Philippa Kaur

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    What Ails Corporate Governance in India?

    Most businesses perish not because of strong competition or adverse macroeconomic conditions but because of cracks within. One such failing is weak corporate governance. For publicly listed companies, this often translates to controlling shareholders or “promoters” pursuing policies and practices in their own interests at the expense of minority shareholders. It turns out that companies with such promoters are at greater risk of crises and near-death moments in bad economic cycles. Those companies with better governance, where promoters act responsibly in the interests of shareholders, tend to do better during adversity. In fact, savvy investors now treat good corporate governance as an intangible asset.

    This can be best seen in India’s banking sector. In general, private sector banks have practiced better governance than state-owned ones. Consequently, their financial and operating metrics also tell a story of profitable growth with less asset quality issues than their public sector peers. No wonder that private sector banks trade at a higher valuation than public sector ones.

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    Higher valuation puts these banks into a virtuous growth cycle. They are able to raise capital cheaply with less dilution. This reinforces their already high return ratios, which in turn continue to support a higher valuation. This self-perpetuating cycle has led to long-term compounding of shareholder returns. State-owned peers have fared much worse.

    Despite a large number of state-owned banks, the majority of credit growth in India is led by private sector banks. In fact, state-owned banks are struggling and the government is forced to merge them to ensure their survival. The success of well-run private banks demonstrates how good governance can lower a company’s cost of capital. That is not all. The resulting higher valuation also gives such companies immense pricing power in corporate transactions and talent management, widening their economic moat. 

    Multiple Issues

    India boasts of the oldest stock exchange in Asia, which is also the region’s largest. However, corporate governance in India still lags behind many other places like Singapore or Taiwan. India must understand that good corporate governance is the foundation of a lasting business. It builds investor confidence and has other benefits. India is short of capital and needs to earn investors’ trust. Without an infusion of capital, the Indian economy will fail to thrive. 

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    There are multiple issues that plague corporate governance in India. First is the lack of accountability among controlling shareholders. For example, promoters get away with appointing their friends, ex-employees and business-school classmates as independent directors with no one raising an eyebrow. Often, statutory auditors are given only one-year extensions to pressurize them to “comply” with management demands. Compliant auditors tend to persist for too long, developing far-too-cozy relationships with the very people they are supposed to keep an eye on. With no strong checks and balances, promoters are in effect incentivized to take advantage of minority shareholders. 

    Second is the slow and selective enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the country’s market regulator. Cases against the management’s missteps take years to resolve. SEBI generally hands out warnings or mild punishments. This could be because SEBI does not have enough resources to deal with a large number of cases, or it could be a lack of authority or competence. In certain cases, promoters are extremely powerful and politically connected. Given that regulators are political appointees, it is far from easy for them to ignore pressure from politicians, remain impartial, punish the powerful and deliver justice.

    Third is the fact that markets do not punish poorly managed companies for their misdeeds. India needs deeper markets with broader participation for true price discovery. Stock markets must be treated as marketplaces, not as forums for votes of confidence on the government’s economic policies. Because governments place too much importance on market performance, they have an incentive to keep them inflated. Indian corporate bond markets are even worse than stock markets in terms of participation. They are really accessible to only a handful of companies. 

    Fourth is the lack of transparency and weak disclosure requirements. This further perpetuates weak governance. The most detailed yearly disclosures by Indian companies are annual reports, which are often colorful marketing decks instead of detailed, factful and insightful documents, like the 10-Ks in the US. The quarterly earnings report for many companies is just a one-pager. This discloses summary items only without any breakdown of details.

    Earlier, manufacturing companies were mandated to disclose operational details pertaining to capacity, production and inventory. A few years ago, this disclosure requirement was done away with. Now, the only time companies make adequate disclosures only during their initial public offerings, which is a mere one-time event instead of an annual exercise.

    Bringing Sense to the Madness

    The only way to bring some sense to the madness in India’s public markets is to give more independence, power and resources to SEBI. At the same time, India must seriously penalize auditors and boards of companies for overlooking management follies. In addition, the authorities must incentivize and protect whistleblowers in a similar manner to developed economies.

    Some argue that complying with higher disclosure requirements might be too costly for smaller companies. That is not true. Furthermore, even the top 100 Indian companies default frequently on mandatory disclosures. Instead of reducing requirements for disclosures, India should lower costs of disclosures and compliance by using more technology.

    Another way to improve the health of India’s public markets is to increase market participation and trading volumes. Then good corporate governance would be rewarded while poor corporate governance would be penalized. Making short-selling a smoother affair might make the market deeper and more liquid. To increase depth in corporate bond markets, India must make lasting banking reforms. This involves privatization and granting more powers to the banking regulator.

    An unintended consequence of banking reform might be the improvement of India’s infrastructure. Currently, many state-owned enterprises in infrastructure sectors such as power are mismanaged because their bosses are able to buy time by restructuring their bank loans. Banking reforms will make that impossible and will transform this sector too.

    A combination of disclosure, regulation and enforcement can improve corporate governance. Reforms can also reduce conflicts of interests as well as create the right incentives and disincentives for Indian companies. These would inevitably lead to some short-term backlash, but the substantial long-term benefits are too significant to be ignored.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    Is Michel Zecler France’s George Floyd?

    In recent weeks, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has accelerated his recent campaign to bolster his credentials as Europe’s most determined authoritarian leader. Citing France’s secular philosophical tradition, he appears to believe in the 18th-century cultural meme of the enlightened despot.

    Macron came to power in 2017 after painting himself as the inclusive centrist standing midway between the left and the right, whose parties were in total disarray. Like Joe Biden today, he promised to unite a nation that had suffered from a system of “alternance” (alternate rule). For decades, it had allowed the powerful political organizations on the right and left to repeatedly replace the other as France’s ruling elite, perpetuating a political class that had lost touch with reality.

    After three years of Macron, and because of the events last week, the president may be suddenly realizing the truth behind William Butler Yeats’ observation a century ago that “the center cannot hold.” Yeats was of course referring to Western civilization as a whole, not French politics. Macron wants people to believe he represents Western civilization. After claiming Jupiterian authority at the beginning of his reign, he has increasingly projected himself as the all-seeing arbiter of modern political truth. He claims to embody what he calls “the principles and values” of la république. His version of the Enlightenment has become the French version of Puritan America’s shining city on a hill.

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    Macron may have noticed that the American politicians — notably Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — who successfully marketed the shining-city meme to justify their militaristic authoritarianism, represented the right rather than the center. The right traditionally applauds xenophobic nationalism. But Macron still sees his brand as centrist. This obliges him to thread the needle by emphasizing secular universalism, traditionally approved by the left, as opposed to the right’s typically faith-based nationalism.

    In recent months, Macron has pushed two distinctly authoritarian themes: declaring cultural war on Islamists (meaning he has a beef with Islam itself) and reinforcing France’s already well-structured police forces to help the nation evolve into an enlightened police state. At the same time, he poses as the promoter of European unity, encouraging the EU to rally around his “liberal” values that notably include “freedom of expression,” redefined as the right — if not the duty — to blaspheme, so long as the target is Muslims, who clearly take their religion too seriously.

    Macron’s crowning achievement of the past week was the French parliament’s passing of the global security law, with its provisions to punish journalists and citizens who dare to film the police in the act of enforcing the always fair and just authority of the state. Those found guilty of filming the police face a €45,000 fine.

     Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Global security (Sécurité globale):

    The universally valid application of authoritarian methods of policing human activity in France and, why not, everywhere around the globe, since France is, as everyone should know, the source of universal moral values.   

    Contextual Note

    The vote in parliament took place the same day the surveillance video was released of the brutal beating by the police of Michel Zecler, a black music producer. The police booked Zecler for “violence against a public authority,” which, if successfully prosecuted, would have landed him in prison for many years. The three officers failed to notice the surveillance camera in Zecler’s professional premises, where the beating took place. The episode has proved severely embarrassing for Macron’s government. Although alive and safe, Michel Zecler could become the George Floyd of France. The law was already contested, but a massive protest on Saturday highlighted the symbolic importance of this incident. Others are likely to follow as the government hesitates on what tack to take.

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    Without the video, Zecler would have undergone the fate of so many other members of minorities harassed or brutalized by the authorities. The police officers claimed that he had assaulted them and attempted to seize their weapons. What judge or jury would believe Zecler’s word against theirs in a courtroom? Zecler has insisted on expressing his own respect for the police. He considers his attackers as three bad apples who do not represent the vast majority of law enforcement. What they do represent, however, is the workings of an arbitrary, racist and authoritarian system that Macron has chosen to reinforce and place beyond any criterion of accountability.

    The government finds itself in a quandary that in some way resembles the comedy of the Keystone Kops. The right-wing interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, a J. Edgar Hoover-type personality whom Macron appointed to demonstrate his commitment to authoritarian rule, immediately dismissed any reconsideration of the law. Within an hour, Prime Minister Jean Castex contradicted him, asserting, as France 24 reported, “that the government would review the wording of a controversial draft law that would place restrictions on citizens filming the police and publishing the images.” Castex immediately promised to set up “a commission to rewrite the text.”

    It didn’t take long for Macron’s own legislators who voted for the law to protest, calling the idea of appointing a commission to rewrite their law an insult. One complained of being treated like a “vulgar floorcloth” (serpillière), another like a doormat (paillasson). How embarrassing! The president had crafted the entire operation specifically for electoral purposes, following the results of private polling that showed a positive response to Macron’s promise to get tough on Muslims.

    Macron’s minister of justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, speaking to BFM-TV, dared to undermine Macron’s and Darmanin’s logic: “It’s out of the question to forbid journalists from filming and informing the public.” He called for “amending a number of the law’s provisions.”

    Historical Note

    Macron has been heralding the 18th-century Enlightenment as an export rivaling champagne, Bordeaux or foie gras. This tells us a lot about the political philosophy of a man whose career oddly parallels Donald Trump’s. For both men, the presidency is the first political office they have been elected to. Theoretically, that should be good for democracy in two nations that have suffered from the corruption associated with government by political professionals whose idea of governing amounts to playing off vested interests against one another.

    Neither Macron’s center nor Trump’s solipsistic system have the capacity to mold reality to their purposes. But if both political mavericks managed to make it to the top, it is also because the traditional parties had themselves succumbed to a reality they could no longer control.

    Future historians will undoubtedly look back with curiosity at this strange period of history inaugurated by Osama Bin Laden in 2001, in which small terrorist groups and individuals managed to destabilize the immense power of the Western nations not through the damage they did do it directly, but through their ability to provoke self-destructive authoritarian responses from Western governments.

    Embed from Getty Images

    To be elected and respected, leaders had to show their electorate their determination to base policy on paranoia. In the meantime, the entire political class had lost its ability to analyze causes and effects, for the simple reason that they were focused on the task of balancing the interests of the powerful cliques — financial, industrial and military — that formed a club they aspired to belong to.

    Their governments’ growing authoritarianism had a two-fold effect: It punished its own citizens by restricting their liberty and reducing them to puppets in a system increasingly designed for a single purpose: to protect the status quo. Since terrorists were attacking the existing system, good citizens could accept the idea that it was the system that needed protecting, not the people themselves. 

    The second effect was more fundamental. The laws and political practices designed to protect the status quo augmented the power of private interests, increasing their wealth and control over the economy. This produced devastating social effects. The people — the supposed bedrock of democracy — were faced with an intolerable psychological dilemma. They were asked to adhere willingly to an increasingly arbitrary system that pushed them further and further into economic oblivion. Up to now, the system has worked because it seemed like the only system possible. But Yeats was right: There comes a moment when the center cannot hold. Sometimes it’s an obscure name that triggers it — a name like George Floyd or Michel Zecler.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Sex Abuse Is the Moral Downfall of the Catholic Church

    My mother passed away a few years ago. She spent the last years of her life in a home for the elderly in a small town in Bavaria, where she and my father had spent most of their lives. In their younger days, both my parents were devout Catholics, initially taking at face value what the church taught. Later on, confronted with the daily hypocrisy and outright nastiness inherent in the institution, they gradually distanced themselves from the Catholic Church, disillusioned, disenchanted, if not worse. But that is a different story.

    I myself spent eight years in a Catholic boarding school, initially with great enthusiasm, in later years increasingly disenchanted, seeking to get out. My parents would not hear of it, for good reasons which had nothing to do with the Catholic Church. I stuck it out until I was old enough to transfer to a different school.

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    A few months before my mother passed away, during one of my last visits with her, she suddenly, out of the blue, asked me a question that initially stunned me: “Why were you so eager to leave the boarding school?” Her eyes were insistent, her voice sounded almost desperate, looking for an answer that would alleviate her concerns and anxieties. At the time, I did not understand. Only a few weeks later, when I recalled the incident, it dawned on me: My mother was afraid that I had experienced sexual abuse, that my asking for being allowed to leave the place was a plea for help, and that, by refusing to take me out, my parents had been accomplices in abetting abuse.

    I had the opportunity to alleviate my mother’s fears. I never experienced sexual abuse nor am I aware of any of my fellow students ever having been subjected to it. Yet this episode showed me to what degree the criminal behavior of legions of members of the Catholic clergy was causing mental anguish among ordinary believers like my mother.

    Facing the Facts

    Over the past few decades, the Catholic Church has been forced to face the facts in the wake of investigations that revealed the full extent of the depravity and corruption endemic to some of its institutions. In the process, once-eminent icons such as Pope Benedict’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, once the all-powerful director of the famous Regensburg Domspatzen (boys’ choir), have fallen hard. In some cases, even members of the Catholic Church’s gotha were convicted of crimes and sent to jail by worldly courts unimpressed by the status of the accused.

    And yet, the McCarrick report recently released by the Vatican suggests that previous scandals have done little to bring about a fundamental change in the way parts of the Catholic hierarchy have been dealing with the question of sexual abuse that has fatally undermined the Catholic Church’s claim to represent a moral authority.

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    For those unfamiliar with the case, until his forced resignation in 2018, Theodore McCarrick was the cardinal of the Archdiocese of Washington, which encompasses the District of Columbia and surrounding areas in Maryland. This is of particular significance given that Maryland has an extensive history of Catholic settlement in the United States, dating back all the way to the 17th century. McCarrick was appointed cardinal of Washington by Pope Paul II, despite allegations that McCarrick had engaged in questionable behavior involving young aspiring priests — he slept in the same bed as seminarians.

    Paul II did not believe the allegations. They reminded him of allegations at priests in his native Poland, promoted by the “communists” to discredit Poland’s Catholic Church. It was only under Paul’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, that the allegations were taken seriously. But by then, it was too late.

    By now it is established — and the report makes it quite clear — that Cardinal McCarrick has a long track record of sexually-inspired coercion, largely ignored and hushed up by the Catholic hierarchy, including the entourage of Paul II. As a result, as The New York Times recently put it, Paul’s image has been severely tarnished, his canonization (the elevation to the status of a saint) put in question. Pope Francis, under whose aegis the report was assembled, has made it entirely clear that he “Intends to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse.”

    I, for my part, believe in his sincerity. The reality is, however, that he is confronted with a hierarchical structure which, in the past, has gone out of its way to dismiss, downplay and cover up reports of abuses, if only to uphold the authority of the church.

    Absurd Theater

    A recent prominent case is the absurd theater provoked by the Catholic Church of Cologne. Its cardinal, Rainer Maria Woelkli, had commissioned a law firm from Munich to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the archdiocese. The Cologne prosecutor’s office recently brought charges against one of them. He is accused of sexual abuse of his underage nieces in the 1990s.

    Once the expertise was delivered to the Cologne archdiocese, it was kept under lock and key by the cardinal’s office, which charged that it was methodologically faulty and therefore useless. The real reason, critics suggest, is that the report implicates one of Woelkli’s closest aids, today archbishop of Hamburg, put in charge to make sure that the affair would be covered up.

    The result has been a perfect example of mutual recriminations and mud-slinging. Those opposed to the way the diocese has handled the affair allege that Woelkli is more interested in protecting the perpetrators than the victims of abuse. In the meantime, church authorities have gone out of their way to censure and silence critics. A few days ago, they turned off the webpage of the archdiocese’s Catholic University Community, in charge of looking after the wellbeing of Catholic students at various universities in the region. The reason was, according to a Cologne newspaper, the community’s continued criticism of the “backward and evasive” attitude of Church officials with regard to controversial issues, including sexual morals.

    In the meantime, the recent start of an official investigation by the Vatican has put additional pressure on Cardinal Woekli. The investigation concerns a priest active in three dioceses in the greater Cologne area. Tried and convicted of sexual abuse of children and dependents, the priest had been sent to jail in the early 1970s. After his release a short time later, church officials reinstalled him. In the late 1980s, he was once again convicted of sexual abuse. And, once again, he was allowed to continue his active service. It was not until 2019 that he was retired, most likely as a result of the expertise commissioned by the archdiocese.

    In sharp contrast to the Cologne church authorities, the Diocese of Aachen, whose cathedral was the site of the coronation of German kings between 936 AD and 1531, recently announced it would no longer privilege the perpetrators of abuse — an independent report established numerous cases of abuse by priests in the diocese — over the rights of their victims. Unlike hushing up abuse, church authorities in Aachen launched a newspaper campaign asking victims of clerical abuse to contact church offices.

    Not Draining the Swamp

    What all of this suggests is that a significant segment of the Catholic hierarchy has absolutely no interest in “draining the swamp,” to borrow a term from an entirely different source. The reality is that the avalanche of revelations about sexual abuse rampant inside the Catholic Church has not only severely undermined its authority to speak on matters of morals, particularly when it comes to sexual mores, but its authority in general. In late 2019, a mere 14% of the German population said they trusted the Catholic Church; 29% said they trusted the pope. In contrast, 36% expressed trust in Germany’s Protestant Church.

    Embed from Getty Images

    You don’t have to be a prophet to suggest that the most recent revelations about sexual abuse and the way these have dealt with will further tarnish the church’s already dismal image and its moral authority. And for good reasons. The Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality is a joke given the prevalence of homoerotic endeavors within the church itself. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, the priest “doth protest too much, methinks.”

    The Catholic Church’s position on birth control is also risible, given the fact we no longer live in an age where the survival of the tribe depended on replenishing its membership. Those who don’t know what this means might want to read the story of Onan, famous (wrongly so) for being the father of masturbation. Onan’s crime — in the eyes of the Lord — was not that he masturbated, but that he preferred to “spill his seed” outside of the vagina of his late brother’s betrothed rather than fathering an offspring that would be credited to his dead brother.

    Today, we are no longer subject to archaic tribal rationale. Yet the Catholic Church still pretends that we are. Unfortunately enough, President Donald Trump has managed to stuff the US Supreme Court with prominent legal minds stuck in a pre-Middle Age way of thinking. Most of them are Catholics, Amy Coney Barrett the most recent one. In a world where the moral authority of the Catholic Church has been debased to a degree that even in Poland, the home of Pope John Paul II, a mere 10% of young people see the Catholic Church in a positive light, with 47% viewing it negatively, the Catholic Church and its representatives would do well to keep a low profile.

    In reality, the opposite is the case. High-ranking Catholic officials continue to take the moral high ground while pretending that sexual abuse is negligible. As Arthur Serratelli, a retired bishop from New Jersey, put it last year, “Is the terrible crime of child abuse limited only to Catholics? Today’s media would even have people believe that abuse of minors is becoming more frequent within the Church. Patently false. But, too often facts do not matter when a villain is needed.”

    Serratelli should know. During his time as an active bishop, the New Jersey dioceses were a hotbed of sexual abuse by priests. In 2019, New Jersey’s bishops listed some 200 priests “found credibly accused of sexually abusing a child.” To be sure, sexual abuse of minors is hardly limited to the Catholic Church. Quite the contrary. But given its claim to be the ultimate yardstick of moral authority, it should be held to the highest standards. The notion that the Catholic Church is not any worse than any other institution, as Serratelli implies in his defense of his own institution, does not cut it.

    Luckily for the Serratellis and Woelklis of this world, Jesus is no longer around. As he once said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Those concerned are advised to study Houdini. His tricks might come in handy.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Cult of Kek: An Archaic Belief System for an Alt-Right “New Age”

    Pepe the Frog, the green character in Matt Furie’s “Boy’s Club” cartoons, is familiar on the internet. The alt-right started to use it to symbolize their battle against political correctness as well as the principles of liberty, equality and justice — the founding values of liberal democracy. The alt-right aims to restore traditional hierarchical society and a racial state. Pepe the Frog landed a role in this task, mainly because of the alt-right’s desire to use memes to spread their message far and wide. From its humble beginning as a cartoon character, Pepe the Frog made a meteoric rise when the alt-right renamed it Kek, establishing the Cult of Kek.

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    The Cult of Kek appears to offer different things to different people based on what they seek. For those who enjoy creating or following memes, the Cult of Kek is satire. For others, it offers a religion, a deity, even a prayer to advance “meme magic.” However, at the heart of it, the Cult of Kek is neither satire nor religion but an arcane belief system firmly grounded in ancient Egyptian mythology.     

    Who Is Kek? 

    The ideology behind the Cult of Kek is explained in a series of eight books published under the pseudonym “Saint Obamas Momjeans” in 2016-17. The satirical pseudonym helps to keep the books from inviting serious analysis. Dan Prisk identifies this as “an ironic and irrelevant mode of communication” that seems to have the best of both worlds: the advantage of using “ironic humour” to attract attention and the ability to “hide true politics while openly promoting them.” “Nothing is as it seems” is the best adage to explain the Cult of Kek; even its “prayer” asks to “twist reality around the memes we make.”

    The term “meme magic” seems to have multiple meanings. First, meme magic is a reference to the accessibility and appeal of memes, which can attract followers and create thought movements. Second, the Cult of Kek wants memes to have perceived magical qualities, a pretext to attract followers and enthusiasts. As a 2015 essay published on Daily Stormer explains, “The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.” But who is Kek, and in what context did the alt-right come to appropriate it?

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    “The One True Bible of Kek” is the primary source of the cult. This text introduces Kek as a figure who opposed the creation in favor of primordial chaos said to be a myth in the religion of ancient Egypt. Was there a Kek in ancient Egypt? Evidence can be traced back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom during 2575-2134 BC, where primordial Ogdoad was worshipped in Hermopolis on the banks of the Nile. Ogdoad was eight (male and female) personifications of nature, such as water, air, infinity and darkness. Among them, Kek and Keket represented primordial darkness. Kek is the male form with a frog head. The Papirus of Ani, dating back to 1450 BC, which forms a part of the Book of the Dead, mentions four of Ogdoad as humans, having heads of frogs and the other four of serpents.

    E.A. Wallis Budge, citing M. Maspero, links these ancient deities to the later forms of famous Egyptian gods: Kek and Keket as the early forms of Osiris and Isis. Such evidence indicates that the mythology of Kek dates back to the Old Kingdom period in Egypt. But what does the current iteration of Kek offer? What is the message behind the Cult of Kek?

    The Magic of Memes

    Kek is mainly associated with meme magic, which refers to the transferring of “idea viruses” online in order to change the subconscious. Memes are visually and textually appealing thought elements. They can spread like viruses, creating trends or habit-forming thought movements. For example, radical-right memes launch assaults against liberal democracy, and the Cult of Kek and its meme magic are part of this radical-right mobilization.

    Meme magic is believed to have started in 4chan and 8chan imageboards around 2015. It is created by an anonymous swarm, the so-called ANONs or anonymous members of the imageboards, producing one-line messages. The first book of the Kek series, “The Divine Word of Kek,” explains how to create and transfer memes. The book recommends further readings, such as Tom Montalk, William Walker Atkinson and Franz Bardon.

    Montalk is a German spiritualist interested in metaphysics. His website explains the world as a matrix control system led by the Illuminati. Atkinson is an American author who writes extensively on esoteric subjects and is known to be a theosophist. Bardon is a leading occultist known to be influenced by the likes of Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley. The evidence confirms the initial suggestion that the Cult of Kek is neither satire nor religion but something of an arcane belief system.   

    One book of the Cult of Kek series, “Intermediate Meme Magic,” explains the story of Kek, citing authors such as E.A. Wallis Budge, an eminent British Egyptologist. This shows that the anonymous author used arcane knowledge to find a mascot for memetics. Their battle is said to be against “the degenerate left.” It tells the reader to “tear society apart so that you can rebuild it later without undesirable elements.” Another work, “Shadilay, My Brothers: Esoteric Kekism & You!” affirms that “This is truly the beginning of a new age.”

    Why did the alt-right apply an ancient deity to brand the modern practice of memetics? It may not be an accident, nor that they needed spiritualism to give their craft strong roots. Instead, the Cult of Kek sits precisely where the radical right connects with the broader new-age belief system. For example, Nouvelle Droite (New Right) thinkers such as Guillaume Faye were firm believers in “the Golden Age of a future humanity.”

    It is well known that the Nazis were influenced by messianic and millenarian myths. For example, Savitri Devi, famously referred to as Hitler’s Priestess, entwined the idea of the yuga cycle — the Hindu belief regarding the cyclical evolution of time — to give Germany’s National Socialists a new identity. Devi wanted the Nazis to end the corrupt world, ushering in the traditional and sacred Golden Age.

    It appears that the alt-right follows this tradition, borrowing from early extreme-right thinkers but positions the same beliefs in an entirely novel context — the postindustrial realm of cyberspace and memetics, creatively delivering age-old esoteric ideas to the present.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    International Monitors Found No Fraud in US Election

    This month’s election was no doubt the most dramatic in recent US history. Given the highly bipartisan political atmosphere, at 67%, voter turnout was the highest since 1900. Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there were 20% fewer polling stations open across the country. An unprecedented 65 million voters opted for mail-in ballots, raising fears that the US Postal Service may not be able to handle the amount of traffic in a timely manner. President Donald Trump had already laid the groundwork in the preceding months to claim that the election will be stolen from him and, true to his brand, his team promptly filed 36 legal challenges to contest the results; to date, 29 of these have been unsuccessful.

    Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

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    More than three weeks after the election, Trump has not officially conceded. The president and his supporters are vociferously and aggressively claiming voter fraud. President-elect Joe Biden and his camp, alongside US election and security officials, are unequivocal that there is no evidence of foul play. At this time of bitter impasse, it would be invaluable to refer to a truly objective, unbiased third party. Fortunately, there is one.

    Election Monitoring

    The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was founded in 1975. It consists of 57 member countries, and the United States is one of them. A key raison d’être of the OSCE is election monitoring. It assesses whether elections are “characterized by equality, universality, political pluralism, confidence, transparency and accountability.” The OSCE has observed over 300 elections globally, both in established democracies like Canada and the UK as well as in countries like Croatia and Ukraine, where the democratic tradition is still tenuous. A multinational team of experts is on hand before, during and after the vote. The methodology is thorough and transparent.

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    The organization has been observing every general and midterm election in the US since the 2000 disputed contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Its presence is particularly relevant at this moment in US history. The OSCE planned to deploy some 500 observers in the 2020 election, but the number was reduced due to the pandemic. By early October, the International Election Observation Mission (IEOM) to the US had some 130 international election monitors from 39 member nations on the ground. While some states did not allow international observers full access, most did. And even in states where the observers were not allowed in the polling stations, they at least examined the mail-in process. On the night of November 3, the OSCE delivered a detailed, 23-page report, the entirety of which is openly available on the internet. 

    The report covers a lot of ground: the political context and the legal framework of the electoral system; election administration and observation; voter rights, registration and identification; candidate registration (no room for birther controversy here); campaign environment and finance; the role of the media; legal complaints and appeals; as well as new voting technologies and the conduct of the election itself. It also explains IEOM’s process, observations, analysis, conclusions and recommendations.

    Anyone with any doubt about possible voter fraud and whether the election was legal will be assuaged by the report’s conclusion that “The 3 November general elections were competitive and well managed” and that, “In general, IEOM interlocutors expressed a high level of confidence in the work of the election administration at all levels.”

    The report also offers two chilling warnings. First, it states that “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.” Second, it surmises that “Numerous ODIHR interlocutors noted that the judiciary has become highly politicized and indicated that this would have an impact on the rules governing the holding of these elections and possibly the outcome.” This report is preliminary. The IEOM remains on the task and will release a final report in early January.

    Virtually Ignored

    Interestingly, the presence of international election monitors in this United States has been virtually ignored by the media, the public and the politicians themselves. On the one hand, it’s understandable. Given the US-centric focus of many Americans, they may not even be aware of the role international observers play in US elections. Those who claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump are certainly not going to point out that there is an objective assessment of the validity of the voting process. In fact, President Trump fired the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, for stating that this election was “the most secure in American history.”

    But why are the Democrats, the left-wing media and indeed anyone interested in proving beyond doubt that the election was fair ignoring the OSCE findings? Perhaps they don’t want to rely on any outside institutions to determine the validity of their election. Or maybe they feel that international monitors are only for banana republics, not for established democracies — and certainly not for the world’s oldest democracy. Pride goes before the fall.

    Susan Hyde, a professor of political science at the University of Berkeley, California, and an experienced international election monitor, says that “In countries that are very divided, it can be hard for citizens to know which sources of information are objective because it seems like every domestic audience has a dog in the fight.” She explains that international observers can “act as an external but credible resource for voters and for political parties.” International monitoring missions do not stand for Democrats or for Republicans — they stand for democracy.

    On the one hand, it may be ironic that the United States should be in need of the services of international election monitors. But it would be even more tragic if the US did not use their essential, objective and readily available expertise and their vital findings at this critical juncture in its democracy.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Low Expectations of Biden’s High-Mindedness

    As Donald Trump’s war of attrition has wound down to the point at which only an organized revolt could provide the final glimmer of hope the president is hoping for to extend his lease on the White House past January 20, the American people and US media are left wondering how the president-elect will fill the role of an absent reality TV host. It may, in the end, require the talents of a Samuel Coleridge to tell the full story of President-elect Joe Biden, the ancient mariner of the Washington marshes, who, having cast the albatross of Trump from the country’s neck, will seek to govern a nation reeling from the tsunami of COVID-19 and the economic woes that have come in its wake.

    To help us understand at least one dimension of the transformation awaiting us, Ben Smith — President Emmanuel Macron’s newest phone buddy at The New York Times — has authored a fascinating article examining what is likely to stand as the most visible change in the coming transition. It has little to do with policy. Instead, it concerns the two presidents’ relations with the media.

    Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

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    The sudden switch next January from the tweet-wielding, unmasked Republican slayer of Mexican and Muslim dragons, a man equipped his desk with a live hotline to Fox News host Sean Hannity and who manages an extended family ready to spread his improvised policies across the globe, to the 78-year-old Democratic DC seadog who, after 36 years in the Senate, spent half of this year sequestered in his basement, the change is likely to be monumental.

    The world has grown accustomed to Trump’s slogans, insults, claims of greatness and outrageous lies that are automatically echoed by his minions in the media, including those who oppose him. That has become an attribute of the White House itself. Trump is always on stage and always looking to land a zinger. As Smith points out, the contrast provided by the president-elect couldn’t be greater. Where Trump was constantly inventing counterfactual boasts to market his brand, “Mr. Biden liked nothing more than a wide-ranging, high-minded conversation about world affairs after he had returned from a trip to China or India.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    High-minded conversation:

    A dialogue between two people who have mastered the art of sounding not only serious but responsible, regardless of whether the substance of what they have to say is either serious or responsible.

    Contextual Note

    Ben Smith recounts that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, showed himself “particularly attentive to the wise men of Washington, especially the foreign policy columnists David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The Times.” The journalist was almost certainly using the term “wise men” ironically, since the wisdom of both of those writers has too often been questioned by truly wise analysts for Smith’s readers to suppose that Ignatius and Friedman seriously live up to that label.

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    According to the laws of the liberal marketplace — laws with which The New York Times generally complies — opinion writers treating serious subjects in a serious style, and who are read and quoted routinely by educated people, define a journalistic commodity that can be labeled “wise men.” These voices are a form of the merchandise The Times puts on sale every day of the week.

    Ever since Hillary Clinton’s famous characterization of Donald Trump’s voters as “a basket of deplorables,” it has been clear that “high-mindedness” is a feature of the Democratic brand. Democrats like to talk about serious, complex problems, although, even when in a position of power, they appear to be far less adamant about solving them. Above all, they aim to convince a reasonably educated public that they are serious people, in contrast with Republicans who like to reduce complex issues to slogans that turn around a binary choice. That is the kind of thing deplorables voters reflexively respond to.

    Michelle Obama is admired for the dictum she taught her children, which ultimately became a slogan: “When they go low, we go high.” The problem with this as a mobilizing sentiment is that it tends to communicate an attitude of superiority and condescension. When it comes from people who have achieved a high position, it implicitly expresses their indifference to the concerns of those who, for whatever reason, feel impelled to go low. Appearing to be the product of complex thought, it expresses a simple idea: that “we” (the wise ones) refuse to listen to those who fail to admire our accomplishments and respect our rules.

    Smith points out how patently unskilled Biden has been throughout his career at leveraging the power of the media, a force now available to any prominent figure in today’s celebrity culture to impose their brand. Whatever light a public personality has to shed outward can be refracted through the commercial media into thousands of colors and amplified by social media to create an impact that will generate enthusiasm among the populace. That is what Donald Trump consummately knows how to do, and Joe Biden clearly doesn’t. Smith sees Biden as clinging to “an older set of values.” In a word, Biden is an old school politician called to reign over a world that is more likely to resonate with Jack Black’s “School of Rock.”

    As Smith observes, “it misreads Mr. Biden to see him as either a true insider or a media operator with anything like President Trump’s grasp of individual reporters’ needs, his instinct for when to call journalists or their bosses and his shrewd shaping of his own image.” A good segment of the US population and a clear majority of people overseas will be reassured. But can this old school approach make an impact in the US today, where celebrity and influencer culture drives every social and even political trend?

    Historical Note

    In his latest book, “Capital and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty pours out and analyzes in considerable demographic and economic detail the history of voting patterns in the elections of three democracies: the US, France and the UK. The statistics reveal an inversion of the scale of education between the parties labeled left and right in all three countries. 

    Whereas the conservative parties in these countries have traditionally drawn a clear majority of the educated class, today, it is the parties on the left that have won over the college-educated crowd, producing what he calls the establishment’s “Brahmin left.” It may or may not overlap with the progressive left, who tend not only to be educated but, unlike their establishment peers, intellectual. Increasingly the parties on the right continue to appeal to the wealthiest segment of the population — their traditional constituency — but, paradoxically, they have managed to attract the less educated classes into voting for what Piketty calls their culture of the “merchant right.”

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    In a fascinating frank and personal discussion between former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and author Anand Giridharadas, the writer explains his view of how the Democratic Party has evolved. After provocatively observing that “Democrats don’t know how to talk,” he tells Yang that “the Democratic Party as a constellation is a victim of its own high-mindedness, its own sense of moral purpose, its own very high level of educational attainment.” He quite rightly emphasizes that high-mindedness may be a bit overrated in the world of contemporary politics.

    Joe Biden of course managed to squeeze past Donald Trump in five battleground states by having what Hillary Clinton lacked, a tenuous connection with the working class and an education that was definitely not Ivy League. He wasn’t exclusively high-minded. But Biden never acquired or even sought to understand the populist swagger that now seems to be obligatory. When Giridharadas says that Democrats don’t know how to talk, what he means is that they don’t know how to present and sell their vision or their ideas. That, of course, supposes they have a vision and really do want to sell it, a proposition that has become somewhat debatable.

    If Giridharadas seems skeptical about any Democrat’s ability to promote necessary ideas, Ben Smith ends on a complementary melancholy note, wondering almost fatalistically “whether the electorate and we in the media can break our addiction to the Trump news cycle.”

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    12 Years After Mumbai, the Fight Against Terrorism Continues

    The 12th anniversary of the November 26, 2008, Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks in Mumbai is an apt occasion to evaluate not only India’s struggle against terrorism but also how other major countries have dealt with this menace.

    Nine gunmen traveled from Karachi to Mumbai by boat to unleash mayhem over the course of three days. They attacked multiple locations, killing 164 people and wounding more than 300. Iconic locations such as the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel next to the Gateway of India, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (earlier known as Victoria Terminus) and the Leopold Cafe were hit. The attacks paralyzed the city, triggered mass panic and caused the collapse of India’s booming stock market.

    Cat-and-Mouse Game

    India absorbed the monstrous nature of the Mumbai attacks and resumed direct political dialogue with Pakistan in July 2009. India even agreed to make a major political concession: It delinked the dialogue from the issue of terrorism in the hope that the two countries could have a free, frank and uninterrupted conversation. Pakistan treated this as a political victory at India’s expense. Instead of initiating a process of normalizing ties with India, Pakistan continued with its policy of supporting jihadi groups dedicated to launching terror attacks in neighboring countries.

    India’s policy was based on the assumption that Pakistan would realize the internal cost of nurturing jihadi groups on its soil. Like Frankenstein, terrorists have turned on Pakistan itself. In 2013, an explosion killed at least 45 people in a Shia district of Karachi, and the 2014 Peshawar school massacre led to 150 deaths, of which at least 134 were students. These are just two of the many such incidents that have been taking place in Pakistan over the past decade.

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    Yet Pakistani support for terror as an instrument of state policy has continued. India has thus reverted to its position of putting terrorism at the center of any India-Pakistan dialogue. Pakistan refuses to accept India’s position. Instead, it wants dialogue on Kashmir and uses terror as a tactic to wage war against India for this territory.

    Pakistan-sponsored attacks against India have continued unabated. Most recently, on November 20, four suspected terrorists belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad, a jihadist group headquartered in Pakistan, waged a three-hour-long gun battle with the police on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway. They had entered India to disrupt local elections in Kashmir. Reportedly, they were planning a spectacular attack to commemorate the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

    India-Pakistan relations continue to be in a stalemate on the issue of terrorism. In a cat-and-mouse game, Pakistan promotes terrorist attacks while India prevents them. Since 2019, one thing has changed. After the 2019 Pulwama attack that killed 40 paramilitary personnel, India conducted airstrikes on Pakistani territory. For the first time since the 1971 war, India crossed the line of control, the de facto India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir. The airstrikes demonstrated that India is no longer deterred by Pakistan’s nuclear capability. If Pakistan instigates a major terrorist attack on Indian soil, New Delhi has shown to be willing to take limited military action in retaliation.

    An Increasingly Extremist Society

    Even as Pakistan continues to promote terrorism across the border, its society has become increasingly extremist. In 2012, the German news agency Deutsche Welle analyzed the rise in extremism in Pakistani society. Many see cultural plurality as un-Islamic. Arabization is on the rise. Numerous jihadist and terrorist organizations operate freely in the country. This trend taking place in a nuclear state is and should be a matter of great international concern.

    Pakistan now exports terror not only to India and Afghanistan, but also to other countries. As per the European Foundation for South Asian Studies, there is an “unholy alliance” between Pakistan’s army and terrorism. Islamic extremists from Pakistan or of Pakistani origin have been involved in many terrorist attacks in other countries. In September, the main suspect for a knife attack outside the former Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was of Pakistani origin.

    Most recently, street protests have erupted in Pakistan against French President Emmanuel Macron after he claimed that Islam is in crisis following the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty, killed by a Chechen refugee disgruntled over Paty’s discussion of the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons during a civic education class. Protesters burned a defaced image of Macron and the French flag outside the French consulate in Karachi. Many sought the expulsion of the French ambassador and demanded that Pakistan break off diplomatic ties with France.

    Pakistan has taken great umbrage at Macron’s actions to curb Islamic extremism. Pakistani leaders object to France’s insistence that Muslim leaders agree to a “charter of republican values,” reject political Islam and foreign interference. Shireen Mazari, Pakistan’s human rights minister, tweeted: “Macron is doing to Muslims what the Nazis did to the Jews — Muslim children will get ID numbers (other children won’t) just as Jews were forced to wear the yellow star on their clothing for identification.” After French protestations, she withdrew her comments, but the damage was done.

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    In October, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global terror financing watchdog, put Pakistan on its grey list for its failure to “effectively crackdown on means of financing terror activities.” The FATF found “strategic deficiencies in [Pakistan’s] regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.”

    To improve its international image, Pakistan has taken some judicial action against the masterminds of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Hafiz Saeed, one of the founders of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the leader of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, two notorious jihadist organizations, has been convicted on charges of terror financing. As Pakistan’s leading English newspaper Dawn observed, the conviction came “as Pakistan tries to avoid punitive blacklisting” by FATF. Given Pakistan’s incestuous relationship with the likes of Saeed, he might get off lightly after an appeal once Pakistan has escaped censure from the FATF.

    The big international concern is that the Pakistani establishment continues to aid and abet terrorism. There has been no fundamental change in either policy or actions. In fact, Islamabad’s ratcheting up of its rhetoric on Macron is alarming because it is accompanied by “rising religious intolerance at home.”

    Nelson’s Eye

    Despite the fact that six Americans were killed in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the US has been relatively soft on Pakistan. For decades, Islamabad was a Cold War ally. The US and Saudi Arabia funded the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet Union through Pakistan. These led to close ties between the American and Pakistani establishments. Of late, these ties have been weakening and Washington has been inching closer to New Delhi.

    In the most recent joint statement, India and the US have called “for concerted action against all terrorist networks, including al-Qaeda, ISIS/Daesh, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.” They have also asked “Pakistan to take immediate, sustained and irreversible action to ensure that no territory under its control is used for terrorist attacks, and to expeditiously bring to justice the perpetrators and planners of all such attacks, including 26/11 Mumbai, Uri, and Pathankot.”

    While this statement might give diplomatic satisfaction to India, it is important to remember that Saeed was able to freely address public rallies in Pakistan despite the US putting a bounty of $10 million on his head. The US could not, or did not, put Pakistan on the mat for failure to act against the Haqqani Network, responsible for inflicting casualties on US soldiers in Afghanistan.

    The US has imposed the most draconian sanctions on Iran and has not spared a powerful nuclear state like Russia. Yet it has hesitated to impose serious sanctions on Pakistan, giving, unconvincingly, its nuclear status as one of the excuses. The limited military and economic sanctions the US has imposed on Pakistan are neutralized by Islamabad’s ever-increasing economic and military links with China. In any case, despite the FATF proceedings against Pakistan, the country has obtained yet another bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

    The US has turned Nelson’s eye on Pakistan’s promotion of terror because it needs the country’s assistance to retreat from Afghanistan. The war on terror has not quite succeeded. Like the UK and the Soviet Union, the US is worn out after nearly two decades on the ground in Afghanistan. It needs to save face and avoid the impression of total defeat. It is willing to negotiate with the Taliban even as the armed group continues to commit horrific acts of terror against innocent Afghans. A report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction showed a 50% increase in attacks over the past three months alone, with the UN estimating that some 6,000 civilians have died in the violence in the first nine months of 2020.

    India’s Unique Vulnerability to Terror

    As the US makes peace with the Taliban, India’s problems with Pakistan-sponsored terror are likely to grow. Even Russia has opened a “channel to the Taliban,” a historic sworn enemy. The Taliban leadership is demonstrating diplomatic savvy by negotiating their way back to power. This leadership might appear relatively urbane, but the Taliban rank and file continue to be fanatics. They now believe they have defeated two superpowers thanks to their faith in Islam.

    Once the Taliban win power, they will impose their obscurantist ideology. This will embolden extremists in Pakistan. Lest we forget, an Indian plane hijacked by terrorists landed in Kandahar in 1999. India released terrorists to bring back hostages. One of the terrorists was Masood Azhar. He went on to start Jaish-e-Muhammad, responsible for the deaths of hundreds over the years. Azhar is to India what Osama bin Laden was to the US. He got his initial training in Afghanistan, and many more like him are likely to receive similar training once the Taliban are firmly back in the saddle.

    While the Taliban might not engage in direct terrorism against the US, India would be fair game. Pakistan would promote Taliban efforts, and China would ignore, if not abet, them. For a decade, China opposed resolutions in the United Nations Security Council to designate Azhar as an international terrorist, leading Michael Kugelman, a noted South Asia analyst, to call him “China’s favorite terrorist.” China has become a loyal ally of Pakistan and lauds Islamabad’s fight against international terrorism even as its junior ally stays deafeningly silent on the treatment of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. As India and China clash, an increase in terror attacks on Indian soil would serve Chinese interests. Pakistan and the Taliban are likely to oblige.

    Attacks across Europe and elsewhere demonstrate that India is not alone in facing the scourge of terrorism. As we mark the 12th anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, India’s 1996 proposal for a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism is more relevant than ever. The world needs to increase security, boost peace and safeguard the lives of innocents.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Dazzling Shallowness of Bernard-Henri Levy

    One of the attractions, or oddities, of France is its reverence of those who are regarded as philosophers, or at least philosophical thinkers. In the age of fast information, we also have fast philosophy — soundbite philosophy. Not that this has no value, but this value has to be abstracted from the veneers that accompany not just instant thought but instant thought that seems intellectually attractive: exciting, provocative, perhaps outrageous, but plausible.

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    It is in this category that Bernard-Henri Levy now finds a home. It is the task of the reader to distinguish content from veneer. But since many readers seem no longer to try, Levy has a ready audience for instant diagnosis of serious situations, rendered “philosophical” by the constant dropping of names, recognized as the serious thinkers of the past, and constant references to his own earlier work.

    Sense of Exaggeration

    That earlier work is not inconsiderable. Although always controversial because of his willingness to eviscerate sacred cows, his condemnation of Stalinism was a bold challenge to the European left to make a new start that banished socialism achieved by tyranny. His intellectual histories of French thought, such as in “Adventures on the Freedom Road,” although even then striving for effect, were vibrant and made thought seem integral to the French project of a national self. He wanted that national self to be humane and humanitarian.

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    Levy’s championing of refugees was staunchly within the moral need for a nation to be compassionate. His defense of freedom elsewhere, as in his taking of sides with Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban and his more recent advocacy of the Kurdish Peshmerga in their fight against the Islamic State, were evidence of a cosmopolitanism that he saw first evidenced in the life and adventures of his hero, the writer Andre Malraux. Malraux had fought in China (with the Communists), Spain (with the Republicans) and France (with the Resistance), and wrote great novels and art histories as well as somewhat exaggerated memoirs.

    That sense of exaggeration has always been with Levy. Every adventure has been a photo opportunity, including in Bosnia during the Siege of Sarajevo or wandering the ruins of what had been Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. That, of course, comes with kickback. Levy was indeed a frequent visitor to besieged Sarajevo, but those visits tended to be fleeting, leading the entrapped citizens of Sarajevo to nickname him not BHL, as he is widely known in France, but DHL — Deux Heures Levy, in and out (safely on a United Nations plane) within two hours.

    That he then compared himself with Susan Sontag, who stayed in the city for a lengthy period, accepting the same risks as all others without UN protection, was always rich. And his perhaps seminal influence on the French and, through the French, on NATO to intervene in Libya had the unforeseen consequence of war without end in the “liberated” country.

    His latter-day championing of Jewish identity and culture, echoing in some ways Levinas, but without his philosophical gravitas and genuine luminosity, leaves open questions as to Levy’s stance on any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians that they themselves might find just. This is a shame as, in some ways, he might be a reasonable interlocutor between the two peoples making, one would hope, the proviso that human rights must deploy equality of political rights — and, of course, that there is no humanitarian settlement without human rights.

    Gadfly of Thought

    Because he’s rich, given to Dior suits and Charvet shirts, lean enough and with sufficient hair to appear dashing in his late middle age, Levy crafts an image that all the same now seems that of the jet-setting gadfly of the international — and of thought.

    That sense of the gadfly of thought comes through in his latest (short) book, “The Virus in the Age of Madness,” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is full of references to (highly excerpted) thought from great philosophers alongside references to his earlier writing. But there is a difference stylistically to his previous work. Levy was once the pioneer of an evocative methodology that married philosophy with fiction that all the same was evocative and sometimes illuminating. That was within the construction of an imaginary conversation between himself, or himself in disguise, and one of the great thinkers.

    The great thinker explains himself, but always within the terms posed by Levy as an interviewer. Of course, this made Levy the commander of explication and interpretation of another’s thought. But the technique drew in the reader and did provoke thought among the audience.

    This time, Levy seems merely to be interviewing himself, inviting himself to make declaratory and pontifical statements to do with his (seemingly erudite) outrage that COVID-19 has rendered all other catastrophes in the world second-rate as face masks and respirators subvert and overwhelm our awareness of hunger, war, (other) pestilence and political repression. This is a fair point but made with a dazzling shallowness that proposes no means of balancing concerns over the pandemic and for other worlds. It gestures toward the sacrifice of medical frontline workers but almost dismisses them toward the end in a frenzy of concern for the “out there.”

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    The short treatise is a polemic that has a theme but no purpose. It pales beside Susan Sontag’s own short book, “Illness as Metaphor,” which discusses the use of metaphor in the ways we refer to serious illnesses — just as Levy announces his intention to dissect the uses of metaphor but winds up proposing grand vistas of image after image for the sake of effect. And, of course, he does compare himself to Sontag in their quite different Sarajevo involvements. He also progresses the use of Benny Levy, once the controversial aide to the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre, from one side of Bernard-Henri’s interview-as-philosophical-insight technique to the status of good friend. No aggrandizement is spared.

    Levy’s book does not even interrogate the disease itself. One would have expected Levy to interview the coronavirus, but, in fact, he dismisses its personification even in medical discourse without offering any epidemiological or biochemical investigation as to why the virus has been so easy to personify as an almost thinking antagonist. He offers no way forward except, fatalities and medical staff casualties notwithstanding, that we should diminish our concerns over COVID-19 and elevate our consciousness once again to countenance commitment against the great crimes of the world.

    But we never abandoned our commitment against the great crimes. Levy’s evidence that we did so relies only on the plenitude of newspaper headlines about COVID-19, as if that alone were enough to obscure ongoing and heroic struggles. He points out, of course, that he himself never ceased his war on the world’s great crimes.

    But this proposal of singularity ignores the fact that in every case of his activism, he had to cooperate with others and bear witness to the work of others. Levy never took up arms alongside the Peshmerga. He did, however, pose for a lot of photos with them. Perhaps one day he will publish a 1,000-page pictorial history entitled “How I Alone Tried to Save the World,” in hope that the world will forget that he once wrote meaningful books.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More