There Are Reasons Why Democracy Fails in Africa

 By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Virtually every country in sub-Saharan Africa is a colonial construct that makes no sense ethnically, linguistically, and in most cases, religiously. Control of government is a zero-sum game, where one group’s gain, in terms of political power, resources, or influence is an equal loss for another,

Two recent examples are the disputed elections held in Cameroon and Tanzania. (A coup ahead of elections was recently thwarted in Benin.)

Most Cameroonians have only known one leader: President Paul Biya, who is 92 years old and has been in the presidential palace since 1982. The country is a union of a predominantly former French colony, and a smaller British one. The past decade has seen the outbreak of a violent separatist struggle in the nation’s two anglophone regions, where militants are fighting for independence.

In late 2016, peaceful protests started against what was perceived to be the creeping use of the francophone legal system in the region’s courtrooms. The French- and English-speaking parts of Cameroon use different judicial systems. In late 2017, anglophone separatist leaders declared independence for what they called the Federal Republic of Ambazonia. It has led to thousands of deaths.

Meanwhile there is also unrest in the Far North region, where the Islamist Boko Haram has been active since 2013. Boko Haram is an offshoot of local communities, and though far more active in neighbouring Nigeria, it is not a foreign group. There is no real social distance between Boko Haram militiamen and the local population and it is in fact a movement integrated into the local context.

Prior to the Oct. 12 vote, Biya had clamped down on political opposition, jailing hundreds of peaceful protesters, including Maurice Kamto, the runner-up in the 2018 presidential election. He had been freed only after heavy international pressure.

“I’m not sure Biya would have allowed these crises to escalate today,” opposition politician Tamfu Richard said, suggesting that Biya’s years have hampered his ability to resolve national crises. “He’s unable to go to those zones due to his age to actually feel the pinch.”

That didn’t stop him from contesting the most recent election. First of all, he disqualified Kamto from running. A main opponent then became Ndam Njoya, the mayor of Foumban and chairwoman of the Democratic Union for Cameroon (UDC). As a member of parliament, she was a member of the Forum of Women in Africa and Spain for a Better World and a member of the African Parliamentary Union. The 56-year-old politician’s election campaign slogan was “Freedom. Justice. Progress.”

The election produced a wave of violence. Many people were killed during protests in Cameroon’s economic capital of Douala, ahead of the official announcement of results in the highly-contested election. The regional governor, Samuel Dieudonné Diboua, claimed police posts had come under attack and security forces had defended themselves. Opposition figures estimate the death toll at 55.

“The violent crackdown on protesters and ordinary citizens across Cameroon lays bare a deepening pattern of repression that casts a dark cloud over the election,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, remarked. And yes, Biya won, securing 53.66 per cent, in case you were wondering.

In Tanzania, Chadema party opposition leader and former presidential candidate Tundu Lissu was arrested and charged with treason and his party was barred from participating in the Oct. 29 election. The charge was connected to his nationwide campaign pushing for electoral reform under the slogan “No Reforms, No Election.” The only other serious contender, Luhaga Mpina of the ACT-Wazalendo party, was disqualified on legal technicalities.

Many could not see this coming. When current President Samia Suluhu Hassan first came to power in 2021, after the death of President John Magufuli, she was praised for reversing some of his more authoritarian tendencies.

Her “four Rs” policy – “reconciliation, resilience, reform and rebuilding” -- reopened Tanzania to foreign investors, restored donor relations and mollified the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. But over the last two years the targeting of government critics and opposition voices is said to be more ruthless now than it ever was under Magufuli.

Campaigners and opposition parties accused the government of an intensifying crackdown on political opponents as the voting neared, citing arrests and abductions of opposition members.

No surprise: She belongs to one of the longest-reigning parties in Africa, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), which has run Tanzania for over five decades.

The result was a foregone conclusion, with Samia ostensibly gaining 97.6 per cent of the votes. Protests escalated in major cities across Tanzania as opposition supporters denounced the election as a sham. The Tanzanian government deployed the military and ordered a curfew. Reports indicate that no less that 1,000 people had been killed. Independence Day celebrations Dec. 9 were banned.

While the unrest was unprecedented, it had been preceded by a political climate marked by stalled reforms and youth anger. The CCM leveraged its unlimited powers to tilt the political landscape in its favour. Genuine political competition now seems at an all-time low, raising questions about the future of the opposition as well as the direction of democracy in Tanzania.

On the other hand, Samia was lauded on Zanzibar, from where she hails, as the country’s first president from Tanzania’s semi-autonomous archipelago. The split may have widened.

 

Today’s “Anti-Zionist” Propaganda Was Nurtured in the Soviet Union

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

For centuries, Jews have been portrayed, by both religious and secular movements, as obstacles to universal order. Christian theology turned Judaism into the emblem of stubborn particularity. Modern ideologies secularized the script, making Jews stand for capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, or cultural decay. In the twentieth century, this logic reached its most lethal form in the fantasy of human renewal through the erasure of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.

The twenty-first-century iteration recycles the same template in overlapping ways. Islamist movements merge “Jew,” “Zionist,” and “Israeli” into a demonic category whose elimination is a sacred duty. Parts of the Western left have reduced Israel to the very symbol of colonial domination.

What North American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of anti-Zionism spreads in left-of-centre spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s Soviet Union. Just like antisemites battle against a fantasy of “the Jews” that exists in their own heads, the new anti-Zionists battle a “Zionism” that is conjured up by their own fevered imaginations.

Following the June 1967 war, with Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbours, who were intent on destroying the small Jewish state, anti-Zionism became a central tenet of Soviet propaganda, where “Zionism” was usually equated with self-conscious expressions of Jewishness. It was then that the antisemitic notion of Israel as an heir to Nazism and Fascism was popularized in the Soviet media.

It depicted Israel as the outpost of colonial oppression, Jews as betrayers of socialist internationalism. Soviet propagandists distorted the history of Zionism to underscore its supposedly inherent evil nature, ripping its founders and theorists out of historical context and, absurdly, presenting Zionists as the Jewish people’s greatest enemy. These “rootless cosmopolitans” were accused of corrupting socialism from within. By redefining Jews as racists, Zionism as colonialism, the Soviets handed progressives a vocabulary of virtue through which to disguise an old hatred.

In political cartoons and Soviet propaganda art, swastikas were routinely intertwined with Stars of David, and the Israeli military portrayed as resembling Nazi -- and specifically SS -- troops. If there is a Soviet propaganda subtext that highlights its ideological and propagandistic roots, it would be “Fascism Under a Blue Star,” the 1971 book by Evgeny Evseev, who had served as an Arabic interpreter for both Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, he had became one of the principal brains of the ultranationalist antisemitic movement in the USSR, know as the “Russian Party.”

Evseev’s book carried a subtitle redolent of Marxist clichés: “Truth about contemporary Zionism: Its ideology, practice, and the organizational system of major Jewish bourgeoisie.” On the illustration printed next to the title page, there was a black spider with both a swastika and a Star of David on top of its body; the spider’s web was spread over the West, from the United States to Britain, France and Italy.

Perhaps the vilest of all these tracts was “Caution: Zionism! Essays on the Ideology, Organisation and Practice of Zionism,” a 1970 attack by Yuri Ivanov. (By the way, it was republished by a left-wing group, The November 8th Publishing House, in Toronto in 2024.) The book’s singular achievement was to fit classic antisemitic conspiracy theory into the only philosophical framework permitted in the USSR -- the Marxist-Leninist one -- and rewrite it as anti-Zionist critique.

“Ivanov managed to supply a strong theoretical foundation for openly criticizing Zionism with the help of Marx’s and Lenin’s works, which no one could argue against,” Vladimir Bolshakov, another prominent “Zionologist,” recalled in his memoirs. I remember coming across it in the late 1970s while writing my PhD dissertation on Jews and Communism, and was shocked by its vituperative language and tone, not to mention falsehoods, worthy of the worst Nazi propaganda.

All of this bore terrible political fruit. On November 10, 1975, the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism. It remains the foundation stone of antisemitic anti-Zionism. It cast Israel, the collective Jew, as committing today’s ultimate crime. Despite being mass-murdered by Nazi racists, Jews became racists. And despite enduring history’s largest genocide, Jews are now accused of “genocide.”

Communist propagandists enjoyed manipulating words to trigger “Pavlovian” responses, the Princeton Kremlinologist Robert Tucker observed; their “ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.”

Much has been written of late about the deep Soviet roots of today’s virulent anti-Zionism in the West. Some thirty-five years after the fall of the Soviet empire, the Soviet corpse continues to emit its infectious gases and poisons people’s minds and imaginations. After 7 October, parts of the Western Left responded not with horror but with slogans lifted from Soviet propaganda: Israel as colonial, Zionism as apartheid, Jews as global oppressors.

Today’s anti-Zionism is not actually concerned with the relationship Jews have with Israel. It is a project centered on producing villains. In this, it follows its predecessors: antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Antisemites were never concerned with the authenticity of Jewish identity, practice, or behaviour; they sought to construct “the Jew” as a monster.

Anti-Zionism repeats this mechanism, simply substituting “the Zionist” for “the Jew,” while inheriting the same foundational hatred. Failing to recognize that anti-Zionism, whose Soviet and Nazi genealogy reveals that it has nothing to do with Jews and their right to self-determination, is fundamentally a project of constructing fiends.

Antisemitism functions not merely as a prejudice but as a moral language, a grammar that shapes how societies explain disorder and assign blame. It provides simplicity where reality is complex and coherence where the world feels incoherent. For such people, it becomes a battle against a uniquely devious and implacable foe – something that cannot be resolved by elections or arguments, but only by confrontation. The logic points beyond persuasion to elimination.

The only way to be anti-Zionist without being an antisemite is to reject the legitimacy of all nation-states equally. The loudest supporters of Palestinian statehood are not doing that. No one should mistake it, or be taken in by those espousing it, for what it is. We should call it, along with antisemitism and anti-Judaism, as “Jew-hatred.” It is nothing more – or less.

 

Trump Warns Europeans Against Loss of National Identities

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The Trump administration on Dec. 6 warned that Europe was facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” The United States should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism. It is now, it seems, America’s official policy to support populists like Britain’s Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen in France, and Alice Weidel in Germany.

The National Security Strategy (NSS), a 33-page document released to lay out his administration’s foreign policy priorities, “a road map,” according to the president’s own introduction, “to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”  The NSS does not determine policy but rather sets out the government's foreign policy vision. It can, of course, be overtaken by world events.

It states that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it recommends that American policy should help Europe “correct its current trajectory” over the course of the next several decades. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

The document also accuses the European Union and other “transnational bodies” of undermining liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech and trampling on basic principles of democracy to suppress political opposition. U.S. government officials and tech tycoons like Elon Musk have launched an assault on the EU over the European Commission’s decision to levy a $140 million fine on X for violating EU transparency rules, which was widely derided as an attempt at “censorship” of Americans. (Musk suggested Dec. 7 that the bloc should be “abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries.”)

Trump doubled down on his view, denouncing Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people, in an interview with POLITICO Dec. 12, belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct,” he added.

Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23 had already foreshadowed the contents of the NSS document. “Europe is in serious trouble. They have been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody has ever seen before,” Trump remarked. “It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. Your countries are going to hell.” He referred to the situation as an “unmitigated immigration disaster.” He also attacked the UN for the aid it gave to asylum seekers. “The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.”

Europeans reacted to the document with horror regarding the threat to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt claimed the document “places itself to the right of the extreme right.” The president of the European Council, Antonio Costa, admonished Trump against interfering in Europe’s affairs. On Dec. 8, he said the idea that Washington would back Europe’s nationalist parties was unacceptable.

Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, Eurasia programme at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, concluded that political meddling in Europe to back far-right nationalists was now “a core part of America’s national strategy. This isn't just a speech from a novice VP weeks into a new term. It is U.S. policy and they will try to implement it.” The first election Washington might try to influence would be Hungary’s parliamentary ballot in April next year. (Hungary’s Trump ally Prime Minister Victor Orban also criticized the EU’s fine for X.)

Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Instituto Affari Internazionale, in “Does Europe Finally Realize It’s Alone?” an article published Dec. 5 in Foreign Policy, wrote that Europeans had “lulled themselves into the belief” that Trump was “unpredictable and inconsistent, but ultimately manageable. This is reassuring, but wrong.”

The Trump administration has “a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritises U.S.-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces,” she contended. In Russia, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did indeed welcome the document as “largely consistent with our vision” and a “positive step.”

The U.S. has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the European Union. There are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly opposed to U.S. interests and security, including censorship, economic suicide, climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty, promotion of multilateral governance, and so on. For Trump, this inconsistency cannot continue.

But Trump knows he has the upper hand. The NSS pinpoints Europe’s decline. Europe constituted 25 per cent of global economic output in 1990; today, that figure has fallen to 14 per cent. The document notes that Europe’s economic and political weakness has given rise to a general lack of self-confidence. The Atlantic alliance is now in uncharted waters.