SACW - 4 Nov 2017 | Interview with Noam Chomsky / How India and UN mucked in Afghanistan / Pakistan: Democracy test; Turks face Deportation; / India: Industrial Accidents ; jobs time bomb; Right to interfaith marriage / Legacy of Bolshevism / Poland’s Burning Man / Gender and Family Life in Postwar France

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 4 Nov 2017 - No. 2961 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Video & Transcript of Interview with Noam Chomsky by Pervez Hoodbhoy (Oct 2017)
2. Pakistan: 285 Turkish teachers and families risk forcible deportation and persecution - Joint press statement by HRCP & FIDH
3. The Enigma of the Russian Revolution and the Legacy of Bolshevism: Dilip Simeon
4. India figures at a new low in the 2017 Global Gender Gap Index
5. Industrial Accidents: Bhopal . . . Rana Plaza . . . and now Unchahar - Statement by NTUI 
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Case filed against Actor Kamal Haasan over Hindu terror remark
 - UK: Charity Commission to investigate Hindu group over ‘extremist’ speaker
 - India: Haryana Teachers expected to look after Yamunanagar Temple, Says Khattar Govt
 - India and the linguistic division of its provinces
 - India: From part three of The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism by Achin Vanaik
 - India - Kerala: An adult is woman citizen confined and then later her marriage annuled by the court ? 
 - India: In light of Hadiya case, freedom to marry who you want must be a fundamental right | Tahir Mahmood
 - India: ‘Love-Jihad’, NIA, and Democratic Rights - Statement issued by PUDR
 - India:: Hindutva-nationalism based on foreign ideals: Ramchandra Guha

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Sri Lanka: The Queen's Gift | Ishara Jayawardane
8. The turnover test in Pakistan | S. Akbar Zaidi
9. The Fence Driving a Wedge Between Pakistan and Afghanistan | Ismail Dilawar and Kamran Haider 
10. Rohingya Crisis Stokes Fears of Myanmar’s Muslims | Pascal Laureyn
11. India: Hadiya has the right to love and marry whoever she wants | Indira Jaising
12. Murder of a president: How India and the UN mucked up completely in Afghanistan | Avinash Paliwal
13. India: BJP’s intolerance of contrary thoughts
14. India: In the bedroom or a gufa in a dera, rape is rape | Mrinal Pande
15. Indian Army to launch fresh hunt for weapons worth Rs 45,000 crore
16. Defusing the jobs time bomb: Three ideas for how jobs can be created for India’s surplus of 50 million workers | Pranab Bardhan
17. In Praise of Strong Women | Salman Rushdie
18. How Does It Feel? An Alternative American History, Told With Folk Music | Daniel Wolff
19. How to Parent Like a Bolshevik | Yuri Slezkine
20. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin: a turning point in Soviet history | Charlotte Hobson
21. Faucher’s Review of From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
22. Mourning Poland’s Burning Man | Slawomir Sierakowski
23. Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage… bound together in an unholy alliance | Carole Cadwalladr
24. USA: Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Parable of Talents | Rick Seltzer

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1. VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY by Pervez Hoodbhoy (Oct 2017)
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Noam! There’s a whole lot of things that I want to talk to you about, but let me start with this. It appears as if the world is retribalizing. We are going back to our primal tribal loyalties – to religion, to nationalism. You see this just about everywhere. You see this with Brexit, the rise of the ultra-right in Europe, with Donald Trump in United States. And here in Pakistan you have bloodletting with Sunnis killing Shias, and everybody going after the Ahmadis and the Christians and the Hindus. And in India – that seems to be a country that has just gone mad with their protection of the cow. What’s going on? There was once a time of the European Enlightenment and I know that you admire John Stuart Mill very much. Have we given up on the advances that humans made in those times? What’s going on?
http://www.sacw.net/article13550.html

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2. PAKISTAN: 285 TURKISH TEACHERS AND FAMILIES RISK FORCIBLE DEPORTATION AND PERSECUTION - JOINT PRESS STATEMENT BY HRCP & FIDH
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The 285 Turkish nationals, who are teachers associated with the Pak-Turk schools and their families, have been facing deportation to Turkey since November 2016. The 285 now live in fear of raids carried out by the Pakistani police and intelligence services in Pakistan. Should they be deported to Turkey, they are at high risk of arbitrary arrest, judicial harassment, and detention upon arrival. Such detention may be accompanied by torture and other forms of ill-treatment.
http://www.sacw.net/article13551.html

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3. THE ENIGMA OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE LEGACY OF BOLSHEVISM: Dilip Simeon
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For seventeen years from 1905, the Russian polity was soaked in blood and cruelty. The revolution was born and bred in the crucible of warfare. It is one of the most tragic ironies of modern history that a movement driven by massive disgust with war and militarism was overtaken by a series of events culminating in a violent ideological dictatorship directed - for the most part - at the Russian people. The aspirations of that time can neither be forgotten nor dismissed. But the only way the socialist vision may be revived is by speaking across state borders; and speaking truthfully about the Russian Revolution.
http://www.sacw.net/article13553.html

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4. INDIA FIGURES AT A NEW LOW IN THE 2017 GLOBAL GENDER GAP INDEX
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In 2017 India slipped 21 places to 108 on the Global Gender Gap index maintained by World Economic Forum – much behind China and Bangladesh. India has been seeing a declining participation of women in the economy and low wages.
http://www.sacw.net/article13554.html

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5. INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS: BHOPAL . . . RANA PLAZA . . . AND NOW UNCHAHAR - STATEMENT BY NTUI
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The New Trade Union Initiative expresses its deep anguish at the huge loss of life at the National Thermal Power Corporation Limited’s power plant in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and strongly condemns the criminal negligence on the part of NTPC, BHEL and the Governments of India and Uttar Pradesh.
http://www.sacw.net/article13552.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - India: Case filed against Actor Kamal Haasan over Hindu terror remark
 - UK: Charity Commission to investigate Hindu group over ‘extremist’ speaker
 - India: Haryana Teachers expected to look after Yamunanagar Temple, Says Khattar Govt
 - Polarizing Kerala-Yogi on Divisive Path
 - India: Mat Baanto Insaan Ko / Insaan Hain Hum [We are Human] A video of Hindi songs by Vinay Mahajan and Charul Bharwada
 - How can India become a casteless society when the government itself distributes public offices on the basis of caste identities? | CP Bhambri
 - India and the linguistic division of its provinces
 - India: From part three of The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism by Achin Vanaik
 - India - Kerala: An adult is woman citizen confined and then later her marriage annuled by the court ? 
 - India: In light of Hadiya case, freedom to marry who you want must be a fundamental right | Tahir Mahmood
 - India: ‘Love-Jihad’, NIA, and Democratic Rights - Statement issued by PUDR
 - India:: Hindutva-nationalism based on foreign ideals: Ramchandra Guha

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. Sri Lanka: THE QUEEN'S GIFT | Ishara Jayawardane
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(Daily News, November 2, 2017 [ Sri Lanka] )

Today, the administrative center of the University of Colombo, the College House, then known as Regina Walawwa is a well preserved model of ancient Sri Lankan Colonial architecture that is still functioning. The Daily News speaks to Melbourne School of Design, Architect Prof. Anoma Pieris on the College House. Pieris, an associate Professor in architecture, at the University of Melbourne is also the author of Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The trouser under the cloth. Her argument in this book is that due to our colonial history Sri Lankans tend to negotiate between western and eastern influences in their lives, projecting one or the other as the dominant expression according to the perceived advantage.
Anoma Pieris

“The architecture of College House captures a moment in the history of the region and our country when colonial architecture was becoming indigenized due to firstly, the influence of the arts and crafts movement in England which produced a kind of Victorian eclecticism influenced by architecture elsewhere in the British Empire and secondly, Indian nationalism, which inspired early Lankan nationalists. Similarly, the university originates in a colonial institution modeled on western traditions that has been indigenized,” said Pieris.

Regina Walawwa, as it was known then, has an asymmetrical plan with turrets and conical roofs influenced by Victorian Eclecticism. It has few rooms, with numerous verandahs at the front, back and sides of the building, while a rectangular lawn spreads out before its entrance.

“Eclecticism, which emerged as a style at the end of the 19th century in Britain, owes its asymmetrical plans and elevations to the influence of the picturesque and renewed interest in the rustic character of the rural vernacular. Based on these ideas, Architects of the Arts and Crafts movement developed long narrow plans of one room depth with an absence of interior corridors. Eccentric elevations with towers or turrets are also a feature of this style, as is the incorporation of Classical, Gothic and Indian or Indic architectural features. Accordingly, Regina Wallawwa's interior spaces are organized quite informally in comparison with the symmetrical house plans and elevations of the conventional neo-classical mansions,” explained Pieris.

Built in 1912

Regina Walawwa, was built by Thomas Henry Arthur de Soysa for his wife Regina Perera Abeyewardene of Closenburg, Galle in 1912, and the road beside it Regina Para [anglicised as Queens Road] was named after her. He was the son of philanthropist Charles Henry de Soysa whose statue is found opposite the Eye Hospital.

These wealthy families in Colombo were caught between two cultures, indigenous and colonial, and they had to tread carefully in that space. But by the early twentieth century they grew bold enough to bring their Eastern sensibilities to the front in these various forms.

“When building, the carpenters however would have been from Moratuwa, as the de Soysa’s were prominent leaders of the Karave caste. Teams of carpenters would move from home to home conducting repairs and there were many outbuildings at the back of such properties to accommodate their activities. The contractors at Alfred House, the house of Thomas’s father, C. H. de Soysa in the same area included the head contractor Omaru Baas and Davith Singho Baas, and they would often collaborate with Muslim masons,” pointed out Pieris.

There seems to be an element of sadness associated with the building as it was the family home for Arthur, Regina and their five children, but unfortunately she died before it was complete. Arthur and the children continued to live in the house till it was sold to the government.

“Arthur became increasingly conscious of Indian nationalism and even visited Motilal Nehru’s house Ananda Bhawan (later called Swaraj Bhawan) in Allahabad in 1904, and copied the dressing table he saw there, producing one each for his three daughters. The wedding of his eldest daughter, Violet, was held at Regina walawwa, and the wedding pavilion-magul maduwa - was designed according to a Hindu architectural style designed by experts from Jaffna, D.P. Tampo and S. Mahadeva of the Public Works Department (PWD). It had an arched dome similar to the style at the Thirumalai Palace, Madurai,” said Pieris.

Travancore Style

The architecture of Regina Walawwa follows the “Travancore Style” of British architect Robert Chisholm, best represented in his designs for the Napier Museum in Trivandrum and the Madras Post and Telegraph Office built during the 1870s–1880s. One of the features of this style, particularly in domestic architecture is that the plan is not symmetrical but has elements like wings that finger out, and have long singly-loaded corridors. These are features of Regina Walawwa.

“College house was a domestic building later used as an institution. This often happens when stately homes are sold off or gifted to institutions which maybe better able to maintain them. A similar example would be the home of Wilmot Perera on the Sri Palee campus which was similarly indigenized to reflect his connections with China.

On March 8, 1989, elements of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna assassinated the Vice Chancellor, Prof Stanley Wijesundera at the Library Room in the College House.

“I was a university student studying architecture at Moratuwa University at that time, and I recollect this period vividly. As state institutions, universities are regarded as representing state agendas and our government had sorely neglected specific social constituencies in the deep- south and the north and east prompting their radicalization. We need many more universities for such a large population as ours and more importantly, vocational colleges that broaden our understanding of education to become more democratic and inclusive. These need to be better distributed across our geography and give dignity and offer professionalization for a range of skills and competencies,” explained Pieris.

Original designs preserved

One hopes that the building will be maintained and that the integrity of its original designs and materials will be preserved. It was refurbished around a decade ago by the architect Ashley de Vos. The De Soysa family members have a good understanding of its history and have photographs of the building in their possession, although they know less about its architectural significance.

“Colonial architecture is often viewed with hostility as representing colonial oppression and so we tend to tear down these old houses. The pressures of urban development aid us in this process. But they are indicative of social sensibilities of that period, and local labor built them with inter-ethnic collaboration, as with the example of Regina Walawwa. More recently, colonial buildings have been converted into stage sets in the beautification programs of the city. While this revives the architecture, and prolongs their lifespan, it tends to flatten its history into a backdrop for commercialization. We need to understand their relevance through uncovering histories both good and bad,” stated Pieris.

College house then - Regina Walawwa. Pictures by Thushara Fernando

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8. THE TURNOVER TEST IN PAKISTAN | S. Akbar Zaidi
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(The Hindu, November 03, 2017)

The country’s democratic transition faces multiple challenges, real as well as imagined
Indians wouldn’t know much about democratic transitions. However, numerous countries which have had military rule, often for decades, have had to pass through pivotal moments in their processes of democratisation. The paths have varied, as have circumstances and expectations. There have been reversals, counter coups, revolutions and so-called ‘springs’, and some successes and many failures. Transitional paths are littered with diverse examples of a wide variety. Often international and regional powers upset domestic processes.
http://tinyurl.com/yawk4za9

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9. THE FENCE DRIVING A WEDGE BETWEEN PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN | Ismail Dilawar and Kamran Haider 
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(Bloomberg-November 1, 2017)

   - Border smuggling dwarves official trading between neighbors
   - Pakistan has only fenced 43 kilometers of large pourous border

On the upper deck of the Hamza Fort border check-point in Pakistan’s South Waziristan, Major General Nauman Zakaria points to a 12-foot high fence just yards away -- the latest initiative the military says will stem insurgent attacks across a more than 1,000 mile disputed border with Afghanistan.

“There won’t be an inch of international border that shall not remain under our observation,” said Zakaria, who has served in counter-insurgency operations in restive border regions of south and north Waziristan.

At an estimated cost of more than $532 million, Pakistan has started fencing the 2,344-kilometer (1,456 miles) border with war-torn Afghanistan, the latest measure that’s driving a wedge between the fractious neighbors who have accused each other of harboring insurgents launching cross-border attacks.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has condemned Pakistan for instigating an “undeclared war of aggression” against his nation. While only 43 kilometers has so far been fenced since May, Ghani’s administration has repeatedly denounced and threatened armed confrontation over its construction across the disputed Durand Line, which divided the largely ethnic Pashtun communities in the region during British colonial rule.

Despite the objections, Pakistan is proceeding with its plan as Islamabad faces increased U.S. pressure to act against terrorists. President Donald Trump in August strongly denounced the nation’s alleged duplicity. He said the nuclear-armed Islamic Republic continues to harbor militant groups, such as the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network, which have attacked American-backed forces in Afghanistan.

After visiting Islamabad during a tour of South Asia last month, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he was concerned terror groups are undermining political stability in Pakistan and called on leaders there to join in eradicating fighters that seek safe haven within its borders.

Feasibility Questioned

Pakistan’s military expects to complete construction of the chain-linked and barbed-wire topped fence across the South Waziristan portion by December 2018. No timeline has been given for completion of the entire length of the border and there are questions over whether the plan is logistically feasible along the porous and often mountainous terrain.

There are 235 crossing points, some frequently used by militants and drug traffickers, of which 18 can be accessed by vehicles, according to a report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network research group last month.

A soldier stands by a new border fence in Pakistan’s South Waziristan.
Photographer: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images

The Taliban are used to moving with ease between the two countries in the often lawless border lands and are usually waved through by Pakistan security forces, according to the AAN, citing conversations with multiple current and former Taliban fighters, doctors and Afghans living in the region. Pakistan’s military has long denied supporting militant groups, including the Taliban.

While there has been some tightening of security since, the AAN said more than 2,000 Taliban commanders traveled to the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in July 2015 to witness Mullah Akhtar Mansour’s ascension to the group’s leadership, before his death last year when he was killed in Pakistan by a U.S. drone strike.

“It was like a free highway,” Asad Munir, a retired brigadier who served in Waziristan and other border regions, said about one of the crossing points in Birmal. Militants won’t sit idle and will find alternative routes to sneak across the fenced border, he said.

Officials from Afghanistan’s foreign ministry didn’t respond to calls seeking comment, though in April the ministry’s spokesman, Ahmad Shekib Mostaghni, said “any type of unilateral actions” along the Durand Line will be “ineffective, impractical and impossible” without Afghanistan’s agreement. The country will use its security forces to stop the fencing if diplomacy fails, he said.

Nafees Zakaria, a spokesman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, said in a text message that the border fortification was being misconstrued by Afghanistan and is “instrumental in curtailing cross-border movement of terrorists and other undesired elements, smuggling of drugs, weapons and other goods.”
Opiate Trade

The fencing may reduce rampant smuggling which is valued at $3 billion by the Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce & Industry -- more than double the size of official trade between the two nations. Pakistan’s central bank recorded the bilateral trade at $1.2 billion in the financial year ended June.

The barrier is also aimed at reducing the drug trade across the border, which fund the Taliban’s operations in Afghanistan. About 40 percent of the opiates produced in the war-torn country are used in and transit through Pakistan, according to the United Nation’s. The UN estimates that Afghanistan’s opium poppy production grew by 700 tons to 4,800 tons in the decade ended 2016.

“Pakistan is one of the biggest transit routes for the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan,” said Syed Tahir Hussain Mashhadi, a retired colonel who is a member of Pakistan’s Senate committee on narcotics control. Pakistan’s anti-narcotics force “is trying its best to control it, but lacks power to keep the whole border sealed.”

— With assistance by Eltaf Najafizada

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10. ROHINGYA CRISIS STOKES FEARS OF MYANMAR’S MUSLIMS | Pascal Laureyn
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(Inter Press Service) 

YANGON, Oct 24 2017 (IPS) - In a quiet street, the sound of children’s voices can be heard from an open window. They are reciting verses of the Koran in unison. The small Islamic school lays hidden in a walled neighborhood where only Muslims live. This is an island of tranquility in Mandalay, the second-largest city of predominantly Buddhist Myanmar.

Calm seems to be the norm in the narrow streets leading to the Joon Mosque. But since a few years ago, the gates of this community have been locked at night. After centuries of peaceful coexistence, tensions between Muslims and Buddhists are building. Residents of the neighborhood don’t feel at ease anymore.
"Our shopkeepers are sometimes being harassed by monks. But when we call the police, they never show up." --U Wai Li Tin Aung

“Sometimes Buddhist monks try to intimidate us by shouting religious slogans. They call us ‘kalar’, an insulting word for Muslims,” says U Wai Li Tin Aung, secretary of the Joon Mosque, the biggest in Mandalay.

He thinks that the tensions are being provoked by the conflict in Rakhine State, in the west of Myanmar. There, the Rohingya – a Muslim minority group – is being persecuted and murdered by the military and by militias. Since August almost 600,000 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh. The UN has labelled it ethnic cleansing.

Simmering tensions

The propaganda of the government and hostility of Buddhist nationalists are not exclusively reserved for the Rohingya in Rakhine. According to some Burmese, all Muslims are terrorists who want to take over the country. Since the gradual democratization of Myanmar, the authoritarian controls on media have disappeared, giving extremist ideas a free and unfiltered forum. In large parts of society, racism has become normalized. Many fear violence against Muslims has become acceptable.

U Wai Li Tin Aung is worried. “The government does nothing. Our shopkeepers are sometimes being harassed by monks. But when we call the police, they never show up. Laws are only in favor of Burmese Buddhists.”

It used to be different. The Muslim area around the Joon Mosque has a respectable history. Mindon Min, the penultimate king of Burma, gave this neighborhood to the Muslims in 1863. The monarch had founded the new capital in Mandalay and his administration was run mainly by Muslims. But that recognition seems to be forgotten, and now the inhabitants are victims of discrimination.

U Wai Li Tin Aung, secretary of the Joon Mosque, the biggest in Mandalay, Myanmar, stands on the entrance steps with two of his children. Credit: Pascal Laureyn/IPS

Pathe Aye Maung shows his identity card and the one of his son. Both are officially registered as Muslims. The ID card of the father says that he is a member of the Panthee, a recognized ethnic group in Myanmar. But the son is registered as an ‘Indian’, which means he is considered an illegal foreigner. “When my son went to complain about this, he was put in jail,” Maung says.

This is a problem that the Rohingya know all too well. They have been living in Rakhine for centuries, but they have been discriminated against since independence in 1948. The media and the government never use the word Rohingya. Naming them correctly would be interpreted as a recognition of their historical rights. Instead, most Burmese people consider them Bengali: illegal immigrants who should return home.

A large group of Buddhists feel that their culture and religion is being threatened by ‘foreigners’. They are afraid of so-called Islamification. They fear that Myanmar will evolve the same way as Indonesia, a Buddhist country that later became Islamic. So for many, all Muslims are viewed with suspicion. Some religious leaders have tried to turn these anxieties into violence against Muslims.

“We don’t let ourselves be provoked,” says secretary U Wai Li Tin Aung. “Whatever the extremist monks say, we stay calm and keep the peace. We have learned that from our religion. We don’t use violence.”

But that does not always work. In 2014 riots erupted in Mandalay, the bastion of Burmese Buddhist culture. The violence was ignited by false rumors of the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim. Nationalist monks had spread these rumors with lightning-fast speed through social media. In the resulting street fighting, a Buddhist and a Muslim were killed.

During those tumultuous days, the police raided the Joon Mosque. They seized sticks, rods and marbles hidden in the prayer room. The secretary stresses that they were only to be used in case of an attack on the mosque. “Everybody was scared at that time. We couldn’t expect any protection from the army or the police.”

A political conflict

The violence placed Muslims and Buddhists in a polarized position, with simmering religious tensions and identity politics. And critics say the army and consecutive governments have used it to divert the attention away from their faltering policies.

The conflict with the ‘foreign jihadis’ signals to Myanmar’s citizens that the army is the only trustworthy protector of the country. It is a way to tighten the military’s grip on the economy, even after the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD party. For the Muslims, the much-lauded democratization has not delivered much yet. For the first time in the history of independent Myanmar, there is no Muslim presence in parliament anymore.

Still, not everyone agrees with the extremists, and most Buddhists still get along nicely with their Muslim neighbors.

One Buddhist fruit vendor strolls through the Muslim neighborhood with her merchandise on her head. “It’s a pity that there’s a conflict going on. I have been coming here for years and I never had problems. Why should there be problems now? That’s bad for business.”

Meanwhile, the international donor community announced pledges on October 23 for more than 344 million dollars to address the mounting humanitarian crisis of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The pledging conference in Geneva was co-organised by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and with Kuwait and the European Union as co-hosts. They noted that the ongoing exodus is the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world.

“Today’s pledges from the international community will help rebuild Rohingya refugees’ lives. Without these vital funds, humanitarians would not be able to continue providing protection and life-saving aid to one of the most vulnerable groups in the world. While we are thankful, I hope that the end of this conference does not mean the end of new funding commitments. We have not reached our target and each percentage point we are under means thousands without food, healthcare and shelter,” said William Lacy Swing, IOM Director General.

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11. INDIA: HADIYA HAS THE RIGHT TO LOVE AND MARRY WHOEVER SHE WANTS | Indira Jaising
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Hindustan Times - Oct 31, 2017

We have a constitution which guarantees freedom of religion which includes the right to convert to any religion. Why then must Hadiya be denied agency to convert?

Kerala offers very famous cases of Hindus who have converted to Islam, including the late poet and writer Kamala. What was so strange about Hadiya’s conversion, when she herself appeared in court and stated that her conversion was voluntary?(HT Photo)

The Supreme Court today ordered that Hadiya be produced in court on November 27 to speak in her own voice on her conversion to Islam and her marriage. She has been kept captive by her father after a division bench judgement of the high court of Kerala. Earlier, the same high court, after interviewing her had refused to hand over custody to her father, after being satisfied that she converted and married of her own free will. A change of judges led to a change of heart in the court .

The court declared the marriage void in a habeus corpus petition. Such a petition can only be used to check if a person is kept in unlawful custody, and nothing more. It literally means ‘produce the body’ that has been kept in unlawful custody. In this case, the petition was filed by the father to produce his daughter. The validity of the marriage could not be gone into by the court, but it did, holding that a qualified homeopath would not convert to Islam.

Kerala offers very famous cases of Hindus who have converted to Islam, including the late poet and writer Kamala Das. What was so strange about Hadiya’s conversion, when she herself appeared in court and stated that her conversion was voluntary?

We have a constitution which guarantees freedom of religion which includes the right to convert to any religion. Why then must she be denied agency to convert? And why must she be prevented from marrying a man of her choice? To this, the only answer given is that her husband is recruiting for the Islamic State. Today the Supreme Court asked which law prevents a woman from falling in love with and marrying a man who is a criminal, if indeed he us one?

The case raises issues which are fundamental, such as the limits of parental control over their adult children. When does guardianship end and independent agency begin? Hadiya’s is 27 years old and with a mind of her own. To keep her in parental custody is nothing short of unlawful confinement. So complete is the custody that she has not been able to file a petition in the supreme court; the petition has been filed by her husband. An earlier plea to allow her to file an affidavit was turned down by the court.

She will now have to be produced in court, but by whom? By her custodians, her parents who have denied her access to the world? Is this fair process?

She must be set free and allowed access to her friends, husband and her lawyers before she is produced in court .

Playing politics over the bodies of women, always women, denying them agency in the matter of love and marriage is a game played by upper caste parents with their daughters who marry outside their caste in the name of “kidnapping”. The courts have not taken kindly to these tactics in being satisfied that the relationship is voluntary .our efforts to encourage inter caste marriages and now inter faith marriages have miserably failed, making a mokery of our secular credentials. One wonders whether similar custodial rights would be granted to Muslim parents if their daughters converted to Hinduism. Politics are best kept away from inter personal issues

One Hindu woman converting to Islam and marrying one Muslim, cannot pose a threat to national security! No one prevents the State from investigating threats to national security, but to say that an adult woman must not be allowed to convert to Islam or marry the man she loves violates her right to personal liberty and her right to freely practice the religion of her choice.

Indira Jaising has represented Hadiya’s husband, the petitioner, in the Supreme Court

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12. MURDER OF A PRESIDENT: HOW INDIA AND THE UN MUCKED UP COMPLETELY IN AFGHANISTAN | Avinash Paliwal
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Quartz india - October 30, 2017
Mohammed Najibullah Ahmedzai was the president of Afghanistan between 1987 and 1992. The Taliban, which captured the capital, Kabul, in September 1996, executed him and brutalised his body under full international glare. The following excerpt describes the political, diplomatic, and moral dilemmas that the United Nations, India, and various Afghan forces faced in the run-up to Najibullah’s killing.
http://tinyurl.com/y8eqcsqt

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13. INDIA: BJP’S INTOLERANCE OF CONTRARY THOUGHTS
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(The Telegraph, October 31, 2017)

Editorial

Not funny

Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party have found a novel way to ingratiate themselves with their hawkish leaders. All they need to do is park themselves in front of television sets or surf the internet and scour for comments that might appear to be - often remotely - critical of their leaders at the Centre. It can be argued that every political party in the country has a few overzealous followers, but the BJP, surely, has a problem of plenty. Otherwise, why would a parliamentarian, who has the challenging job of looking after the welfare of the people in his constituency, feel inclined to go after an academic for criticizing the prime minister on television? Kamal Mitra Chenoy, the professor in question, had been disapproving of Narendra Modi for not visiting Palestine during his Israel trip. This was enough for the BJP's Satya Pal Singh to file a complaint against Mr Mitra Chenoy with the parliamentary affairs minister for making 'anti-India' statements. The Union minister dutifully forwarded the complaint to the human resource development ministry, which, in turn, sent it to the registrar of the university where Mr Mitra Chenoy teaches. The professor was asked to provide an explanation for his action. This is not the only example of the BJP's allergy to criticism in recent times. In another incident, a BJP national secretary, H. Raja, attacked a Tamil actor over some dialogues that were deemed critical of the goods and services tax and Digital India in the film, Mersal. Shockingly, Mr Raja attempted to drag the actor's religious identity into the issue and suggested that the film star had an ulterior motive to poke fun at Mr Modi's prized schemes.

The BJP may have perfected the art of enforcing obedience. It has resorted to calling into question the patriotism of its detractors to earn the silence that it craves. Those who raise uncomfortable questions against the government, be they politicians or academics, are dubbed 'anti-national'. It appears that many in the BJP are uninformed about the democratic ethos and traditions that are synonymous with India. The freedom to express one's views is integral to a democratic polity. India has also been known for honouring the plurality of opinions. The BJP's intolerance of contrary thoughts has, ironically, also divested the party of humour. It will be glad to hear that a Hindi channel, unsurprisingly, developed cold feet and refused to telecast a comedian's act of mimicking the prime minister. Sentinels of democracy, however, are ruing much more than a lost opportunity to have a few hearty laughs.

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14. INDIA: IN THE BEDROOM OR A GUFA IN A DERA, RAPE IS RAPE | Mrinal Pande
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(Hindustan Times, Aug 31, 2017)

On the marital rape issue — why must the State instead of protecting any woman’s sexuality from forced violation, continue to present or treat her merely as family property?

Even though the present government is a supporter of penetrating citizens’ privacy to gather vital data through Aadhaar, it has chosen to support its bitter rival the UPA in of keeping the bedroom out of bounds for India’s rape laws. (Image for representation purpose only)
Even though the present government is a supporter of penetrating citizens’ privacy to gather vital data through Aadhaar, it has chosen to support its bitter rival the UPA in of keeping the bedroom out of bounds for India’s rape laws. (Image for representation purpose only)(iStock)

As matriarchy was beaten back and patriarchy came to hold sway, the all male groups of law makers unanimously based the offence of rape on the principle of theft. Under this concept (supported notably by both Manu and the English Common law), a woman is a property that belongs first to the father, then the husband. So if she is sexually violated before marriage it will be deemed an offence against the father and post marriage, against the lawful husband. In 1736 Sir Matthew Hale supported this when he adjudicated that a husband could not be guilty of rape on his “lawful wife”, for by her matrimonial consent she had agreed to this (rape by the husband) and this consent she could not retract. So in simpler words marriage extinguishes both the legal and sexual autonomy of a wife!

By 1991 the world had changed sufficiently for this grossly unjust principle to be rejected in Australia by Justice Brannon who declared it, “offensive to human dignity and incompatible with the legal status of a spouse”. The same year in England, Lord Keith also declared (in the House of Lords) that marriage in modern times is “a partnership between equals” and the wife may no longer be deemed her husband’s “subservient chattel”. In India things change somewhat slowly. It was only after (in the winter of 2012) the nation was rocked by a terrible incident of gang rape and murder of a young woman by a group of men that the UPA government bowed to public pressure and mandated a high-level committee led by Justice Verma, one of India’s finest judges, to restructure India’s rape laws and make them more woman-friendly. The Committee did a commendable job and its comprehensive report recommended that marital rape must also be brought within the purview of criminal rape. A marital relationship between the perpetrator and the victim should no longer construed as a valid defence for the man violating a woman’s human rights.

Despite their strong recommendation the then UPA Government rejected this particular recommendation while accepting most others. In 2014, the rival NDA government came to power. But even though the present government is a vehement supporter of penetrating citizens’ privacy to gather vital data through Aadhaar, it has chosen to support its bitter rival the UPA in the matter of keeping the bedroom out of bounds for India’s rape laws. On 28th August it stated (in an affidavit to the Delhi High Court): “what may appear to be marital rape” to a wife “may not appear so to others”. And that criminalising marital rape may “destabilise the institution of marriage apart from being an easy tool for harassing the husbands.”

“The concept of marital rape as understood internationally cannot be applied in the Indian context due to various factors.” notes the Union Cabinet Minister for Women and Child Development.

Today a new wave of conservatism-political, religious, deeply hostile to several gains made by the women after a long hard struggle, is sweeping across the country. The recent anti-homosexual and anti-abortions rulings are all part of this neo-conservative world view. Together they have slowly eroded the ground of choice expanded over the last seventy years, bit by bit by men and women who respected human rights of all men and women. The result of the increasingly regressive mindset is a ten-year-old victim of rape being forced to give birth at a huge risk to her life, millions of women being squeezed out of work force and an undeniable rise of sexual crimes against women all over India.

The point to note is that whether in a bedroom or in some gufa in a Dera, in women’s personal experience, a rape remains a rape. And what married men want from their wives, may not always automatically be what the wives also want from husbands. Why must the State instead of protecting any woman’s sexuality from forced violation and expropriation, continue to present or treat her merely as family property when a crime is committed against her? From the police thana to the courts the case is linked to a family, and adjudicated on grounds of restoring behenon, betiyon or mataon ki izzat (read family name) ki raksha. It is seldom if ever a violation of the individual human rights of the violated woman who remains so and so’s wife, daughter or sister? If she fails to fit, she is mostly discarded as a whore. Interestingly male sexual desire is being romanticised, even sacralised like never before both in society and the media. The Governor of a state, a very learned jurist himself, defies criminalisation of marital rape on grounds it will destroy the family system. Even the minister for women and child development, who had earlier held sensible pro-women views on the matter, now quotes the Hindu view of marriage as a sacrament as one of the reasons why India cannot accept the internationally accepted criminalisation of marital rape.

Once we accept the definition of marriage and rape as defined through the centuries by men, the adjudicated line will come focus on assessment of a wife’s “will”. Was she really unwilling to have sex or only playing hard to get? Isn’t force an ‘accepted’ part of intercourse? Shouldn’t all well-brought-up women be expecting the ideal Mard, the He Man, to assert his will and take the lead in lovemaking? Is the complainant protesting too much? Men who sexually harass wives can go on defending themselves in courts saying she had been harassing him and was crying rape out of malice. They know that the law as it stands will insist on measuring a woman’s consent from the socially reasonable (read objective men’s) point of view, which holds marriage to be an indissoluble sacrament. And the framework of traditional marriage being what it is in its operative form, married women will be seen as less human, more object like, less worthy and less injured than they actually are.

On 26th December, in room 222 of the Vigyan Bhawan annexe, writes the late Justice Leila Seth, Justice JS Verma read out a few guidelines to the Committee Members : “When a woman is subjected to a crime like rape, it becomes a multiple crime. She is raped at home, then in public life, followed by an agonizing cross-examination…her status in the hierarchical structure of society also obstructs the way of securing justice…her social status compounds her gender injustice...” ( Talking of Justice-People’s Rights in Modern India by Justice Leila Seth)

The case could not be better stated.

Mrinal Pande is former chairperson, Prasar Bharti and a senior journalist.

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15. INDIAN ARMY TO LAUNCH FRESH HUNT FOR WEAPONS WORTH RS 45,000 CRORE
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http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/army-finalises-rs-40-000-crore-mega-procurement-plan-for-infantry-modernisation/story-hLy3wkT4eg1wenocAse6zK.html

[Please note the overall health budget in 2017 was INR 48,878 crore (2.27% of total Union Budget)]

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16. DEFUSING THE JOBS TIME BOMB: THREE IDEAS FOR HOW JOBS CAN BE CREATED FOR INDIA’S SURPLUS OF 50 MILLION WORKERS
Pranab Bardhan
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(The Times of India, October 30, 2017)

Many people think that one of the major economic failures of the current government is in the area of jobs. It came to power promising jobs for ‘aspirational India’ in place of ‘doles’. While ‘doles’ remain largely in place, Labour Bureau data seem to suggest even an absolute decline in formal sector jobs over the last three years, instead of any significant rise.

The backlog of ‘surplus workers’ that include the underemployed in all sectors (as estimated in the India Employment Report 2016) exceeds 50 million workers – this does not include the women who are often discouraged dropouts from the labour force. Rhetoric or electoral ‘jumla’ aside jobs, particularly formal sector regular jobs which the young in India hanker after, have been a chronic problem over several decades.

If one takes the whole period since 1972-73 when National Sample Survey started collecting employment and unemployment data on a comprehensive basis, job growth has been relatively sluggish (except for short spells, as in the first decade of this century, and that too mainly in the construction sector). Many alternative solutions for the job problem have been suggested, like larger investment in infrastructure (particularly electricity and roads), education and credit to small and medium enterprises. Some of these involve structural problems which can be resolved only in the medium to long run.

Illustration: Chad Crowe

Others have pointed to stringent labour laws which inhibit firing (and therefore hiring) labour. Some state governments have relaxed those stringent laws over the last three years and it may be too early yet to find much conclusive evidence of that making a big difference in job creation. My own empirical hunch has been that labour law is a constraint, but it may not be the most important or even a binding constraint. 

While the job crisis remains severe and potentially explosive in the socio-political sphere, three possible ways of relieving it have not received adequate attention. 

First, a policy of wage or payroll subsidies. A significant part of current budgetary subsidies, both at the central and state levels, are in the form of capital subsidies – subsidies on interest or credit and tax concessions of various kinds for capital investment. We do not have precise estimates, but my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that these subsidies may come to 5% of GDP. A part of these subsidies, which currently encourage capital intensive methods of production, may be converted into wage subsidies.

In fact the same businessman in the formal sector may be paid the subsidies, but now for hiring more people rather than machines. A cap may be imposed on the wage subsidy on any particular job so that the incentive remains on hiring more people than on paying large salaries to particular employees. Similarly, possible scams in the form of fake payrolls may be avoided with appropriate biometric identification. 

A second suggestion relates to skill formation. The current Skill India programme has not made much progress. The ministry of skill development has now abandoned the earlier much-hyped but unattainable target of training at least 300 million workers in new skills by 2022. Currently less than 5% of the total work force has formal vocational skills. Of about 3 million people who have received some training by July 2017 under the current scheme, less than 10% have reportedly received any job offers.

One possible remedy may be to encourage the business sector (particularly in local clusters) to get involved in the training of workers somewhat in the line of the German model, the world’s most successful vocational training programme. German business largely funds such programmes as this gives them an opportunity to look for and get as apprentice good-quality workers. In any case a vocational programme that is not integrated with a job placement programme is unlikely to be viable. 

A third suggestion relates to the agricultural sector. While most young people even in farmer families now want to get out of their traditional occupation, whether one likes it or not, the demographics and occupational distribution of our labour force is such that for a long time agriculture will have to continue to be a main source of jobs. The important task is to make those jobs more productive and higher-paying.

The area where India has a large potential is in non-crop agriculture – fruits, vegetables and livestock farming. These activities are also highly labour intensive. But for making this sector more productive and job creating at least two essential pre-requisites are (a) investment in cold chains and refrigerated transport; and (b) streamlining the marketing arrangements.

Agricultural marketing remains one of the most unreformed and cartelised sectors in India. More direct farm-to-shop arrangements with minimum involvement of collusive intermediaries have to be forged. Our farms are (and will remain for quite some time) too small. They have to be amalgamated into farming companies or cooperatives at least for the sake of marketing (and input provision). The Amul model of collecting from small producers and then cooperatively marketing and distributing has to be extended all over India in these productive sectors of non-crop agriculture if profitable job creation is our objective. 

These suggestions for job growth are within the realm of feasibility even in the short to intermediate time horizon. Meanwhile the time bomb of not enough jobs for our young people keeps ticking.

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17. IN PRAISE OF STRONG WOMEN | Salman Rushdie
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(Bazar, Oct 31, 2017)

Famed novelist Salman Rushdie pays homage to the daring women who have inspired his life and work.

We called my mother's mother Ammaji. Her husband’s nickname was Babajan. The first was a title of respect, the second of affection. Unlike my grandfather, my grandmother was not an easy person, but she commanded absolute respect. She was, in a word, terrifying. She was small and wide, and you didn’t argue with her. The frown was her habitual expression but every so often she smiled, and it was like a gift. And when she gave it to us, we, her grandchildren, rushed to her and hugged her. The smile was a sign that hugging was, just this once, allowed. We all admired her ferocity, but we were relieved when she let the mask slip and revealed her love.

She had three daughters. The eldest grew up to be a celebrated educator in Karachi, Pakistan, founding a highly regarded school and a college as well, and spent her life at the heart of the city’s cultural life, a close friend of the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whom she once hid from fanatics in her cellar. The youngest married a military man and for a time they were quite the power couple. The middle sister was my mother, who dedicated herself to raising my three sisters and me and protecting us from the excesses of my father’s deepening alcoholism. In many ways I think of her as the strongest and most admirable of all. Whenever I come across the clichéd view of South Asian women as demure and self-effacing, I shake my head, because I don’t know any women like that. Women in India and Pakistan have much to fear from a male-dominated society in which violence against women is all too common, but they are anything but cowed. The women in my family, in every generation, have been fierce, independent people who don’t stand for any nonsense. All four of the women I mentioned above—my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts—transformed by the processes of fiction, inspired characters in my novel Midnight’s Children and, beyond that, instilled in me a lifelong fascination and admiration for bold, assertive women, in books as well as in real life.

As a child, I was delighted by how opinionated Alice is during her adventures in Wonderland. She’s in a world she doesn’t understand, surrounded by fantastic creatures, and her body keeps changing size—but she’s continually telling people how to behave and scolding them if they displease her. She’s outspoken, and in the end it’s her outspokenness—“you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”—that defeats the Queen of Hearts.

It was Alice’s orneriness that made me love her, and, when I got older, it was the same nonconformist boldness that drew me to Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, and to the wild young Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway—Sally who smokes cigars, who deliberately says unladylike things, who runs naked down a hallway, and who Clarissa Dalloway, just once, kisses, and considers that the happiest event of her life. Perhaps above all—because she reminds me of my grandmother—I love the tough as-nails matriarch Úrsula Iguarán, who stands at the heart of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I’ve also been a movie buff all my life. Films have mattered to me as much as books, and so images of women in film inhabit my imagination as powerfully as those of literary characters: Mieko Harada’s ferocious, dangerous portrayal of a sort of Japanese Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa’s Ran; Anna Karina tormenting and betraying Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou (and probably committing murder with a pair of scissors during their long wild journey); the great stars of films by the Indian maestro Satyajit Ray, Madhabi Mukherjee and Sharmila Tagore; Catherine Deneuve icily erotic in Belle de Jour; Jeanne Moreau singing “Le Tourbillon” in Jules et Jim.

In my own books, I’m happy to say, there’s quite a gallery of flamboyant, dynamic women following in the footsteps of those I admired as a reader and a filmgoer: the bohemian painter Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh; the singer and free spirit Vina Apsara in The Ground Beneath Her Feet; the title character of The Enchantress of Florence, fighting to have the life she wants in 16th-century Asia and Europe; and the supernatural princess Dunia, the powerful female jinn fighting to defend the human race against the assault of her tyrannical male counterparts in my fairy tale of New York, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (which, if you do the math, adds up to 1,001).
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    "I remember meeting Picasso’s former mistress painter Françoise Gilot at the Adelaide Festival in Australia and being told by her of her pride that she was ‘the only woman who ever left him.'"

I have been fortunate to meet quite a number of extraordinary women over the years. I remember meeting Picasso’s former mistress painter Françoise Gilot at the Adelaide Festival in Australia and being told by her of her pride that she was “the only woman who ever left him.” I spent one memorable London evening with Martha Gellhorn (who left Hemingway) and hearing her speak with scorn of her ex-husband’s reportage of the Spanish Civil War. She was at the front, she said, while he was propping up a bar. And one night I sat next to the critic Elizabeth Hardwick at a dinner. She had just read Midnight’s Children and traveled to India, which, she declared vehemently, she had hated, so hot, so dirty, so crowded, and everyone trying to get money from her, “and, dear,” she said, in the best backhanded compliment I ever received, “your book captured it perfectly.”

At the PEN International Congress in New York in 1986, my awestruck younger self had his photo taken with Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, and Czeslaw Milosz. Both Sontag and Gordimer became close friends. Susan was a powerful ally during my years of trouble after the publication of The Satanic Verses; as president of PEN American Center, she rallied hundreds of writers in my defense. Nadine, too, was a warrior on my behalf. She was a tiny battle-ax, hardened in the struggle against apartheid, and I loved her. Also at that PEN Congress I saw Grace Paley standing up to an aggressive Norman Mailer, protesting against the small number of women on the panels, and adamantly refusing to be slapped down until he paid attention.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of all was Margaret Thatcher. I met her twice, once in her heyday and then again in her last years. The first time I was instantly aware that I was in the presence of a first-class brain. She had a mind like a knife, and when you talked to her you needed to be on the top of your game; otherwise, she would tear you apart. We were dissimilar politically, but I was powerfully struck by that blazing intelligence. What I hadn’t expected was that she was also very touchy-feely. During that talk she put her hand on my forearm, later on my shoulder, while she asked solicitous questions. It was, of course, very disarming.

Years later I was invited to a London dinner in honor of Mikhail Gorbachev. He was no longer in politics by then but was raising money for the cancer foundation he cofounded in his late wife, Raisa’s, honor. My host whispered to me that Mrs. Thatcher might come to meet Gorbachev. “She probably won’t stay long, so come early if you want to meet her.” When she arrived Gorbachev went to sit with her and began asking her kind, personal questions, how was she doing, her health, and so on. But she had not come to be a little old lady. She had come to be the Iron Lady, and had prepared a series of perhaps half a dozen tough political questions to ask. I could see Gorbachev being taken aback by her determination, and then nodding and answering her as best he could. When she was done she was exhausted, and was led away. But she had used all her strength to remain who she was. She had been Margaret Thatcher.

I teach a graduate seminar at New York University these days, a course in creative nonfiction, and one of the joys of the work is watching bright young minds engage with writers as different as Joan Didion and the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, as Susan Orlean and Azar Nafisi. The writer who has excited me most in recent years is Elena Ferrante, and ever since her “outing” by an Italian journalist I have admired her even more, because now we know that her work is not disguised autobiography but a colossal work of imaginative entry into lives very unlike her own. I’m surrounded, at home, by the work of many admired women artists—
the Indian painters Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Navjot, and the brilliant American Kara Walker. I’m happy to pay tribute to these and many other strong, daring women who have done so much to shape my view of the world. Seems my grandmother’s ferocity really started something.

Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, The Golden House (Random House), is out now.

o o 

[SEE ALSO:

SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE ART OF FICTION NO. 186
Interviewed by Jack Livings
The Paris Review, Issue 174, Summer 2005
http://tinyurl.com/yca2frhk. ]

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18. HOW DOES IT FEEL? AN ALTERNATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY, TOLD WITH FOLK MUSIC | Daniel Wolff
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On Guthrie, Robeson, Seeger, Lomax, Dylan, the Red Scare, the fall of labor, and what folk music had to do with it.
http://tinyurl.com/y848kdrv

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19. HOW TO PARENT LIKE A BOLSHEVIK | Yuri Slezkine
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(The New York Times - October 30, 2017

The original Bolsheviks expected Communism in their lifetime. When that began to appear unlikely, they moved the deadline to the lifetime of their children.

“Fire cannot be contained,” Nina Avgustovna Didrikil, an employee at the Lenin Institute, wrote in her diary in 1920. “It will burst forth, and I am certain that if it does not burst forth within me, it will do so through my children, who will make me immortal.”

The path to the parents’ immortality was the children’s happiness. “You are happy, and you will be even happier when you realize just how happy you are,” wrote Didrikil in 1933 to one of her daughters on her 17th birthday. “You are the youngest and strongest, and the whole life of your society is young and strong. My wish for you, in your 17th spring, is that you continue to move closer and closer, in all your interests, feelings, and thoughts, to the camp of the youngest and strongest: to Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the true Bolsheviks.”

The most celebrated interpretation of children’s happiness in the Soviet Union was Constantin Stanislavsky’s production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play “The Blue Bird,” which had its premiere in 1908 and survived the revolution to become a required rite of passage for the children of the original Bolsheviks (and eventually the longest-running theater production of all time).

In the play, a little girl named Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl find the bird of happiness and release it into the world. In her diary, Didrikil described the Soviet Union as “that miracle-producing magic garden of Communism, from which blue birds fly to every corner of the world, spreading the news of Communist happiness.”

The key to finding the blue bird of happiness was education, and the sacred center of Soviet education was Alexander Pushkin. “We spoke of Pushkin as if he were alive,” wrote Lydia Libedinskaia, who attended the Moscow Exemplаry School in the 1930s. “We kept asking each other if Pushkin would like our metro, our new bridges that spanned the Moskva, the neon lights on Gorky Street.”

After ushering in the New Year of 1937, the 16-year-old Libedinskaia and her friends went to the Pushkin Monument in the center of Moscow. According to her memoirs, they gathered around Pushkin’s statue and took turns “reading his poems to him — one after another, on and on.”

    Suddenly, in the frosty silence of that New Year’s Eve, a boy’s voice, trembling with excitement, rang out:
    While freedom kindles us, my friend,
    While honor calls us and we hear it,
    Come, to our country let us tend
    The noble promptings of the spirit.
    It sounded like a vow. That is how, in solemn silence, warriors take their oaths. Happy are those who had such moments in their youth ...

    The snow kept falling, melting on our flushed faces and silvering our hair. Our hearts were overflowing with love for Pushkin, poetry, Moscow, and our country. We yearned for great deeds and vowed silently to accomplish them. My generation! The children of the 1920s, the men and women of a happy and tragic age! You grew up as equal participants in the building of the Soviet Union, you were proud of your fathers, who had carried out an unheard-of revolution, you dreamed of becoming their worthy successors ...

Many of these boys and girls would be killed during World War II, better known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War. Some would be arrested and sent into exile. Some, like Libedinskaia, would go on to welcome Khrushchev’s thaw and then Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Most would continue to be proud of their fathers. None would consider themselves their spiritual successors.

Bolshevism — and Marxism in general — had a remarkably flat conception of human nature: A revolution in property relations was the only necessary condition for a revolution in human hearts. The dictatorship of the proletariat would automatically result in the withering away of whatever got in the way of Communism, from the state to the family. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks never worried much about the family, never policed the home, and never connected the domestic rites of passage — childbirth, marriage and death — to their sociology and political economy.

No one knew what a good Communist home was supposed to look like, and no one came to check whether Nina Avgustovna Didrikil and her husband, the commander of the assault on the Winter Palace and later president of Red Sports International, Nikolai Ilyich Podvoisky, were reading Marx, Engels and Lenin to their children. They were not, and they were not expected to. They were reading Goethe, Heine and Tolstoy instead.

Most millenarian sects that survive the death of the first generation of believers are those that preserve the hope of salvation by maintaining a strict separation — physical, ritual and intellectual — from the outside world. The Bolsheviks, secure in their economic determinism, assumed that the outside world would join them as a matter of course, and embraced non-Communist art and literature as both prologue and accompaniment to their own. Even at the height of fear and suspicion, when anyone connected to the outside world might be subject to sacrificial murder, Soviet readers were expected to learn from Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes.

The children of the Bolshevik millenarians never read Marx, Engels or Lenin at home, and, after the educational system was rebuilt around Pushkin, Soviet children stopped reading them in school, too. At home, the children of the Bolsheviks read what they called the “treasures of world literature,” with an emphasis on the Golden Ages analogous to their own (the Renaissance, Romanticism and the realist novel, especially Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy).

What most of these books had in common was their anti-millenarian humanism. Some particular favorites, including “A Tale of Two Cities” and Anatole France’s “The Gods Are Athirst,” were expressly anti-revolutionary; most did the opposite of what the Bolsheviks preached by embracing the folly and pathos of human existence. The point of the golden ages, as opposed to the silver ones and any number of modernisms, is the affirmation of “really existing” humanity.

The books proclaimed as models at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 and imbibed religiously by the children of the original Bolsheviks were profoundly anti-Bolshevik, none more so than the one routinely described as the best of them all: Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” All rules, plans, grand theories and historical explanations were vanity, stupidity or deception. Natasha Rostova, Tolstoy’s protagonist, “did not deign to be intelligent.” The meaning of life was in living it.

Something else all those books had in common was that they were “historical” in the sense of being self-consciously concerned with the passing of time and with the past as a foreign country. The children of the Revolution did not only live in the past — they loved it for being the past and, like most readers and writers of historical fiction, tended to focus on lost causes: Scott’s Scots, Boussenard’s Boers, Cooper’s Mohicans, Sienkiewicz’s Poles, Mayne Reid’s Seminoles, Mérimée’s Corsicans, Pushkin’s Pugachev, Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Stendhal’s Napoleon and everything Dumas’s Musketeers pledged to preserve, from Her Majesty’s honor to the head of Charles I.

Even the great socialist classics, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s “Spartacus” and Ethel Voynich’s “The Gadfly,” were about Romantic self-sacrifice. And, of course, no one doubted that the greatest of them all was the one that focused on the most hopeless of lost causes: the pursuit of historical causality. Tolstoy did not deign to be intelligent.

Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks, who did not fear the past and who employed God-fearing peasant nannies to bring up their children, were particularly proficient in creating their own gravediggers.

The parents had their faith; the children had their tastes and knowledge. The parents had comrades (fellow saints who shared their faith); the children had friends (pseudo-kin who shared their tastes and knowledge). The parents started out as sectarians and ended up as priestly rulers or sacred scapegoats; the children started out as poets and ended up as professionals and intellectuals. The parents considered their sectarianism the realization of humanism — until their interrogators forced them to choose, and to die, one way or the other. The children never knew anything but humanism and never understood their parents’ final dilemma.

As Tyltyl and Mytyl discovered at the end of “The Blue Bird” (and at the beginning of their self-aware lives), the truth they were seeking had been with them all along: They were that truth.

Yuri Slezkine is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution.”

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20. WHEN KHRUSHCHEV DENOUNCED STALIN: A TURNING POINT IN SOVIET HISTORY | Charlotte Hobson
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(The Spectator - 10 June 2017)

The first glimmers of glasnost occurred with Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of 1956. Kathleen E. Smith celebrates his courage

Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring Kathleen E. Smith
Harvard, pp.423, £23.95

The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 passed off entirely without incident. Speeches on the next five-year plan were applauded and Stalin’s pet agronomist Lysenko made his customary appearance to denounce bourgeois genetics. A visiting communist from Trieste, Vittorio Vidali, noted his envy of two Uzbek party members who sat reading short stories throughout the proceedings. By late on Friday, the Congress was over, except for the announcement of one additional closed session the following morning.

How many delegates skipped this dreary-sounding extra session? Any that did missed the single pivotal moment in the history of the Soviet Union. Without preamble, Nikita Khrushchev stood up and delivered a report ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’. For over four hours he spoke to the hushed hall of the ‘exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of party democracy and revolutionary legality’ that had occurred during the latter part of Stalin’s reign. He was speaking out, but secretly — a confusing message that aimed to launch a programme of strictly controlled reform to invigorate the Party and, most importantly, to absolve the Party leadership of complicity in Stalin’s and Beria’s crimes.

Yet, as Kathleen E. Smith points out, 1956 could be used as a case study for ‘how dictatorships stumble into reform and cope with ambiguity of their own making … and the obstacles to controlled liberalisation’. Once delivered, Khrushchev’s revelations took on their own momentum. They set in motion a pendulum of reform and reaction that swung back and forth through the Brezhnev years and beyond. Intermittently hesitant and high-handed, the Party’s approach had the effect of emboldening both sides of the debate, which would culminate in Yeltsin’s appearance on a tank outside the Duma in 1991 and the collapse of the entire Soviet system.

In this fluent and engaging account, Smith describes the unfolding events of 1956 — the early bewilderment, as details of the speech filtered out to Party members and society at large, press responses as they began to explore ‘acceptable’ criticism, and the exhilaration of the younger generation at the new atmosphere. As Khrushchev rolled out his plans for reform, the Party repeatedly came into conflict with writers, scientists and students who overstepped the hazy official line. When dissent erupted in Poland and Hungary in the autumn, the Party panicked and clamped down. The year that had begun with the secret speech ended with a secret letter circulated to Party members, demanding increased vigilance against the ‘unhealthy moods’ inspired by the ‘worsening of the international situation’. The pendulum had swung away from trust and towards suspicion, although there were to be several more passes before Khrushchev was removed in 1964.

For all its initial promise, how much did this first, timid glasnost of 1956 achieve? The year saw the release and rehabilitation of vast numbers of people after Khrushchev openly admitted that accusations against them had been fabricated. Now, as Anna Akhmatova famously remarked, ‘the prisoners will return and the two Russias will look each other in the eyes; the one that imprisoned, and the one that was imprisoned’.

The exhausted returnees hoped to pick up the threads of their careers and relationships where they had been dropped years before; but of course in many cases the experiences of the intervening years were inescapable. It depended on individuals’ flexibility and their appetite for adaptation. The great chronicler of the Gulag, Varlam Shalamov, had no patience with his wife’s conformism, nor his daughter’s conventional attitudes. Even his relationship with Pasternak, whom he had idealised, foundered when he saw at first hand the poet’s selfish domestic arrangements. Compromise was not a part of Shalamov’s character, and one wonders how typical this was of older ex-prisoners.

For the young, however, the freedoms of 1956 were formative. Smith describes the ways they immediately began to test the boundaries of the new glasnost by protesting against conditions in the universities, for example. This most touching of youth movements was one of the great achievements of the Soviet Union. Too young to be compromised by the purges, members of the Thaw generation were brought up on Soviet ideals of social justice, altruism and honest labour. Their own children would consider them hopelessly idealistic. Yet they became more and more influential as the years went by: Gorbachev, among many others, counted himself as ‘a child of the Twentieth Party Congress’.

For all his vacillations, compromises and many flaws, Khrushchev’s courage comes through clearly in this account. Ever curious, he urged the Party to open up to the world. And although the Hungarian protesters were viciously crushed and dissenters were imprisoned, Stalin’s paranoid blood-lust, thank God, was never repeated. No doubt this was precisely what terrified Stalin for all those years: the thought that inside the murky soul of one or other of his henchmen lay a tiny, hidden spark of humanity. It’s fitting that it was the buffoon, Nikita Khrushchev, who overturned his master’s legacy. Dictators always seem to underestimate people who are willing to look ridiculous.

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21. FAUCHER’S REVIEW OF FROM VICHY TO THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: GENDER AND FAMILY LIFE IN POSTWAR FRANCE
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(Reviews in History - 2 November, 2017)

Book:
From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
Sarah Fishman
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780190248628; 296pp.; Price: £26.49
Reviewer:
Dr Charlotte Faucher
Queen Mary, University of London

‘Horrible, horrible, it’s horrible.’
‘Oh my! This is gorgeous.’
…
‘You are gonna catch a cold.’
…
‘Well if I stood next to her I would be the happiest man on earth.’

This is how a group of male bystanders reacted to two female models wearing mini-skits walking down a generic French street in the mid-1960s. The scene, part of a two-minute clip about a new item of clothing, ‘mini skirt’, was broadcast on the French evening television news program in 1966. The last part of the clip allows a few young women to explain why they chose to wear miniskirts: ‘because I like it’, ‘because it looks young’. A young female sales assistant concludes the short film by putting forward that the main criticism against young girls wearing miniskirts comes from older women jealous of not being young enough to wear such items of clothing.(1) The mini-jupe had made its appearance in French fashion the year before, provoking passionate reactions among French men, women and youth. As this clip reveals, a large section of French society interpreted mini-skirts as cultural and generational statements that forced parents to confront the possibility of sexual emancipation and wrought tensions among generations.

The issue of youth culture and fashion is but one of the themes in Sarah Fishman’s new book From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France. Fishman, who has previously authored two important monographs The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France and We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945, returns to the topics of gender and youth to analyse afresh how ideas of gender and family relations developed in post-war France. In publishing From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution Fishman makes important contributions to the dynamic historiography of the aftermaths of the Second World War in European societies (and the question of what French historians call sortie de guerre) but also to the on-going debates about the time-spam in which historians need to consider the events of 1968 and the sexual revolution.

Fishman analyses how and why ideas about women and men’s lives as well as perceptions of gender roles have changed in the 20 years that followed the Liberation of France in 1944. This timeframe allows her to articulate a nuanced approach to notions of continuity and rupture between the Second World War (when an ultra-conservative, collaborationist government established in the spa town of Vichy governed France) and the post-war period when the provisional government, followed by the Fourth Republic (established in 1946) sought to reject many of Vichy’s traditional ideals. She convincingly demonstrates that while ‘the immediate postwar years … fuelled a strong rejection of Vichy’s extreme backward glance’, conservative ideas about men, women, children and family relations did not disappear after 1944 (p. xv). The book ends just before the events of May 1968 and allows Fishman to consider changing gender relations in the backdrop of France’s economic recovery (Trente glorieuses), the growth of the welfare state and the rise of affluence and mass consumerism. She thus convincingly argues that the 1950s were a turning point for ideas of gender, family and sex (p. xxiii).

From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution relies on three sets of sources that allow Fishman to outline changing social trends concerning a broad range of topics connected to family relations and gender roles, from courtship, love and youth sexuality to spousal relations – to name but a few. Firstly, it examines guide books and pamphlets intended to instruct various audience about dating, marriage, or childrearing. Women’s magazines constitute the second corpus of sources. More specifically, Fishman analyses in depth Elle, the French magazine which was highly influential among urban, middle class women. Confidences, Antoinette and Constellation, which were less wide-spread than Elle but were aimed at more rural or working-class readers, also feature in the book. Fishman uses the magazines to get a glimpse into the issues discussed in their advice columns. Many readers wrote to these papers in the hope of obtaining advice on relationships with lovers, children and husbands, homemaking and, at the end of the period considered in the book, sexuality. Male and female journalists and (pseudo-)psychologists replied to some publicly, and in other cases privately. Some of the women’s magazines discussed in the book even had offices open for ‘consultations’. Marie-Claire, for example, had a clinic where a ‘psycho-technician’ would see both (female) readers and their children. While Fishman acknowledges that this inexpensive prescriptive literature does not give insights into the actual behaviours of parents, teenagers, and couples, she outlines that they nonetheless suggest ‘social ideas about the way families and individuals should operate defined certain behaviors as unacceptable, shaped social responses, and influenced how people interpreted their own actions and situations.’ (p. xvii). Recently Claire Langhamer has also emphasised the position of negotiation in which the agony aunt found herself as a figure who ‘mediated between the prescriptive and the subjective, operating in a blurred space where norms are rendered practical’.(2)

Thirdly, Sarah Fishman uses juvenile court cases from four different regions so as to reflect the diversity of France: Paris, the industrial region of the North, the rural region of the Drome located in the Vosges Mountains and finally the Bouches-du-Rhone region centered on the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles. As she explains in the introduction, ‘juvenile court case files represent a rich source, beyond the world of journalists and moralities for uncovering both changing material realities and social attitudes about families’ (p. xxi) most of whom were from poor, rural, working class or immigrant backgrounds. All three set of sources allow Fishman to delve into a fascinating ethnographic-like analysis of gender norms and conception of childhood in post-war French society.

The book is split into eight chapters, the first of which opens with a discussion on how French families experienced the end of the war. Firstly, Fishman explores the impact of homecomings of prisoners of war on French family lives and also the disruption caused by those American soldiers who remained on French soil after the Liberation.(3) Secondly, the chapter analyses how women’s wartime role in managing households shaped new expectations for post-war families and society. Politically, the historiography has so far largely insisted that the end of the war had led to women’s suffrage. Simultaneously, the roles of women within the home began to shift too. As Fishman argues, post-war France moved away from Vichy’s understanding that maintaining a home required sacrifice and self-abnegation on the part of women: housekeeping progressively became something that women ought to study and analyse as part of the growth of domestic sciences. Thus work inside the home was increasingly seen as work that required skills and ingenuity (p. 12). Using juvenile case reports, Fishman demonstrates that the role of men in families too began to be conceptualised differently by social workers. While prior to the war the latter thought of fathers as absent/ present figures ‘after the war, fatherhood was becoming a relationship’ (p. 15). To be sure, the prescriptive literature still put forward that male authority at home was necessary and desirable to husbands, wives and children; however, parenting was increasingly seen as a collaborative effort and a shared responsibility, hence the growth of contemporary anxieties over the figure of the ‘authoritarian wife’. As a result of the mounting attention social workers paid to fathers, they investigated family structures more closely. Nonetheless, the decisive factor in assessing children’s cases and whether they ought to remain in their families (rather than be sent to a foster family, a group home or a private institution for troubled youth), was parental affection for a child. As Fishman convincingly demonstrates, this trumped all class bias or racial prejudices.

The second chapter discusses the influence of publications by three key thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, who published The Second Sex in 1949, and Alfred Kinsey, who authored two studies of male and female sexuality published in 1948 and 1953 in the US and translated into French shortly after. Fishman compellingly reveals how the ideas developed by these thinkers progressively penetrated French society and served as base for a new language that psychoanalysts such as Françoise Dolto (4), but also journalists and social workers, employed to speak about parenting, children and intimate relationships. Relying on a detailed analysis of juvenile court cases and women’s magazines, Fishman demonstrates how varied spheres of French society, including parents and non-experts, appropriated psychological language, feminist ideas and new understandings of sexual behaviours and desires to analyse current issues.

The third and fourth chapters, titled ‘Marriage and parenting in the 1950s’ and ‘Children and adolescents in the 1950s’ highlight changing ideas about family members and the family as a unit. While society still expected women to marry (and most women still saw marriage as an important part of their destiny) important aspects within marriage such as the relationship between spouses and birth control began to change. As a result, a new way of thinking about sexuality and family relations developed. Interestingly, it moved away from wartime moral and religious arguments and relied far more on practical and psychological principles. Consequently fatherhood, motherhood and childhood too were redefined in the 1950s, in part owing to the popularisation of Freudian ideas and the developing science of education: children were seen as individual beings whose emotional experiences could have dramatic repercussion on their adult psychological states. In this section Fishman also meticulously researches the changing patterns in youth culture and the consequence of the growing affluence on French society and children more specifically. While the section does reference the influence of American culture, it could perhaps put a little more emphasis on the full significance the Americanisation of French culture had for French children and youth.(5)

By the 1960s, France had entered what Fishman calls a ‘post-psychology era’ in which Freudian terms were used in all types of publications from psychiatric journals to catholic writing (chapter five, p. 115). The second strand of chapter five contributes to studies of post-war affluence (6) by looking at gendered consumption and the limits of affluence among working class families investigated in juvenile court cases. As Fishman shows, in spite of the government’s role in spreading affluence through various welfare measures, many families continued to live in poverty. These families were often offered public loans, which consequently created debts; these presented the French government (and social workers) with a perfect opportunity to attempt controlling families’ budgets in a somewhat paternalistic fashion.

Chapter six looks at the impact of the democratisation of education in the 1960s on ‘Youth, women and jeunes filles (young girls)’ and the developing generational gap of the decade. This chapter is important in nuancing some of the dominant narratives on 1960s French youth culture. For example, a survey published by Elle in 1960 to which over twenty thousand ‘young girls’ had responded (most of whom were from educated urban middle-class families) indicated widespread conservative tastes: the respondents overwhelmingly preferred Albert Camus to Françoise Sagan whose Bonjour tristesse (1954) had shocked much of French society. 38 per cent of respondents also judged New Wave films as being ‘exaggerated’ (p. 154).

The introduction to the subsequent chapter ‘dating and courtship’ underscores a paradox that a growing number of French youth faced in the 1960s: ‘by the early 1960s, most observers … recognised that young women’s lives now included educational and professional aspirations. Yet many values and expectations about gender remained firmly in place’ (p. 162). For example, the double standard over the virginity of future husbands and wives prevailed: while flirting was accepted and sometimes encouraged, female magazines insisted that women ought not to go ‘too far’ before their wedding day. Even Orientation Nuptiale, one of the first dating services, reminding its female clients to respect the rule of ‘common morality’ (p. 172). To be sure, not all unmarried couples followed this rule. However, while in previous decades the prescriptive literature would have advised unmarried pregnant women to marry the father of the unborn child, in the 1960s this type of recommendation became less frequent and single motherhood began to be seen as a morally acceptable and financially possible option for young girls. This was in part supported by French family policy that guaranteed full access to family allowance and benefits to single mothers.

The final chapter ‘Something old, something new: marriage and children in the 1960s’ wraps together issues on domestic violence (with the French system offering limited recourse to women but increasingly protecting children), women’s sexuality (with a discussion of the growing anxiety concerning frigidity), adultery and divorce. While stigmas of divorce had lessened since previous decades, the act of divorce still represented a social and financial burden that weighed more heavily on women than men. The last couple of sections in the chapter deal with children and teenagers’ sexuality and the new instructions – to be found in the prescriptive literature and women’s magazines – that it was the role of parents to exchange information about sexuality with their children.

From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France is a clear, convincing account of post-war France which engages with a number of important discussions in modern European history. The originality of sources, the attention to the language deployed in the documents analysed and the focus on children within developing gender relations is especially valuable. Throughout the book, Fishman introduces elements of transnationalism and comparison with other European countries and with the US which will no doubt be of interest to all historians and students of gender, sexuality and childhood in the modern period.

Notes

1. My translation. ‘L’apparition de la mini-jupe’, ORTF, 1ère chaîne (Collection: Journal Télévisé de 20 H), 30 avril 1966, available on the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, INA <http://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu01069/l-apparition-de-la-minijupe.html> [accessed 14 September 2017].Back to (1)
2. Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution(Oxford, 2013).Back to (2)
3. The literature on this topic is vast and Fishman’s reliance on juvenile court cases allows us to understand how families were impacted by the end of hostilities. See also Bruno Cabanes et Guillaume Piketty, Retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre (Paris, 2009); Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do. Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago, IL, 2013); Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad, Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace (New York, NY, 2005); Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation, (Bloomington, IN, 2015).Back to (3)
4. On Dolto see the ongoing work of Richard Bates, especially Richard Bates, Psychoanalysis and Child-Rearing in Twentieth-Century France: The Career of Françoise Dolto (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017).Back to (4)
5. Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993).Back to (5)
6. Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (New York, NY, 2011).Back to (6)

November 2017

========================================
22. MOURNING POLAND’S BURNING MAN | Slawomir Sierakowski
========================================
(Project Syndicate - October 26, 2017)

Late in the afternoon on October 19, a 54-year-old man outside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw distributed several dozen copies of a letter addressed to the Polish people. Then he set himself on fire – a protest and sacrifice that called to mind the protests of Buddhist monks against the Vietnam War a half-century ago, and that of the Czech student Jan Palach against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1969.

The text of the letter that was left behind is eminently rational. It carefully enumerates and decries actions taken by Poland’s government that, according to Polish and international courts alike, amount to an attack on the rule of law and liberal democracy.

The letter accuses the government, controlled by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, of restricting civil liberties and undermining the judiciary. Specifically, it condemns the PiS for its discrimination against immigrants, women, LGBT people, Muslims, and others, and for destroying the environment, by supporting coal-based energy, hunting, and logging in Białowieża Forest.

More broadly, the letter also denounces “the people holding the country’s highest offices” for abdicating government decision-making to PiS Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, who holds no public office; and for converting public television and radio stations into PiS “propaganda organs.” And it laments that the PiS government has made Poland an “object of ridicule” on the world stage.

One of the man’s goals in immolating himself, according to the letter, was to force “the chairman of PiS and the entire PiS nomenklatura to recognize that my death is their direct responsibility, and that they have my blood on their hands.” The man hoped that his act of protest would influence PiS supporters – 47% of the population, according to the latest polls – who should not want their favored policies to be enacted in ways that undermine democracy and the rule of law.

But the letter also implores the party’s opponents – 16% of Poles support the largest opposition party – “to remember that PiS voters are our mothers, brothers, neighbors, friends, and colleagues.” As such, they should not be vilified, but rather reminded of “the rules of democracy.” The letter concludes by calling on all Poles to “wake up” and change their government before it causes irreparable damage to the country.

So far, all we know about the letter writer is that his first name is Piotr, and that he is currently in critical condition, with burns covering 60% of his body. But, despite his anonymity, his ideas are resonating through Poland.

In a separate letter to the media, Piotr warned that the PiS would attempt to minimize his act of protest. “Their first point of attack,” he predicted, would be to point out that he suffers from depression. “I am what you could call a mentally ill person,” he wrote. “But there are millions like me in Poland, and somehow they manage to function more or less normally.” Piotr’s plea is clear: please do not confuse depression with insanity.

In Poland, the reactions to Piotr’s self-immolation have been mixed. At first, the media were rather silent, with the exception of a few opposition pundits who spoke out to hold the PiS responsible. In response to this criticism, Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak, tried, as predicted, to attribute Piotr’s action to his depression. Błaszczak then described Piotr as “a victim of the opposition’s all-out propaganda, which proclaims that they are fighting the government in the streets and abroad.”

Meanwhile, the renowned Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland issued a strong rebuke against liberal media outlets that would attribute Piotr’s protest to mental illness. It is an “act of extreme moral laziness,” she wrote on Oko.press, to explain “such extreme civic despair and self-sacrifice as a result of depression, mental illness, and a related desire to end one’s own life.”

Holland speaks from a position of authority on this topic. She is the daughter of Henryk Holland, an anti-Communist dissident who committed suicide in 1961. And in 2013, she made an HBO miniseries about Palach’s self-immolation in Wenceslas Square.

For my part, I believe the Polish people should heed the message that Piotr conveyed in his letter. Even if his actions did stem from some personal crisis, they should not be written off as the behavior of an irrational person. After all, we can’t possibly know more than the man himself about his intentions. He deserves to have his stated motives and opinions known, discussed, and taken seriously.

But Piotr’s act should not be made a spectacle in Poland’s political fight, or wielded haphazardly as a blunt object against the PiS or anyone else. As the World Health Organization states in its guidelines for journalists covering suicides, “Suicide should not be reported as unexplainable or in a simplistic way.” Moreover, suicide victims should not be glorified as “martyrs and objects of public adulation,” lest other “susceptible persons” come to think “that their society honors suicidal behavior.”

After an act of despair such as what Poland witnessed this month, the first priority should be to mourn the victim. The second should be to channel the despair that many are feeling in ways that nurture hope.

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23. TRUMP, ASSANGE, BANNON, FARAGE… BOUND TOGETHER IN AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
by Carole Cadwalladr
========================================
(The Guardian, 29 October 2017)

The WikiLeaks founder’s astonishing admission should prompt MPs finally to start asking questions

Julian Assange was asked by Cambridge Analytica if he wanted ‘help’ with Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Last Wednesday, 11 months into Donald Trump’s new world order, in the first year of normalisation, a sudden unblurring of lines took place. A shift. A door of perception swung open.

Because that was the day that the dramatis personae of two separate Trump-Russia scandals smashed headlong into one another. A high-speed news car crash between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks, the two organisations that arguably had the most impact on 2016, coming together last week in one head-spinning scoop.

That day, we learned that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that helped Trump to power, had contacted Julian Assange to ask him if he wanted “help” with WikiLeaks’s stash of stolen emails.

That’s the stash of stolen emails that had such a devastating impact on Hillary Clinton in the last months of the campaign. And this story brought WikiLeaks, which the head of the CIA describes as a “hostile intelligence service”, directly together with the Trump campaign for which Cambridge Analytica worked. This is an amazing plot twist for the company owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, which is already the subject of investigations by the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI and, it was announced late on Friday night, the Senate judiciary committee.

So far, so American. These are US scandals involving US politics and the news made the headlines in US bulletins across US networks.

But it’s also Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company that has its headquarters in central London and which, following a series of articles about its role in Brexit in the Guardian and the Observer, is also being investigated, by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company that was spun out of a British military contractor, is headed by an old Etonian and that responded to our stories earlier this year by threatening to sue us. It’s our Cambridge it’s named after, not the American one, and it was here that it processed the voter files of 240 million US citizens.

It’s also here that this “hostile intelligence service” – WikiLeaks – is based. The Ecuadorian embassy is just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Cambridge Analytica’s head office. Because this is not just about America. It’s about Britain, too. This is transatlantic. It’s not possible to separate Britain and the US in this whole sorry mess – and I say this as someone who has spent months trying. Where we see this most clearly is in that other weird WikiLeaks connection: Nigel Farage. Because that moment in March when Farage was caught tripping down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy was the last moment the lines suddenly became visible. That the ideological overlaps between WikiLeaks and Trump and Brexit were revealed to be not just lines, but a channel of communication.

‘Nigel Farage, who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange.’ Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Because if there’s one person who’s in the middle of all of this, but who has escaped any proper scrutiny, it’s Nigel Farage. That’s Nigel Farage, who led the Leave.EU campaign, which is being investigated by the Electoral Commission alongside Cambridge Analytica, about whether the latter made an “impermissible donation” of services to the leave campaign. Nigel Farage who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange. Who is friends with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Who headed an organisation – Ukip – which has multiple, public, visible but almost entirely unreported Russian connections. Who is paid by the Russian state via the broadcaster RT, which was banned last week from Twitter. And who appears like clockwork on British television without any word of this.

This is a power network that involves WikiLeaks and Farage, and Cambridge Analytica and Farage, and Robert Mercer and Farage. Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Farage. It’s Nigel Farage and Brexit and Trump and Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks… and, if the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee and the FBI are on to anything at all, somewhere in the middle of all that, Russia.

Try to follow this on a daily basis and it’s one long headspin: a spider’s web of relationships and networks of power and patronage and alliances that spans the Atlantic and embraces data firms, thinktanks and media outlets. It is about complicated corporate structures in obscure jurisdictions, involving offshore funds funnelled through the black-box algorithms of the platform tech monopolists. That it’s eye-wateringly complicated and geographically diffuse is not a coincidence. Confusion is the charlatan’s friend, noise its accessory. The babble on Twitter is a convenient cloak of darkness.

Yet it’s also quite simple. In a well-functioning democracy, a well-functioning press and a well-functioning parliament would help a well-functioning judiciary do its job. Britain is not that country. There is a vacuum where questions should be, the committees, the inquiries, the headlines on the TV bulletins. What was Nigel Farage doing in the Ecuadorian embassy? More to the point: why has no public official asked him? Why is he giving speeches – for money – in the US? Who’s paying him? I know this because my weirdest new hobby of 2017 is to harry Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who was Ukip and Leave.EU’s main funder, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms man and Belize’s trade attache to the US, across the internet late at night. Wigmore told me about this new US venture – an offshore-based political consultancy working on Steve Bannon-related projects – in a series of tweets. Is it true? Who knows? Leave.EU has learned from its Trumpian friends that black is white and white is black and these half-facts are a convenient way of diffusing scandal and obscuring truth.

What on earth was Farage doing advancing Calexit – Californian Brexit? And why did I find a photo of him hanging out with Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian known in the US press as “Putin’s favourite congressman”? The same Dana Rohrabacher who’s met with Don Trump Jr’s Russian lawyer and – wait for it – also visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. And who is now interceding on his behalf to obtain a pardon from Don Trump Junior’s dad.

(You got this? Farage visited Trump, then Assange, then Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher met Don Trump’s Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Then Assange. And is now trying to close the circle with Trump.)

In these post-truth times, journalists are fighting the equivalent of a firestorm with a bottle of water and a wet hankie. We desperately need help. We need public pressure. We need parliament to step up and start asking proper questions. There may be innocent answers to all these questions. Let’s please just ask them.

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24. USA: JERRY FALWELL JR.’S PARABLE OF TALENTS | Rick Seltzer
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(Inside Higher Education, November 1, 2017)

Falwell calls Liberty University the Fox News of academia. But where is one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters taking the university he and his family built?

http://tinyurl.com/y9qmpsz7


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
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Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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