Are French Intellectuals No Longer Important?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

Are the French no longer enthralled by their intellectuals? This is the country, after all, that gave the world Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Camus and Sartre.

The French have historically valued high culture and given an almost sacred role to the writer. Intellectuals have always had a prominent role in French, their ideas debated with intensity. Their philosophers and thinkers have influenced political life to a degree rarely seen in other nations.

France is arguably the world’s most self-consciously intellectual country, devoted to reason, abstraction and logic. French historian and political essayist André Siegfried claimed that French thought had been the driving force behind all the major advances of human civilization.

But is this today no longer the case? So contends Sudhir Hazareesingh, a tutor in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, in a new book, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People.  

A specialist in French political and cultural history, the Mauritian-born Hazareesingh has also written In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of De Gaulle, arguing that de Gaulle saved the French political right after the disaster of the Vichy regime in the Second World War. (The general also considered France a country with an “eminent and exceptional destiny.”)

“French thought is in the doldrums,” Hazareesingh declares in his new book. “French philosophy, which taught the world to reason with sweeping and bold systems such as rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism, has had conspicuously little to offer in recent decades.”

In the past, French civilian and military heroes inspired national liberators throughout the world, French legal codes were widely adopted, and the 1789 Revolution became a template, for better or worse, elsewhere in Europe and later, on other continents. 

Victor Hugo proclaimed that Paris was the “centre of the earth.” As the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik has remarked, Paris “remade human consciousness.”

From the Enlightenment onwards, French ideas and symbols were universally equated with self-determination and emancipation from servitude: the Statue of Liberty, the iconic emblem of America, was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi.

Yet little of this ideological fertility is now in evidence, maintains Hazareesingh, and French thinking is no longer a central point of reference for progressives across the world. “It is noteworthy that none of the recent social revolutions, whether the fall of Soviet-style communism in eastern Europe or the challenge to authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, took their cue from the French tradition.”

In any case, there was a darker side to “the deeply held assumption of the beneficial quality of French civilisation for humankind.”

French progressives consistently advocated a policy of assimilation in their colonies, due to their uncritical belief in their “mission civilisatrice,” which would bring “civilization” to those under their rule. France had a duty to enlighten the rest of the world.

France’s republican heritage and civilization would be offered to all of its subjects, who could become assimilated as French citizens. The empire would become an integral part of France. But this proved a disaster in places like Algeria and Syria.

In France itself, the republican principle of laicité, or secularism, and the strict interpretation of the 1905 law of separation of church and state, which states that religion has no place in the public square, has bedeviled relations with the country’s growing Muslim population. 

France is no longer a major power, and there is now a widespread belief that French culture is itself in crisis. Hazareesingh cites France’s diminishing cultural imprint on the wider world. The decline of French as a global language, and its replacement by English, is resented by many.

The mixture of rationalism, republicanism and Marxism that dominated the mindset of the nation’s progressive elites for much of the modern era has disintegrated, concludes Hazareesingh, and with it much of the confidence, and even arrogance, of the French intelligentsia. “Grandiose declarations of intellectual and spiritual superiority” are not heard as often as in the past.

Algeria Has Proved a Political Disappointment

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
When Algeria achieved independence, there were great hopes the country, but it has proved a disappointment.

The struggle by the Arab population of Algeria to gain independence from France became a cause célèbre of the anti-imperialist left in the 1950s and early 1960s.

It was a bloody affair that lasted from 1954 to 1962, one that brought down the Fourth French Republic and returned General Charles de Gaulle, the hero of the Second World War, to power.

It also divided the country; left-wing intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus supported Algerian independence, while those on the French right, like Maurice Bardèche, defended the colons, or French settlers, in Algeria.

The slogan of the million colons, more than 10 per cent of the overall population, was “Algérie française,” and indeed the whole Mediterranean region was administered as an integral part of metropolitan France.

The insurrection was led by the National Liberation Front (FLN). By 1956, about 512,000 French soldiers were in Algeria but victory eluded them. De Gaulle was brought to power in May 1958 after an attempted coup by the French army.

The colons assumed de Gaulle was on their side, but by 1959 the general realized that Algerian independence was inevitable.

Die-hard opponents considered him a traitor and formed the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which attempted to assassinate him. An aborted military putsch in Algiers in April 1961 was quashed.

It was the last gasp of resistance. The Evian Agreements of March 1962 set the stage for an independent Algeria, and the country became a sovereign state four months later. By the time the war ended, as many as one million people had been killed.

The FLN became the ruling political party and a corrupt autocratic machine. Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, was deposed by Colonel Houari Boumedienne in 1965. Boumedienne’s successor in 1978, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, was another military officer.

By the late 1980s, popular discontent led to a law allowing opposition parties to contest future elections. The main beneficiary was the newly-formed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which looked certain to win power in the 1991 general election.

The military intervened and annulled the vote, heralding a bloody civil war in which perhaps 200,000 people died. Of course the FIS didn’t believe in democracy either.

 Former foreign minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected president in 1999, and opened secret negotiations with the FIS. An amnesty led many rebels to lay down their arms.

Although political violence in Algeria has declined, and the Arab Spring bypassed it, the country has been shaken in recent years by bombings carried out by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The group said it was behind an ambush in July in the area that killed nine soldiers.

President Bouteflika won a fourth term in 2014 but, following a stroke, he is now near death. Fears that a power struggle within the regime, or an attempted Islamist coup, will unleash a new cycle of violence have gripped the nation.

Pakistan's Tumultuous History

Henry Srebrnik, (Summerside, PEI) Journal Pioneer

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the “land of the pure,” is at 191 million people the world’s second-most populous Muslim country.

It has had a tumultuous history since being carved out of the British Indian Empire in 1947, originally consisting of two parts in the west and east, separated by what was left of India.

Pakistan has been called a “hard country,” a “garrison state,” and a “warrior state.” Some refer to it as, not a country with an army, but an army with a country.

Obsessed by its rival India, it has neglected economic and political development, pouring resources into an unequal effort to retain military parity with its giant neighbour, which has five times its population and almost ten times its economy.

Indeed, some authors suggest that, since the state was created for India’s Muslims, who lived across the width and length of the entire subcontinent, not just in the areas allocated to them in 1947, they should still be the rightful rulers of India – as was the case for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the British.

The Mughal Empire was, after all, the creation of Turkic and Persian Muslims.

Since its inception, Pakistan has had a dearth of effective political leaders, or parties truly committed to democratic norms.

Parts of the Punjab and Sind remain virtually feudal, and corruption is a way of life. Economic stagnation and massive youth unemployment fuel resentment and violence in cities such as Karachi and Lahore.

Most politicians are political brokers who use patronage to build power bases. They are unresponsive to ordinary people, being obliged to reward their relatives, dependants and connections – that is, when they even manage to govern. In fact the nation’s military has, more often than not, ruled the state.

Pakistan’s military establishment has viewed the political class as self-interested hostages to ethnic and regional interests and sees itself as the sole institution able to unify the country. It even has major business interests.

As the military gained strength over time, it arrested the development of democratic institutions. Only once, in 2013, has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government.

The imposition of martial law by President Iskander Mirza in 1958, the rise of generals Muhammad Ayub Khan and Yayha Khan in the 1960s, the 1970s populism of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, the authoritarianism of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, General Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship from 1999 to 2008, and the 2007 assassination of Bhutto’s daughter Benazir, also a former prime minister -- all have been disasters.

Pakistan today faces increasing ethnic and sectarian strife, as Sunnis and Shia, Balochs, Sindis, Punjabis, Pashtuns and Muhajirs (Muslims who fled Indian territory after 1947) contend for power -- or seek to separate. Many madrasahs (religious schools) graduate Islamist extremists who target other sects in Islam, especially the Ahmadiyyas. The country struggles to exist as a cohesive unit.

An insurgency in Balochistan that began a decade ago is now the most violent and long-lasting of five rebellions that have broken out in Pakistan’s least developed province since the country’s independence from Britain in 1947. 

In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, alongside the Afghanistan border, the Pakistani Taliban continues its own insurgency.

A rent-seeking state, Pakistan has made use of its pivotal position in South Asia to attract billions of dollars of aid money, especially from the United States, during the Cold War and the more recent War on Terror.

But most of it has been funneled to its military, its nuclear program, and its Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency.

The ISI has consorted with radical Islamist organizations and supported terrorist groups to achieve foreign policy objectives – usually involving Pakistan’s permanent confrontation with India.

It has fomented trouble in Afghanistan by supporting that country’s Taliban, in order to gain “strategic depth” against India. Both Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, were sheltered in Pakistan.

Despite Pakistan’s longstanding ties to the United States, there is a strong current of anti-American feeling in the country, and CIA drone strikes against suspected terrorists have only added to this sense of hatred.

Veteran politician Nawaz Sharif currently heads a civilian government but his two previous stints as prime minister don’t offer much hope that he might institute significant reforms.

South Asia remains a very dangerous neighbourhood, in no small part because of Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies.

India's Relationship with Bangladesh Improves

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

India’s highly-charged quarrels with Pakistan have rarely eased up over the decades since partition in 1947. The two countries have fought a number of wars, the last a brief one in 1999. 

But political differences with Bangladesh have been less acute. After all, were it not for Delhi’s intervention and defeat of the Pakistani army in 1971, Bangladesh would never have achieved independence. 

The Bengalis of what was East Pakistan, though constituting more than half the population of the country, were treated as poor relations by Pakistan’s rulers, all of whom were in West Pakistan. 

They were under-represented in the military and bureaucracy, and received less government attention from far-off Islamabad, some 2,000 kilometres to the west, with India in between.

The politics of exclusion and the economics of inequality finally came to a head in a campaign for sovereignty, under Sheik Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League.

India provided massive aid to the country after its independence in the 1970s, when Congress Party leader Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India.

Things have changed since then, especially with the arrival of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule in India. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party and Bangladesh, while not perceived as a threat in the same manner as Pakistan, is nonetheless the third-largest Muslim country in the world.

One major issue has been illegal immigration from Bangladesh into the neighbouring Indian states of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal, whose people have feared becoming minorities in their own entities.

The BJP claimed that the Congress party when in power had done little about this for fear of losing the support of the Indian Muslim electorate.

After 2001, the BJP also tried to frame Bangladesh as a refuge for insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda and other Islamists, who wished to target India.

When the BJP won India’s election last year, the current Bangladeshi government was worried, because the ruling Awami League had been close to the rival Congress Party.

But in June Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Bangladesh in order to improve relations. He described terrorism as an “enemy of humanity” and praised the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina (the daughter of the country’s founder, Sheik Mujibur), for combating it at home.

They agreed to step up security ties, with Hasina saying both governments reiterated their commitment to a “zero-tolerance” policy on extremism.

Bangladesh has seen a spike in terrorism in recent years. Earlier this year, two atheist bloggers, Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman, were hacked to death in Dhaka, the capital, by Islamist radicals. 

The Jamaat-e-Islami Party retains significant pockets of support and has managed to instigate major strikes and violent protests across the country at times.

But Hasina has refused to be cowed by threats, barring religious parties from using Islam as a political tool. 

On her watch, the Supreme Court three years ago restored Bangladesh’s founding status as a secular rather than Islamic republic.

Former Chad President on Trial for Crimes

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Hissène Habré, the former president of the northern African nation of Chad, is now on trial in a special court in Senegal, accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and torture.

Habré ruled the desert country from 1982 to 1990, when he was deposed by Idriss Déby Itno, the current president.

The irony is that Habré was a protégé of France, the former colonial power, and the United States. They had both provided him with weapons to fight his neighour, Libya, then an anti-western hotbed involved with terrorism.

Habré was seen as a bulwark against Moammar Gadhafi, who had expansionist designs on northern Chad and tried to conquer the region.

The trouble was that Habré also used the weapons against his own people. A National Truth Commission created after his overthrow said that more than 40,000 people were killed or left to die, and that about 200,000 were imprisoned, and often tortured, in his network of jails.

His government periodically targeted civilian populations, including various ethnic groups such as Chadian Arabs, the Hadjerai, and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to Habré’s rule.

Yet for the past quarter-century he was living a comfortable existence, thanks to his looting of Chad’s treasury when he fled, in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. But the Senegalese government has finally been shamed into arresting Habré and putting him on trial.

Habré was first indicted by a Senegalese judge in 2000, but for the next 12 years the government of former President Abdoulaye Wade did little to enforce the order.

It was only in 2012, when Macky Sall became president of Senegal and the International Court of Justice demanded that Senegal prosecute or extradite Habré, based on the fact that Senegal had breached the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture by ignoring charges against Habré, that progress was finally made.

His trial is taking place before the Extraordinary African Chambers, inaugurated by Senegal and the African Union in February 2013 to prosecute the “person or persons” most responsible for international crimes committed in Chad between 1982 and 1990, the period when Habré ruled the country.

The African Union had in 2006 called on Senegal to prosecute Habré “on behalf of Africa.”

Habré’s trial is the first in the world in which the courts of one country prosecute the former ruler of another for alleged human rights crimes, under the concept of “universal jurisdiction.” It means that despots cannot expect to hide from their crimes by fleeing the country where they were committed.

Victims are permitted to participate in proceedings as civil parties, represented by legal counsel.

More than 4,000 victims have registered, with the help of Human Rights Watch and other groups.

Habré has denounced his trial as a farce staged by “African traitors” and “servants of America,” and refuses to cooperate, so the proceedings have been postponed until September -- but at least he is now facing justice for his crimes.

Citizenship Issues Ruined a West African Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The issues revolving around migration and citizenship eligibility continue to roil the political waters in both Europe and the United States, as desperate people cross the Mediterranean and the Rio Grande River, seeking better opportunities.

But similar concerns have also been politically deadly in non-western states. In the case of the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, it led to civil war and the near-breakup of the country.

A former French colony, Côte d’Ivoire achieved independence, along with the rest of French West and Equatorial Africa, in 1960. Its 20 million people belong to more than 60 ethnic groups, with the Baoulé, at 20 per cent, the largest.

The country’s first president was Félix Houphouet-Boigny, who ruled until his death in 1993. His political vehicle, the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), went virtually unchallenged.

Côte d’Ivoire prospered economically. This success became known as the “Ivorian miracle” and was due to a combination of sound planning, the maintenance of strong ties with France – the president was a devout Roman Catholic who built the world’s largest church in his new capital of Yamoussoukro -- and development of the country’s significant coffee and cocoa industries.

Houphouet-Boigny’s ethnic group, the Baoulé, became widespread throughout the country, being the most numerous planters of cocoa, rubber, and coffee; they sometimes came to outnumber local native ethnic groups.

As well, given the need for labour to work in agriculture, northerners, mostly Muslims, began to migrate into Côte d’Ivoire from neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso.

As long as prosperity was the norm, this wasn’t much of an issue. But in the 1990s the country began to unravel, racked by economic crisis as prices for cocoa and coffee declined, and ethno-regional tensions rooted in issues of identity and citizenship increased.

Also, the democratization process opened up a new way to attain power – but since only nationals could exercise political rights, citizenship became important.

The ideology of “Ivorité,” based on aboriginality, began to be used against people whose ancestors were not native to the country, despite being born there. In contrast to the increasingly Muslim and immigrant north, the predominantly Christian south increasingly came to define itself as the indigenous group.

Houphouet-Boigny’s successor, Henri Konan Bédié, also a Catholic Baoulé, prevented a northern Muslim, Alassane Ouattara, a member of the Dioula people and leader of the Rassemblement des Républicains (RDR), from contesting the presidency in 1995, claiming that his parents had been born in Burkina Faso.

Many northerners were blocked from voting and were increasingly subject to attacks, particularly in the south. Other politicians boycotted the election, which Bédié won with 96 per cent of the vote.

In advance of the 2000 election, Bédié’s supporters continued harassing people they considered non-indigenous, driving them from land in the south. Both Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo, a Catholic Bété politician and leader of the Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI), were determined to unseat him.

Before that could happen, however, a military coup, led by a northern Muslim of the Yakouba ethnic group, General Robert Guei, seized power in 1999. In the ensuing election, which Guei contested, and from which both Ouattara and Bédié were barred from running, Gbagbo became president.

Once in office, Gbagbo began supporting “Ivorité” as a political principle, creating an Office of National Identification to certify whether individuals could claim indigeneity. Ouattara saw this as an attempt to deny his supporters their citizenship rights.

An insurgency, led by a new movement, the Forces Nouvelles, began in 2002 and soon the country was virtually partitioned into two. Attempts to create a government of national reconciliation kept breaking down.

While French and UN peacekeepers patrolled a buffer zone, a 2007 agreement still made no determination as to who was a citizen and therefore had rights to land.

The autumn 2010 presidential election provided stark evidence that little had been resolved. The election, in which ethnicity and the country’s north-south divide played a crucial role, pitted President Gbagbo against Ouattara.

Both men claimed victory and took the presidential oath of office. A new crisis ensued, which in March 2011escalated into full-scale war. At least 3,000 people were killed during the five-month conflict, most of them by pro-Gbagbo forces.

The UN endorsed Ouattara’s election win and French forces finally arrested Gbagbo. In October 2011 the International Criminal Court charged him with four counts of crimes against humanity and he was transferred to The Hague, where he awaits trial.

Ouattara inherited an economy shattered by more than a decade of misrule. Conflicts over land continue to pit northerners against southerners and many other unresolved issues make the likelihood of renewed violence a possibility.

The October 2015 October presidential election, in which Ouattara will seek a second term, will be a critical moment for the country.

Reflections on Coming Federal Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Three months out from the next federal election, things are not looking good for the Conservatives.

Prime Minister Harper has lost a number of key cabinet ministers, including John Baird and Peter MacKay, oil prices have collapsed, and Canada may already be in recession.

That spells trouble for a party whose main claim is that it is a better steward of the economy than its opponents. After nine years, the Harper government seems listless.

At best, the Conservatives can only count on a loyal base of somewhere between 30-35 per cent of the electorate. On the other hand, large segments of Canadian society absolutely loath Harper; he’s been compared to everyone from Attila the Hun to Hitler! (Some call this “Harper derangement syndrome.”)

Despite that, the Conservatives will emerge victorious. The well-oiled Tory machine, plus the addition of 30 new seats in the House of Commons, mostly in Conservative-friendly areas in Ontario and the West, will see to that.

However, while they will come first, the Conservatives won’t win the 169 seats needed for a majority.
The New Democrats will be a close second, though this will depend on the Bloc Québécois not re-emerging as a major force in that province.

The Liberals will hold about the same number of seats as they currently have; they will basically become a “niche” party, supported mostly by recent immigrant communities in big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, anglophone and allophone federalists in Montreal, and Atlantic Canadians.

By the way, Atlantic Canada’s continued support of the Liberals has an interesting historical parallel: in the United Kingdom, after the Liberals became a minor party in the 1920s, their support came mainly in the “Celtic fringe” (parts of Scotland and Wales).

If all goes as I suggest, the Conservatives will emerge with 154 seats, the NDP with 135, the Liberals with 35, the Bloc with 12, and the Greens with two.

Justin Trudeau will try to entice Thomas Mulcair into forming a coalition government – after all, the Liberals will have nothing to lose -- but the New Democrats would be wise to resist it: why breathe new life into their rivals?

Instead, the NDP will try to topple the minority Tories in a vote of non-confidence when parliament resumes sitting and then form their own minority government (with tacit support from the Bloc and Liberals).

What happens after that is anybody’s guess. My own crystal ball becomes hazy at that point. No doubt they will be interesting times!
Henr

Should India Have Been Partitoned in 1947?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The advocates of today’s fashionable but often utopian ideal of multiculturalism are usually critical of states based on national or religious beliefs.

Such authors lament the partition of the Indian subcontinent in August of 1947, when, after almost three hundred years, the British finally left, and two independent states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, emerged.

Even before the British pulled out, large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who would be caught on the “wrong” side of the new borders.

There began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction, to India.

Some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. There were massacres, arson, forced conversions, and rape. Whole villages were torched, and refugee trains, with all their passengers, set on fire.

Those who consider partition an avoidable disaster assert that for centuries, Hindus and Muslims co-existed in a world of intermingled traditions, languages and cultures that cut across religious lines.

The British are typically blamed for bringing religious division to the fore during their long administration, and so setting the stage for the carnage that followed the Second World War.

Others make Hindu and Muslim politicians, in particular Jawaharlal Nehru of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party and Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, responsible.

Their clash of personalities led to a truculent Nehru refusing Indian Muslim demands for a looser federation that would provide them with greater power and security, and hence making possible Jinnah’s demands for a separate sovereign Muslim state, to be named Pakistan.

Events moved rapidly as the war ended; people moved out of mixed neighbourhoods and cities became informally partitioned into Hindu and Muslim zones.

In the Bengali capital of Calcutta (now Kolkata) major violence broke out in what is known as the “Great Calcutta Killing.” Between August 16 and 19, 1946, four days of massive Hindu-Muslim rioting resulted in 5,000 to 10,000 dead, and some 15,000 wounded. Partition now became the preferred option for all.

The British, realizing they had lost control of events, quickly speeded up their date of departure, and announced they would be gone by August 15, 1947. The rush exacerbated the chaos, with a British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, assigned to draw the borders of the two new countries – and given little more than a month to do it.

Most of the violence now centered in the states of Bengal and Punjab, with their mixed Hindu-Sikh-Muslim populations, as the partition lines would run through them.

The two countries that emerged – both now nuclear powers – have had an uneasy relationship ever since, including two wars over the disputed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, most of which remains within India, and a 1971 conflict when East Pakistan became the new country of Bangladesh.

But what would have been the alternative? As it stands, there have been horrific massacres inflicted by both sides since 1947, even after the creation of two (and later three) separate states.

For example, in the Indian state of Gujerat, which has a large Muslim population, a three-day period of inter-communal violence in February-March 2002 was triggered by the bombing of a train.

According to official figures, the riots resulted in the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus; 2,500 people were injured non-fatally, and 223 more were reported missing. Other sources estimate that up to 2,000 Muslims died.

Meanwhile, on the Pakistani side, after the initial exodus of Sikhs and Hindus, the society has turned its fury on Christians, Shi’ites and Ahmadis (the last two considered “heretics” by Sunni Muslim extremists).

Imagine a united India, stretching from Kashmir to the Burmese border, with a population of close to one billion Hindus and some 530 Muslims, with Hindus rallying behind Narendra Modi’s “Hindutva” nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Muslims in turn supporting various radical Islamic parties as a reaction.

The country would be ungovernable. So, to paraphrase Churchill, “Partition was the worst outcome, save for all the others.”

The Course of German Politics

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

It’s now been seven decades since the end of the Second World War, and most Germans alive today have no personal memory of their country’s horrific Nazi past. And it is now a quarter-century since Germany was reunited and regained full sovereignty.

How is this affecting the country’s political culture?

The Federal Republic (“West Germany”) that emerged from the ashes of Hitlerism, for many years steered by Konrad Adenauer, understood that its rehabilitation and security, in the era of the Cold War, depended on its participation in the European project that eventually became the European Union, and on its commitment to the Western alliance, as part of NATO.

With memories of the Holocaust, other war crimes committed against virtually every European nation, and the most virulent form of racism the world had ever seen, still fresh, the Bonn Republic was, so to speak, on political probation.

Though Germany had lost considerable territory, mainly to Poland, was itself partitioned into two states, and had to resettle millions of refugees that were expelled from countries such as Czechoslovakia, its role in starting a war of expansion and extermination forced it to keep quiet about any injuries its own population had suffered.

So issues such as the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, and the various acts against civilians perpetrated by the victorious armed forces, in particular those of the Red Army, were rarely mentioned.

Germany was constrained by the Cold War and its own Nazi past.

But in the watershed years of 1989-1991, Europe underwent a zeitgeist shift of immense proportions. 

The Soviet empire in Europe collapsed, the USSR itself disintegrated, and the Berlin Wall came down. 

Today, a woman who herself grew up in the old Communist German Democratic Republic is chancellor of Germany. None of this was foreseen as late as the mid-1980s.

How has this affected Germany’s national identity? For one thing, the country has become more assertive and less afraid of alienating its friends and neighbours. 

The very hard line it has taken against Greece in that country’s current economic crisis is one indicator – some would call it heartless. Its very public support of Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s Russia is another.

As well, Germany no longer marches lock-step with its NATO partners – far less accommodating to Washington’s pressures than in the past, it kept out of Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. It now sees itself as an equal, rather than a junior partner, to the United States. 

In fact, given its economic might, Germany feels it needs no advice from countries adversely affected by the financial meltdown in 2008.

The assertive Germany that emerged after 1871 and led Europe into two ruinous wars was followed by a rump state where any sign of nationalism was viewed with suspicion by much of the world.

Hopefully the new Germany will follow a middle course that does not veer too far in either direction.

Anniversary Marked

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Two of the 20th century’s well-known dictators died in 1975, 40 years ago.

Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of Nationalist China, was 87 when he passed away on April 5, 1975, while Francisco Franco, the caudillo of Spain, was almost 83 when he succumbed to illness on Nov. 20, 1975.

Chiang Kai-shek was the Chinese military and political leader who led the Kuomintang (the KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party) for five decades and was head of state of mainland China between 1928 and 1949, when his forces fled the mainland to the island of Taiwan.

Chiang began his military training in 1906 and, leading a regiment in Shanghai, took part in the uprising in 1911 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen.

After Sun's death in 1925, Chiang became leader of the KMT. He reunified most of China under a Nationalist government based in Nanjing and led the suppression of the Chinese Communist Party.

From 1931, though, he had to contend with a Japanese invasion, first in Manchuria, and after 1937, in the rest of the country.

Though Japan was defeated in 1945, civil war broke out between the KMT and the Communists, who had grown in strength during the war. In 1949, the Communists were victorious, establishing the People’s Republic of China, and Chiang and the remaining KMT forces fled to Taiwan.

There he established a government in exile, which Chiang led for the next quarter-century, and where he imposed martial law. He insisted that his remained the legitimate government of China, though eventually most countries recognized the government in Beijing.

After his death, Taiwan was governed by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who began to liberalize the political system in the mid-1980s. The generalissimo’s memory is rarely invoked by current political parties, including the Kuomintang.

Francisco Franco in 1907 entered the Infantry Academy and rose rapidly through the ranks; by 1926 he was the youngest general in Spain.

A military dictatorship condoned by King Alfonso XIII governed Spain from 1923 to 1931, but the king was deposed and a republic declared. The country entered a period of uncertainty and disorder.

In 1935 Franco became army chief of staff. When a Popular Front coalition, including Communists, won the elections in February 1936, he and other military leaders began discussing a coup.

On July 18, 1936, military officers launched an uprising. The ensuing Spanish Civil War would last three traumatic years, killing at least half a million people, and devastating the country.

Franco secured the backing of the Catholic Church, and dissolved all political parties other than the fascist Falange. He also acquired massive military assistance from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

The Republic received support from the Soviet Union and the Communist-led International Brigades, but was eventually worn down. Madrid surrendered in March 1939, ending the conflict.

Though he sympathized with the Axis powers, Franco largely stayed out of the Second World War, perhaps because Hitler refused to guarantee Spain a giant chunk of the French Empire in Africa following the French defeat in 1940.

However, Franco did send some 50,000 volunteers, the Blue Division, to fight alongside the Germans on the Soviet front.

Following the war,Spain faced diplomatic and economic isolation, but that began to lessen during the Cold War. As well, political repression within the country diminished.

In 1947 Franco had declared that a king would succeed him, and in 1969 he chose Prince Juan Carlos, the grandson of King Alfonso XIII.

The new monarch dismantled the authoritarian state created by Franco and legalized political parties. The first post-Franco elections were held in 1977. In 2007, the Spanish government removed statues, street names and memorials associated with the Franco regime.

Since the deaths of the two rulers, both Taiwan and Spain have become functioning democracies, and have left their days of military rule and dictatorship behind them.

Racist Extremism in America

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

By now the whole world knows about the murders of nine African Americans at the historic Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. 

Dylann Roof, a 21-year old man, has been arrested for this hate crime. It appears he became a white supremacist in large part by reading racist literature from groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, posted on the Internet. Roof’s own “manifesto” contains material culled from such sources.

The Council started in the 1950s in Mississippi as the Citizens’ Councils of America, formed to fight against the integration of public schools following the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling banning segregation.

There were many other Southern groups battling against the elimination of “Jim Crow” laws during the civil rights era of the 1950s-60s, including a revived Ku Klux Klan. 

The era also spawned George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, founded in 1959. In July 1963, the party’s publication the Stormtrooper was replaced with the newspaper White Power, bearing the swastika in the centre of the paper.

Rockwell, who was assassinated in 1967, was a major figure in the neo-Nazi movement in the United States, and his beliefs and writings have continued to be influential among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, including the white supremacist Louisiana politician David Duke. 

A former national director of the Knights of Ku Klux Klan, Duke formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People in 1980.

The most horrendous crime perpetrated by white extremists was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

They killed 168 people and injured over 600. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.

They were inspired by The Turner Diaries, a 1978 book written by William Luther Pierce, founder of the white supremacist National Alliance. It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to a “race war” against Jews, non-whites and gays. 

The book has been labeled a “bible of the racist right” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The book is also associated with two extremist groups, the Aryan Nations and The Order. The former, long headquartered in Hayden Lake, Idaho, was founded in 1974 by Richard Butler, who openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest.

In his youth, Butler had been a member of one of the largest pro-Hitler organizations in the United States, William Dudley Pelley’s fascist Silver Legion of America, active in the 1930s.

In its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, Klansmen and other white nationalists convened regularly at the Aryan Nations compound for its annual world congresses.

In 2000, though, the group began to fall apart after losing a civil lawsuit that depleted the group’s finances. The 2004 death of founder Richard Butler further weakened the group, and it splintered into various factions. 

Butler’s most infamous acolyte was probably Robert J. Mathews, founder of The Order. Its members, who referred to the federal government as ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government), murdered Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, who was Jewish, in 1984. Butler himself died in a confrontation with the FBI later that year. 

But white supremacists of various stripes remain active. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people in the U.S. have been killed by anti-government fanatics and other racist extremists than by radical Islamists, according to New America, a Washington research center.

So Dylann Roof is heir to a long tradition of extreme right-wing anti-Semitic and racist groups in America.

Will Tunisia's Fragile Democracy Survive?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The only state to have come out of the Arab Spring with genuine democratic institutions, after popular discontent toppled the autocratic Ben Ali regime in December 2010, is the north African nation of Tunisia.

But will this last? Recent events make the prognosis problematic.

Tunisia has struggled to contain an insurgency along its porous border with Algeria, where Islamist militants have been increasingly present.

A greater problem stems from Ansar al-Shariah, whose leaders are members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and are now based in Syria and neighbouring Libya, and connected to the Islamic State.

It shares the goals of cleansing north Africa of Western influence and instituting Islamic law.

The chaos unfolding in Libya has created large areas where extremists train, and a ready source of weapons for them from the armouries of former dictator Muammar Gadhafi.

And Tunisia itself, a country which produces 80,000 university graduates a year but has around 20 per cent unemployment, provides fertile soil for the disappointed.

Three thousand Tunisians now make up the biggest foreign fighter contingent in the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Last December, a group of Tunisian Islamists in Syria asked their compatriots to rise up against their own government in the name of an Islamic Caliphate. Clearly, some have responded to the call.

This year, the country has been victimized by a series of terrorist incidents, mainly aimed at foreign tourists, and designed to cripple that segment of its economy.

Among Tunisia’s tourist attractions are its capital of Tunis, the ancient ruins of Carthage, the Muslim and Jewish quarters on the island of Jerba, and various coastal resorts along the Mediterranean Sea.

On March 18, an attack by three gunmen on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis killed 21 foreign tourists. The Islamic State declared that they had struck “citizens of the Crusader countries.”

One week later, a soldier killed seven other troops in an attack at the Bouchoucha military base in Tunis.

Then, on June 26, another shooter murdered 40 people, most of them British, on a beach between the Soviva and Imperial Marhaba hotels, in a tourist complex near Sousse, along the Mediterranean.

Prime Minister Habib Essid, appointed by President Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi on Feb. 5 to lead a coalition government whose members include the Islamist Ennahda and the secular  Afek Tounes parties, has announced the closing of 80 mosques being investigated for extremist links.

Tunisia must take back the terrain of religion that it surrendered to extremists, contends Sami Brahem, a researcher at Tunisia’s Center for Economic and Social Studies and Research.

On Jan. 27, 2014, then President Moncef Marzouki signed the country’s new constitution, adopted a day earlier by a constituent assembly. “With the birth of this text, we confirm our victory over dictatorship,” he said in a speech, waving the victory sign. Perhaps he spoke too soon.