The Passing of a Great Historian

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

When I was a university student, many moons ago, few courses in modern history were without a book, or at least a number of scholarly articles, by Walter Laqueur, assigned as part of our readings. Laqueur, who died Sept. 30, at the age of 97, was a giant in his field.

A German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he was part of an era when historians wrote on a broad range of topics and countries. All these issues and places in one way or another had affected his own life.

At the time of his death, Laqueur was a retired professor at Georgetown University and chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

He was born in Breslau, the city that is today Wroclaw, Poland, on May 26, 1921. He was 17 in 1938 when he left Germany days before the Nazi-led Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews and managed to gain entry to the British mandate of Palestine as a student. His parents perished in the Holocaust.

Laqueur worked as a journalist in Israel before moving to London in 1955, where, along with another eminent historian, George Mosse, he founded and edited the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications.

From 1965 to 1994 he was director of the London-based Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a leading archive and repository of documents.

Some of Laqueur’s works will remain classics, including his 1972 A History of Zionism and A History of Terrorism, published in 1977. Both remain in print and are as relevant as the day they were published.

A History of Zionism traced the movement from its beginnings, with the emancipation of European Jewry in the wake of the French Revolution, to 1948, when the Zionist dream became a reality. 

In A History of Terrorism Laqueur described the trajectory of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe to  the operations of various Middle Eastern and other groups today. 

The book was a companion to Guerrilla Warfare, published that same year, which sought to provide a critical interpretation of guerrilla theory and practice throughout history.

He wrote dozens of other books, on a wide array of subjects, including antisemitism, Communism, fascism, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the Soviet Union. 

When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Laqueur predicted the emergence of “an authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism.” And this indeed came to pass.

Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, published in 2015, explained how three long-standing pillars of Russian ideology -- a strong belief in the Russian Orthodox Church, a sense of Eurasian “manifest destiny” and a fear of foreign enemies -- continue to exert a powerful influence on the Russian people. 

Laqueur’s last book, The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Alt-Right, written with Christopher Wall, was published this year. There, he cautioned that the Islamic State’s short-lived successes in creating a caliphate demonstrated that “true believers now have a model that they can hope to achieve and acquire, because it has been done.”

When he visited his boyhood home after the Second World War, he wrote in his 1992 memoir, Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, “the world I had known as a boy no longer existed, and as I tried to remember the people I had known when I was 16, I realized that most of them had died a violent death.

“Some were killed in the ruins of Stalingrad,” he added, “others in Auschwitz, some in 1948 in the battles for Palestine.”

No one could call Walter Laqueur a starry-eyed idealist. In his long and productive life, he had lived through too many historical tragedies to assume that there was a “right side of history” and that the world was becoming a more just and peaceful place. 

In one of his last works Laqueur called himself a “veteran pessimist” We will miss his steely-eyed insights into politics and human nature.

Brazil Taking Hard Turn to Right

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph Journal

Brazil, South America's largest country in land and population, has become a political basket case. Formerly governed as a military dictatorship before 1985, it has always been marred by corruption and economic dysfunction – problems that are only growing worse.

In the past decade, billions of dollars' worth of public contracts have been awarded on the basis of kickbacks for elected officials. Crime is out of control, with 175 murders a day. And the man who governed the country for most of this century, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, has been jailed for influence peddling and bribery.

It's little surprise, then, the country finds itself in political turmoil during the current election season. Many international observers are sounding alarms about the possible victory of Jair Bolsonaro of the Social Liberal Party, which takes a populist conservative stance and pledges to bring the country significantly to the right.

Bolsonaro served in the army for 17 years before going into politics in 1988 and has praised the former military dictatorship. Since 1991, he has served as a congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro, winning re-election six times.

Critics have accused him of inciting sexism, homophobia and racism. He says he “loves” U.S. President Donald Trump and has vowed to "drain the swamp" in the capital, Brasilia – language common from populist leaders in many countries who vow to take power back from out-of-touch elites.

The Social Liberal Party's slogan is "Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone."

Like France, Brazil has a two-stage process for electing the president. There is an open field in the first round and, if no candidate earns more than 50 per cent of the vote, a "run-off" second round between the top two finishers is held.

Voting in Brazilian elections is compulsory.

Round 1 was held Sunday. Out of a pack of 13 candidates, Bolsonaro emerged with 46.1 per cent of the vote, despite spending a large part of the campaign in hospital after being stabbed at a rally in September.

Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, representing the Workers’ Party, which governed from 2003 to 2016, was a distant second at 29.1 per cent.

Bolsonaro seems poised to cruise to victory in the second round on Oct. 28, given his strong showing last weekend. To defeat him, opponents will have to rally a coalition to the Workers' Party, which many see as responsible for Brazil's malaise.

Certainly, Bolsonaro is a divisive figure. He has demonized his opponents on the left as corrupt and inept radicals. Until early August, he did not even have a running mate because traditional parties and politicians found him too extreme.

But that's all changed now. He emerged as the front-runner in this race because his pledge to crack down on crime and political corruption resounded with millions of voters. In this, he is striking a common note for populist candidates in many of the world's democracies.

The next three weeks will be fierce. Brazil seems on the precipice of another period of political volatility.

Some Answers to 50-Year Old Mexican Tragedy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Fifty years ago, in October 1968, a massacre took place, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City, just days before the country was due to host the Olympic Games. 

The preceding months had seen ongoing confrontations between students – both those from the working-class polytechnic school, IPN, and the middle-class Autonomous National University – and the government's riot police, against a backdrop of authoritarian leadership and growing economic inequality. 

The government was determined to put an end to civil unrest, and on the evening of Oct. 2, gunfire broke out in the Plaza, with snipers, riot police, tanks and helicopters all taking part. 

Many students had already waged pitched battles to defend their premises. It had all started on July 22, when an incursion of riot police entered into two vocational schools to break up a fight.

Protests and marches escalated thereafter in response to police brutality – from indiscriminate beatings to arrests and torture.

Four days later, after “authorized” local protests, some more radical IPN students decided to push on to the main square and seat of government, merging with another march, led by pro-communist students, to commemorate the Moncada assault that had begun the Cuban revolution in 1956.

The revolutionary slogans alarmed President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, worried by the prospect of Communist-inspired disruption of the Olympic Games that would ruin the facade of a stable, prosperous Mexico.

Indeed, the major student concern was the lack of democracy and labour rights. While the elite and the PRI bureaucracy enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom, there was hunger, unemployment and deprivation, especially in rural and indigenous areas. An academic study in 1967 found that of a population of 47 million, five million went barefoot and 11 million were illiterate.

Student demands included freedom for political prisoners; the firing of city police chiefs and officials responsible for the repression; and compensation for the families of those killed or injured in the conflict up to that point.

Confrontation intensified in August, as students, workers and the unemployed took to the streets together.

Two massive marches on August 13th and 27th to the Zocalo, the main square in Mexico City saw upwards of 500,000 people participating. In response, Díaz Ordaz resolved to destroy the movement.

On Oct. 2, 10 days before the start of the Olympics, the 12,000 students and other civilians who had gathered in the Plaza that evening were attacked without warning.

The total number of deaths remains unknown. Some estimates are as high as 1,000, but most have settled on about 300.

For decades the PRI government stuck to its story that students, controlled by foreigners, had triggered the bloodbath, despite countless witnesses to the contrary. International media also played down the massacre.

After the PRI lost power to the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the new president, Vicente Fox, instructed a Special Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the massacre. It concluded that the state had embarked on “a spiral of violence” that led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide.

It filed charges against former President Luis Echeverria, who as interior secretary in 1968 was in charge of policing, but a tribunal exonerated him in 2007.

On Sept. 24, for the first time, a Mexican government body acknowledged that the massacre was a “state crime.”

Jaime Rochin, head of the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims, said the government used "snipers who fired to create chaos, terror and an official narrative to criminalize" anti-government demonstrations.

The new Mexican president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist not beholden to either the PRI or PAN, will take office in December.

Sergio Aguayo, a journalist and academic, said Lopez Obrador’s victory is a fulfillment of the hopes of the leftist student movement of the 1960s.

Perhaps he will finally provide Mexicans with more answers to what happened on that dreadful night 50 years ago.

It's No Longer Primarily About the Economy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

In the 1992 American presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton famously argued that “It’s the economy, stupid.”

He used the recession in the United States at the time as one of the means to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush.

But in in this November’s midterm elections, so-called identitarian politics, not economics, will be the major factor – despite the fact that the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath has been much worse than previous downturns.

The Democratic Party’s base has increasingly become the home of people of colour and of women, while white males skew towards the Republicans. 

In the 2016 presidential election issues of identity -- race, religion, gender and ethnicity -- and not economics, were the driving forces that determined how people voted.

These are the findings of political scientists John Sides of George Washington University, Michael Tesler of the University of California at Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California at Los Angeles, co-authors of the new book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

The two candidates stood further apart on identity issues than any major-party presidential candidates in 40 years, so this became more strongly related to how Americans voted in 2016 than in any recent presidential election, maintain the authors.

It’s not that economic issues didn’t matter. But racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.”

Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, in “Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment,” published in the November 2017 British Journal of Sociology, argues that in the contemporary political climate, the fear of cultural disruption has become pervasive on the right.

The reason for this is that many Donald Trump supporters have long held strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these have only recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other Republicans before him, “have actively stoked fears of demographic and cultural change and channeled them into powerful resentments toward minority groups.”

That’s why many academics are wary of identity politics, seeing it as a double-edged sword.

In his new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science at Stanford University, deals with this issue.

“A lot of these recognition struggles flow out of the social movements that began to emerge in the 1960s involving African-Americans, women, the LGBT community, Native Americans, and the disabled,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an Aug. 27 interview. 

“These groups found a home on the left, triggering a reaction on the right. They say: What about us? Aren’t we deserving of recognition? Haven’t the elites ignored us, downplayed our struggles? That’s the basis of today’s populism.”

Populist nationalism springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means, especially given the insecurity caused by economic disruption plus rather rapid cultural change.

While every single one of these struggles is justified, “the problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society.”

In “An Anatomy of Radicalism,” in the Fall 2018 issue of the journal American Affairs, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein also acknowledges that modern theorists and practitioners of identity politics, at their best, “capture people’s actual experiences, and their keen sense of exclusion and humiliation. That can be helpful and even important, but it is hardly a basis for reform.”

It is not clear exactly what it does, he maintains, "aside from giving people a sense of having some kind of home. It is probably best understood as a plea, or a demand, for understanding and respect. That should not be diminished. But where exactly does it lead?”

Perhaps Fukuyama has the answer, when he suggests that “We need to get back to a narrative that’s focused less on narrow groups and more on larger collectivities.”

Libya's Violent Political Culure

By Henry Srebrnik. [Saint-John, NB] Telegraph Journal 

In the states of the Middle East, four types of regimes are on offer:

Theocracies such as Iran, which is governed by Shia clerics; rule by a strongman -- the Assads in Syria are an example; kings with a modicum of legitimacy, such as Abdullah II in Jordan; finally, fragile and – if history is any guide – short- lived democratic regimes, as in today’s Tunisia.

Should any of them collapse, the most likely outcome is a descent into anarchy and violence – witness today’s Libya.

The downfall of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011 produced, not democracy, but chaos, with conflicts along regional, tribal and linguistic lines.

Libya is now a failed state with rival groups battling for control of the country and its oil riches.

In August clashes between rival armed groups in Tripoli plunged Libya into yet deeper chaos, casting serious doubt as to whether the war-wracked country is ready to hold planned elections later this year.

On August 27, fierce fighting erupted in the capital’s southern districts after the Seventh Brigade, an armed group based in Tarhouna, southeast of Tripoli, launched a surprise offensive against rival militias.

By Sept. 23 at least 115 people had been killed in clashes between rival factions in Tripoli, Libya’s health ministry said.

The fighting pitted the Seventh Brigade against the Tripoli Revolutionaries’ Brigades (TRB) and the Nawasi Brigade, two of the capital’s largest armed groups.

The country now has two rival legislatures - the internationally recognised Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HOR) in Benghazi. Each has its own central bank and national oil company.

The head of the GNA is Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj, while General Khalifa Haftar of the self-styled Libyan National Army runs the east.

While armed groups in the western part of the country technically have pledged allegiance to the GNA, that doesn't mean that they will heed civilian authorities’ instructions.

“Everybody is under the GNA government because the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence pay out salaries but nobody takes orders from them,” remarked Tarek Megerisi, a political researcher specialising in Libya. They are all “vying for a piece of the pie.” 

Emadeddin Muntasser, a Libyan political analyst, concurs. “The GNA is a paper government with no influence of events.”  

Wolfram Lacher of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs has identified four groups that exercise disproportionate power in the GNA’s part of Libya: the TRB, the Nawasi Brigade, the Special Deterrence Force and the Abu Slim unit of the Central Security apparatus.

This has angered rival militias such as the Seventh Brigade, who feel like they have been marginalised and dealt with unjustly, as well as being at risk of losing access to state funds.

They stated that they “reject the rule of militias inside Tripoli.” So the fighting will, unfortunately, continue. And don’t hold your breath waiting for elections. Libya is destined to be a failed state for years, perhaps even decades to come.

The European Union and Euroskeptic Populism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the past decade, the European Union (EU) has been hit by three crises -- a financial crisis, a refugee crisis, and the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain. 

These have increased voter pessimism with the EU, creating a favourable context for Euroskeptic populist parties expressing anti-establishment positions.

The French National Front (FN) is a prototype of the populist radical right in Western Europe, exhibiting its key characteristic features -- nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. 

Since its electoral breakthrough in 1984, the FN has established itself as a major actor in French politics, and a vehicle for Euroskepticism.

It has made significant electoral gains since 2008, especially after Marine Le Pen took over the party in 2011.

In Germany, the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from its inception in late 2012 to its unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 federal election, when it came third, has moved the party beyond opposition to aspects of the European integration process into a more profound critique of German society and politics.

For the first time since the early 1950s, a political party has occupied viable political space to the right of the Christian Democrats (CDU).

The AfD was founded by German conservatives who were unhappy with the centrist direction of the CDU under Angela Merkel’s leadership.

The economic and financial crisis in Europe, and Germany’s central role in leading responses to it, provided the mobilizing narrative for the AfD. The party successfully presented a clear political message to a distinct set of German voters. It has shaken up the German political system.

Greece has been an EU member since 1981 but its relationship with the organization has always been problematic.

More recently, it was one of the leading protagonists in the Eurozone crisis, which not only put the future of the euro in question but even the country’s membership of the monetary union. 

Greece was also one of the frontline states during the refugee crisis due to its proximity to sender regions, such as the Middle East and North Africa.

This resulted in the perception among the Greek population that the EU was not doing enough to help the country manage the crisis. 

As a consequence, support for the mainstream pro-EU New Democracy declined, whereas the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), a previously minor populist party, effectively replaced the mainstream pro-EU Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) as the main left-wing contender for power.

The Italian party system includes populist parties that have opposed the pan-European project.

The Italian Northern League (LN) is in the populist radical right party family, while the Italian 5 Star Movement (M5S) started out as an anti-establishment party with left-libertarian concerns, but increasingly adopted nativist tones.

The LN has, ever since its establishment in the early 1990s, centred its political activity on the defence of the “common man” against the elites. 

It has progressively moved towards a politics of nativism and authoritarianism by including xenophobia and “law and order” in its discourse.

The M5S, organized as a full-fledged party in 2009, gradually developed a pronounced Euroskeptic profile. In the 2018 election, it received the largest number of votes, and formed a coalition government with the LN.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) has become the main contender on the populist right since its entry into parliament in 2006. 

It blames political elites for an array of social problems, related to the spread of multiculturalism and the supposed “‘Islamisation” of Dutch society. It also describes the EU as an undemocratic “super state.”

The 2008 recession also moved the Portuguese and Spanish party systems in a populist Euroskeptic direction.

The Portuguese Left Bloc (BE) jumped from 5.2 per cent of the vote in the 2011 general election to 10 per cent in 2015; and the newly born Podemos in Spain received 21 per cent of the vote and became the third largest party in the parliament in the 2015 election.

In the Swedish election of Sept. 9, the ultra-right Sweden Democrats won 17.6 per cent of the vote, and ended the day as the country’s third largest political party. 

In 2010 they had entered the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, with just 5.7 per cent. 

An anti-immigrant spectre is haunting Europe, and traditional parties have failed to respond to the sense of discontent that exists.

Pakistan's New Leader Feuds With Washington

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The election of Imran Khan as Pakistan’s new prime minister following the country’s parliamentary election on July 25 has increased the country’s military power as never before.

Since its creation in 1947, after the partition of British India, Pakistan has had 30 years of military rule, over three periods: 1958-70, 1977-88 and 1999-2008. 

But for the past 10 years, the military has stayed in the background, allowing civilian politicians to take turns in power after elections that were always marred to some extent by electoral irregularities.

In fact in 2013, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, a democratically elected government completed its full term and there was a democratic change of government, with the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) succeeding the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party.

This strengthening of the democratic process was bound to disturb the military, which is known by its opponents as the ‘deep state’ because of the key role of its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). 

Indeed, some elected PPP and PML-N leaders tried to pursue policies that ran counter to the military’s wishes, especially towards India, which it regards as its principal enemy. 

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party won 151 of the 342 seats in the lower house of parliament, defeating the PML-N party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Khan has cobbled together a coalition government.

The Pakistani military is widely accused of skewing the election in favour of Khan, but it denied the charge. Most observers, including Sharif, believe they wanted Khan to win and rigged the vote.

The new prime minister indicated that he would move away from what he called a “clientalistic” relationship with Washington, whose drone attacks and war on terror he blames for fostering extremism within Pakistan, towards countries closer in the region. 

To make this point, he welcomed the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, as his first diplomatic guest and stated his support for the nuclear deal that U.S. President Donald Trump recently cancelled.

Irritation with this led the U.S. military to announce that it would be cancelling $300 million in aid to Pakistan.
 

It stated that this was over what it called Islamabad’s failure to take action against militant groups.

The State Department also has criticized Pakistan for failing to deal with terrorist networks operating on its soil, including the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban.

Pakistan has been accused of providing covert support to the Haqqani network, a militant group that focuses most of its activities on neighbouring Afghanistan.

Kabul has complained for years that Pakistan allows it to operate unimpeded from its soil across the border. The group is linked to the Afghan Taliban. 

Trump in January accused Pakistan of deceiving the U.S. and suspended nearly all of the $1.3 billion in annual security aid given to Pakistan.

In May, the two countries even placed travel restrictions on the diplomats based in their respective capitals.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made his first official trip to Pakistan on Sept. 5, saying that he hoped to “reset the relationship” with the new government after a period of sharp disagreements.

Pompeo met with Khan and Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Javed Qamar Bajwa. Washington is anxious to enlist Pakistan’s help in its efforts to end the war in Afghanistan. 

Pakistani commentators had been denouncing the United States as a hectoring bully that seeks to force Pakistan to do its bidding and fails to appreciate its efforts to fight Islamist terrorism.

One thing is certain, though: the Pakistani military will continue to hold the levers of power.

In the words of Mohammed Ayoob, a South Asia expert at Michigan State University, they will “keep Prime Minister Khan on a very short leash.” They always have the last word.