Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Monday, January 31, 2022

America is Already at War With Itself

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Articles depicting the decline of democracy in the United States now abound. They have become a dime a dozen, particularly since the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. They describe a country in disarray that many observers feel is coming unraveled.

The legitimacy of its elite has been shaken repeatedly, and faith in the electoral process itself is now rapidly declining among large segments of the electorate. Stagnating middle-class incomes and rising inequality has resulted in economic insecurity in broad regions of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war has even entered political discourse. Increasing numbers of Americans claim they would actually prefer to declare war on those of their fellow citizens who have become “incorrigible enemies.”

They are confident that the military is so strong that in any conflict the federal government is simply assured of victory. But they forget something.

The most significant political split in America is between rural areas and coastal metropoles, and the armed forces are reliant, as far as recruiting soldiers goes, on the very areas it would be tasked with policing.

The more that brutality would be used against fellow Americans, the more these soldiers would be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family-- a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.

You don’t have to look to other countries where the military dissolved into rival units during civil war, as has happened in the Irans and Lebanons of the world. America has its own example: the 1861-1965 war that saw tens of thousands of Americans die at the hands of fellow citizens.

Last Dec. 17, three retired U.S. army generals warned of an insurrection or even civil war if the results of the coming 2024 presidential election were not accepted by some in the military.

Former Major Gen. Paul Eaton, former Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, and former Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson made the warnings in an op-ed in the Washington Post. They wrote that they were “increasingly concerned” about the 2024 election and the “potential for lethal chaos inside our military.”

The generals highlighted the “disturbing number” of veterans and active-duty members of the military that took part in the Jan. 6 incident.

According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement Dec. 17-19 among a random national sample of 1,101 adults, the percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 per cent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by the Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades.

The political right and left increasingly loathe each other and believe the other side is out to destroy the country. They praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose.

Bizarrely, President Biden went to Georgia on Jan. 11 to talk about election security. The core of his message was that future elections could well be rigged and stolen! It reflects how much the partisan wars continue to rage across the country.

Canadian novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator Stephen Marche has just published The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States; he thinks that the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Marche describes a Trump rally where a reporter spotted Republicans wearing shirts that read, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”

The damage from inflation, assaults on the rule of law at the southern border, and the lawlessness pervading major American cities arguably pose more serious threats to American democracy than the prospect of a sequel to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Liberal democracy is a fragile system because it rests on the principle that citizens will respect the right of democratic representation even for those with whom they strongly disagree. In today’s America, both sides are failing that test. America is engaged in a war with itself.

 

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

NATO’s Drive to the East and the Russian Reaction

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We have been bombarded over the past few months with relentless news coverage of a non-event: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But who is really the aggressor?

In December, Russia demanded of the United States and the NATO alliance that they sign a formal agreement that they would cease their activities to bring certain countries, particularly Ukraine and Georgia, into NATO membership and to place offensive weapons, particularly missile systems, within a broader range of countries within Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow has backed up these demands by deploying 100,000 troops near Russia’s border with Ukraine.

We are told that Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal is no less than the reclamation of the old Soviet empire, conveniently ignoring NATO’s ongoing attempts to expand its own force to Russia’s borders.

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the accompanying end of the Cold War, NATO has been expanding eastward. NATO member Germany was reunited in 1990, and its eastern section, the former Communist German Democratic Republic, became part of the alliance. In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, all formerly Soviet satellite states within the Warsaw Pact, were admitted.

Other former Communist states followed: by 2004 seven more counties – Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia — had joined. As well, three former republics of the USSR itself, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were welcomed that year.

NATO also saw the accession of Croatia and Albania in 2009, of Montenegro in 2017, and of Northern Macedonia in 2020. These, also, are former Communist east European entities. Even Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state in internal turmoil, is under consideration.

Russia has been clear and consistent in objecting to NATO’s expansion to the east as a threat to its vital security interests. It has been especially sensitive to any expansion into the former republics of the Soviet Union. These include Ukraine and Georgia, which are the current subjects of dispute. And though the United States for almost 30 years has thought that it could ignore the perspective of the Russian security elite, the Russians think this has gone far enough.

The expansion of NATO to include the Baltic states had already brought this American military organization, indeed an American commonwealth of nations, right up to the Russian border. Estonia is only 150 kilometres from St. Petersburg and the three Baltic countries are located astride the military approaches to all of Russia lying between St. Petersburg and Moscow. But the Boris Yeltsin-led Russia of the 1990s was a weak state in internal chaos and unable to do much about this.

Of course it’s easy to say that the Russians are “evil,” and hence their fears should be of no concern. An example of this popped up recently in a remark by former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt:

“I see that Russia complains that the West has a ‘lack of understanding’ of the Kremlin’s security demands. That’s entirely correct. Virtually everything they’ve said in the last few weeks about NATO or Ukraine suddenly becoming a threat to Russia is pure invention. Factually wrong.”

In Bildt’s eyes, it is a verifiable truth that NATO does not threaten Russia. Any claims to the contrary from Russia are “factually wrong.” Therefore, NATO should not make any concessions to Russia.

Maybe Russia is indeed “wrong” in its assessment of NATO, but that incorrect assessment is driving what it does. From Russia’s own subjective position, things look differently. NATO’s claims that it is a purely defensive alliance might ring hollow after its attacks on Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Libya in 2011. Russians might well conclude that maintaining a strong military is the only guarantee they have of not meeting the same fate.

Perhaps Vladimir Putin has taken note of a recent article, “The U.S. must prepare for war against Russia over Ukraine,” by Evelyn N. Farkas, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia in the Obama administration, and as former senior adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander, NATO.

“U.S. leaders should be marshalling an international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war,” she writes.

Also totally ignored is that Ukraine is more divided than many realize. It has a very substantial Russian population, especially in the east, many of whom wish to retain close ties to Russia. As for Crimea, which until 1954 had been Russian for centuries, ethnic Russians comprise 68 per cent of the population, followed by Ukrainians at 16 per cent, and Tatars at 12 per cent.

Putin has reiterated his commitment to the Minsk II settlement aimed at ending the fighting in the Russian majority eastern regions of Donbas and Luhansk, brokered with Kyiv in 2015 by France and Germany but never implemented. Why? It’s the Ukrainian nationalists in Kyiv who have been reluctant to grant autonomy to these areas.

The end of the Cold War could well have ushered in a new partnership between Washington, the European Union and Moscow. Instead, the expansion of activities into areas where the West has had no compelling strategic interest has brought forth renewed conflict. We are living in dangerous times.

 

 

Monday, January 24, 2022

Germany’s Far Left Party is Fading Away

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Germany’s Die Linke (The Left) Party, deeply divided over priorities, suffered a disastrous collapse in last September’s German federal election, winning just 4.9 per cent of the vote.

As this fell short of the five per cent threshold required to guarantee a proportionate number of seats in the Bundestag, it has clung on only because of a rule stipulating that a party with a majority in at least three electoral districts (out of 299) is entitled to form a parliamentary group.

But the erosion in support was spectacular for a party which had achieved 12 per cent in 2009 and 9.2 per cent in 2017. This time it received just 2.3 million votes, scarcely more than half its 2017 total of 4.3 million. And its parliamentary party has been reduced to 39 MPs from 69 in the last parliament, out of a total of 736.

Fifteen years after the old Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in East Germany fused with ex-finance minister Oskar Lafontaine’s split from the Social Democrats (SPD) to form a unified socialist force, Die Linke’s future as a viable party and leading force in the European left is hanging by a thread.

Die Linke united two distinct groups. One was trade unionists and former social democrats disappointed by their party’s change of direction; the other was the heir to East Germany’s former ruling party. Thanks to its roots in the eastern Lander (states), the PDS had passed the five per cent threshold in 2005 for the first time since German reunification in 1990.

Die Linke flourished because it filled a vacuum. That cycle seems to be over. It has been losing its strongholds, even in the eastern states, where its numbers have halved in ten years, from 20 per cent to 9.8 per cent.

The dominant explanation for the defeat, within party ranks, is that voters turned their backs on Die Linke because of its constant infighting and inability to speak with a unified voice. Most blame is leveled against Die Linke’s former parliamentary speaker Sahra Wagenknecht, who resigned from that position in 2019 following a long public feud with former party cochairs Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger.

Wagenknecht’s latest book, Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous), was a three-hundred-page attack on her political opponents and what she calls “lifestyle leftists,” for whom being left-wing has become a question of culture and taste rather than material or class interests. The book left many in Die Linke feeling betrayed and many party members refused to campaign for her.

But the party has indeed struggled to define its role in Germany’s political landscape. Is it a protest party devoted to fundamental opposition, or a left-leaning corrective to the Social Democrats? A platform for disenfranchised East Germans, or one oriented toward the progressive intelligentsia and activists?

The latest example of this ongoing indecision came in late August, when the German parliament voted to deploy the armed forces to evacuate German citizens and government employees from Kabul as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. As the only party to have consistently opposed the war in Afghanistan, Die Linke should have been well-placed to reassert its claim as the only credible antiwar party.

Instead, it resolved to abstain on the vote, a compromise reflecting divisions among its MPs, some of whom think the party should drop its opposition to NATO in order to be more in tune with the zeitgeist. Even this failed to hold, however, with five Die Linke MPs voting in favor of the deployment and seven against.

During the election, Die Linke’s leadership campaigned in favor of a “red-red-green coalition” – the colours of Die Linke, SPD and the Greens. The result of this policy of adaptation was a disaster. Over a million former Die Linke voters switched to the other left of centre parties.

So who did stick to Die Linke? A demographic breakdown reveals the party won only six per cent of union members, five per cent of workers, and three per cent of voters without a college degree, suggesting that the heaviest losses were among the most disenfranchised. Its message now seems to hold little appeal for its traditional support base in the former East Germany or among the working class.