically politicising everything.”
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The public screenings this year have also coincided with attacks against purported communists. In the past month a planned seminar about 1965 at Jakarta’s Legal Aid Institute was met with violent protests by hardliners and rent-a-thugs. This week a group established to collect and share stories from 1965 was branded “communist” on social media sites.

And at a rally in the capital on Friday thousands of protestors gathered at the gates of the parliament to decry a “communist revival”.

Evoking the threat of threat of communism to instil fear has proven very effective in Indonesia in the past, notes Yosef Djakababa, a history lecturer and director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies Indonesia.

“It forces citizens to seek protection from an institution that can be seen as capable of protecting them,” he argues. “In the past it was the military that has proven, through this narrative, that they are ones that are able to protect the country from communism.”

In Indonesia communist ties are still a kind of political kryptonite. A smear campaign that falsely branded then-candidate Joko Widodo as a communist and ethnic Chinese almost cost him the 2014 presidential election.

Last year a government-organised symposium on the events of 1965 gave some hope the government might finally be ready to face its ugly past. But the momentum to officially acknowledge past rights abuses appears to have lost steam.

Even when in recent weeks the president suggested the Suharto-era propaganda film be “updated” for millennials, he was quickly shot down. His coordinating security minister quickly clarified, saying the president did not mean the film’s overall message, the anti-communist narrative, should be changed.

In any case it seems most Indonesian millennials – who have not been forced to watch the film every year – don’t think about communism much at all. Judging by his students, lecturer Djakababa says many in his class can’t understand why people would “kill each other over ideas”.

“They can understand that people can kill each other if they fight over resources, like oil for example, energy,” he says, “But for ideology, communism. What is communism?”

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19. GERMANY: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Claus Offe
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(social Europe - 3 October 2017)

The key question now is: What happens next? After the social democrats have (wisely, I think) opted for a role in the opposition, there will be an extended period of bargaining on coalition formation, with only one majority option remaining on the table: the black-yellow-green “Jamaica”. That option is likely to fail. Differences among the participants cannot possibly be bridged in stable ways. After all, the Greens would at the very least have to win the support of the majority of their membership constituency, which is hard to imagine. The next option is the formation of a black-yellow minority government. That would be without precedent in Germany at the federal level. But it will be tried, as new elections are unlikely to yield an easier-to-handle result, perhaps a worse one. Moreover, there are creeping succession leadership crises in both the CDU and CSU (if not SPD), plus looming divorce issues between the two Christian “sister” parties regarding the continuation of a joint faction in the Bundestag.

We see an ongoing flattening of the bell curve of the parties’ electoral strength. We see a rather dramatic loss of center parties, a moderate growth of the leftist parties, and a big growth of the new rightist party. “Catch-all” parties catch less and less.

They pay the price for their centrist complacency, consensus politics, and their silencing of contentious issues. The CDU slogan “A country in which all of us like to live and live well” can hardly be surpassed in its political emptiness. Merkel told voters “You know me”, implying that more does not have to be said: let the incumbency bonus speak for itself. Schulz was right: the chancellor won by denying politics and open controversy – but why has he failed to revive it?

German exceptionalism is over. It consisted of the combined effects of historical immunization to authoritarian regime forms and political as well as economic stability. So far, Germany has lacked a relevant force of the political right in its federal parliament. Now we face the dynamic of accelerated centrifugality. Even if it were desired/-able, a grand coalition would no longer be possible (or highly unstable and virtually suicidal for SPD). German exceptionalism also consisted of the relative robustness of social democracy, which has now hit its historical low, though not (yet) having arrived in the single digit realm as in France and the Netherlands.

Also, a historical virtue of PDS/die Linke is a thing of the past. It consisted of its capacity to mask the legacies of East German xenophobic, authoritarian nativism by reframing it in terms of social justice issues. Now die Linke has lost 420,000 of its voters to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, which also mobilized nearly 1.5 million non-voters, making it the party with by far the greatest success in mobilizing this group relative to the number of votes it received). In spite of this massive loss to AfD, however, die Linke has been able to more than compensate for it by winning the support of 700,000 former social democratic and 330,000 former green voters.

There is a clear East/West divide in Germany. The new Länder in the East provided almost twice the level of electoral support for AfD as that of the old Länder. In Saxony, AfD even overtook CDU by a narrow margin and came in first. The same divide worked in Berlin as well as in the EU in general: populists are in power in Hungary and Poland and (so far) nowhere in the West of Europe.

We seem to have arrived at an age of non-cooperation where the world is framed as a zero sum game immersed in moral hazard psychology. The anti-EU mobilization has been successful by asking the rhetorical question: why should we share our resources with others? Euro bonds and other forms of debt mutualization are taboos that are strictly observed by virtually all sides. There is a new ethos of “going it alone”, of resentful unilateralism, of putting ourselves “first” (Trump), and of taking back “control of our country” (as in Brexit).

This is of course very bad news for Emmanuel Macron and others who have launched plans for deeper integration and the pooling of parliamentary, fiscal, educational, military and research resources and competencies in order to cope with border-transcending challenges that affect all of us. Yet, in order to maintain domestic support, the new German government will feel encouraged to use its power within the EU (power being, as we know from Karl Deutsch, the privilege to be relieved from the need to learn) to continue its course of unashamed punitive austerity mercantilism, mitigated by a Europhile rhetoric that serves little more than the purpose of blame avoidance. Whereas the French President shows a remarkable degree of ambition, imagination and determination, many members of the German ruling elite, as well as the majority of the media, are busy drawing up red lines.

A key feature of populism is its “negative” politics (Max Weber) of distrust and protest without a coherent programmatic stance (or even a credible ambition) to govern. An excuse often heard these days is that AfD voters do not really believe in this party’s ideology but just wanted to register their protest against Merkel; yet they did not hesitate to register protest with an authoritarian and xenophobic bunch of people whose declared purpose is to “pursue” their political enemies, a change which indicates the weakening of normative inhibitions which so far have been operative in German politics.

Populist mobilization relies on the (vertical) mobilization of distrust (of political elites and intermediary institutions – mendacious media (Lügenpresse), academia, experts, civil society associations, also courts) – and the (horizontal) spreading of fear of outsiders. Migrants/refugees are ideally suited as objects of fear mongering for three reasons:

    Economic: they threaten us in the labor and housing markets and live at the expense of our taxes;
    Cultural: allegedly incompatible language, religion, ethnic identity;
    Failures of state protection: rape, crime, terrorism.

Distrust is particularly effective when the two can be combined: Elites are to be distrusted because they fail to protect us from or are even actively promoting (Merkel in September 2015) the access of migrants. (Trust is anyway a scarce political resource. It is most readily granted in Germany to professions such as fire-fighters and rescue medics (=96%) and least so to professional politicians (=15%)).

One lesson we can draw from the 2017 campaign and its outcome is this: Centrism of grand coalition governments breeds anti-elite centrifugality and the further fragmentation of party system, with an unprecedented number of seven distinct parties now in the Bundestag. As one commentator observed: “Fighting extremism in Germany may demand less political centrism.” (Another one has joked: There are two right answers to the question: Are there still true social democrats in Germany? One answer is: No – all socialist projects have been abandoned by SPD. The other is: Yes – there are even two of them, namely both members of the grand coalition whose social and economic policies have become virtually indistinguishable.)

Yet that may soon change under the impact of the new rightist forces in parliament. A typical response of threatened conservative leaders (Cameron/May in Britain, Rutte in the Netherlands, Kurz in Austria, Seehofer in Bavaria, among others) is to follow the strategy: If you can’t beat them at the polls, adopt (a light version of) their appeal and assure their voters of your “understanding”.

Another problem grand coalition strategists must face is this: Centrist parties cannot fight their partners because they are themselves to be blamed for failures they committed while governing in coalition with them. (Which is why candidate Schulz was “imported” from outside German politics, i.e. from the European Parliament, in spite of his manifest deficiencies.)

Thus, important controversies were covered up by consensual silence: The EU debt crisis, migration and integration, the future of the EU, poverty/inequality, climate, Leitkultur (mainstream culture), international and Atlantic relations, German arms trade, Russia/Ukraine, Poland, investment gap vs. austerity and “black zero” (balanced budget) etc. figured at best marginally or not at all in the campaign. Instead, parties focused on quite arguably secondary issues such the use of diesel. Yet, after all: Who can be opposed to cleaner air, or, for that matter, to sanctioning the fraudulent machinations of top managers of the car industry? Outside observers agreed: “Germany’s sleepy campaign has left most of these issues unattended”. As the NYT wondered: The “paradox is that the most important political topic is not being discussed by the most important political parties in public.”

This applies to issues of inequality and poverty, too. Schulz has proclaimed that it is “time for social justice”, without providing the bare outline of relevant and credible policies enhancing “justice” – and this in a country where simply not all “live well” (as the CDU slogan claimed) but where the lowest 40 per cent of earners have seen no real pay increases in two decades, where every sixth child lives in near-poverty and where no less than 1.5m are being served by food banks.

Germany’s intransigence on economic cooperation and “leadership” (the opposite, nota bene, of domination) in Europe has structural causes in the German political economy: once described as “overindustrialized”, it still has an outsized manufacturing sector that employs 19% of the workforce (as opposed to 10% in the US and 9% in the UK). Maintaining a high level of manufacturing employment requires Germany to secure a trade surplus (of currently 8% GDP, twice the volume of China!). This can be done only if the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) regime remains stable, as the external value of the Euro is depressed by all the others that export less or import more than DE. Absent the Euro, from the presence of which Germany profits more than anyone else, German exports would become mostly non-competitive, as a new Deutschmark would dramatically appreciate, putting exports and export-dependent jobs into jeopardy. Without the Euro, the German economy would price itself out of markets for many manufactured goods. In order to keep export industries alive and prevent companies moving to low wage locations, Germany depends on wage restraint and other measures that ensure favorable unit costs of labor and productivity gains through process innovation. Other members of the Eurozone cannot improve their competitive position through the devaluation of their currency anymore; the EMU regime deprives them of their monetary sovereignty, thus leaving them with the only option of adjustment by “internal” devaluation.

It used to be a blessing in Germany (and similarly in France) that the right is divided into sectarian groups vehemently fighting each other. An instance of this divisiveness is the unprecedented refusal, declared one day after the election, of AfD chairwoman Frauke Petry to join her party’s parliamentary caucus (a party she co-founded and is now ready to leave). Much will depend on whether AfD can overcome that kind of internal struggle, which I think is unlikely.

With the SPD (and probably the Greens) out of power, the German government is no longer prevented from shifting rightwards (under CSU pressure) to even more explicitly dominant, Eurosceptic and migration-averse policies.

Based on a talk given by the author at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, on September 28

About Claus Offe

Claus Offe teaches Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at, among others, the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and the New School University, New York. He is the co-chair of the Working Group ‘Europe and the MENA-region’ in the Dahrendorf Forum.

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20. Fitch on Gisèle Sapiro. The French Writers' War, 1940-1953
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Gisèle Sapiro. The French Writers' War, 1940-1953. Translated by Vanessa Doriott Anderson and Dorrit Cohn. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Tables, graphs. 672 pp. $134.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-5178-8; $37.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-5191-7.

Reviewed by Mattie Fitch (Tarleton State University)
Published on H-War (September, 2017)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

What are the responsibilities of scholars and artists in a time of political crisis and militant nationalism? This dilemma confronts us today, just as it did French writers during the Second World War. The French Writers’ War by Gisèle Sapiro investigates the question of the public intellectual in France during the 1930s and 1940s, particularly debates about the appropriateness of writers’ political engagement during the German occupation and the liberation. Sapiro’s monograph is a timely translation of her 1999 French publication with broad relevance for our contemporary world. The work immediately brought to mind the public engagement of historians who have discussed the current rise of the nationalist Right in many countries, which has led other commentators to ask whether historians should intervene as pundits or stick to analyzing the past. Timothy Snyder, historian of the impact of nationalism, dictatorship, and genocide in Eastern Europe, is a good example of a contemporary scholar/writer acting as a public intellectual. His recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) (listed as a “#1 Best Seller in Democracy” on Amazon.com) explicitly responds to the contemporary political situation.[1] The ideas developed in Snyder’s book first appeared in distinctly public fora, such as a Facebook.com post and an article in the online Dallas News.[2] Responding to the outpouring of public observations by historians on Donald Trump’s presidency, historian Moshik Temkin published a New York Times opinion piece to argue that historians should be more cautious when offering commentary. He asks, “what should historians do? What is their role in the age of Trump?”[3] French writers asked themselves precisely these questions during the age of fascism and the German occupation of France.[4]

The role of writers as public intellectuals is particularly relevant in the history of France, where conflicts over national identity have repeatedly found echoes in the literary world, eliciting questions about the appropriateness of writers’ engagement with political questions. As the exemplary illustration of this phenomenon, French historians often point to the Dreyfus affair, which divided writers into two camps in a debate that pitted the rights of man against the prestige of the military.[5] Each subsequent national crisis that produced a rethinking of French identity drew writers into the fray, and occasioned impassioned attempts to define or deny the legitimacy of writers’ contributions. The debate continued in the interwar period, reignited after the First World War, when some writers participated in the fierce national hatreds produced by the conflict. Writer Julien Benda, in his famous 1927 essay The Treason of the Intellectuals, warned of the danger posed by writers who “adopted political passions,” because they brought to their cause “the tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.”[6] At this time, modern political ideologies such as communism and fascism, offering new understandings of history and the role of individuals in society, appealed to many writers. Communist writer Paul Nizan, for example, targeted bourgeois writers, such as Benda, in his essay The Watchdogs (1972) for their nonengagement, through which they supported the status quo and thereby buttressed a system of oppression.

Writers, along with other cultural figures, became increasingly divided after anti-parliamentary riots in Paris on February 6, 1934, and the resulting rise of the Popular Front. This grassroots anti-fascist movement resulted in the election of a government in 1936 led by the Socialist Party with the support of the Radical Party and the Communist Party. The Popular Front witnessed the engagement of many writers. Coalition members viewed cultural practices as a means to unite the French people around anti-fascist French values, in opposition to the French values promoted by nationalists and traditionalists. Other writers denounced these figures for serving the cause of bolshevism.

Though the Popular Front had collapsed by the time of the German invasion and French defeat in 1940, the divisions it revealed among writers continued. As Sapiro shows, the debacle served to further exacerbate internal conflict. The occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 heightened debates about “true” French identity and the meaning of “French cultural heritage.” Some writers linked themselves to the forces and institutions of the Vichy state established in the Southern (initially unoccupied) Zone, the collaborators with the Nazi occupiers in Paris, or the resistance that arose to these two groups, lending them “literary legitimacy in this ideological war” (p. 1). Others attempted to remain silent and unengaged in political struggles, but according to Sapiro this too functioned as a stance in the high-stakes conflict. Nonengagement was judged by many writers as unsuitable to the crisis situation in an ongoing debate about the role of writers within the nation. Furthermore, the crisis destabilized writers in ways many could not ignore. Sapiro reveals that the replacement of the Republic by the Vichy state with its traditionalist, authoritarian, and hierarchical aspirations, and the control established by the German powers, changed the conditions organizing the literary field through censorship and patronage. So too did the alliances and opportunities fostered by the intellectual resistance, which opposed Vichy, collaboration, and Nazi Germany through coded legal publishing and clandestine underground printing. The liberation in 1944, bringing the fall of Vichy and the expulsion of the occupiers, again shifted power dynamics, affecting writers, the structures of their production, and positions in relation to their engagement with political questions.

Unsurprisingly, the debate continued after the liberation. The Algerian War called into question France’s identity as an imperial power. Journalist Henri Alleg’s account of his torture by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers elicited a response from writer Jean-Paul Sartre, advocate of an “engaged literature” against a “pure literature.” Sartre “added his moral weight to Alleg’s text,” asking, “And what distinguishes us from these sadists? Nothing does, because we do not protest.”[7] (Alleg’s The Question was published in 1958 by Editions de Minuit, a publishing house founded during the resistance.)

The French Writers’ War is an ambitious project. Sapiro has amply succeeded in providing a comprehensive study of four literary institutions, the writers who composed them, and the decisions these figures made before, during, and after the occupation. (As with many works that originated as French dissertations, the scope combined with the attention to detail results in a very long book, a veritable “brick” at 740 pages.)

Her work combines several methodologies. First, it is an institutional history: she investigates the French Academy as an authority upholding respectability and the social order, the Goncourt Academy as a group dependent on public opinion, the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue français as a symbol of aesthetic legitimacy, and the Comité national des écrivains (formed during the resistance) as a representative of the subversive capacity of literature. Sapiro describes the evolution of these groups as they responded and adapted to the conditions imposed by Vichy, the occupiers, and the liberation. For this segment of the book, she relies on the archives of the institutions, as well as correspondence between writers, interviews with writers she conducted in the 1990s, and journals and accounts produced by writers. Archival collections assembled around figures and organizations of the resistance provide additional material. Using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, she differentiates the four institutions based on their relative degrees of temporal and symbolic power (the former based on social status and relationship to political and financial resources, the latter based on the peer recognition of high literary quality). Her analysis is also Bourdieusian in its understanding that the competition among these different groups and their positions defined the literary field itself.

Sapiro is a sociologist, and in a second section, The French Writers’ War provides a sociological study of a professional milieu. She conducted a factorial analysis of 185 writers who participated in the debates about the writer’s role, considering such characteristics as social background, age, professional trajectory, location in the literary field, and position taking. Biographical reference works of literary figures, as well as archival collections of personal papers, furnished these details. Through the Multiple Correspondence Analysis she identified “the literary field’s structuring principles during the Occupation” (p. 6). The results place writers, publishers, publications, and institutions along the axes of temporal and symbolic power and allow Sapiro to pinpoint correspondences among political tendencies, literary positions, and social characteristics. Thus the “logics proper to the literary world and its institutions” determine her analysis, rather than “preconceived categories of political history” (p. 9).

Thirdly, and appropriately for an examination of a cultural discipline, Sapiro explores the discursive practices and production of the writers she evaluates. Correspondence between writers, published works by the authors, and essays and articles in various publications give her access to the ways that writers understood their professional craft, literary positions, and political ideologies. She describes the politics of publishing during the occupation not in the sense of ideology or party membership but in terms of motivated choices. Her interpretation reveals what publication choices meant to authors and how they were read by other writers. In particular, she investigates writers’ beliefs about their responsibilities, whether to society, the state, or the literary world. The concepts of autonomy and heteronomy constitute another organizing dichotomy of the book, meaning the relative ability of Sapiro’s institutions to regulate their own codes of conduct in contrast to the impact of outside forces on their activities. For these writers, different notions of responsibility determined and were determined by political positions, social background, and location in the literary field. Writers argued for a variety of stances in a debate concerning freedom of expression at a time when it was limited, critical detachment as the basis for literature’s potency or a renouncement of its power, and the morality of choices within the literary and political fields.

Sapiro argues, and convincingly proves, that the relationship of writers to politics during the occupation, a highly politicized era, often depended on literary positions. Considerations internal to the literary field, and the social trajectories of the writers within it, significantly influenced political choices. For example, a preexisting conflict over education—the republican project of expanding access to education and focusing on a modern curriculum confronted a classical humanities approach of writers who criticized what they saw as short-sighted specialization or dilution through egalitarianism—influenced the positions writers adopted in relation to political or literary hierarchies. An institution such as the French Academy, dedicated to “literary orthodoxy” and defending “a conception of literature as an instrument for reproducing a social ‘elite,’” became a natural ally of Vichy’s traditionalist National Revolution (p. 192). Because literary considerations had a history predating the defeat, literary rifts and political divisions did not match up in a clear-cut way. The political conjuncture instead fractured literary positions across political groups.

As Sapiro demonstrates, many interests united literary supporters of Vichy and writers who collaborated with the occupiers, especially the identity of national traitors within the French literary community: writers whose works celebrated, they believed, perversion, weakness, or disunity in the name of art. Writers who in the 1930s produced works whose value supposedly lay in the aesthetic realm were in fact responsible for the moral collapse of France, ultimately contributing to the defeat. For the writers making these judgments, the responsibility of writers lay in guiding and creating the French society they wished to build by upholding certain “healthy” moral values and defending “civilization.” However, this stance could violate literary codes of conduct based on autonomy from political authorities, because in calling out these literary traitors, writers exposed them to very real repression.

Another shared interest between Vichy and the occupiers was normalizing life after a profound political upheaval to gain acceptance for the new status quo. This included the literary field, as the renewed publication of books and periodicals (those deemed acceptable by the censors) would indicate the health of intellectual pursuits in the new society. Promoting an art-for-art’s-sake position, as Drieu La Rochelle attempted to do with the Nouvelle Revue français (with a fascist sympathizer as its new director and purged of its Jewish contributors), could provide a veneer of continuity and normalcy, as the art continued even as the political situation changed. A major question animating the literary field concerned whether or not to continue publishing in reviews that had aligned with the new political forces or were supported and financed by Vichy or the occupiers. For some writers, publishing in these fora constituted a contribution to the ideological project of Vichy or the fascists. For others, it related to their desire to attach themselves to the prestige of the review established prior to the defeat, or to their monetary necessity. But for many, the issue at the heart of continuing to publish in these sanctioned reviews and gaining the approval of censors was whether publishing played into the interests of the occupiers (the desire for normalcy) or whether not publishing constituted a capitulation through the diminishment of the “French spirit.”

Among the writers who participated in the intellectual resistance or who opposed Vichy and the occupiers, similar discussions arose. Did silence constitute a protest or a refusal to take sides? Some writers published in new reviews, rejecting the compromised publications and viewing this as a way to maintain the true “French spirit,” uncontaminated by the occupiers and collaborators. Other writers engaged in the clandestine intellectual resistance, which served simultaneously as a political and a literary stand. These writers linked their production to the assertion of simultaneously universal and French values, such as freedom, while also seeing their work as a defense of the rights of literature, primarily autonomy. Many of them had been condemned as the literary traitors of the nation, and they in turn denounced the collaborationist writers as traitors for betraying these literary values. Recruitment into the intellectual resistance was based more on literary networks than on political alliances, and thus succeeded in uniting writers of diverse political opinions through the message of the defense of autonomy in a way that a more political message would not have done.

The liberation that again overturned political power relations destabilized the literary community as well. Debates over the purge of individuals who had compromised themselves with Vichy or the occupiers focused on whether the punishment of collaborationist writers constituted a betrayal of the literary autonomy for which some had so recently fought, or an essential execution of justice. The art-for-art’s-sake position had been revealed as a political stance during the occupation, and a new generation of writers imbued with “moral capital” won during the resistance rejected it for engagement based on universal values (p. 438). As the Cold War increased in intensity, though, the literary field again split along lines determined by the autonomy/morality divide. Non-Communist writers feared that writers aligned with Communism, who had been central to organizing the intellectual resistance within the Comité national des écrivains, betrayed the autonomy of literature by subjecting it to political control.

The French Writers’ War speaks to a number of historiographies. A large literature exists on the political engagement of French intellectuals, and includes the work of such influential historians as Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory (Les Intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours [1986]), Alice Yaeger Kaplan (Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [1986]), Sudhir Hazareesingh (Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline [1991]), Tony Judt (Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 [1992]), and Gérard Noiriel (Les fils maudits de la République: L’avenir des intellectuels en France [2005]).[8] Sapiro explains that works focusing on writers’ engagement during the occupation generally take the approach of “politically focused intellectual history,” separate from studies of “‘cultural life’ under oppression” (p. 2). This leads to works that either are over-politicized, focusing on extreme figures, or address depoliticized cultural realms.[9] By considering the specifically literary considerations that contributed to political position taking, Sapiro bridges this gap to provide a more nuanced picture of the political engagement of cultural figures. She locates herself with studies of cultural domains or professional groups during this period that help to break down temporal, geographical, and political divisions, because these divides “appeared less clearly in those milieus” (p. 2). This approach also places Sapiro’s work within a broader historiographical trend exploring convergences between groups conventionally viewed as politically opposed, especially across the fascist/anti-fascist or right/left rift of the polarized interwar and Vichy periods.[10] Along with other historians within this tendency, she considers a longer chronological time frame for this period in order to trace continuities and pinpoint breaks.[11]

In addition, the book contributes to the literature about collaboration and resistance in France, especially expanding on Philippe Burrin’s concept of accommodation (La France à l’heure allemande, 1940-1944 [1995]) by revealing a variety of motivations for collaboration or resistance and complicating what has sometimes been treated as a sharp divide.[12] By focusing on the internal logic of the literary field that structured responses to the external pressures of Vichy and the occupation, she demonstrates the nonpolitical considerations that contributed to political stances. Opportunism or opportunity as much as ideology determined writers’ involvement in collaboration or resistance. Prewar literary debates and sociological factors did so even more. This interpretation allows Sapiro to illuminate unusual combinations or engagements not explained by politics, such as the heterogeneity of contributors to the collaborationist periodical La Gerbe, who included Henry Poulaille, known for “proletarian literature”; the alliance at the Goncourt Academy between the politically opposed Léon Daudet and Lucien Descaves, which represented the union of the old guard against a new generation of writers; and the recruitment of political conservative André Rousseaux by Communist Louis Aragon to the intellectual resistance because the critic was open to the avant-garde (p. 28). By rethinking the principles of division in the literary field during the occupation, she clarifies the split between the Vichy nationalists in the Southern Zone and the fascist collaborators in Paris; shows that distinctions between resisters and collaborators were sometimes porous, as was the case with Jean Paulhan and Drieu La Rochelle, who in spite of belonging to opposite camps relied on one another for literary reasons; and demonstrates the basis for the diversity of the resistance (both the intellectual and armed branches), which included Communists, Catholics, and nationalists.[13] As for literature concerning the liberation, Sapiro expands on Megan Koreman’s investigation of the meaning of justice for French communities after the war in The Expectation of Justice (1999), exploring the oppositions and intersections of different priorities: justice, national reconstruction, and legitimacy.

Sapiro’s historiographical and methodological approaches endow her book with many strengths. She emphasizes that what it meant to be a writer at this time, and what it meant for writers to engage as public intellectuals, was contested, rather than inevitable.[14] She focuses on the disputes themselves, such as whether or not to publish under the occupation, which defined the options available to authors in relation to the historical situation, analyzing a wide range of responses and behaviors. By placing the occupation period in a broad chronological context from the 1930s to the 1950s, she can discover the impact of literary and publishing networks on resistance and collaboration. Her combination of several methodologies gives her analysis a firm grip on cultural phenomena, which can be subjective, amorphous, and difficult to define.

As a written work, The French Writers’ War has a clear structure, and the argument is well presented in the introduction. Sapiro provides a good mix of interpretation, historical context, personal detail about the authors, and sociological group portraits that make it an engaging read in general. She succeeds in humanizing the writers of the collaboration, even while exposing their ethical failings and compromises; with the writers of the resistance she takes the same unflinchingly critical gaze. Perhaps her extensive investigation of writers’ engagement during a morally perilous era guided her to a stance that is objective yet does not refrain from judgment.

Though overall the book holds together well as a coherent whole, a few areas of unevenness are inevitable. In the early chapters, Sapiro spends more time on the background of the writers and positions that ultimately aligned with the collaborationist or Vichy camps than on the background of the writers who were associated with the Left in the 1930s. When reading these chapters, I wondered if perhaps the author’s real interest lay in examining the reasons behind literary engagement with the occupiers or collaborators. The description of the evolution of left-leaning intellectuals during the Popular Front seemed especially cursory (for example, the reference to the Cartel des Gauches in 1935 as a foreshadowing of the Popular Front was jarring: in 1935, even if the political parties were still working toward their pact of unity and the Popular Front government had not yet been elected, the Popular Front already existed as a powerful grassroots alliance, and one of the most visible moments of the triumphant Popular Front was the massive demonstration in Paris on July 14, 1935). This is significant, because left-leaning and anti-fascist writers made arguments about writers’ responsibilities prior to 1940 that Sapiro does not discuss. For example, writers in groups linked to the unions, such as the Théâtre du peuple, and other working-class organizations criticized so-called psychological romantic literature, especially theatrical works dealing with the internal developments or interpersonal dramas of its protagonists. They viewed such works as a symptom of a self-obsessed bourgeois individualism to be replaced by works connected to social realities.

These lacuna result perhaps from the narrow definition of politics employed by the author (who includes political parties or groups associated with collaboration/fascism, Vichy/traditionalism, or the resistance). Many cultural figures in the 1930s argued precisely that cultural practices were political, in that they could mobilize groups behind certain identities and instill particular values. The Maison de la Culture, Mai 36, and other Popular Front cultural groups in particular embraced these ideas.

Obviously a scholarly work must have limits, and Sapiro’s are well defined. However, some of the assertions she makes about them can be questioned. For example, she states that “the widespread mobilization of writers [during the 1930s] had, in fact, no equivalent among artists or musicians” (p. 54). This is simply not true, as Jane Fulcher in The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France (2008) and Pascal Ory in La belle illusion: Culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire (1994) have demonstrated. The Popular Front groups mentioned above, and nationalist and Catholic cultural associations, mobilized musicians and visual artists as well as writers. The question of political engagement was not limited to writers, as the author suggests. In one major example, Louis Aragon, a Communist writer who features largely in The French Writers’ War, participated in a 1936 debate about realism in painting that centered on precisely this question. The proceedings were published as La Querelle du Réalisme (1936). Scholars who have investigated the La Querelle have focused on conflicts between artists who embraced Soviet-style socialist realism and French artists who resisted limitations on their artistic liberty.[15] The debate opposed two groups, one committed to socialist realism and the other to new realism in painting, who contested art’s role in social change. The first group, including artists Jean Lurçat, Edouard Goerg, and Marcel Gromaire, called for engagement in society in order to transform it; through realism, they would seek their inspiration both from the world they witnessed and the society they hoped to create. They would create works that could connect with workers, foster solidarity, and promote the development of a new state of mind. Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and the other painters of the second group rejected socialist realism for aesthetically innovative styles, which alone, they believed, could attain truth and further liberation. They maintained that the artist was not responsible for social transformation, but rather social transformation would make the experience of art more collective and egalitarian.[16] Sapiro thus misses some elements of the discussion about the engagement of cultural figures, particularly those made by artists associated with the Left.

Sapiro also limits her investigation to “metropolitan France, where the majority of the struggles for redefinition of the literary stakes played out” (p. 2). Certainly this limitation in scope makes sense, but did these debates really not see reverberations in the colonies, where Vichy had a major impact, as Eric Jennings has shown in Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina (2002)? In addition, there is the question of reception (perhaps inevitable for histories of cultural production). Did these debates or works have a broader impact beyond what was essentially an elite group of intellectuals (though of course some writers did not belong to “the elites,” they nevertheless as a whole constituted a group apart discussing questions that could be considered esoteric)? Did the debate move beyond the relatively small circle of the literary world?

In some ways this book itself is meant for a specialized audience: the use of jargon limits its accessibility, and historical context or the identity of individuals are not always explained. For example, on the first page of chapter 1, the author invokes the “appeal of June 18,” a reference to Charles de Gaulle that readers not versed in French history would not know (p. 13). The problem is partially mitigated by helpful notes on the part of the translators or the author, and becomes less of an issue as the book progresses. Similarly, I (a cultural historian) found the description of the statistical results difficult and tedious to read, though perhaps sociologists would disagree. More of it could be moved to appendix 1, “Presentation of the Survey.”

Despite these critiques and quibbles, however, The French Writers’ War is an illuminating book and Sapiro deserves to be warmly thanked for her contribution.

Notes

[1]. “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Twenty-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/0804190119/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499438761&sr=8-1&keywords=on+tyranny+twenty+lessons+from+the+twentieth+century (accessed July 7, 2017). In a Washington Post review, Carlos Lozada notes, “Steeped in the history of interwar Germany and the horrors that followed, Snyder still writes with bracing immediacy, providing 20 plain and mostly actionable lessons on preventing, or at least forestalling, the repression of lives and minds.” Carlos Lozada, “20 Ways to Recognize Tyranny – and Fight It,” review of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, The Washington Post, February 24, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/02/24/20-ways-to-recognize-tyranny-and-fight-it/?utm_term=.9ffe2e660108.

[2]. Timothy Snyder, Facebook status update, November 15, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/timothy.david.snyder/posts/1206636702716110; and Timothy Synder, “What You – Yes, You – Can Do to Save America from Tyranny,” Dallas News, November 21, 2016, https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2016/11/21/learning-history-can-save-america-tyranny.

[3]. Moshik Temkin, “Historians Shouldn’t Be Pundits,” The New York Times, June 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/opinion/trump-nixon-history.html. He worried that the historical analogies drawn between Trump and previous eras give the public “history lessons that are often misleading” about “our current travails” and that constitute distorted history.

[4]. Contemporary reverberations of Sapiro’s book abound, such as the outrage expressed by members of H-France in solidarity with renowned French historian Henry Rousso when he was detained in February 2017 at the US border on his way to give an academic talk. (See an article reporting Rousso’s detention: Steve Kuhlmann, “International Scholar Visiting Texas A&M ‘Mistakenly Detained’ by Customs Officials,” The Eagle, February 24, 2017, http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/international-scholar-visiting-texas-a-m-mistakenly-detained-by-customs/article_b4153a96-fad7-11e6-8c7d-bb567fe94e17.html?mode=jqm; and a description by Rousso of his experience: Henry Rousso, “Les Etats-Unis sont-ils encore les Etats-Unis?” Huffpost, February 26, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/henry-rousso/muslim-ban-donald-trump-etats-unis_a_21721946/.) His near-deportation offended historians’ belief that intellectuals, scholars, and writers—and their ideas—should be free to circulate regardless of political circumstances, national borders, and international tensions. The incident resulted in the release of a open letter from H-France Editor-in-Chief David Kammerling Smith on behalf of the H-France Editorial Board. David Kammerling Smith, “An Open Letter to President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly,” e-mail to H-France listserv, March 1, 2017.

[5]. David Schalk characterizes the Dreyfus affair as “the first systematic and organized political involvement on the part of a group of individuals possessing a self-conscious identity as intellectuals.” David Schalk, The Spectrum of Intellectual Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6.

[6]. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927; repr., New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 47.

[7]. James D. Le Sueur, introduction to Henri Alleg, The Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xv; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Victory,” preface to Alleg, The Question, xxxi.

[8]. Such works have often focused on a particular era of political engagement or a particular political conjuncture, such as the fin de siècle and the Dreyfus affair. See, for example, Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels” (1880-1900) (Paris: Minuit, 1990); and Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Sometimes these histories of the engagement of French intellectuals themselves participate in a debate about engagement, for example, Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect, in which he condemns the “reluctance” of historians “to assign responsibility for positions adopted and things said.” For Judt, “one is not excused from the obligation to be accurate, but neither is one under a compelling obligation to pretend neutrality.” Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 140, 8.

[9]. See, for example, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., La Vie culturelle sous Vichy (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1990).

[10]. See, for example, Susan Whitney, Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Jessica Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934-39 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[11]. See, for example, Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body; and Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[12]. For Burrin, accommodation described the attitude of those people who simply wanted to get through a difficult time by adapting to circumstances, which was not a political or ideological stance. He therefore moves beyond the question of whether to interpret apathy and indifference as functional collaboration (Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 [New York: Knopf, 1972]) or functional resistance (John Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]).

[13]. “This complicity” between the two branches of the Éditions Gallimard-La Nouvelle Revue Française network, the one that was oriented toward the intellectual resistance, and the one that was engaged in the structures of collaboration via Drieu’s review, “took its source in the interests that united them in spite of themselves—Drieu needed Paulhan in order to make the review, while Gallimard needed Drieu to protect the [publishing] house” (pp. 376-377).

[14]. Here Sapiro expands on an idea utilized by Herman Lebovics, who relies on the work of Rousso to depict a “civil war” over the definition of “true” French patrimony. As Sapiro shows, though national identity was at stake, among writers the sides opposing each other disagreed for literary reasons, and not just because of different understandings about national identity. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

[15]. See, for example, Nicole Racine, “La Querelle du réalisme (1935-1936),” Sociétés & Représentations 15 (December 2002): 113-131.

[16]. Jean Lurçat, Marcel Gromaire, Edouard Goerg, Aragon, Küss, Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, André Lhote, Jean Labasque, Jean Cassou, La Querelle du réalisme: Deux débats organisés par l’Association des peintres et sculpteurs de la Maison de la Culture (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1936). Küss and Aragon used their last names alone as an artistic signature.


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