Anti-Immigrant Politicking Has Merkel on the Defensive

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is running scared.

Clearly, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is nipping at her heels. She is now shifting to the right in an attempt to win next September’s German federal election.

The AfD is the first populist party likely to clear the five-per-cent threshold required to land seats in the Bundestag. In recent state elections, it has siphoned votes from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after capitalising on anger in parts of the German electorate over her liberal refugee policy.

It now has seats in 10 of Germany’s 16 states.

Though Merkel’s party remains the frontrunner, the AfD is currently polling at about 12 per cent nationally.

At the recent CDU party conference in Essen, Merkel, who has led Germany for 11 years, confirmed she would run for a fourth term. But she acknowledged the election would be more difficult than any other she has contested.

Merkel’s decision, in the summer of 2015, following the escalation in the Syrian civil war, to suspend all external border controls and the usual rules on refugees, resulted in a record influx of nearly 1.1 million refugees and migrants, mostly from predominantly Muslim countries.

Merkel’s opponents have blamed the policy for the mass sexual assaults last New Year’s Eve in Cologne and two recent terror attacks by ISIS supporters. So her government is now addressing public fears surrounding the issue.

In an about-face, Merkel has now called for a public ban on the Muslim full-face veil in some areas of public life — such as courts, schools and universities, as well as in road traffic and during police checks.

A full ban is considered incompatible with Germany’s basic laws.

To the applause of about 1,000 delegates, she called the burqa and niqab not compatible with German culture.

“Here we say ‘show your face,’ ” she said. “So full veiling is not appropriate here. It should be prohibited wherever legally possible.”

A year ago, the CDU had rejected such a ban.

She also promised that honour codes or Islamic Shariah law would never replace German justice. “That has to be expressed very clearly.”

Merkel told the party conference that last year’s large influx of refugees would not happen again. A situation like that of 2015 “should not be repeated.”

She stated that refugees had found protection in Germany against war and persecution in their troubled homelands. But, she added, “not every refugee can stay.”

She also stressed it was legitimate for Germany to expect newcomers to integrate.

Her government has moved to toughen asylum rules and to declare several countries “safe” — meaning people from there cannot expect to receive protection in Germany.

Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister and one of Merkel’s closest allies in the CDU, had already proposed a partial burqa ban last August. He called the veils “contrary to integration.”

He said the law would apply in “places where it is necessary for our society’s coexistence.”

All this is taking place within the context of rising populist and anti-immigrant sentiment throughout much of the continent. Politicians who play on nationalism and worries about economic disenfranchisement are on the rise.

Is the current flow of Europe’s politics now also working against Merkel?

Only Clinton Responsible for Her Defeat

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Hillary Clinton has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged cyber attack of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail server and FBI director James Comey’s investigation of her own e-mails for losing the presidential election.

Speaking to campaign donors in New York Dec. 15, she said Putin’s actions were “an attack against our country.”

The American political and media establishment has for weeks been in a state of hysteria over Russian interference in the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump – as if Clinton would otherwise have certainly won.

Let’s assume that the Russians hacked the DNC e-mails and had them leaked. First off, remember this: Putin didn’t actually fix the election, in the sense of electronically “stuffing” ballot boxes long-distance and creating a false victory for Trump.

The Russians simply released true information to WikiLeaks. They didn’t spread “false news” – the e-mails were not forgeries.

They revealed the corruption and collusion by those running the DNC, such as Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in order to defeat Bernie Sanders.

What the Democrats are now saying is that the American electorate should not have known about these shenanigans -- because they then voted for the “wrong” candidate. 

It’s hard to believe unemployed rust belt voters who helped elect Trump paid much heed to any of this anyhow, or that they were swayed by Putin.

As for those Americans who did bother to read them, they certainly, as American journalist Doug Henwood wrote Dec. 13 in of the London-based Guardian, “discovered precisely how cynical and empty the Clinton operation was.”

It’s also easy to blame James Comey, the director of the FBI, for the trouble that the private e-mail server scandal caused, but the decision to set that up was hers. Had she used the State Department’s own system, there would have been nothing to investigate.

Maybe Clinton should look in a mirror if she wants to lay blame. She lost because she failed to engage the millennial and the minorities Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. She spent most of August with the elites in Hollywood, the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard fundraising instead of meeting with the working class across the country.

Her refusal to hold press conferences, her dismissal of the Goldman Sachs speeches, her assumption that identity politics would suffice, her high-handed comments about Trump supporters being a “basket of deplorables,” and her assumption that the presidency should be hers by “divine right” – all these were far more important matters.

Anyhow, if foreign hacking is tantamount to an attack on the nation, maybe there should also be an investigation to determine whether foreign nations curried favor with the Clintons with their multi-million dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, and what they expected in return when Clinton was supposed to become president.

The election wasn’t an exam, where the voters gave the “wrong” answer. In a democracy, regardless of what the Russians or the FBI did, Americans had the right to vote for Trump and not for Clinton.

Now the mainstream press has taken to running endless articles warning their readers about Trump’s subservience to Putin, his anti-democratic tendencies, and his existential threat to their liberty.

Two typical examples in the Dec. 18 New York Times: Nicholas Kristof, “Trump: The Russian Poodle,” and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “Is Our Democracy in Danger?”

They make Trump sound like a cross between the Nazi collaborators and puppets like Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy France and Vidkun Quisling in occupied Norway. It’s not even very subtle as propaganda.

Dutch Politician Convicted of Inciting Hatred

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Whatever one may think of his politics, one thing is certain: Geert Wilders certainly has the courage of his convictions.

A populist Dutch politician who is the founder of the nationalist right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV), he is its leader in the House of Representatives, the lower assembly of the nation’s bicameral parliament.

An agent provocateur par excellence, Wilders in 2008 caused protests in the Muslim world for a short, online film which showed verses of the Qu’ran next to images of extreme violence and terrorism.

In 2011 Wilders was acquitted of hate speech, but he was less lucky this year. On Dec. 9 he was convicted of inciting hatred by a Dutch court. However, he received no penalty or punishment.

The charge stemmed from a March 2014 incident during the country’s municipal elections in which Wilders urged his supporters to chant that they wanted fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. Members of the Dutch Moroccan community pressed charges.

Wilders denied any wrongdoing, saying the comments he made are protected as free speech.

But the three-judge judge disagreed, finding that Wilders had overstepped the limits by specifically targeting Moroccans.

“For the first time, Wilders has been condemned for racism and discrimination,” said Abdou Menebhi, one of the people who registered a complaint.

“Today, I was convicted in a political trial which, shortly before the elections, attempts to neutralise the leader of the largest and most popular opposition party,” Wilders responded. “They will not succeed.”

Regardless of the verdict, “no one will be able to silence me.” He mocked the court, tweeting that it had convicted “half of the Netherlands.” He intends to appeal.

His anti-Islam, anti-immigration rhetoric has propelled him to the top of Dutch polls. Some of them suggest the PVV is today the most popular party in the Netherlands, on track to win some 36 seats in the 150-seat lower house if elections were held now. It currently occupies 12 seats in parliament.

On the other hand, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s centrist People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) would get 23 seats compared with the 41 seats it won in the 2012 elections. Labour (PvdA) would get 10 seats against the 38 it won then. The two parties currently govern the country in coalition.

Last August the PVV released its one-page manifesto ahead of the March 2017 legislative elections.

Under the PVV proposals, mosques, Islamic schools and asylum centres would be closed; the borders would be shut down with a blanket ban on migrants from Islamic countries; women would be forbidden from wearing a headscarf in public; and the Qu’ran would be banned.

The party also pledged to withdraw from the European Union and has called for a vote on it as soon as possible.

Pressure from people like Wilders has had an effect. In November the Dutch government agreed to a partial ban of the wearing of full-face veils in public places such as schools, hospitals and on public transport.

The motion was approved by 132 members in the 150-seat house, including Rutte’s ruling VVD- PvdA coalition.

However, this doesn’t go far enough as far as Wilders is concerned, because it does not ban wearing full-face coverings on the street. He remains a man who continues to attack the country’s liberal political culture.

Empires Often Decay from Within

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

Empires, after a long period of international reverses and inner political decay, often expire, as T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” may suggest, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

This was the case with two of the mightiest imperiums on earth, separated by more than 1,500 years – Rome and the Soviet Union.

On Sept. 4, 476, the last day of the Roman Empire in the west, Odoacer, a member of the Germanic tribe Siri and former commander in the Roman Army, who had entered the city unopposed, easily dethroned the sixteen-year-old emperor Romulus Augustulus.

The one time military and financial power of the Mediterranean was unable to resist and disappeared.

Fast forward more than 15 centuries to Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991, when the last Communist president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, like Rome, had been one of the mightiest powers on earth.

By then, most of its 15 constituent republics had effectively seceded from the federation.
Even its core, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, had declared its independence under its leader Boris Yeltsin, who had assumed its presidency on June 12, and it would emerge as the Russian Federation.

In a nationally televised speech, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president. He declared the office extinct and handed over its functions, including control of the Soviet nuclear codes, to Yeltsin.

A state whose Communist Party had for more than seven decades exercised totalitarian control over the economy, administering all industrial activity and collective farms, and which controlled every aspect of political and social life, was no more.

Gorbachev had come to power in 1985, following decades of rule by old apparatchiks. He inherited a stagnant economy, an onerous arms race with the United States, a debilitating war in Afghanistan, and a restive group of Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe, in particular Poland, whose fierce sense of nationalism had grown in the wake of the election of a Polish pope, John Paul II.

Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. The first of these was known as glasnost, or political openness.

Glasnost gave new freedoms to Soviet citizens. Political prisoners were released. Newspapers could print criticisms of the government. For the first time, parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.

The second set of reforms was known as perestroika, or economic restructuring. The best way to revive the Soviet economy, Gorbachev thought, was to loosen the government’s grip on it. Individuals and cooperatives were allowed to own businesses for the first time since the 1920s. Workers were given the right to strike for better wages and conditions.

However, these reforms were slow to bear fruit. Perestroika had torpedoed the “command economy” that had kept the Soviet state afloat, but the market economy took time to mature.

In his farewell address, Gorbachev summed up the problem: “The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working.”

He also withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and declared a policy of non-intervention in the Warsaw Pact states. The first revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, soon followed by others.

Not surprisingly, the desire for sovereignty spread to the Soviet republics themselves. It was a tsunami that swept away one of the world’s largest empires by the end of 1991.

The USSR committed many crimes, especially against its own citizens, and no one should mourn its passing. But no one should forget what it stood for, however imperfectly, either.

Its values included altruism, self-sacrifice, the elevation of group over individual concerns, and the rejection of materialism. This bound people together and gave them a sense of meaning.

That this became intertwined with the cruelty and mass murder that eventually destroyed it was a twentieth-century tragedy.

The McCarthyism of the Left

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
From the end of the Second World War to the downfall of Senator Joe McCarthy, America was consumed by an anti-Communist “red scare.”

People on the left, mainly Democrats, were accused by Republicans of being “fellow-travellers” and “fifth columnists” on behalf of the Soviet Union and its dictator, Joseph Stalin.

There were blacklists that led to people being fired from their jobs and ostracized, and many lives were ruined.

In 1948, right-wingers insisted that presidential hopeful Henry Wallace was just a Communist puppet. Today, it seems, the tables are turned.

With the election of Donald Trump, it is now Democrats whipping up anti-Russian hysteria by claiming that Vladimir Putin helped the Republican candidate defeat Hillary Clinton by interfering in the presidential election.

The charge of being a tool of the Kremlin, levelled against Trump and his supporters, is part of the left’s campaign to de-legitimize the incoming president. Might we call it McCarthyism 2.0?

During the presidential campaign, the Democrats and the mainstream media (especially the Washington Post) repeatedly warned of the supposed endangerment to the country’s national interest by the apparent ideological affinity between Trump and Putin.

Stories also regularly appeared in the press regarding Trump’s business interests overseas, as well as those of his associates, implying that he would be “soft” on Russia due to his ties there.

In late October NBC News reported that the FBI was looking into business dealings between ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russian politicians and businessmen. He denied any business relationship with the Kremlin, calling the charge “Democratic propaganda.”

Then there were the stories alleging that Russians had hacked into the communications of the Democratic National Committee and the private emails of influential individuals, notably Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and then leaked the contents onto the internet.

By the end of August, several leading Democratic lawmakers had asked the FBI to investigate senior Trump campaign advisers for collusion in the suspected Russian hacking. Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin said the Trump campaign had multiple advisers with deep ties to Russia.

“The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, Wikileaks and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity and merits full examination,” wrote Harry Reid, the Democratic Minority leader in the Senate, to FBI director James Comey.

In early September, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter warned Moscow that Washington “will not ignore attempts to interfere with our democratic processes.”

Trump’s victory has only made things worse. On Dec. 9 President Obama ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the presidential campaign, after intelligence officials reported that the CIA concluded that Putin was not just trying to undermine the election, but had also acted to give Trump an advantage.

Eric Schultz, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters that the president wanted this done under his watch because “he takes it very seriously.”

And Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are pushing for a broad investigation. Do they hope to lay the groundwork for future impeachment proceedings?

The Democrats will also pounce on the fact that Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, has struck several major deals with the Russian state-run corporation Rosneft and has a personal relationship with Putin.

This frenzy remains part of America’s enduring Russophobia. Twenty-five years after the collapse of Communism, why do people still assume Russia is capable of nothing but evil?

Now that Obama has himself become a McCarthyite, “Tail-gunner Joe” must be laughing in his grave.

Actually, with Trump’s ascendancy, maybe Americans can liberate themselves from their Cold War discourse. The world doesn’t need a new period of American-Russian enmity.

India and Israel Forge a Growing Partnership

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

The Israeli-American relationship, already under strain during the Obama presidency, enters a new period of uncertainty with the election of Donald Trump. Jerusalem’s ties with Europe have also deteriorated.

As a consequence, Israel seeks closer bonds with other major powers. One of these is India.

Twenty-first century geopolitics are bringing Israel and India closer together. The force driving this is Islamism, from which both these democracies are under attack. 

As well, India faces a hostile nuclear-armed state, Pakistan, next door, which it accuses of supporting jihadis and fomenting violence in Muslim-majority Kashmir, while Israel is concerned that its main adversary, Iran, may be in the process of acquiring a nuclear capability. 

As a reaction to these external threats, the secular political left, once led, respectively, by the Congress Party in India and the Labour Party in Israel, has been displaced in government by the hard-line nationalists in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Likud.

India formally established full diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992, but under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in office since 2014, ties between the two nations have greatly expanded. His election elicited an enthusiastic response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

India has begun denouncing Palestinian suicide bombings and other terrorist acts in Israel, and is no longer initiating anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations. 

In 2015 it abstained from voting on the UN Human Rights Council’s condemnation of Israel’s actions during its conflict with Hamas in Gaza a year earlier; all the European countries on the Council voted in favour. It was the first time in decades that India abstained from a decision against Israel in an international forum. 

After all, India’s historically pro-Arab stance in the Middle East has not been adequately reciprocated and rewarded by the Arab world. It has received no backing from Arab countries in the resolution of problems it faces in Kashmir. On the contrary, Arab nations have firmly stood by Pakistan.

This flourishing friendship was highlighted with the eight-day visit to India in mid-November by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

“We noted the strength of our growing defence partnership and agreed on the need to make it more broad-based through production and manufacturing partnerships,” Prime Minister Modi said at a joint press conference in New Delhi.

“Our people are constantly threatened by forces of terrorism and extremism. We recognize that terrorism is a global challenge, knows no boundaries and has extensive links with other forms of organized crime.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, India found itself with outdated military hardware and equipment that were unsuitable for combat. At the same time, the Israeli defence industry was developing electronic upgrades to improve the capabilities and extend the life cycle of military platforms such as planes, ships, and tanks. So India has now become Israeli defence companies’ largest customer. 

But the commercial ties between the two nations also include water treatment, telecom products, optics, metals, aviation, agriculture, diamonds, chemicals and medical equipment.  India is Israel’s third largest trading partner in Asia, just after China and Hong Kong.

Bilateral non-defence trade stands at about $5 billion. Shraga Brosh, the president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, has said that he and his Indian counterpart have agreed to work “to triple trade and cooperation between our two countries in the coming years.”

In a speech before the Israel-India Innovation Partnership, Rivlin told listeners that “India is a top trading partner for Israel today. Together, we have built a powerful and strong market. And together we must work to make this market even stronger.

“I express here today an official Israeli hope that this visit to India will open the way to a full free trade agreement between our countries.” Rivlin’s assertion could provide fresh momentum to the conclusion of the agreement, which has remained elusive despite negotiations having begun more than six years ago.

During Rivlin’s stay in India, the two countries signed cooperation agreements in agriculture and the management of water resources. Rivlin observed that there are already programs that bring thousands of Indian farmers to Israel, and that expanding these initiatives would greatly improve their quality of life. 

He added that India can leverage Israel’s expertise in water management through technological solutions and “greatly benefit” from it.

Israel also signed more than 20 education collaboration agreements with India and its institutions of higher learning. “Ten percent of all foreign students and scholars in Israel today are from India, and 40 joint research projects were supported by both governments,” Rivlin said. “I truly believe that the academic cooperation between India and Israel is a top priority for both nations, both people.”

Hindu-majority India has no history of anti-Semitism, and the country is a favorite destination for Israeli tourists, especially young Israelis taking time off after completing their army service. 

The Israeli president laid a wreath at the tomb of Mahatma Gandhi, and visited the sites of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks by Pakistani-based Islamists, which killed 195 people, including nine Israelis. 

“Nearly eight years ago, this wonderful city was the victim of one of the most terrifying, brutal and murderous terror attacks. Indians are no strangers to the threat and to the reality of modern global terrorism,” Rivlin said. 

An anticipated visit by Modi to Israel next year would demonstrate that a new era of Indian-Israeli relations has truly begun.

The Rise of European Populism

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer:

Throughout Europe, as issues revolving around economic stagnation and national identity become ever more salient, populist parties are becoming stronger. 

Though their specific policies may differ, they all share a rejection of the established liberal order, and demand strong governments to carry the fight against immigration.

The most visible is the National Front (FN), which some analysts think may even be poised to win power in the French presidential election next spring.

Marine Le Pen, the daughter of co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been the head of her party for almost six years.

Her followers insist that Islam constitutes a threat to the country’s very future. And like most of her fellow populists, Le Pen blames membership in the European Union, already weakened by the Brexit vote in Britain last June, for its troubles. “We want to destroy this EU,” she has declared.

If Le Pen becomes president, she will push for a referendum based on the British model. “I want to regain control over our currency,” she insists, “and our borders.” Le Pen is an economic nationalist who believes in a strong role for the state within the capitalist system.

Remarked Florian Philippot, one of Le Pen’s main advisers, “Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built.”

Another player in the populist surge has been Nigel Farage, the former leader of Britain’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), one of the main supporters of Brexit. “Our life has changed,” he boasts. “There are plenty more shocks to come.”

Some of these “shocks” are already potentially on the horizon. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for March in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders of the radical anti-Islamist Freedom Party (PVV) is ahead in the polls, while Germans will vote in the fall of 2017 for the next Bundestag.

Frauke Petry of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is planning to announce her candidacy for chancellor in the election, which is likely to see the AfD win seats in the federal parliament for the first time.

Even Czech President Milo Zeman, a social democrat, wants his government to pursue a “foreign policy based on our own interests” rather than kowtowing “to pressure from the United States and the EU.” He is also critical of what he considers to be the “organized invasion” of the continent by Muslims. 

In neighboring Slovakia, the Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party came second in the March parliamentary election. 

SaS leader Richard Sulik told Slovaks that he did “not want to live in a Europe where more Muslims are born than Christians -- and I’m an atheist.”

Meanwhile, Austria held a rerun of its 2016 presidential election on Dec. 4. Last May’s result was declared invalid after irregularities in the counting of postal votes.

Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the Freedom Party (FPO), the far-right nationalist movement originally formed in the 1950s by former Nazis, had seen his support surge due to worries over immigration as well as weak economic growth. 

Hofer, who campaigned on an “Austria First!” slogan, asserted that he wanted to lead a country that was secure “for our children and grandchildren.” But he lost to a former Green Party politician, Alexander Van der Bellen, by 53.6 to 46.4 per cent.
Italy held a constitutional referendum the same day, with a different outcome. 

There, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) asked voters to approve a constitutional law that would streamline Italy’s government, including slashing the size of the Senate from 315 members to 100. 

It was opposed by the anti-establishment, anti-globalist and Euroskeptic parties: the Five Star Movement (M5S), founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo, and the Northern League (LN), led by Metteo Salvini. 

The referendum lost by some 20 per cent, and Renzi resigned. Salvini called it a victory against “the bankers, the financiers,” while Grillo claimed that now “Sovereignty belongs to the people.” Both parties will be major factors when the country elects a new parliament.

American journalist John Judis, in his recently published book The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, contends that these European populists are benefitting from the current rage against their financial and political establishments.

Far-Right Populist Party Loses Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Austria may have dodged a right-wing bullet on Dec. 4. The country held a rerun of last spring’s presidential contest, after that result was declared invalid by Austria’s constitutional court after irregularities in the counting of postal votes.

Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the Freedom Party (FPO), the far-right nationalist movement originally formed in the 1950s by former Nazis, was beaten by a former Greens politician, Alexander Van der Bellen, by 53.6 to 46.4 per cent.

Hofer had garnered some support from mainstream conservatives in the People’s Party, one of the country’s two mainstream parties, which declined to throw its weight behind Van der Bellen. The Social Democrats, the other major party, did back the winner.

The FPO is anti-foreigner, anti-Islam and anti-globalization. The party saw its support surge due to worries over immigration as well as weak economic growth.

Memories of last year’s Europe’s migration crisis, in which nearly one million people passed through Austria, a country of 8.4 million, are still fresh.

Hofer promised to “put Austria first” by introducing strict border controls and banning the burqa. “Islam is not a part of Austria,” Hofer said recently. “The kind of politics that is permitting a changing face of Austria and Europe has to be opposed.” He wanted, he asserted, to lead a country that was secure “for our children and grandchildren.”

Johann Tschurtz, the FPO’s deputy governor of Burgenland, a border region next to Hungary, also attributed the party’s popularity with a rejection of “elites” in Vienna, the Austrian capital.

“All the actors, the artists in Vienna are against Norbert Hofer -- and, yes, the comics, too. The ordinary voters don’t like that,” he maintained.

Hofer’s election would have sent shockwaves through Europe, as it would have made him Europe’s first far-right head of state since the Second World War.

He had made clear that he wanted to be an interventionist head of state, threatening to dismiss a government if it raises taxes and calling for referendums on a range of issues.

Hofer is also an irredentist, who in 2015 indicated that he’d like to incorporate South Tyrol, the German-speaking province in northern Italy that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into the Austrian state.

He has since proposed offering dual nationality to citizens of the autonomous province.
The claim was made on the basis of ethnicity and history. The region, known as Alto Adige by Italy, was annexed by Rome in 1918, following the Austrian defeat in the First World War.

Yet despite dictator Benito Mussolini’s attempt to “Italianise” the area by forbidding German and pushing through Italian vocabulary and culture, the population remained German-speaking.

After the Second World War, despite the region being granted autonomy, the locals continued to fight, sometimes even with violence.

They are Italian citizens but simply don’t feel Italian; German is spoken the vast majority of the 510,000 inhabitants of the region. Polls conducted in 2013 noted that 46 per cent of South Tyrol’s population would favor their secession from Italy.

Any attempt by Austria to reopen the issue would have led to yet more friction in an already fragile European Union.

The 'No-Go' Bastions Inside European Cities

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The year 2016 has seen a spare of major terrorist attacks, as well as lesser crimes of violence, across Europe.

Most of the perpetrators of these crimes live in so-called no-go zones, enclaves that are almost exclusively populated by Muslims in otherwise prosperous cities.

Some are now becoming separate Islamic societies where sharia, the Islamic legal and moral code, is effectively replacing the country’s own legal system.

These are areas of high unemployment, especially high youth unemployment. Young people in these places, marginalized and with few prospects, feel like victims.

They are fertile ground for radical Islamic preachers and they become prime targets for jihadist propaganda, often after a stint in jail for petty crimes.

In the streets of Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris, extremists are recruiting extensively. Philippe Galli, Saint-Denis’s most powerful French official, has admitted that the police are too frightened to enter alone most areas under his control.

“The children of immigrants don’t recognise as their values those values that attracted their parents to France,” he added.

Cities like Strasbourg have similar areas, such as the neighbourhoods of  Meinau and Neuhof. There are now 572 no-go zones in the country, officially defined as “sensitive urban areas.”

The German towns of Dinslaken, Duisburg, and Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia have also become hotbeds of Islamist radicalization. The adherents are younger than they used to be, and their radicalization happens over a shorter period of time, according to the Federal Criminal Office.

In Duisburg there are neighborhoods where the police hardly dare to stop a car, because they know that they'll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men. These attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to the authority of the state -- attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing their contempt for our society,” reported Rainer Wendt, President of the German Police Union.

In effect, the no-go zones -- Saint-Denis in France, Maalbeek in Belgium, Norrebro in Denmark, Tensta in Sweden, Duisburg in Germany, among many others -- are states within a state that provide shelter for radicals who may become terrorists.

A study released in September by the liberal Montaigne Institute in Paris reported that 60 per cent of French Muslims support the right to wear the hijab headscarf in schools and other public institutions, while 29 per cent said sharia should be more important than French national law.

These findings are very troubling to most people in the country, a nation proud of its secular republican identity.

“But restricting such practices causes wounds that go much deeper than the prohibitions themselves: It allows Islamists to exaggerate the implications and accuse France of Islamophobia,” according to Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the Ecole des hautes études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In Denmark, the Immigration Ministry has sought to avoid what it calls “parallel societies” of migrants living in “vicious circles of bad image, social problems and a high rate of unemployment.”

Muslims do not assimilate as easily as Europeans or some Asians, asserted Denmark’s culture minister, Bertel Haarder, partly because their patriarchal culture frowns on women working outside the home and often constrains freedom of speech.

 In a book written with journalist Thomas Larsen, Danish Queen Margrethe suggested that some immigrants and refugees have failed to properly integrate into society.

“It’s not a law of nature that one becomes Danish by living in Denmark. It doesn’t necessarily happen.”

As Leon Hadar, senior analyst at Wikistrat, a geostrategic consulting group, wrote in the National Interest in September, Western secular liberals seem ideologically unable to confront this problem, so the reaction has been the growth of xenophobic anti-immigrant parties such as the French National Front and the Alternative for Germany.

Pessimists wonder whether Europe’s secular cultures will survive.

The Arab Spring and the Fall of Communism

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

It’s been five years from the time when the series of uprisings known as the “Arab Spring” began in the Middle East, while a full 27 years have gone by since the regimes in the Soviet-bloc states in eastern Europe began to crumble.

Why was one set of revolutions largely a failure, while the other, despite occasional setbacks, largely succeeded?

The similarities between them are clear. The degree of corruption and political sclerosis in both sets of countries meant their regimes all lacked legitimacy, so change was indeed “over-determined.”

Their respective ideologies -- in the one case, Marxism-Leninism, in the other, pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism -- had become empty shells.

When such hollow regimes are revealed for what they truly are, any event in any one of them might begin a succession of revolutions across all those countries that shared the same pattern of political erosion.

The uprisings were, nonetheless, largely spontaneous and without prior planning, with little organized leadership at first.

Both were triggered by a specific event: in one, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Ben Arous, Tunisia who set himself on fire in protest of the corruption and harassment from the authorities Dec. 17, 2010.

In the other, the mistaken rumor that a student demonstrator, Martin Smid, had been beaten to death by riot police during a demonstration in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Nov. 17, 1989.

In eastern Europe, liberal capitalist systems replaced the totalitarian regimes and power structures in almost all of the states quickly and peacefully. They almost literally evaporated within weeks.

The exceptions were Romania, where a “strongman” refused to give up power, and Yugoslavia, a multi-national state that fell victim to ethnic war.

Not so in North Africa and the Middle East. There, states had differing organizations of power, so their adaptability, resistance to change and willingness to use force caused them to have different outcomes.

In Egypt, the fall of the dictator initially brought to power a Muslim Brotherhood government, soon overthrown by the military.

In Libya, an autocratic regime led by a psychopath and based on fear was only dispatched after much bloodshed, and has left a power vacuum.

Syria has been engulfed in a horrific many-sided ideological and ethno-religious civil war, with hundreds of thousands dead. A smaller version of the same sectarian strife has also affected Yemen.

Finally, Tunisia, where it all began, did escape the terrible outcomes in the other countries, but its democracy remains shaky at best.

Outside interference in the case of eastern Europe was minimal. The Soviet Union stepped aside and signaled it would not use force to retain control, and the United States also kept its distance.

In the Middle East, though, the implosion led to a power struggle between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, with each providing arms and money to the warring factions.

Another major difference was the role of religion. Other than in Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church was a major factor in the demise of the Communist system, religion played a minor role in the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, and continues to be relatively marginal in the post-Communist era.

As well, the newly emancipated eastern European states sought, and received, guidance from their western European neighbours as they transitioned away from totalitarianism.

With the Arab states the reverse has been the case. Islam in this region is a strong ideological alternative to liberal capitalism, with aspirations to become a dominant political force.

Islamist groups have taken advantage of the uncertainty and insecurity that followed the collapse of the old order, and have proposed theocratic alternatives to the people.

They are now a power to be reckoned with throughout the region and a counterweight to those advocating liberal democracy.

A Work in Progress

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The American re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba may prove to be outgoing President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement. So how are things progressing?

Last March, Obama visited Cuba and told its people that “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”

His visit was the culmination of fifteen months of diplomatic engagement, which began when the U.S. and Cuba announced the restoration of relations, on December 17, 2014.

It was the first visit of an American president since the Cuban Revolution, and the first since the United States imposed more than fifty years of diplomatic and commercial isolation on the island.

In visiting Havana, Obama was hoping that his presence could accelerate an opening in Cuba’s economic and political institutions, while President Raul Castro wanted to gain international credibility and legitimacy without making too many political concessions.

The private sector has grown exponentially since Raul Castro began a program of economic reforms in 2010, allowing hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers, such as restaurateurs, barbers, and cabdrivers, to sell their services directly to customers.

A year later Cubans were given the right to buy and sell their own homes and cars, to start an expanded range of businesses, and to travel freely.

So is a reconciliation under way between the two nations? To some extent, of course. Since launching in May, Carnival Corporation’s cruise line Fathom has been running trips every other week to Cuba.

The first direct commercial flight between the U.S. and the island in over a half-century took place on Aug. 31. Soon, up to a maximum of 110 daily flights operated by U.S. carriers are due to begin flying to the island.

On Sept. 27, despite some Republican objections, Obama nominated Jeffrey DeLaurentis be the first U.S. ambassador to Cuba since the two countries broke off relations 55 years ago.

The U.S. on Oct. 26 abstained for the first time in an annual UN General Assembly condemnation of the half-century-old American trade embargo against Cuba. It was the first time Washington did not oppose the motion, proposed every year since 1991. 

But Fidel Castro, who died last week, remained suspicious of American designs on the country, and wanted to uphold the gains made since 1959.

Referring to Obama’s appeal to “forget the past and look to the future,” Castro responded, in Granma, the Communist Party’s newspaper, that no one should “succumb to the illusion that the people of this noble and self-abnegating nation will ever renounce the glory, the rights, and the spiritual bounty won with its achievements in education, the sciences, and culture”

At the seventh Communist Party Congress held in April, Fidel told the delegates that “the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervour and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without truce to obtain them.”

So Cuba has not become an American friend just yet. Havana’s resentment over the more than five-decade embargo, which remains in place, is still strong despite the renewal of diplomatic ties with Washington. It can be annulled only by Congress, where support for it remains.

And Donald Trump’s election victory will probably make it even harder to lift it.

Turkish Minority in Bulgaria Often Persecuted

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The centuries-long Ottoman Empire rule over Christian peoples in the Balkans was never accepted as legitimate. However, some did convert to Islam, in many cases in order to benefit from becoming part of the rulers’ own faith.

As the Turks were slowly driven out, such people were often left “stranded,” as it were, a residue in newly-sovereign Christian states that were not very hospitable to these remnants of Islamic empire. They were viewed as a reminder of Turkish Ottoman domination.

Bosniaks and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia faced hardship, including two major wars, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, in the 1990s.

Less well-known is the persecution suffered by Turkish Muslims in Bulgaria during that period.

Three decades ago, the Communist regime in Sofia started to assimilate the Turkish minority by force. Bulgarian Turks had to change their names and were no longer allowed to speak Turkish in public.

In 1984, army and police units surrounded the Kardzhali district in southern Bulgaria, fairly close to the Turkish border, and home to the bulk of the Turkish minority. The Turks received new identity cards and all previously existing minority rights were revoked.

Resistance mounted, and by 1989, the Communist rulers in Sofia realized that the situation was spiraling out of control. Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov decided that only a mass emigration of the Turkish minority to Turkey could ease the pressure.

Fortunately for the Turks, the Communist regime collapsed soon afterwards.

As Bulgaria transitioned to a post-Communist political order, parliament unanimously voted that Turks and other Muslims could again use their own names. Still, the majority of the 300,000 emigrants never returned.

The 1991 post-Communist Bulgarian Constitution contained a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” So the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSDP), successor to the Communists, asked the country’s Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional a new political party formed by the beleaguered Turkish minority.

However, the Court affirmed the legality of the new Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), which today largely represents Bulgaria’s Turkish and other Muslim ethnic minorities.

As Bulgaria moved towards trying to gain admission to the European Union, in 1999 parliament ratified a resolution for the protection of minorities. The country joined the EU in 2007; it is also a member of NATO.

Today Bulgarian Turks represent about 10 per cent of the country’s population of 7.3 million. The DPS party won 38 of 240 seats in the Bulgarian election of 2014, with 14.8 per cent of the total vote (including 83 per cent of Turkish voters), and is the third biggest party in the National assembly.

Its opponents consider the party to be excessively pro-Turkish, in contrast to Slavic Bulgarians, who, as Orthodox Christians, historically have tended to sympathize with Russia.

In December 2015 Lyutvi Mestan, chairman of the DPS, was expelled from the party following a declaration he had made in support of Turkey following the downing of a Russian fighter aircraft by Ankara a month earlier.

Mestan then founded a new party, DOST, an acronym which stands for Democrats for Responsibility, Solidarity and Tolerance in Bulgarian, but spells and sounds like a word for “friend” in Turkish

Is There a Resurgence of Hungarian Anti-Semitism?

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

With the rise of Victor Orban and his Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz), a nationalist party now dominates Hungarian politics.

In 1988 Orban helped found the party, initially as a youth-oriented liberal anti-Communist group. But under Orban’s guidance, it began to move to the right, especially since its landslide victory in the 2010 national election. In 2014, it took 44.87 per cent of the vote, winning 133 of 199 seats.

He now hopes to lead a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe, in which liberal ideas like helping refugees are supplanted by identity-based notions of family, community and Christianity, with the European Union stripped of its powers to force asylum-seekers onto unwilling countries.

With political freedom has come a renewed sense of Hungarian nationhood, and Orban has tapped into this nationalistic mood. He even questions Hungary’s membership in the EU.

Hungarian Jews have reason to be alarmed by this, as there are unpleasant precedents to this type of rhetoric.

In the first few decades of the 20th century the Jews of Hungary numbered roughly five per cent of the population. Jews were disproportionately represented in the professions and in commerce, relative to their numbers.

But after the First World War, the country was ruled by an autocrat, Admiral Miklos Horthy, whose views towards Jews verged on anti-Semitism.

“I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad,” he remarked in a letter to one of his prime ministers.

In 1920 Horthy introduced the quota system at the universities, restricting Jewish presence to a maximum of six per cent of all students enrolled.

Numerous anti-Jewish laws were passed in the late 1930s, as the country moved closer to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Hungary would join the Axis powers in World War II.

Nonetheless, Hungary’s Jews did not become engulfed by the Holocaust until March 1944, when German tanks occupied the country, and the viciously pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party took power. Of the original 825,000 Jews in the country before the war, about 565,000 perished, most at the Auschwitz death camp.

During the Communist period, anti-Semitism was formally forbidden, though Zionism and mass immigration to Israel were not allowed and contacts between Hungarian Jewry and world Jewry were curtailed.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet control created a problem of loyalty for the Jews, whom the Soviet Union had saved from Hitler and his collaborators. The fact that a few of the Communist leaders were Jews fueled the hatred of anti-Semites.

Since the end of Communist rule in 1990, anti-Semitism has openly re-emerged.

One of the major representatives of current anti-Semitic ideology is the Movement for a Better Hungary, known as Jobbik, In the election of 2014, the party secured 20.22 per cent of the total vote, good for 23 seats, making them Hungary’s third largest party in parliament.

In November 2012, Marton Gyongyosi, one of the party’s leaders, posted a video speech on the Jobbik website in which he called for a list to be drawn up of all the Jews in government because he deemed them to pose “a national security risk to Hungary.”

Jewish organizations responded by describing it as a reintroduction of Nazism in Hungary.

In May 2013, Jobbik members protested against a World Jewish Congress meeting in Budapest, claiming the protest was against “a Jewish attempt to buy up Hungary.” Nine months later Tibor Agoston, the deputy chairman of Jobbik’s organization in Debrecen, Hungary’s second largest city, referred to the Holocaust as the “holoscam.”

A report produced in April by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies found that 53 per cent those aged between fifteen and thirty-four years old said they would vote for Jobbik, and only 17 per cent for the ruling Fidesz party.

Hungary’s Jews have reason to be frightened.

Russian PM Medvedev Visits Israel

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
The war in Syria, nuclear proliferation, trade, and the Israeli-Palestinian issue were on the agenda during a Nov. 9-11 three day tour of the Middle East by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

In Israel, he met with President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and opposition leader Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Union, among others. In the Palestinian territories, he was greeted by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Medvedev told Netanyahu that terrorism threatens Israel in a “very unique way,” but Russia also suffers from it. “This is why there is a need to fight terror together,” he stated.

In turn, Netanyahu described Russia and Israel as partners in combating radical Islamist terror and stressed that Russia and Israel, along with many other countries share the goal of eliminating the Islamic State.

Netanyahu and Medvedev discussed Iran and the 2015 deal that six world powers, including Russia and the United States, struck with Tehran to limit its nuclear capacity.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “Iran has espoused the destruction of Israel and supports terrorism on five continents.”

Iran, he added, must not be allowed to establish “Shi’ite militias, which it is organizing, and of course the arming of Hezbollah with dangerous weapons aimed at us.” One U.S. estimates places the Lebanese group’s arsenal at more than 100,000 missiles and rockets.

Medvedev also reaffirmed Russia’s position on Israel’s legitimacy. He told Israeli media that “Our country has never denied the rights of Israel or the Jewish people to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount or the Western Wall.”

Medvedev then visited Abbas in Ramallah on the West Bank, declaring that Russia consistently supports the implementation of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.
Abbas said that Russia “must play an effective and permanent role in any events related to the peace process.”

Medvedev responded that Moscow’s September invitation to host direct talks between Palestinian and Israeli leaders was still on the table. “Mediation cannot replace direct talks between the parties, which is the best thing.”

He expressed hope that the new U.S. administration would participate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“Our recognition of the state of Israel cannot be for free,” Abbas was quoted as telling Medvedev. “As such, it is necessary for Israel to recognize the state of Palestine.”

The backdrop to all this, of course, is Moscow’s deeply expanded involvement in the Syrian civil war. Vladimir Putin wants more than anything else to reassert Russia’s role as a high-stakes player in the international system.

Netanyahu might not have been happy to see Russia get so involved in the Syrian equation, but he knows that the physical presence of Russian forces in Syria may help contain threats from Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, as well as from Islamist terrorists.

In the past year, Netanyahu and Putin have met four times, and Moscow and Jerusalem have agreed to coordinate their actions in Syria as well as share intelligence.

Last June, Israel’s Ambassador to Russia Zvi Heifetz told Russian media that his country supported Russia’s war on terror in Syria.

Will Trump Be Accepted as the Next President?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Voters upset that Donald Trump has been elected president have begun scrambling for ways to change the results.

Almost instantly, protests, some of them violent, erupted in dozens of cities, with participants insisting that Trump was “not my president,” and blaming the Electoral College.

Actually, there have been five elections since 1820 in which the recipient of a plurality of the popular vote did not become president. Presidents are not elected by a national vote, but in 51 separate jurisdictions.

The Electoral College is part of the U.S. Constitution and is composed of 538 members, with each state and the District of Columbia having one elector for every member of its Congressional delegation – its Senators and members of the House of Representatives.

Except in Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the popular vote in each state gets all of its electoral votes.

The Electoral College exists to ensure that the states, through their own electorates, would choose the president. America is a federation, and has checks and balances built into its political system.

Actually, if the states all had an equal say in who was elected the president, the Democrats would fare even worse, as Republicans win most of the states.

Still, thousands of people have taken to the streets. There were demonstrations in Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Milwaukee, Oakland, San Diego and numerous other cities.

Several thousand protesters marched up New York City’s Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower, the president-elect’s skyscraper home. “We’re horrified the country has elected an incredibly unqualified, misogynist, racist on a platform that was just totally hateful,” declared one, who held a sign reading, “No Fascism in America.”

A flag was set ablaze in front of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, as protesters chanted “America was never great.”

In Los Angeles, several thousand protesters gathered in MacArthur Park holding placards reading “Dump Trump” and “Minorities Matter.” A protester in Portland, Oregon, was shot in a night of rioting and vandalism.

A post-election Washington Post-ABC News poll found that one-third of Clinton supporters do not view Trump’s election as legitimate. I’ve never seen this before.

As well, petitions have appeared demanding that the actual members of the Electoral College, which is to meet on Dec. 19, switch their votes to the Democratic candidate.

A petition on Change.org, signed by millions of people, noted that electors can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, if they would simply pay a small fine – “which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay!”

Organizers in a drive led by Faithlessnow.com are targeting roughly 160 Republican electors in the 15 states that Trump won but which don’t have laws bounding the electorates to the winner.

All of this is unprecedented. I vote in Pennsylvania, and found myself unable to support either of these flawed candidates. But we have to accept the result.

As a comparativist, I study countries where very deep divisions, usually based on ethnicity, religion or class, result in polarizing elections that lead to violence when the outcome is not accepted by the losers. Is democracy in the United States now under the same threat?

Requiem for a Ruling Elite

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Maybe the astounding result in the 2016 American presidential election, which saw the most improbable of candidates, Donald Trump, beat the seasoned pro, Hillary Clinton, should not have been the shock it was.

A system that had completely failed tens of millions of people for decades, and especially after 2008, needed a rude awakening. The Democrats even lost the “rust belt” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, long their bastions!

The political elites, had Hillary Clinton won, would over the next few years have allowed the rage to continue building, and 2020 would be a lot worse than today.

A really smart ruling class would have allowed Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries, instead of fixing it and crowning her.

Now they’re looking for excuses. Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal even claimed that a group of “right-wing agents” in the FBI intentionally prevented Clinton from behind elected president.

This is indeed sour grapes. Clinton lost because not enough of members of her core constituency came out for her.

Clinton held an 80-point advantage among African-Americans, but was unable to match Obama’s 87-point edge in 2012. She won 65 per cent of Latino voters, compared with the 71 per cent who voted for Obama in 2012.

Among millennials, she won 54 per cent, compared with 60 per cent for Obama in 2012.

With women, she barely improved on Obama, gaining 54 per cent among them, just one per cent more than Obama’s vote in 2012.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, “overturned the table.” We are in uncharted waters, for sure, but with Clinton, the establishment seemed oblivious to the charted ones, and they were heading straight for the rocks.

“The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance,” wrote Matt Taibbi on the Rolling Stone magazine website on Nov. 10. It bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of ‘the establishment.’ The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media.”

The rage was directed at institutions that people believe have failed them and at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary workers. Voters saw the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and perpetrators escaped punishment.

 “What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency,” contended Robert Reich, a former Democratic Secretary of Labour, in the Guardian of London, Nov. 10. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

“Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel,” he wrote. They do not show the linkages between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, “and the undermining of democracy by big money.”

When liberal elites are unable to deal with, or even acknowledge, major cultural and economic problems, just calling those who are hurting names, people turn to the extremes.

After 2008, President Obama needed to be a reformer like Franklin Roosevelt, but he wasn’t. Instead, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted in her Nov. 13 column, he “settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.”

His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats, more than 60 fewer House seats, at least 14 fewer governorships and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began.

So maybe now we may have a “Huey Long” demagogue in the White House. The Democrats asked for it.

Why is the European Union Failing?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The attempt to build a European super-state has hit rough water, being buffeted on the one side by the wave of migrants entering the continent from Africa and Middle East, and by the rise, in reaction, of ethnic nationalism in countries such as Hungary and Poland.

The greatest blow, of course, has been the decision of the United Kingdom to exit the union. Globalizers have been taken aback by this, and seem unable to comprehend the desire of many citizens in long-established nations to retain their own sense of cultural identity – and, not coincidentally, to recreate an economic order in their countries that privileges them over foreign labour and capital.

Meanwhile, the post-2008 Eurozone crisis has hit southern European countries particularly hard. Italy, Spain, and Portugal all chafe under a regime of austerity that benefits stronger economies like that of Germany.

In these countries youth unemployment now approaches 50 per cent and surveys report an unprecedented level of pessimism among them. Aimlessness and lack of opportunity have driven up the suicide rate.

Worst hit has been Greece: six years of financial and fiscal oversight by the Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund have brought a cumulative loss of 27 per cent of its economy, an unemployment rate of 24 per cent, and political instability. Since 2009, its governments have averaged seventeen months between elections.

Some of the blame falls on the shoulders of the country, of course. Governments were reluctant to cut the extraordinary waste of the Greek state; they were part of a political system known for its opportunism and complete lack of responsibility.

When the extent of its fiscal mismanagement became apparent, investors began to realize that unlike in other currency unions, there was no formal mechanism to support a distressed constituent government and that Eurozone members were unprepared to fully stand behind the liabilities of their weakest link.

So now that the bills have come due, creditors are offering the country no slack. The proliferation of social ills and the intensity of economic stagnation has fueled the rise of political extremists.

In eastern Europe, meanwhile, the electoral success of nationalistic parties such as Law and Justice in Poland and Hungary’s Fidesz also reflect the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which turned many people against liberal elites. They also share the fear of a Muslim presence, one which is widespread in the region.

In the end, the EU may collapse because it doesn’t have the kind of support that individual countries take for granted from their citizens.

“Working mainly on societies where the state malfunctions,” writes the well-regarded Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Oxford University School of Government, Peter Collier,  in the September 30 Times Literary Supplement, “I have come to recognize the value of an inclusive sense of shared identity: ‘whatever our political, ethnic and religious differences, we are all X.’” By this Collier means a collectivity with a sense of shared political consciousness, as if it were a large extended family.

“A common identity underpins the notion of the ‘common good,” and that in turn supports compliance with the taxation that supports public goods. In some societies X is an empty set. Most of Europe’s nations have an X; but lacking a common language and hence a common discourse, ‘Europe’ can never build an equivalent.

“By progressively stripping nation states of authority, ‘ever closer union’ risks transferring power to an entity that has the appetite to acquire it but lacks the legitimacy to use it: a political black hole,” concludes Collier.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has urged the 28 EU member states to “fight against stupid populists.” This is how he insults those who worry about their future.

Rather than the shining hope of a united Europe, it seems the EU is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

Ethiopia in Trouble Because of Ethnic Rivalries

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This past year, Ethiopia, the second most populous nation in Africa after Nigeria, has been convulsed by protests in which hundreds of people have been killed.

This worries western powers. American military and intelligence services work closely with the Ethiopians to combat terrorist threats across the region, especially in Somalia, and few if any countries in Africa receive as much Western aid.

Ethiopia had been seen as an economic success story. Addis Ababa became the showpiece of the country’s transformation, with a Chinese-built light rail system, luxury hotels, fancy restaurants and wine bars packed with millionaires. The narrative for Ethiopia was that of a successful nation with double-digit growth.

Much of this was due to the efforts of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who was, writes British scholar Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation in his 2015 book The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, “a master player of the diplomatic game, and he managed both to charm the international community and to use it for Ethiopia’s benefit.”

But he died in 2012 and it may all now come crashing down, thanks to ethnic rivalries – so often the bane of African states. His successor, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, is eroding the institutions of government and reversing state-building.

The trouble started in November 2015 when members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, began protesting government land policies. The protests were initially over a plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into the Oromia region.

In July 2016 Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group, the Amhara, joined in, and the protests hardened into calls to overthrow the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which is led by the Tigrayans, a small ethnic minority.

Though only about six percent of the population, they dominate the military, the intelligence services, commerce and politics.

Since the protesters hail from Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, with a combined population of more than 62 million out of the country’s 100 million, this is no small matter.

Demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians chanted anti-government slogans. Sugar factories, textile mills, and foreign-owned flower farms were burned down.

The government in early October took the drastic step of imposing a six-month state of emergency. Human rights groups called the response ruthless and witnesses said that police officers have shot and killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators.

Thousands of Oromos have been jailed without trial on suspicion of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front, a secessionist group. Hundreds of bloggers, journalists and opposition figures have been detained.

“Limitations on independent media, jamming of television and radio signals, and recent blocking of social media all point to a government afraid to allow its citizens access to independent information,” Felix Horne of Human Rights Watch indicated in August, as unrest spread.

The government’s control of the country is so complete that not a single opposition politician sits in the 547-seat parliament. After a widely criticized election in May 2015, the regime won the last seat the opposition had held.

Opposition party members point to continuing efforts to intimidate those who challenged the result. Three of their members have been killed since the vote.

“It’s a tough time for Ethiopia,” asserted Yilkal Getnet, chairman of one opposition party, Semayawi. Added Beyene Petros, chairman of another opposition group, Medrek, “These are non-ambiguous acts of reprisal.”

Yet Washington, making it clear that security trumps its other concerns in the Horn of Africa, described the government as being “democratically elected.”

CETA Deal Remains Controversial

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
The European Union trade deal with Canada known as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) provoked huge opposition across Europe, with critics warning that it could lead to the break-up and privatisation of public services which could be deemed to be monopolies under its competition rules.

Hence the initial opposition by the French part of Belgium known as Wallonia. The EU requires all its member states to consent to the treaty -- some 38 national and regional parliaments across Europe must approve before it can be implemented.

This means that in Belgium, for important national deals like this one to pass, its federal, regional and community bodies must all give their approval.

Only after further negotiations did a new version that provides guarantees for farmers and a corporate dispute settlement system allow Wallonia to agree to the deal.

The Belgians insisted that implementation be regularly evaluated on environmental and socioeconomic impacts and that regions such as Wallonia can protect agricultural products where they expect CETA to cause a “market imbalance.”

The Belgians also will refer to CETA’s most controversial component, the Investor Dispute Settlement System (ISDS), to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a ruling.

It set a precedent for talks between the European Union and the United States over an even larger trade deal: the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

“We had to fight CETA to prepare for TTIP, because that free trade deal is 10 times worse,” remarked Luc Hollands, who in 2013 helped start a movement against free-trade agreements and austerity policies.

Wallonia’s prime minister, Paul Magnette, met with other Belgian leaders to hammer out a joint declaration and declared himself “extremely happy” that Walloon demands were met.

Wallonia has above-average unemployment and was worried that cheaper Canadian goods might threaten the livelihoods of its people. In economically depressed regions voters may not see trade deals as a good thing.

Wallonia’s economy has stagnated in recent decades, as its steel mills have closed down. Global competition has squeezed small businesses dry.

The prime minster of the more prosperous Flemish region, Geert Bourgeois, said the original 1,598-page text of the trade deal stood, with the addendum serving as a “clarification.”

Other countries are also wary. Bulgaria had also been threatening to veto the trade agreement if Canada didn’t guarantee visa-free access for its citizens. But its government formally accepted the trade pact, with any remaining concerns to be met during the ratification process.

Prime Minister Trudeau finally signed the deal in Brussels on Oct. 30 and expressed hope that the other EU members will come aboard soon.

It may take two to four years for full ratification across the EU to be completed, and parties to the deal reserve their right to opt out, if they can’t gain majority approval in their parliaments.

Supporters of CETA contend that failure to agree to the agreement would have undermined the EU’s ability to forge other deals and would have further damaged its credibility, which is already in trouble due to the Brexit vote in Britain to leave the EU, and disputes over the migration crisis.

Where is Hungary Heading?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a nationwide revolt against the Soviet-imposed government of the Hungarian People’s Republic, lasted from Oct. 23 until Nov. 10, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks.

At least 30,000 people were killed and some 200,000 others fled to the west, with more than 37,000 eventually coming to Canada.

Imre Nagy had been appointed prime minister during this brief window of freedom and announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact.

With the return of Soviet troops and the re-introduction of Communist rule, Nagy was tried, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave.

Even so, the Hungarians were able to define their own more economically liberal brand of Communism. This so-called “Goulash Communism,” instituted in 1968, was formally known as the New Economic Mechanism. When I was in Hungary in 1977, it felt much freer than neighbouring Communist states.

Still, Hungarians longed for a multi-party system, rather than their Soviet-style state. In October 1989, the Communist Party convened its last congress, and the country’s parliament transformed Hungary into a non-Communist republic.

It guaranteed human and civil rights, and created an institutional structure that ensured separation of powers among the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government.

On March 25, 1990, the first free parliamentary elections in Eastern Europe took place in Hungary. The country seemed to have become a liberal democracy and had joined both NATO and the European Union by 2004.

But things have in recent years taken a different turn, with the rise of Victor Orban and his Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz), a nationalist party that has dominated Hungarian politics on the national and local level since its landslide victory in the 2010 national election. In 2014, it took 44.87 per cent of the vote, winning 133 of 199 seats.

Orban first made his name in Hungary when, as a young lawyer and activist, he spoke at an immense rally in 1989 celebrating the reburial of Imre Nagy. He had helped found his party a year earlier, initially as a youth-oriented liberal anti-communist group.

But under Orban’s guidance, it began to move to the right. The Orban who was elected prime minister in 2010 and re-elected in 2014 has become a political and economic conservative nationalist who promises to restore Hungarian values.

Only on the basis of national, Christian and European traditions “can a strong and successful Hungary be built,” declared the prime minister in March 2014.

The European refugee crisis of 2015-2016 has brought Orban’s views regarding Hungarian sovereignty into sharp focus. He is a fierce opponent of the EU’s plan to share migrants across the 28-nation bloc under a mandatory quota system.

He has described the arrival of asylum seekers in Europe as “a poison,” saying his country did not want or need them.

“This is why there is no need for a common European migration policy: whoever needs migrants can take them, but don’t force them on us,” Orban stated last July. The populist leader added that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”

Orban in 2015 set up a border fence to block the path of asylum seekers streaming into Europe. Along with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary is suing the EU to avoid taking in the 1,294 migrants the bloc says it must resettle.

In October, he held a referendum in which 98 per cent of participants voted against the admission of refugees to the country. Ahead of the vote, the government warned that immigrant communities had turned major cities across Europe into "no-go zones.”

But more than half of the electorate stayed at home, rendering the process constitutionally null and void. Undaunted, Orban still hopes to lead a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe.

With political freedom has come a renewed sense of Hungarian nationhood, and Orban has tapped into this mood. He reminds Hungarians of their once-great stature within Europe.

“Our responsibility is to prevent Brussels from Sovietizing,” Orban told a crowd at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the revolution in October. It is clear that the great majority of Hungarians don’t want to take orders from Brussels any more than they were willing to be ruled from Moscow. Might they even follow Britain out of the European Union?

Balfour and Bolshevism, 99 Years On

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
This coming week marks the 99th anniversary of two of the seminal events of the 20th century: the release of the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Both changed the course of history.

There are only a few documents in Middle Eastern history which have as much influence as the Balfour Declaration. It was sent as a 67-word statement contained within the short letter addressed by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, on November 2, 1917.

In the letter, the British government stated its intention to endorse the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine:

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Following the First World War, Britain acquired a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, its purpose was partially to put into effect the Balfour Declaration, in conjunction with the World Zionist Organization.

It specifically referred to “the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine” and to the moral validity of “reconstituting their National Home in that country.”

Furthermore, the British were instructed to “use their best endeavors to facilitate” Jewish immigration, to encourage settlement on the land and to “secure” the Jewish National Home.

At the time, the vast majority of Palestine’s population comprised Christian and Muslim Arabs, but Jewish settlement increased in the decades following 1917, as the Zionist project brought many Jews to the land.

By the time the UN General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947 voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Jewish population had reached one-third of the Mandate’s total of almost two million people. Six months later, the State of Israel was born.

In 1917 tsarist Russia was bogged down in the First World War and its population was weary and hungry. Riots over the scarcity of food broke out in the capital, Petrograd, on March 8, and Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate one week later, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.

A new government was constituted under Aleksander Kerensky, but he was unable to halt Russia’s slide into political, economic, and military chaos.

By autumn the Communist Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had won considerable support. Their slogan of “peace, land, and bread,” which included taking Russia out of the war, resonated among the hungry urban workers and soldiers, many of whom were already deserting from the front in large numbers.

On Nov. 7 the Bolsheviks and their allies staged a nearly bloodless coup, occupying government buildings, telegraph stations, and other strategic points. Kerensky’s attempt to organize resistance proved futile, and he fled the country.

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which convened in Petrograd, approved the formation of a new government composed mainly of Bolshevik commissars.

Though there would be many more years of civil war and instability, a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would eventually emerge, setting the stage for the worldwide ideological contest between Communist and capitalist states that would last for most of the century.

Next year being the centenary of these two seminal events, we will see many more articles like this one.

The Sinai Campaign and Suez Crisis of 1956

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

A war that started 60 years ago provided Canada with its now familiar role as a peacekeeping force on behalf of the United Nations.

On Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli forces invaded Egypt. In a swift, sweeping operation of 100 hours, under the leadership of then chief of the General Staff, Moshe Dayan, the Sinai peninsula fell into Israeli hands.

A reserve brigade captured Sharm el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. Israeli troops were soon within 42 kilometres of the Suez Canal.

The Sinai campaign was designed to put an end to Palestinian incursions into Israel from Egyptian-occupied Gaza and to remove the Egyptian blockade, at the Straits of Tiran, of the Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat.

The action provided the pretext for a French and British ultimatum to Israel and Egypt, calling on both sides to cease hostilities and withdraw from the Suez Canal area.

On Nov. 5, Britain and France landed paratroopers along in the Suez Canal Zone, and its Egyptian defenders were quickly defeated.  British casualties stood at 16 dead, French casualties at 10, while the Israeli losses were 231 dead. A cease-fire was called on the insistence of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold on Nov. 6.

It became clear that the Israeli invasion and the subsequent Anglo-French operation had been planned beforehand by the three countries. They had, in fact, during discussions held between Oct. 22 and 24, 1956, reached a secret agreement, the Protocol of Sèvres, to attack Egypt.

The British and French aims were to regain western control of the Suez Canal, and to remove Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, who had nationalized the waterway July 26, from power.

This was perceived as a direct threat to their interests. The canal, which connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, was of strategic importance as it had become the main passageway for oil to get to Europe from the Middle East.

France was, as well, engaged in a ruthless war in Algeria and hoped the overthrow of the pan-Arab nationalist Nasser, whom they believed was aiding the National Liberation Front (FLN) rebels, might help defeat the insurgency.

But the British and French would lose the political war that followed. Nasser responded by sinking ships in the canal and effectively closing it to shipping from October 1956 until March 1957. The crisis greatly improved his standing in the Arab world.

On the other hand, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign, and Guy Molet’s French government was brought down because of rightist criticism of his push for social reform on a budget badly depleted by the Suez invasion.

Their campaign failed because the two major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, adamantly opposed it. The Soviets threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side, and to launch rocket attacks on Britain, France and Israel.

In turn, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower feared this might start a major conflagration and put pressure on Britain and France to cease hostilities. Also, Washington, locked in a Cold War with the USSR, was eager to appear to the post-colonial world as an ally rather than an accomplice of two dwindling empires.

The two European countries withdrew their militaries by the end of the year, though Israel did not leave the Sinai until March 1957.

Canada, too, had strongly objected to the military action out of concern that it was damaging relations between the western allies, and risking a wider war.

Lester Pearson, then Canada’s minister for external affairs, developed the idea for the first large-scale United Nations peacekeeping force. Addressing the UN General Assembly, Pearson made his case, saying: “Peace is far more than ceasing to fire.”

A United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was in place by late November 1956, where it would remain until the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

The Growth of the German Right-Wing

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition is in trouble ahead of the September 2017 federal election. And much of it emanates from the right.

Founded in 2013 as a protest party focusing mainly on financial neoliberalism and the Eurozone crisis, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has seen its polling numbers rise significantly since pivoting towards anti-migrant rhetoric in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The AfD has a strong profile in the former communist east of Germany but a growing following in western parts as well. It has become a national political force, with a presence in 10 of the country’s 16 federal states.

The party is confident they have found a base for long-term success with their anti-migration, anti-establishment message.

Earlier this year, support for the AfD reached fifteen per cent in national polls, three times more than for any previous right-wing party, and well beyond the five-per-cent threshold required to enter the Bundestag after next year’s national elections.

There were five state elections in Germany this year, and in all of them, the party made substantial gains.

In March, the AfD garnered 12.6 per cent of the vote in Rhineland-Palatinate, good for 14 of 101 seats. The 15.1 per cent it took in Baden-Wurttemberg gave the party 23 of 139 seats. It captured 24.2 per cent of the vote, and 24 of 87 seats, in Saxony-Anhalt.

Six months after Merkel had adopted a “we can manage this” mantra towards migration, the election was the first big electoral test of the German leader and her policy, one that had seen over one million asylum applicants arrive in the country.

In Saxony-Anhalt, 56 per cent of AfD voters said they had opted for the party because of the refugee crisis, according to one poll. The news weekly Der Spiegel described the results as a “black Sunday” for her.

Merkel suffered further damaging losses at the hands of Germany’s resurgent far-right in elections in Berlin and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September.

The latter result was particularly humiliating, as it is her home state. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came third behind the Social Democrats (SPD) and the AfD.

While Mecklenburg-Vorpommern provided the AfD with 20.8 per cent, good for 18 of 78 seats, in Berlin the AfD won the highest share of the vote for a right-wing party since the Second World War, with 14.2 per cent. It resulted in winning 25 of the city-state’s 160 seats.

“From zero to double-digits, that’s a first for Berlin,” stated the AfD’s top Berlin candidate, Georg Pazderski. “We have achieved a great result,” added Beatrix von Storch, one of the AfD’s leaders. “We have arrived in the capital and are on our way to the Bundestag.”

In none of these states did the party have a single seat prior to 2016. “The migration crisis was the catalyst for our success,” Frauke Petry, the party’s chair, admits.

A former entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in chemistry, Petry is a member of the state parliament in Saxony, the first German state to elect AfD legislators.

The arrival of 890,000 refugees last year has deeply polarized Germany, and misgivings against the newcomers run particularly deep in eastern states like Saxony, with unemployment fueling resentment and xenophobia.

She predicts that the AfD will benefit from a breakdown of the two big parties, the CDU and SDP. Alexander Gauland, a leading party spokesperson, told supporters that his party would “chase the old parties to hell.”

The party’s relationship with the Dresden-based hardline protest movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) has come under scrutiny, with the AfD often referred to as the group’s political arm.

While Petry, who was herself born in Dresden in what was Communist East Germany in1975, denies this, the overlaps are undeniable. In April, the AfD issued a statement declaring that “Islam does not belong in Germany.” It said that head scarves should be banned in schools and universities, and minarets prohibited.

The AfD is an “outbidder” party, one that adopts radical strategies to maximize support among voters belonging to an ethnic group. Democratic competition involving ethnic parties often leads to outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to avoid defeat.

Will Petry force the CDU to move further to the right? Angela Merkel, in power since 2005, has yet to confirm whether she will run for a fourth term in 2017. The party’s convention, scheduled for December, may provide an answer.