Liberal Media's 'Right Thinkers' Suppress 'Wrong' Views at Their Own Peril

By Henry Srebrnik, Online article, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald 

The rise of U.S. President Donald Trump, Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban, the right-wing Polish Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party, and Britain’s anti-EU Brexiteers, all falling under the rubric of “populism,” have unnerved establishment organs such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, among others.

They have become very shrill in “defending” a “free press” — as opposed to what they consider the “fake news” of anti-establishment “samizdats.”

But what they really mean is that they adhere to what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a country’s “truth regime,” that is, the ideologically acceptable views of its ruling elites.

In that sense, the Soviet flagship newspaper Pravda also was “free” — it could run debates within its pages about various policy differences within the nomenklatura, arguments about Marxist-Leninist theory and so forth.

But they could not challenge the overarching hegemonic power of the ruling communist circles. That remained off-limits.

The same holds true for “respectable” discourse in today’s Western mass media, which must adhere to a liberal-left political line and its pop slogans. In other words, there are certain parameters that define what is appropriate in public discourse.

Just as Pravda was not able to publish what communists would have considered “anti-socialist propaganda,” so today views not deemed “politically correct” are looked upon with disfavour.

At best, they are deemed “provocative,” “controversial” or “divisive,” and readers are alerted to be on the lookout so they may discount them should they appear in print.

Opinions not seen as worthy of serious consideration are often tagged with words such as “skeptics” (anti-European Union “Euroskeptics”), “deniers” (as in “climate-change deniers”), or “populists” (an elastic word that is applied to anyone the liberal media disparage).

Those who question policies around multiculturalism and immigration, and mantras such as “inclusion” or “diversity,” are written off or silenced, referred to as racists, xenophobes, and so on by those with the “proper” attitude. Such views are, to use religious language, heretical.

So today, many people increasingly distrust and resent the mainstream media. A major reason is that many journalists have crossed the line from reporting to advocacy.

They tend to share a uniform ideology, which originates in their university education, tightly-knit peer groups, and the influence of popular culture since the 1960s.

As a result, newsrooms are often out of touch with the communities they serve.

It gets worse.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced in November that the government was introducing $600 million in tax credits and incentives to help the media industry over the next five years.

A government-appointed panel would determine which organizations would be eligible.

“When the media, or media organizations, or in fact, individual journalist jobs are dependent on government subsidies, that is the antithesis​​ of a free and independent press,” remarked Conservative MP Peter Kent, a retired journalist himself.

This is bad news for journalists, and bad news for journalism. As people continue down the path of growing mistrust of the mainstream media, they will start looking for alternatives.

It also allows those like Trump, himself accused of spreading falsehoods, to portray the media that constantly attack him as themselves purveyors of “fake news.”

Trump in 2016, remember, ran against the entire political class, including the national political media.

It is time the journalistic mainstream addresses this problem. Motivated by good intentions, it has allowed a narrow orthodoxy to restrict debate about the burning questions that confront us today.

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Putin

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summeride, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In my winter 2019 Russian politics course at UPEI, we discussed the breakaway regions of Transnistria (which seceded from Moldova), and Abkhazia and South Ossetia (who both separated from Georgia).

You can make the case that in these instances, as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk issues in eastern Ukraine, now governed by pro-Moscow politicians, everything Russian president Vladimir Putin has done is a reaction to prior moves on the part of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine. The same can be said about the Crimea, also contested between Russia and Ukraine.

Egged on by the late U.S. Senator John McCain, the then Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008 decided to forcibly grab Abkhazia and South Ossetia; they were not ethnically Georgian and had never wanted to be Georgian.

Following the dissolution of the decrepit USSR in 1991, they had successfully escaped Tbilisi's control and declared their independence. But Georgia never recognized this and plotted their reconquest.

Only after beating Georgia in a short war that the latter began in 2008 -- something the meddlers in Washington and Brussels were of course angry about -- did Moscow recognize these two regions as states.

However, given the continued designs on them by Georgia, in order to survive they have had to become de facto Russian protectorates.

Unlike the Crimea, which is ethnically Russian and was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (today’s Russian Federation) itself, until handed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic 1954, Putin did not incorporate Abkhazia and South Ossetia into the Russian Federation.

As for the Crimea, he left it in Ukrainian hands until the 2014 coup in Kyiv by right-wing anti-Russian Ukrainians.

He has also aided the Russian and pro-Russian population in the Donbas region who fear the Kyiv regime -- but here, too, he has not annexed them to Russia and still considers them legally Ukrainian.

He wants the regime in Kyiv to recognize their rights, perhaps by giving them a measure of autonomy, and not treat them as fifth columnists.

Moscow is trying to protect the millions of ethnic Russians now found in the “near abroad” – the former Soviet republics outside the Russian Federation.

Moscow is also concerned about ethnic minorities who don’t want to remain within the boundaries of the ultra-nationalistic successor entities that emerged from the old Soviet Union. Many would rather become sovereign themselves.

Admittedly, none of this applies to minorities within the Russian Federation --as the Chechens and even the Tatars well know. This is of course hypocrisy on Moscow’s part, and no one should defend it, even if it is based on fears of Islamist penetration into Russia.

Abkhazia today defines itself as a nation state in the “strong” sense, that is, as the state of and for a particular nation. In order to preserve that status language and education laws were passed to protect the primacy of its language.

The authorities in Sukhumi have put the ethnic Abkhaz at the centre of their nation-building project.

A 2007 law defines Abkhaz as the only state language and declares that “all citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia must have command of the state language.” These laws are component parts of an effort for Abkhaz cultural and linguistic revival.

In fact in Soviet times, the Abkhaz had become a minority in their own land. This is no longer the case, of course – Russians moved away, and Georgians fled. The 1992–1993 war led to the ethnic cleansing of the more than 200,000 Georgians by then living in the region. Today Abkhazia’s 243,000 people are mostly Abkhaz.

The Ossetians were arbitrarily divided into North and South Ossetia within the Soviet Union. The north was part of, and remains, within Russia proper, while the south became an autonomous region of Georgia.

South Ossetia’s population of 53,000 is also ethnically homogenous, as most Georgians, who had comprised some 30 per cent of the population, left the region after 1992.

In South Ossetia, while Ossetian is the state language, Russian remains an official language. However, Moscow is committed to helping the authorities in Tskhinvali in their development of the Ossetian language and culture.

In 2014-Russia concluded treaties of alliance with both polities. Moscow has used its strengthening ties to them to deter Georgia’s efforts to develop effective relationships with external actors, particularly with the United States and NATO.

The Chinese View of Japan is Defined by Politics

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In recent decades, anti-Japanese nationalism has grown into an important feature of Chinese popular discourse and at times caused serious strains in bilateral official relations.

Yet China’s view of its neighbour and sometimes adversary Japan, though embedded in longstanding attitudes, has nonetheless oscillated between sympathy and hatred over the decades. 

These shifts, argues Yinan He, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, have often been the result of changing domestic circumstances in China itself. 

This should come as no surprise. The late Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth, editor of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, outlined an approach to the study of ethnicity that focused on the ongoing negotiations of boundaries between groups of people.

Ethnic identity, he asserted, is maintained through relational processes of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the group defines itself in opposition to an “other.”

However, defining Japan as this “other” has not been a constant in China. While China’s traumatic wars with Japan should have brought about constant anti-Japanese hatred over time, in the initial period after each major war with Japan, Chinese national identity was never primarily centered around animosity against Japan but against some other enemies.

Following China’s humiliating defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, she writes, “modern Chinese nationalism burst forth, but a large segment of Chinese elite, especially Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary comrades, embraced Meiji Japan as a model of modernization and source of aid for revolution.”

Instead, they focused on ridding the country of the Manchu ruling class, defined as non-Han ethnic foreigners.

Therefore, it was not coincidental that Sun Yat-sen, who would in 1911 lead the revolution to end imperial rule and create a Chinese republic, adopted the platform of driving out the Manchus to restore Chinese rule in 1894. 

Like many Chinese nationalists, he was also a pan-Asianist, advocating that all Asians, connected by common race and cultural heritage, should unite against Western imperialism. Chinese elites formed an image of Japan as a fraternal neighbour.

Only after the First World War, when Japan began to place humiliating demands on a weak Chinese state, was anti-Japanese fervour included in a rising tide of anti-imperials feeling, also directed against European powers.

What caused a great disillusion among Chinese nationalists about fraternity with Japan were the “21 Demands” raised by Japan in 1915, designed to give Japan regional ascendancy over China.

This was followed by the agreement between the victorious Western powers, in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to transfer defeated Germany’s concessions in China to Japan. 

Similarly, for several decades after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 193-1932, and the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, Chinese official historiography in the post-1949 People’s Republic had mainly highlighted the struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Nationalist Party (KMT), and the foreign supporter of the KMT, the United States. 

This history did not demonize Japan, nor did it emphasize Chinese victimhood vis-à-vis Japan. According to Oxford University professor Rana Mitter, author of China’s War With Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, Chinese national identity in this period was actually anchored at the “defining fundamental fissure” between the Chinese Communists and the capitalists, rather than an ethnocentric nationalism directed at Japan.

In 1972, 27 years after the war, the two countries normalized their diplomatic relationship, and formed a loose strategic alignment targeted at the Soviet Union.

Anti-Japanese nationalism only began in the early 1980s, about ten years after the two countries had a normalized diplomatic relationship and had developed weighty economic ties and close societal contacts with one another.

Domestic Chinese politics was the main cause of the change. From the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms after the Cultural Revolution increased inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. 

Patriotism replaced the discredited Communist ideology of class struggle as the centrepiece of a new Chinese national identity, with Japan now singled out as the main cause of the nation’s decades of “national humiliation.”

Thus, the memory of past wars with Japan was resurrected and politicized. Knowing this, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held off from visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine for war dead in April. It honors 14 Japanese leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as war criminals in 1948.

This was partly out of consideration of improving relations with China, as President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Japan when it hosts a G20 summit at the end of June.

The Politics of Religion in Uzbekistan

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the post-Soviet states of Central Asia, many of the new regimes try to contain radical forms of Islam with their own, more moderate and “official” versions, with varying success.

This has been the case in Uzbekistan, the largest of these countries, and the centre of Muslim civilization in the region.

Uzbekistan accounts for approximately 60 per cent of Central Asia’s population. Moreover, it represents the core of the Islamic landscape that characterized Central Asia for millennia, converted to Islam in the century after Muhammad.

With its 33.2 million people, it is the successor to Muslim states such as the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanates of Khiva and Kokand, conquered by tsarist Russia in the 19^th century.

Islam Karimov, the former president of Uzbekistan, died in September 2016, a day after the 25th anniversary of his country’s independence. His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, is from the city of Samarkand, as was Karimov.

In his opposition to radical Islam, Karimov was particularly clear: “Uzbekistan has always been against all forms of radicalism,” he said in August 2002. “We are against religious fundamentalism, we are against Communist fundamentalism and, if you like, we are against democratic fundamentalism.”

So, as geographer Reuel R. Hanks at Oklahoma State University has noted, Karimov’s strategy involved jointly mythologizing the Islamic heritage while simultaneously condemning its unsanctioned expression.

Most Central Asian Muslims were followers of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam. Moderate in tone and theology, it was an acceptable alternative to more radical, politicized and “imported” pan-Islamic movements, such as Wahhabism, Salafism, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

In the early 1990s, after living for more than 70 years under Marxist-Leninist atheism, most Uzbeks were ignorant of the basic rituals and beliefs of Islam.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people attempted to reconnect to their cultural and spiritual heritage. Karimov himself linked Islamic tradition to the new national myth.

He issued numerous proclamations and statements promoting its “proper” expression in the context of Uzbek society.

The Uzbek government maintained monopolistic control over the qualities of the officially sanctioned Islamic myth. A Muslim Spiritual Board monitored the activities of Islamic officials and the content of their pronouncements and sermons.

In the first two years of independence, the number of mosques in Uzbekistan tripled, from approximately 300 to over 1000, and many of these were constructed with funding originating outside Uzbekistan. This also provided entry by more radical forms of the faith.

Karimov understood that those visions of Islam represented a serious threat to his monopoly on power. He began to cultivate the myth of a threat from Islamic radicalism and began a crackdown on “unofficial” Muslim organizations.

Adolat, an Islamic association that had emerged in the city of Namangan, was banned and its leadership arrested, but some key figures slipped away to neighbouring Tajikistan. 

In 1998, they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Its stated goals were the establishment of a radical Islamic state.

During the civil war, Uzbekistan had backed moderate forces, supporting the People’s Front against the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.

By early 2001, the IMU, allied with the Taliban, had bases in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

In response, Uzbekistan passed a 1998 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations, considered one of the most restrictive statutes in the world governing religious behaviour.

In May 2005, Uzbek security forces fired on a large crowd of demonstrators in of Andijan, killing perhaps as many as 1,500 people. The government accused them of being in league with Islamic extremists, primarily Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

However, since President Mirziyoyev took power, Uzbekistan has seen significant reforms.

Recognising the abuses of the previous administration, he began to address the country’s egregious human rights record.

Since he came to power, dozens of high-profile political prisoners have been released, some restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly have been eased, and a more open media environment is now in place.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its 2019 Annual Report, has noted that religious freedom conditions in Uzbekistan have improved, though concerns remain.

Hundreds of religious Uzbeks remain imprisoned on vague charges of extremism, and law enforcement officials continue to systematically detain people suspected of belonging to unregistered religious groups.