Philippa Kaur

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    Russia’s Denials of Navalny’s Poisoning Fall on Deaf Ears

    The Russian government has said it will not investigate the poisoning of the opposition politician and anti-corruption investigator Alexei Navalny until there is evidence of a crime. Navalny, who is 44, collapsed during a flight to Moscow after drinking a cup of tea at Tomsk airport on August 20. After much wrangling with the Russian authorities, he was flown to Germany on August 22 and remains in a medically-induced coma at Berlin’s Charité hospital.

    On 24 August, German doctors announced that they had detected the presence of a cholinesterase inhibitor in Navalny’s blood. Cholinesterase is a component of nerve agents. The Russian doctors who treated Navalny after his plane made an emergency landing at Omsk have contested this conclusion, insisting that their tests for cholinesterase inhibitors were negative.

    Yet Another Poisoning

    Depressingly, yet another poisoning of an enemy of Vladimir Putin is no surprise. Navalny has been a vigorous anti-corruption campaigner and prominent critic of the Russian president and his circle, for the last decade. In return, Putin’s security services have harassed, arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, threatened and now poisoned Navalny —apparently a second time. He joins a list of dozens of opposition politicians, investigative journalists and critics of Putin’s regime who have been forcefully silenced.

    These include Boris Nemtsov, a political high flyer who turned against Putin, assassinated in 2015 right outside the Kremlin. Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire former ally of Putin’s, was found dead in his home in the UK in 2013. Sergei Magnitsky, a tax-law investigator who exposed widespread government fraud spanning some 23 companies and $230 million, who died in police custody in 2009 after being brutally beaten and denied medical treatment. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician who played an instrumental role in the passing of the Magnitsky Act by US Congress, was poisoned twice, in 2015 and 2017.

    Anna Politkovskaya, a renowned investigative journalist, was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block in 2006 following a failed poisoning attempt two years earlier — also involving a cup of tea on a flight. Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB defector, was poisoned with polonium 210-laced tea in London in 2006. Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence officer and double agent, was poisoned alongside his daughter with the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018. The list goes on and on. Russia has denied any involvement in any of these cases, despite mountains of forensic, surveillance and other evidence to the contrary.

    Of course, no rational person believes the Russian denials, although the followers of the Putin cult seem willing to swallow it. But Vladimir Putin clearly does not care whether he is believed or not. The purpose of these assassinations or poisonings is to cow the opposition, bludgeon it into silence, to prevent the investigation of the government’s crimes and to establish Putin as the autocrat, accountable to nobody. Vladimir Putin wants to ensure that no one in Russia dares to oppose him.

    A Good Moment

    The West is in disarray about how to respond to Navalny’s poisoning and particularly desperately misses the leadership of the United States. President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the Navalny case. But Trump, the Russian president’s self-proclaimed “fan,” generally refuses to criticize Putin, so we should fully expect him either to say the Navalny case “never reached his desk” or that he was prepared to believe Putin’s sincere denials, as he did over the conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election. Russia is once again heavily engaged in the campaign to reelect Trump, so we should not expect him to take effective action. Putin thrives on Trump’s weakness.

    President Putin is not as secure as he would like to believe. The economy is doing badly, oil prices are down, the number of COVID-19 infections is the fourth-highest in the world, and in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, tens of thousands of demonstrators have been taking to the streets since July, protesting the arrest of the popular governor on Moscow’s orders. In neighboring Belarus, where the dictator Alexander Lukashenko is fighting to hold on to power, the popular uprising against the rigged election may foreshadow Russia’s future. 

    Putin has regional elections of his own to rig in September, and a national election next year. Alexei Navalny, with his well-organized political movement, is the most prominent, effective and popular figure opposing Putin. Rather than take any chances of the Belarusian uprising being contagious, Putin may well have thought this would be a good moment to eliminate his chief opponent and to terrorize Navalny’s supporters. Now would also be a good time for the West to show some spine and oppose Putin’s murderous dictatorship.

    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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    For Yemen, No Consistent EU Policy in Sight

    The European Union and its member states have presented an approach to the ongoing conflict in Yemen that has lacked both coordination and coherence. The situation in Yemen, which was the poorest Arab country already before the eruption of a civil war in 2014, has been described by the Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. In the face of this, the EU and its national governments have too often proved unable or unwilling to make a positive impact on the developments in Yemen. Some EU members, in fact, have been going in the opposite direction.

    The lack of a common European position on Yemen could be observed after September 14, 2019, when Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia were hit by airstrikes, forcing the kingdom to cut its oil production by more than a half. The attacks were claimed by the Houthi rebels who had seized the capital Sanaa in 2014.

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    Although the Houthis had hit Saudi territory several times in the past, Riyadh insisted that the Aramco attacks were launched from the north, implicitly blaming either Iran or Iraqi militias backed by Tehran. Iran provides the Houthis with support, although claims that the group is an Iranian proxy are far-fetched. An investigation carried out on behalf of the United Nations Security Council concluded that the attacks had probably not been launched from Yemen.

    On the one hand, France and Britain reacted to the attacks (whose authorship was even more uncertain at that moment) with very similar statements, highlighting their commitment to support the security of Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the German Foreign Ministry and the European External Action Service (the diplomatic arm of the EU) emphasized the need for de-escalation and made no reference to Saudi security.

    The Embargo That Never Was

    The different wording of these statements following the Aramco attacks could be considered anecdotic if it did not reflect a more profound divergence of views among EU members regarding the conflict in Yemen. France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain have continued to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia despite its blatant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights in Yemen. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, direct targeting by the Saudi-led coalition has resulted in more than 8,000 civilian deaths since 2015.

    Germany is the only EU heavyweight that has banned weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, even though Berlin has exceptionally approved the export of €400 million ($449 million) in weapons to Saudi Arabia in March last year. Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are some of the countries that have taken a similar position. It must be noted, however, that the economic value of weapons sales to Riyadh differs greatly from country to country. Saudi Arabia represents Britain’s biggest market for weapons exports and the third-largest for France. On the contrary, none of the above-mentioned countries implementing a ban has Saudi Arabia among its top-three buyers of military equipment.

    An EU-wide ban on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia is not only extremely unlikely, it would also have a limited impact if implemented. The United States remains by far the major arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, providing 68% of the weapons the kingdom has bought since 2014. Even so, an EU-wide ban on weapons sales to Riyadh is one of the strongest policies the EU could enforce. The share of Saudi weapons imports originating from EU countries is not the sole indicator of its importance for Riyadh. Switching from one weapons supplier to another takes money, time and may lead to incompatibilities in the weapons systems.

    EU countries exporting weapons to Saudi Arabia are acting against the EU Council Common Position on Arms Exports approved in 2008. Article 2 of the Common Position establishes that EU member states must deny an export license for military technology that “might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.” Adding to this, the EU’s former foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, used to speak strongly against military solutions for Yemen. Mogherini’s successor, Josep Borrell, has less credibility to take such a position since he was Spain’s foreign minister when the Socialist government reversed its initial ban on weapon sales to Saudi Arabia.

    At the end, however, national EU governments retain sovereignty in the management of arms exports and thus often contradict the EU Common Policy. The European Parliament has called for a sanctions committee to be implemented in order to monitor weapons sales, but the decision is non-binding. Actually, it is not unusual to see members of the European Parliament voting in favor of severing support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen while their own parties implement a diametrically opposite policy at the national level.

    The Rhetoric-Reality Gap

    This notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to think that the European Union has not been able to formulate a coordinated and coherent strategy regarding Yemen only because of the dissimilar positions of its member states regarding weapons exports. The low priority given to formulating and eventually supporting such a policy has been equally important. The volume of aid Yemen has received from the European Union is proof of its limited importance to EU leaders.

    Between 2015 and 2018 — the last year for which reliable data is available — Yemen has been allocated €2.33 billion in aid from EU institutions and member countries. During these same four years, Afghanistan and Morocco have received more than €5 billion each from the European Union, the largest global contributor of humanitarian aid.

    It is true that the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance is always complicated when a country is involved in a civil war, and Yemen is no exception. Actually, there are reasons to fear the Houthis might be diverting aid to non-humanitarian purposes. However, it would be naïve to assume that this is the main reason for the low levels of humanitarian aid Yemen has received from the European Union and its member countries. With a slightly smaller population, war-ravaged Syria has received three times as much humanitarian aid as Yemen between 2015 and 2018.

    The explanation for this reality has more to do with the fact that the war in Yemen does not carry the threat of a refugee crisis for the European Union. As surprising as it may seem, more than 160,000 migrants, mostly from Ethiopia and Somalia, arrived in Yemen in 2018. Once there, they often join Yemenis in trying to reach Saudi Arabia in the search of a better life. Riyadh, however, exerts strict controls on migration on the Saudi-Yemeni border, having built a fence along it during the early 2000s.

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    Marissa Quie and Hameed Hakimi argue that in the European Union, aid has become “a tool to stem what electorates perceive to be a ‘tidal wave’ of migration.” This goes a long way into explaining why Libya — through an Italy-Libya deal supported by the EU — Morocco, Turkey or Afghanistan, important points of rigin or transit for migrants aiming to reach Europe, are seen as a higher priority than Yemen.

    The incapacity of the European Union to reach and implement a comprehensive strategy regarding Yemen damages its soft-power projection in the world. Even though the EU stance on the Yemeni conflict is only one of many aspects leading to the questioning of Europe’s soft power, it does not always have to be this way. Europe proved this with its constructive role in the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, regardless of the fact that the EU was far less successful in finding a solution to the US exit from the deal in 2018.

    The European Union rhetorically upholds a certain set of norms that are presumably the result of a certain European identity. These include the defense of human rights, the respect of international regimes — the 2008 EU Common Position and the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty among them — and the responsibility to help avert humanitarian crisis through aid. Nevertheless, as Mai’a K. Davis Cross explains, “identity, image, policies and Public Diplomacy are all interrelated.” EU public diplomacy in Yemen cannot work as long as its policies, and those of its member states, convey an image at odds with the identity the European Union claims as its own.

    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 Infiltration of Law Enforcement by Racist Extremists

    As protests continue to bring cities across the United States to a standstill, the problem of racist policing is more evident than ever before. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department was the latest in a long line of violent assaults on people of color by law enforcement, and his name joins an ever-growing list of those who have been killed by ones who are sworn to protect and serve. The United States is grappling with the issue of police racism before the world’s eyes, and the scale of the conversation currently happening is unprecedented and, sadly, still not enough.

    While the unconscious bias of some officers of the law has been laid bare for all to see, the conscious and hateful bias of others has remained largely in the shadows. The systemic issue of racial profiling is evident, but the hidden epidemic of far-right activism in police departments around the country is an insidious and even more dangerous threat. The links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves. During the civil rights movement, Southern police chiefs coordinated with local Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many officers and commissioners in the deep South were accused of aiding Klan activity and even being active members of KKK organizations.

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    While this trend seems like an archaic symptom of the era of segregation, links between law enforcement and far-right organizations have remained constant through the 20th century and into the 21st and are now seemingly more widespread than ever. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that a number of deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office had concrete links to neo-Nazi organizations and that a number of cases of police violence against black and Latino communities had been motivated by their racist hostility and “terrorist” sympathies. Likewise, in 2008, a prominent Chicago-area police officer was fired and prosecuted over links to the Ku Klux Klan.

    Widespread Infiltration

    A 2015 FBI investigation found that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies was at epidemic levels, and suggested that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” were using links with law enforcement to gain intelligence and restricted access privileges, as well as ultimately evade capture. The report found that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies across the United States did not screen potential recruits for links to far-right organizations and often turned a blind eye to those recruits with questionable political beliefs.

    The bureau was aware of widespread infiltration as early as 2006, suggesting in a heavily redacted report that white supremacist activists were taking advantage of weak vetting procedures in local law enforcement agencies to gain access to “restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence.” The 2006 report suggested that this was a systematic effort, coordinated by high-profile far-right figures such as William Pierce, and infiltration was seen as a key element in the philosophy of leaderless resistance.

    Despite the concerns and recommendations outlined in the FBI’s latest report, recent research has shown that the links between law enforcement and the extreme right have continued to flourish. Last year, a Reveal News investigation found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers were members of online forums dedicated to Islamophobia, neo-Confederate ideology and even neo-Nazism. Almost 400 police officers from 150 different departments had their identities verified, and many were found to have been actively peddling hate speech, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric.

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    The Proud Boys in particular have strong links to law enforcement, and a number of high-profile investigations have highlighted the extent of the collusion between police and the hate group described as the “alt-right fight club.” In May this year, a Chicago PD officer, Robert Bakker, was found to have been an active member of a Proud Boys Telegram channel called “Fuck Antifa,” where he actively coordinated Proud Boys meet-ups and bragged about his connections in the police department and the government.

    Six months earlier, a police officer from East Hampton, Connecticut, was forced into retirement after his links to Proud Boys groups in the area. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law led an investigation into the officer’s social media activity, finding that he was an active member of the self-described “western chauvinist” group. A year before that, a female officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after she was pictured wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt and was later discovered to have been merchandising Proud Boys apparel on the design-sharing RedBubble website.

    Even in cases in which officers are not active members of hate groups, collusion remains a very real issue. In 2019, police officers in Washington, DC, were pictured fist-bumping Proud Boys members at a July 4 rally in front of the White House. The members of the group were then given a police escort to a local bar, while anti-fascist protesters were met with violence from both the police and the Proud Boys. In an even more egregious case, an investigation in Portland, Oregon, found that a senior police officer had been exchanging friendly text messages with Joey Gibson. Gibson was the leader of the far-right Patriot Prayer, a sometimes violent offshoot of the Proud Boys defined by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

    In the lead-up to a number of high-profile clashes between the group and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, Gibson and Lieutenant Jeff Niiya shared joking messages and talked about Patriot Prayer’s planned actions, with Niiya even confiding in Gibson that he had told officers to ignore outstanding warrants for the arrest of a prominent Patriot Prayer member, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese. A separate investigation found that Niiya had submitted police reports on Gibson’s behalf, launching criminal investigations against “antifa activists” based on footage Gibson had privately sent him. This raised concerns that far-right demonstrators were being given preferential treatment by Portland police, particularly given the reputation for forceful suppression of anti-fascist counterprotest in the city.

    Not Immune

    Although this trend reaches uniquely epidemic levels in the United States, the rest of the world is not immune. A 2019 report showed alarming levels of collusion between law enforcement and violent right-wing extremists in Germany. The investigation, led by the nation’s general prosecutor, found that the extreme-right Nordkreuz group had compiled a death list of leftist activists, journalists and pro-refugee targets using police records and was in the process of planning a major terror attack. It was found that the 30 members of the group had close ties to law enforcement, with at least one member actively employed by a special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.

    A recent investigation by Der Spiegel found that the elite unit, known as the KSK, openly tolerated extremist right-wing iconography and membership, even using widely-known Nazi ciphers such as “88” — code for HH, or Heil Hitler. The investigation uncovered high-level officers openly promoting “national-conservative ideology” and espousing racist ultranationalism. Earlier this year, a KSK soldier who reportedly had links to extremist groups was arrested after a weapons and explosives cache was found in his back yard. The German government responded to Der Spiegel’s exposé by launching its own investigation into the unit, finding that racist extremism was endemic across all ranks. As a result, the unit was officially disbanded in early July.

    As historian Kathleen Belew has shown in her most recent book on the long history of the far right’s links to the United States military, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” the siphoning of weaponry and ammunition from military bases to white supremacist organizations has been a constant tactic of would-be terrorist groups. There is no doubt that the continued militarization of police forces in the United States and Europe, combined with the high levels of extremist infiltration, offers new avenues for the theft of high-grade weaponry and tactics, and further armament of extremist right-wing groups.

    These links between law enforcement and white supremacist organizations are deeply concerning, and present a very real threat to peace, justice and liberty in the United States and around the world. As police racism once again enters the spotlight, it is more important than ever to examine and challenge the infiltration of law enforcement by racist extremists. A centralized vetting process that directly seeks out links to organized racism and excludes candidates with any affiliation with far-right groups is the bare minimum and should be the first step toward a total overhaul of the training and oversight procedures.

    Despite a number of legal challenges to the protective role of policing, law enforcement, at its core, still exists to protect and serve the people regardless of race, religion or creed, and any affiliation with hateful ideology compromises an officer’s ability to execute this role fairly and without prejudice. Until the systemic and personal racism of law enforcement is no longer an issue, we will see more George Floyds, more Breonna Taylors, more murders in the name of law and order. Preventing and eliminating racist bias in police departments across the US is only the first step toward a long process of reckoning and reconciliation.

    *[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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    Britain Fails Its Exams

    The Advanced Level Certificate (A-level), together with the General Certificate of Education (GCSE), is one of two sets of exams students across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own system) sit in the summer. The GCSE is a ticket to spending two years studying for A-levels, itself a ticket to university, where 40% of England’s schoolchildren end up. The results are released in August by the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual.)

    This year, there were no exams because the United Kingdom locked itself down against COVID-19. Instead, teachers supplied predicted grades. Teachers make these predictions every year, and it is with these in mind that universities make the offer of a place. Offers are made either unconditionally or with the proviso that the predictions are realized or bettered. In recent years, more and more offers have been made unconditionally, and these now comprise around a third of the total.

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    Universities do this because they are dependent upon the fees each student pays: no students, no fees, no university. The pressure rises as universities expand, and each finds itself having to attract a greater share of a shrinking number of school leavers. Restrictions imposed by a hostile immigration service on international students’ movements, and now in response to COVID-19, have made matters worse.

    The Algorithm

    This year was also different because, when the results were issued on August 13, it was obvious that Ofqual had intervened. The grades awarded to many students bore little resemblance to the schools’ predictions. Worried that teachers were being too generous and that this would undermine the credibility of the exams, Ofqual devised and applied a mathematical formula to moderate the results. The algorithm took account of the students’ mock results and the performance of each school in previous years, amongst other variables. The calculations determined that 40% of grades should be reduced. This threw offers and plans into doubt, causing umbrage among students, parents, teachers and universities.

    Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, stuck resolutely to his guns. By August 17, he had abandoned them, and the original predicted results were reinstated. Williamson had been blindsided by Ofqual, he claimed, and only became aware of the full implications of the recalculations over the weekend. Ofqual struck back, saying that Williamson had known difficulties were brewing ever since March, when he ordered the regulator to adjust grades if they appeared inflated.

    It was then made known that the head of Ofqual, Roger Taylor, established and ran a firm implicated in the Mid Staffs Hospital scandal. His firm, Dr Foster,  had come up with an algorithm enabling the hospital to present its mortality rates as low when, in fact, they were dangerously high and its patients were being dreadfully mistreated.

    Just what had Gavin Williamson been levelling at? The entire mess was completely avoidable and unnecessary. No exams had been taken, so there were no exams to be brought into disrepute. And there had been no exams because of exceptional circumstances. So why treat the teacher’s predictions as an assault on standards, especially when predictions are made every year and unconditional offers are issued to a fair proportion of students as a matter of course?

    Whatever the answer, the response was immediate. Gasps of disbelief at the secretary’s sheer incompetence (“He’s fucking useless,” declared one vice chancellor) were combined with emotional outbursts from students worried that their lives had been ruined, from parents trying to deal with the fallout at home, and from university staff whose summer breaks were interrupted.

    All parties most likely suspected that things would eventually sort themselves out if only because chancellors are desperate to fill seats. Having said that, the government and Ofqual displayed a complete absence of trust in teachers and schools. Most disgraceful was the treatment of students with potential and drive who had worked hard against the odds in schools assessed as poor over the last few years. At a macro-level, it meant that the proportion of the most deprived pupils (the bottom third) who achieved a Grade C or better fell by nearly 11%, while the independent schools saw their proportion of A and A* grades increase by nearly 5%.

    An education secretary, whose only claim to the job is that he was not educated at an independent school and did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, willfully took away the ladder from the very kids it is meant for. A more callous and spiteful decision in the name of equality is difficult to imagine. However, the farrago matters for another, even more important, reason. It illustrates just how superficial education has become.

    Grades Are Everything

    The A-levels are not just a passport to university. A school whose students’ average grades fall too far will come under greater scrutiny from the government, which can end in sanctions of one sort or another. These include changing staff pay and conditions; removing staff and governing bodies; turning the school’s budget over to an interim board; closing the school; or handing it (minus its former staff) to an academy. Academies, though state-funded, have more control over management, curriculum, pay, the selection of students and staff, and the freedom to attract money from private sponsors.

    Of the 3,400 or so state-funded secondary schools (3.25 million pupils), nearly three-quarters (about 2.3 million children) are now academies. If an academy fails, then it, too, is either absorbed by a more successful one or closed. Independent schools judged to be failing can also find themselves in trouble. For instance, they may be prohibited from taking on new pupils, fined or closed. Proprietors who do not respond adequately to enforcement notices can end up in prison.

    Grades, then, have come to mean everything. And because they mean everything, what they are supposed to signify has come to mean very little at all. The education system — and “system” is a good description — barely manages to educate. Where a good education is found in English schools, it is provided by teachers and parents despite the vast amount of nonsensical instructions (misleadingly entitled “guidelines”) issued by the government. In these oases of levelheadedness, staff teach outside the system’s narrow confines, helping children to explore more rounded and deeper understandings of the world, introducing them to new ways of thinking.

    The problem is not just that teachers are weighed down and worn out by red tape. To avoid falling foul of the government and its quality enforcers, teachers must consume millions of words of legislation, statutory instruments, notices and guidance that lay out in extraordinary detail everyday practice within the school. It is that education — or rather the fulfillment of standards dictated by the government — has become a bureaucratic procedure, a glorified exercise in form-filling, in which content, imagination, experimentation and sustained and unconventional thought no longer matter.

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    Children and teachers must do what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. “Best practice” holds sway over fresh thought. The student must see the world as directed. Thus, for instance, a play is a composite of meaning shaped by literary and dramatic devices. History is an unstable melange of constructions arrived at by historians through their interpersonal relationships. The economy must be studied through the application of the correct economic models. Only by breaking the mind into a kaleidoscope of skills through which patchworks of information are collected and assembled, declare geography teachers, can social and natural worlds be understood. Facts, interpretations and evidence are set out in neat bullet points so they can be memorized and marshalled in the correct way and in the correct place.

    All of this and more — such as precisely defined “command words” like “analyze” and “suggest,” and the marks to be awarded for each correctly placed fact or argument — is found in thick, glossy volumes of “specifications,” “amendments,” “sample assessments,” published “resources,” “mark schemes,” “specimen papers,” “exemplar material,” “schemes of work,” “skills for learning and work” and “topic materials” produced by exam boards for each subject.

    Officialism smothers all schools. But when parents are well educated and bring up their children to read, learn, write, talk and think coherently, teachers have an easier time of it. Children are confident, and this shows in class and in their work. Teachers know that as far as the exams are concerned, their students can, to all intents and purposes, teach themselves. A teacher’s immediate job is to make sure a child is practiced in the bureaucracy and is given the required information. This will deliver the grades.

    The second, and more important job, is to lead their children out and well beyond those limitations. It is this — a passion for their subject and a willingness to go further — that really prepares the child for university and beyond. Most, though not all, of these schools are independent and selective.

    State-funded schools are far more constrained by the system, and it is all they can do to meet its demands. The bureaucracy does not allow them the time, freedom, money or incentive to instill in children and parents the outlooks, values, beliefs, practices and confidence that will enable them to see beyond the government’s petty world view.

    I should say that the distinction I make between independent and state is too stark. There are some excellent state schools, and there are some terrible independent schools — unhappy little communities tucked away in some old building in the countryside. My point is simply that education, rather than its bureaucratized version, is found unevenly and rarely, and is more likely where teachers and parents have the wherewithal and determination to play the system and so keep it from dragging them and their children down into a mire of niggling and pointless tasks, boredom and despondency.

    Not Much Help

    British universities have not been much help. Rather than find common cause with schools and encourage them in fostering a university-style education, universities have gone along with government reforms all too easily and are becoming more like brash, over-confident schools. The university has become a brand, an experience, a rite, designed to extract as much cash as possible from students. Walk away with a good degree, the student is told, and our brand will confer upon you a charisma, a light, a duende that will set you up for life or at least give you a foot in a door so that you show an employer what you can do. Meanwhile, behind all the pizzazz, the content of the degree is scratched away at and the process through which the certificate is awarded becomes more bureaucratic.

    The trend is especially obvious in universities without a well-established pedigree. Why should a student pay tens of thousands of pounds for a certificate from a university no one has heard of? The answer is “relevance,” and relevance means “skills.” As the degree is hollowed out, the space is filled with an omnium-gatherum of skills: cognitive skills, intellectual skills, key skills, transferable skills, employment-related skills, practical skills, applied skills, inter-personal skills, writing skills, reading skills, thinking skills, networking skills, team-working skills, observational skills, speaking skills, speech-making skills, analytical skills, editing skills, note-taking skills, research skills, computing skills, entrepreneurial skills, lab skills, creative skills, leadership skills, work ethic skills and ethical skills.

    Choose a verb or adjective, put the word “skill” after it, and it becomes teachable, assessable and marketable. To write an essay or a thesis or to take an exam is to engage in a piece of bureaucracy, an updated form of medieval scholasticism, in which all these skills are stitched together, tracked and traced.

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    By lifting a corner of the veil, the A-level fiasco exposes a little of the humbug swirling around the government’s education system and something of the cynicism with which the government treats the people it claims to represent. Just how deep this cynicism goes, however, is revealed by a matter from which the farce distracted public attention over the last week — a week that I suspect will prove deadly. I say deadly because it will be difficult in the time left to deter the government from repeating the same mistakes it made at the start of the pandemic that cost over 40,000 lives.

    At present, the UK government and its scientific advisers are busy saturating the press with its claim that the “life chances” of children will be damaged irreparably if schools stay closed. A generation of children will “fall behind,” many of those who rely on schools to feed them will go hungry, and many others, forced to stay at home, will be at greater risk of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

    The government’s chutzpah is breathtaking. To indict the produce of its own policies and then use that indictment as cheap blackmail in support of those same policies is surely the height of contempt. A fifth of the population is poor because of government actions and inactions over many years. It is these “ordinary” people, as ministers like to call them, who are most under pressure to go work because of cuts to welfare, changes in benefit rules and threats from government.

    It is also they who, last time around, suffered most from a virus allowed to run loose. And it is their children who are most likely to bring it back home after struggling on public transport and spending hours in crowded classrooms working on pointless and soul-destroying bureaucratic techniques. The only strand of reasoning that makes some kind of sense in this tangled web of lunacy is a ruthless one: the primary function of the education system is to keep Britain’s labor force — and especially its cheaper end — at work.

    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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    Does Joe Biden’s Transition to the Center Have Any Meaning Today?

    The New Yorker features a lengthy biographical portrait of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden written by Evan Osnos. Clearly recognizing Biden’s positioning on the electoral spectrum, the title of the article takes the form of a question: “Can Biden’s Center Hold?” Though it doesn’t provide an answer to the question, it implicitly pleads in favor of Biden’s tactical choice of occupying the center, not just of the Democratic Party but of the entire oligarchic system.

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    Osnos focuses on the candidate’s own characterization of his strategy. “Biden has described himself as a ‘transition candidate,’ able to overcome generational and ideological rifts,” he writes.

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Transition candidate:

    A candidate lacking definition in terms of vision or coherent policy agenda, but intent upon influencing the choice of future leaders, presumably who will share the same deficiency of vision and clarity

    Contextual Note

    Osnos zeroes in on Biden’s idea of what it means to ensure a transition. He writes: “In the spring, Biden began describing himself as a ‘transition candidate,’ explaining, ‘We have not given a bench to younger people in the Party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.’”

    We might marvel at the tautology offered by a 77-year-old man, whose political career spans more than 50 years, referring to people who are at the same time “newer” and “younger.” The two attributes tend to go together. But Biden undoubtedly remembers that his opponent, US President Donald Trump, was new to politics at the age of 69 when he launched his first real political campaign in 2015. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    Biden is also correct in noticing the rise of a generation of newer, younger people who have been making headlines, such as “the squad,” led by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Ilhan Omar. They are now being joined by a host of new candidates for this election, some of whom have successfully unseated longstanding incumbents, such as Cori Bush, who defeated the William Lacy Clay dynasty in Missouri, or Jamal Bowman, who upended the career of Eliot Engel, chairman the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    But those aren’t the youngsters Biden has in mind. Had that been the case, he would have insisted on highlighting their contribution at last week’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, AOC was given a minimal spot only on the insistence of Senator Bernie Sanders, who himself was only reluctantly included because of his status as the uncontested leader of a future-oriented movement. Andrew Yang, who made a major impact during the debates thanks to his groundbreaking ideas, was belatedly invited only after he publicly expressed his astonishment at not being invited. 

    The most telling absence was that of the most courageous and credible of the young presidential candidates, Tulsi Gabbard. She has attained the status of an unmentionable within a party dominated by the Obama and Clinton dynasties. The young and articulate veteran is guilty of vehemently opposing the bellicose foreign policy favored by every Democratic president since Harry Truman.

    That leaves the party’s hopes of prominent new talent essentially in the hands of two people. Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, performed poorly in the Democratic primaries and is no youngster. She will be 60 in 2024. Pete Buttigieg, who enjoyed a moment of glory in the Iowa caucuses where he was helped along by the software the party chose to use for tabulating the votes, is the image of a young technocrat with no political vision.

    Perhaps Biden’s idea of a transition candidate simply means that he sees the US itself transitioning to something different than the past four years of Trump. That would mean that anyone outside of Trump’s own family would be a transitional candidate. But that is too obvious a truism to take seriously.

    Historical Note

    Evan Osnos cites the Northwestern University historian Brett Gadsden, a native of the part of Delaware where Joe Biden grew up: “There’s probably a metaphorical lesson in the fact that Biden hails from a place that has this mythical reputation as a middle-ground state. It’s emblematic of a kind of imagined center.” Gadsden hints that the meaning of “center” in terms of both US politics and culture can only be elusive, if not totally imaginary.

    The ambiguity surrounding the center perhaps defines better than anything else the legacy of Donald Trump. The nation is polarized, split in two. The center, represented by the establishment of both parties, has lost much if not yet all of its credibility among the traditional bases of Democrats and Republicans. It still maintains its hold on power in the world of finance and technology, but only a minority “believe” and adhere to its values. 

    On one side, Trump represents the defiance of the hyper-individualistic, assert-your-personality-at-all-costs wing, not so much of US politics as of US culture. On August 24, at the Republican National Convention, Kimberly Guilfoyle expressed the voice of that hyper-aggressive segment of the culture. It was as if Guilfoyle, a campaign official and the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., was calling to arms the unregulated militias that represent President Trump’s constituency in a battle against a satanic enemy. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom, they want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she said. 

    Biden embodies and symbolizes the problem of the center. The Yahoos on the right unleashed by the Trump revolution are ready to challenge everything to their left, including that part of the Republican Party that can be called the center, which appears now to have joined forces with the establishment of the Democratic Party. They have become virtually indistinguishable.

    In contrast, without revolting, the progressive left has declared its growing mistrust of a center that has increasingly focused on resisting any kind of reform designed to respond to the increasingly grave crises society is facing. Seeking control is not a feature of the left’s culture. It basically counts on the growing awareness by the center of the gravity of the problems all previous administrations have failed to address. But the progressive wing’s patience is clearly wearing out.

    If after a Biden victory in November he has the opportunity to demonstrate the transition he has promised, a real danger awaits him. Unlike what happened with Barack Obama, the progressive wing will offer Biden no honeymoon. The messy and probably violent Trumpian revolt against the government itself after a defeat in the polls will occur simultaneously with the seriously organized contestation by the left of Biden’s likely “transition” team. In the midst of intractable crises, his policy choices and his capacity to govern will be vehemently challenged.

    Squeezed from both sides, the center’s fate is unsure. In his poem, “The Second Coming,” written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, William Butler Yeats prophesied:

    “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.”

    The “center of power” is not just Washington. The “center of finance” is not just Wall Street. The center that has held Western society relatively intact for more than seven decades is already under severe pressure. It increasingly requires arbitrary force to hold back the growing tide of chaos unleashed by the not totally coincidental convergence of a pandemic, multiple irrational military ventures across the globe and exacerbated inequality of income, wealth and treatment by official institutions.

    In his New Yorker piece, Osnos quotes a senior Obama administration official’s description of Biden: “He is very much a weathervane for what the center of the left is. He can see, ‘O.K., this is where the society is moving. This is where the Democratic Party is moving, so I’m going to move.’”

    But the Democratic Party, committed to flirting with never-Trumper Republicans, no longer represents its own voters. And when “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” — and Jacob Blake lies on a hospital bed as its latest witness — even a transition candidate finds himself in a situation similar to that of a refugee of the American wars in the Middle East. There’s simply nowhere safe to move where one will be welcome.

    *[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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    in World Politics

    The 2020 US Census Could Threaten Human Rights

    On July 21, President Donald Trump signed an unprecedented memo directing the commerce secretary to collect data on undocumented immigrants and remove them from the final population totals. The memo follows up on a July 2019 executive order that assigned the Census Bureau to determine how many residents are US citizens.

    It remains unclear how this plan — seemingly a workaround the Supreme Court decision that blocked the administration from including a question about citizenship on the census — would be enforced or survive a legal challenge. However, removing undocumented immigrants from the population totals would have the effect of distorting the count, thus diminishing political representation and federal funding for states with larger undocumented populations.

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    The decennial census, enshrined in the US Constitution, was conceived to count all residents of the country — regardless of citizenship or eligibility to vote — as a basis for taxation and the regular reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives among the various states. In March 2018, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that for the first time in 70 years, the 2020 census would include a question about citizenship status for all households. After months of court battles, the Supreme Court issued a complicated ruling that kept the question off the census, noting that the administration’s rationale for adding the item was contrived.

    Nonetheless, recent surveys by civil society groups indicate that Latino communities remain fearful of participating in the census: as a result of the controversy, many mistakenly believe that a question about citizenship status will still appear and fear that census data could be shared with law enforcement or other government agencies. Now, the Trump administration seems determined to work around the Supreme Court ruling, noting that it is the “policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

    The ramifications of removing undocumented immigrants from the count loom large as census information is used not just for congressional apportionment, but also for the allocation of an estimated $900 billion in federal funding for programs on issues such as nutrition, public health, housing, transportation, education, law enforcement and environmental protection. International human rights law — including the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) — recognizes the rights to education, health and an adequate standard of living.

    Distorted census results would damage the protection of these fundamental human rights by putting communities with large immigrant populations at risk of limited access to essential services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems particularly punishing. Further, an undercount would place certain states at a political disadvantage in terms of proportional representation in Washington, undermining the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives. Removing undocumented immigrants from the census count would ensure that everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, ultimately suffer.

    The Trump administration has come to be associated with a xenophobic, exclusionary and race-based conception of American identity. Indeed, President Donald Trump has stood apart from all of his recent predecessors in displaying open hostility toward immigrants, asylum seekers and other vulnerable and minority groups. The president has proposed dramatic new restrictions on legal immigration and pledged to abrogate birthright citizenship — the constitutional guarantee that those born in the United States, whether or not their parents are citizens, have a right to citizenship. As a result, this proposal, beyond its harmful practical impact, has been criticized as an effort to enforce that identity.

    The proposal can also be seen as part of a larger pattern in which politicians seek to define American political membership, determine voters’ political identity according to demography and then maximize their chances at the polls through the manipulation of district boundaries or the rules of voting eligibility. In effect, a census that undercounts immigrant populations and distorts reapportionment could amount to an enormous partisan gerrymandering exercise. Like all such efforts, this would undermine the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives rather than representatives choosing their voters, further eroding the idea that elected officials should serve and appeal to all segments of society. Everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, would ultimately suffer from such an outcome.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

    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

    Three Years On, Still No Accountability for Our Son’s Death

    Three years ago today, we suffered the most painful experience a family can endure. Our son Christopher Allen was murdered on the other side of the world, reporting on the civil conflict in South Sudan. A freelance journalist and dual US-UK citizen, Chris was only 26 years old and had a bright future ahead of him — a future that was taken from him, from us and from those whose stories he was so intent on telling the world.

    On August 26, 2017, our lives changed irrevocably. Now, the pursuit of justice for Chris would become a central part of our existence. Our hearts were broken and, in addition to experiencing insurmountable grief, we found our family facing an uphill battle not only with the South Sudanese but also with Chris’ own governments in Washington and London, as well as with the United Nations.

    No Justice

    These are the very democratic institutions that are meant to protect journalists and press freedom, that are meant to fight injustice and ensure accountability for unspeakable crimes. Yet they have failed to act meaningfully to support us or help secure justice for Chris’ killing. Everything that is meant to be set into motion when a tragedy like this occurs simply did not happen — at least not without a fight from our side. Now, three years on, there has still been no investigation and no justice. We still lack even basic answers about what happened to Chris.

    Chris developed his craft as a journalist in Ukraine, where he lived and worked from April 2014 and from there embarked on a new challenge. In August 2017, he traveled to South Sudan to cover the country’s under-reported civil war, embedding with the SPLA-IO, a rebel faction attempting to overthrow the established government in Juba.

    Chris had embedded with the soldiers for more than three weeks, listening to the stories of their lives, their losses, motivations and fears before being targeted by government forces during a battle in Kaya, near South Sudan’s border with Uganda. We spoke with Chris the night before he was killed. The company was moving out that evening to walk through miles of bush to capture munition supplies.

    We urged Chris not to go, to write a piece that covered the embed to date, to share with his readers the pain the families of these men suffered at the hand of those in power. But he insisted that the story of preparing for battle was incomplete. Chris’ dedication to his journalism was absolute — he felt he must bear witness to the battle. He said to us that he “had to see it through.” Our son looked for the truth at all costs.

    As his parents, it is daunting and painful to recount this. Just as Chris sought the truth of the tragedies and difficulties of others, we have been working to establish the truth of the circumstances of his killing every day for three full years. Yet the very governments and institutions whose duty it is to help us find the truth have failed to support us at every key juncture over the past three years.

    Based on evidence uncovered through journalistic investigations in the absence of any official inquiry, we know that Chris was killed by a member of the South Sudanese armed forces and that his killing and the treatment of his body post-mortem are likely to constitute war crimes. With support from a legal team as well as campaigners at Reporters Without Borders, we have tenaciously sought an independent criminal investigation from the South Sudanese and US authorities.

    We Must See This Through

    In our deep desire to secure justice and accountability for the wrongful killing of our son, a civilian and journalist armed only with a camera, and to remind states that they cannot suppress press freedom by killing journalists with impunity, we will continue to demand a meaningful investigation and justice. Like Chris, we must see this through.  

    Despite our intense efforts, the US and UK governments and the United Nations have still failed to act meaningfully to help us find answers or justice, and in some cases have not responded at all. This is in sharp contrast to their publicly stated commitments to freedom of expression. The lesson we have learned over these past three painful years is that too often, these bodies cannot be taken at their word, and must very actively be held to account.

    We persevere in our fight for justice not only for our son, but for all journalists taking tremendous risks to get out the truth from dangerous places around the world. Every case of impunity leaves the door open for further attacks on journalists and emboldens those who wish to use violence to silence public interest reporting. In contrast, every case in which justice is achieved sends a powerful signal that violence against journalists will not be tolerated anywhere and that those who commit such atrocious acts will pay the price. This, in turn, serves to deter violence and protect journalists everywhere.

    We ask that a bright light be shed on the circumstance of Christopher’s killing. We call on governments and institutions to hold the South Sudanese military accountable for the wrongful death of our son. A transparent investigation is the first step. Accountability and justice for Chris must follow. By demanding accountability for our son’s killing, we hope to create a safer world for journalists and bolster press freedom everywhere.

    We must see this through. 

    *[Joyce Krajian and John Allen are the parents of Christopher Allen.]

    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

    Donald Trump and the “Kung Flu”

    Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have proved immune to his insults (at least in his public utterances). Trump’s favorite targets for public abuse have been Hispanics, especially individuals seeking to enter the country clandestinely along the border with Mexico. He has also complained bitterly and profanely, in a semi-public setting, about immigrants from Haiti and sub-Saharan African countries.

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    This is hardly the end of things. Early on in his administration, Trump imposed a ban, which was overturned by courts, on all Muslims seeking to enter the United States based on popular fears of terrorism. Very much unlike his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who were careful to distinguish between terrorists and the followers of Islam, Trump sought to equate Muslims in general with terrorism, thereby inflaming existing popular fears.

    Classic Demagoguery

    Then came COVID-19, a disease that has taken the lives of nearly 168,000 of Americans to date. After some initial hesitation, Trump labeled it “kung flu.” To cheers and wild laughter at mass rallies and other public events, the president has sought to deflect widespread criticism of his handling of the pandemic by blaming the Chinese — not merely the government but the people in general — conflating the Chinese martial art of kung fu with influenza to the delight of his followers.

    All this, of course, is classic demagoguery intended to mobilize Trump’s base of whites with less than a college education and win him their renewed support at the polls in November. The fact that he actually appears to believe what he is saying adds to the appeal of his message. 

    Trump’s demagogic appeals have consequences for those targeted by his abuse. Using data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, researchers have reported a substantial decline in hate crimes committed against Asian Americans over the periods 2003-07 and 2014-18.  Asian Americans appeared to be well on their way to acceptance by their fellow citizens. The arrival of COVID-19 arrested this development and turned it around. So that, for example, in the three months ending on July 1, another source reported over 800 discrimination and harassment incidents, including 81 assaults, aimed at Asian Americans in California alone. 

    The situation of American Muslims is somewhat different. For members of this religious minority, there was no reversal of the trend toward greater acceptance, simply a continuation of widespread animus. Illustratively, as reported in The Daily Beast, in the two months following the murder of 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, by Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man who reported being a “fan” of Trump, mosques in San Diego, California, New Haven, Connecticut, and Queens, New York, became the targets of arson attacks.

    These crimes were simply the most menacing of some hundreds of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that followed upon the Christchurch killings. Abbas Barzegar, the director of a national watchdog organization that tracks anti-Muslim bias incidents, told The Daily Beast in 2019, “We’ve already reported over 500 incidences of anti-Muslim bias or harassment just this year so far.” Barzegar went on to say that the uptick in anti-Muslim events began in 2015 and continued unabated thereafter.

    Poisonous Atmosphere

    For how much of this is Trump responsible? The answer is not easily quantifiable, but at a minimum, we can say Trump has done little to qualm the poisonous atmosphere in the country. At a maximum, we can claim he has sought to promote a politics of inter-group hatred to advance his career and improve his chances of reelection.

    There is a striking contradiction in this situation. As Trump and his base insult or, in some cases, physically assault Chinese Americans and Muslims, holding the Chinese responsible for COVID-19, individual members of such now stigmatized groups have been busy trying to save Americans from the disease. A long list of Chinese American epidemiologists, emergency room physicians and virologists, led perhaps by Dr. David Ho (director of the Aaron Diamond Research Center at Columbia University) and Dr. Thomas Tsai (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), have been playing vital roles in fighting the disease, often at the risk of their own lives.

    About the same applies to America Muslims from both the Middle East and South Asia. The list here would have to include Dr. Ashish Jha (director of Harvard Global Health Institute), Mahrokh Irani (Harvard Global Health Institute), Dr. Najy Masai and Dr. Imran Siddiqui. Of course, the list could be extended.

    Will these performances by Chinese American and American Muslim physicians and scientists have any impact on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the bigoted perceptions of his base? Probably not. To do so would require Trump voters to link the physicians’ backgrounds to the groups to which they belong and modify their attitudes accordingly — not an easy feat. Further, the president and his campaign operatives have too much invested in his crowd-pleasing rhetoric to change at this late date.

    *[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