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      Can China Duplicate the US Military-Industrial Complex?

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      With the 2020 US election approaching, the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear to have decided that there are only two issues worth pursuing. The first,  which they hope the American public will swallow, would be the visibly diminished cognitive capacity of Democratic nominee Joe Biden that has, they claim, turned him into a Marxist and Bernie Sanders’ poodle.

      The second issue is more likely to stir up the jingoistic emotions of the electorate. It consists of portraying China as an evil empire and perpetrator of pandemics. Pompeo has been trotting the globe, raising the rhetorical tone to make sure everyone understands how deserving China is of any punishment Trump may decide to inflict on it in between now and the first week of November.

      China certainly merits everyone’s attention, simply because it’s there, it’s imposing, it’s growing in influence and it has already clearly shifted the global geopolitical balance in parallel with America’s ongoing hegemonic decline. It’s a theme that resonates with the working class. From a purely electoral point of view, countering the evident rise of China seems like the most obvious theme for Trump to push. After all, his stance of getting tough with China played a big role in the 2016 election.

      The Brain Malfunction Affecting the US and Its Respectable Media

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      Irrespective of elections, every pundit involved in evaluating geopolitical game plans has been homing in on the faceoff between the US and China. Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks, writing for Foreign Affairs, have produced a fascinating piece of tendentious ideological reasoning in an article with a provocative title, “Can China’s Military Win the Tech War?” It has the merit of focusing on what is truly the most crucial point of rivalry between the US and the Middle Kingdom: technological prowess in the coming decades.

      Alas, their article reads like an exercise in fuzzy neoliberal logic, adorned with an orgy of Silicon Valley venture capital jargon, imbued with romanticized entrepreneurial idealism. Its trendy vocabulary tells us more about a new culture shared between Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, than it does about the geopolitical theme it purports to clarify. The authors assail the reader with these bold concepts: “innovative startups” “collaborative disruption,” “agile and innovative,” “critical innovation,” “emerging technologies,” a “sense of urgency” linked to “today’s competitive … environment,” and “incentives for innovators.”

      China’s rise as a supplier of technology poses a major problem because, in today’s world, technology and defense have become one and the same thing. We learn that “as China’s defense capabilities have grown, some Western policymakers have started to wonder whether the United States needs to adopt its own version of civil-military fusion, embracing a top-down approach to developing cutting-edge technologies with military applications.”

      And here is the crux of the problem: “Chinese President Xi Jinping formalized the concept of civil-military fusion as part of the extensive military reforms laid out in his 2016 five-year plan.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Civil-military fusion:

      The name given to the Chinese version of the seven-decades-old system developed in the US christened by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 as the military-industrial complex

      Contextual Note

      Manuel and Hicks start their discussion in this introductory sentence: “As the Chinese government has set out to harness the growing strength of the Chinese technology sector to bolster its military, policymakers in the United States have reacted with mounting alarm.” Thinkers in the West are now wondering whether the Chinese top-down, authoritarian model of decision-making might not be superior to the point of constituting a model the US needs to emulate. The authors set out to prove the contrary.

      The article highlights President Xi Jinping’s Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development whose “goal is to promote the development of dual-use technology and integrate existing civilian technologies into the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).” Manuel and Hicks seem to have missed the most obvious point — that Xi has simply taken the American system and stood it on its head. Since World War II, the US has traditionally followed the pattern of developing military technology, which is then made available to private companies to exploit commercially as civilian technology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The article also fails to notice how the Chinese have profited from the American system. The US uses its commercial marketplace to validate the types of civilian technology that prove successful. The Chinese can then either copy or reverse engineer the same technology for their civilian market before adapting it to military use. This means the Chinese are getting the best of both worlds. They let the marketplace in the West filter out the civilian applications that work, sparing themselves the research.

      Sensing a possible weakness, the authors, undaunted, turn to the catechism of their neoliberal ideology. It contains an article of faith based on the unfounded (and clearly mistaken) belief that private enterprises will always be paragons of efficiency as opposed to governments that will always function as fountains of inefficiency. “China’s bureaucratic and authoritarian approach to civil-military fusion is likely to waste considerable time and money. By trying to control innovation, Beijing is more likely to delay and even stifle it,” Manuel and Hicks write. We are safe. The liberal economy of the US owns a monopoly on innovation.

      The authors conclude that the US should not seek to emulate the Chinese model. They do, however, concede that “Washington does need a strategy to strengthen its national security technology and industrial base.” That sounds like encouragement of government inefficiency, but Silicon Valley jargon comes to the rescue. The US needs a strategy “centered on collaborative disruption that generates the right incentives for innovators, scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, and others,” they add. The following sentence offers more jargon in lieu of logic, but especially wishful thinking. The authors call for “forward-looking changes in the Defense Department and smart investments across government.”

      Curiously, Manuel and Hicks seem to recognize the obstacle. They see a “risk not because of China but because of a lack of agility and creativity among U.S. planners and policymakers.” This is the ultimate expression of neoliberal ideology. Entrepreneurs are agile and creative. Government planners and policymakers are useless bureaucrats, a fact they reaffirm with this remark: “The Defense Department’s long lead times and slow decision-making remain significant obstacles to innovation.”

      Perhaps even more astonishingly naive is their plea to push the already existing logic of revolving door corruption. As a solution to US inertia, they recommend “more opportunities to hire people directly from industry or research institutions into the senior civilian government or even the military ranks,” as well as wishing to expand “the number of temporary fellowships for private-sector experts to spend a year or two in government.” Those are permanent features of the military-industrial complex that have contributed massively to its corruption.

      Historical Note

      Insisting that if China wants to catch up, it should emulate the United States, Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks offer a potted history of the development of America’s military-industrial complex. They cite the founding of labs in the 1930s to develop supercomputing, the military’s post-war collaboration with Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor to develop microprocessors and the creation in 1958 of the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which helped develop GPS and the Internet.” They then proudly cite the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit, founded in 2015, which “has helped innovative startups gain a foothold at the Pentagon.”

      The authors recommend little more than the logic that has prevailed for the past 70 years. They maintain that “partnering effectively with the private sector can save taxpayer dollars.” In reality, it means companies will continue to see their R&D funded by taxpayers, with no risk and, of course, the opportunity to reap profits from future business in civilian technology. That translates as no benefit to taxpayers but colossal rewards for shareholders.

      Manuel and Hicks insist on the necessity of “collaborative disruption,” which “will require upfront investments and streamlined approaches for getting the best commercial technology into the Department of Defense.” This language is designed to appeal to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It may also appeal to the same political class that has profited personally and politically from the growth of the military-industrial-financial complex. In other words, it is more of the same, but with updated vocabulary. Whether, as the authors hope, the US can by these means “secure the advantage in defense capabilities on its own terms” over China remains to be seen.

      *[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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      Art, Nature and the Exclusion of the Alien

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      In light of escalating environmental crises and radical-right activism around the globe, there has been renewed academic interest in how the radical right engages with environmental issues. These analyses cover radical right-wing articulations of global and abstract climate change — often, though not always, being skeptical in one way or another — and the protection of local and nation-specific ecosystems. In doing so, these analyses employ highly specialized idioms to explain how radical-right articulations of the natural environment “legitimize” the exclusion of all those deemed to not “naturally” belong.

      However, artistic approaches offer alternatives to illuminate how the natural environment is mobilized in exclusionary projects. Two short films, mentioned in a conversation during an event hosted by the Jan van Eyck Academie’s program on environmental identities in July this year, provide useful examples.

      The National Ecosystem: Radical Right and Biodiversity

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      Moderated by Bruno Alves de Almeida, the event aimed to understand relations “between self- and social identity and the natural environment.” While I had the opportunity to participate in this conversation, the following focuses specifically on how “Habitat 2190,” by Hanna Rullmann and Faiza Ahmad Khan, and “Oysters for Naturalization,” by Domenico Mangano and Marieke van Rooy, think about the politics of space, nature and exclusion, and non-human and human “nativeness.” While both films might thus remind viewers of radical-right arguments, they also thematize the presence of such tropes in the political mainstream.

      Oysters for Naturalization

      “Oysters for Naturalization” engages with the issue of belonging by considering the presence of the Japanese oyster in Dutch waters. As van Rooy explained during the conversation, the Japanese oyster was introduced in the beginning of the 1970s in the south of the Netherlands by oyster farmers, following a bad season for Dutch oysters. They were not expected to survive the cold waters for long, but they did end up expanding north. Intriguingly, the artists noticed that around the same time, the Dutch government arranged for Moroccans and Turks to come to the country and work, and, as in other European countries, the expectation was that these workers would “go away” too.

      Thus, the Japanese oyster in the Wadden Sea are used by the artists to examine belonging as they approach them with questions on how they (should) behave in their environment, with questions inspired by the integration exam for immigrants who want to acquire Dutch citizenship. By creating an analogy between oysters and humans, Mangano and van Rooy’s questions to oysters encourage reflection on (“ideal”) subjectivities offered through them, on exclusion and inclusion:

      The government introduces local species, which rules here a long time ago, into your habitat.

      What do you do?

      A. Conspire with family members to bring them down.

      B. Nothing. They have a right to come back.

      C. Show them who’s in charge.

      It is in this context, viewers, while seeing a moon-like landscape, listen to a Japanese oyster saying: “We have heard that they think there are too many of us. They say that we aren’t from here, that we have taken over … But what does it mean ‘to be from here?’ Our ancestors came from far away, but we have been rooted here for decades without ever leaving.” It is the notion of rootedness, or rather of not being rooted enough, which is reminiscent of references to so-called invasive species in radical-right environmental communication.

      Thus, while the artists, like the radical right, relate non-human to human movement across space, the former utilize this scenario to (though not in these terms) oppose ethnopluralism — the radical-right idea that ethnic groups have a “right to difference,” viewing them non-hierarchically and, consequently, promoting their separation as preservation and opposing the mixing of ethnicities that would endanger these collectives — and what Ken Thompson calls a “frozen moment.” Indeed, in line with communication about “invasive” species by the radical right — and often beyond, as the sheer metaphor of invasion evokes a military scenario that calls for harsh responses — ecosystems are regularly imagined as pure and stable, as being comprised by intertwined parts which, if changed (through “too much” human or non-human influx), would result in pollution and the unbalancing of the system.

      This assumes that species belong where they are now or were in relatively recent past — for example, a few hundred or thousands of years ago — and that such change is problematic. As such, the common separation of “native” from “alien” or “invasive” disregards the fundamental fact of species movement having always characterized life on Earth. In fact, van Rooy explained during the conversation that “Dutch” oysters have been added to the sea in reaction to the process started with the introduction of the Japanese oyster (though this happens to increase biodiversity), without recourse to discourses about nativeness and national identity.

      Habitat 2190

      “Habitat 2190” addresses the issue of nature and exclusion more explicitly by looking at how the establishment of the nature reserve Fort Vert at the site of the former migrant camp in Calais known as the Jungle is connected with the management of the border between France and the United Kingdom. The site was used as agricultural land until the 1960s before becoming a dump site for toxic waste. In 2015, a migrant camp was formed, but was demolished in 2016. Subsequently, the site was turned into a nature reserve. What Rullmann and Khan achieve in their film is to illuminate the intersection of security and environmental concerns, the “weaponisation of ‘nature’ and conservation management” strikingly visible in the construction of barriers. Consequently, Khan claims during the conversation that “military tactics” were “embedded in the naturing process.”

      Also designed to keep people out and prevent new settlements, the effort to rewild the site furthermore points to what “Oysters for Naturalization” addresses too: the question of what is supposedly “native,” and thus has a “natural” right to be here, and that which is considered “alien” or “invasive, and can thus be “legitimately” excluded. Here, the European Habitats Directive and its habitat type 2190 that gives the film its name are central as the artists point to the presence of an endangered orchid, Liparis loeselii.

      Although the orchid has not been seen recently at the site as Rullmann mentions during the conversation, the aim is to facilitate its reappearance there. However, this return of nature is nothing but natural: Viewers learn that not only were trees removed, but so were “invasive” plants: “It was like waste,” says one of the interviewees. As such, and as so often, the return of nature is about human choice and frozen moments. As mentioned above, the radical right too has long pitched the “native” and “naturally belonging” against the “alien” and “invasive,” but Rullmann stresses that such radical-right takes “are also very much ingrained in the way that we generally perceive nature.”

      Both films powerfully illustrate how art can stimulate critical thinking about the intersection of exclusion and the natural environment. More precisely, both films make viewers aware that the inclusion and exclusion of humans and non-humans cannot be framed as neutral or natural. Of course, this does not imply that support for endangered species and biodiversity is per se problematic. But while informed steps should be taken to support biodiversity and ecosystem functions, both films quite rightly question drawing on allegedly “neutral” and “natural” categories of “native” versus “alien” and “invasive,” and on “origin,” when doing so. Such films provide useful counternarratives to the attempts to use nature and environmental issues for the politics of exclusion.

      *[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right is a partner institution of 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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      Big Blow for a Stable Dictatorship: Major Protests Hit Belarus

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      It’s not that Belarus hasn’t had any protests recently. It’s just they have never been this big and this bloody. The capital, Minsk, has seen the use of military machinery, grenade explosions and special forces attacking both protesters and innocent bystanders. Smaller cities are experiencing major rallies, too. At least two people have died. Hundreds have been injured and nearly 7,000 arrested.

      Journalists were attacked. Not that they were not attacked before, but again, it was never on a scale this massive and brutal. The regime blocked some of the popular media platforms which published independent content. I learned about some of my colleagues being detained. They were missing for days — no one knew what happened to them. Then, suddenly, the law enforcers decided to reveal that the journalists were, in fact, detained and that charges were being pressed against them.

      Belarus Election Unleashes Unprecedented Anti-Government Protests

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      When asked about the protests, Lukashenko rather unoriginally responded that they were being directed and funded from abroad. He also claimed that it was the foreign interference that blocked the internet in the country. Despite a lack of information and increasing violence, people managed to communicate via VPN and some encrypted channels. They keep protesting.

      Neither Free nor Fair

      Belarusians took to the streets on the evening of August 9, as voting stations were shutting down. This was hours before the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, was announced to have won 80% of the vote in an election widely claimed to be fraudulent that the EU called “neither free nor fair.” Lukashenko’s victory means a sixth term — and at least five more years — in office. He has ruled the country for 26 years already and is the only president independent Belarus has ever had.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Throughout his rule, Lukashenko had a low track record on human rights and managed to extend a nearly total control over the media, the military and the courts. He nearly succeeded in crushing all dissent and opposition. Previous protests where either brutally dispersed or died down on their own. However, the events leading to Sundays’ election demonstrated that some big changes were taking place in Belarus.

      First of all, the opposition has managed to unite around an unlikely leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, whose husband, a popular vlogger-turned-candidate Sergei Tikhanovsky, was arrested and blocked from standing in the election. Second of all, the level of popular dissatisfaction has reached its all-time high, with people becoming increasingly disillusioned with the regime and its handling of the many crises facing Belarus. The pre-election protests, combined with post-election rallies, in Minsk as well as other major cities, have attracted the biggest crowds in the country’s modern history.

      On election day, people could not vote properly. There were long lines at voting stations, and many were unable to enter at all. The regime spoke about an unusually high rate of early voting. Some foreign journalists were detained and deported, and the internet worked only intermittently. Independent observers were detained across the country following reports of violations, and the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has withdrawn its mission, leaving “no credible observers overseeing the election.”

      No Surprises

      Consequently, the announcement of Lukashenko’s sweeping victory surprised no one. It was also not surprising that people took to the streets to contest the result. What was surprising was the scale of the protests, their continuation despite a vicious crackdown and the level of fear that the regime has shown when attacking the demonstrators. Many people are missing, presumably detained, with widespread reports of inhumane treatment and beatings. The pictures of bloodied marchers on the streets of Minsk show the dangers of fighting for a right as basic as free elections.

      Tikhanovskaya fled the country to neighboring Lithuania, following a brief disappearance after a visit to the election commission to file an appeal. She later recorded a video where she asked people not to protest. Many speculate she’s being blackmailed by the regime.

      The protests have continued for four days, with a little dialogue between the opposing sides. Women have come out wearing white, with people forming human support chains, while doctors and workers at a number of factories across the country have walked out in protest. On August 12, more than 500 CEOs, investors and employees in the IT sector — the pride of Belarusian economy — have signed a letter calling for an end to violence and a new election, threatening to move their businesses elsewhere. There will potentially be an escalation or an attempt to quash the protest movement by the increasing use of force.

      It is perhaps logical to be hopeful and to expect that change will come so that Belarus can transform into a more transparent country where human rights are respected and where citizens can vote, express themselves, enjoy peace and stability, and elect representatives who will follow democratic principles. However, even now, it’s hard to predict what happens next.

      The protests have made a big crack in what is often referred to as Europe’s last dictatorship, but the regime remains strong. During his rule, Lukashenko had managed to maneuver Belarus between an assertive Russia while still maintaining limited contact with European leaders. So far, Germany has called for a reintroduction of sanctions that were lifted in 2016 to bolster cooperation, and Poland wants an emergency summit to discuss what the EU has condemned as “disproportionate and unacceptable state violence against peaceful protesters.” But with the resources at his disposal, Lukashenko can remain in power unless both domestic and external pressure are applied equally strongly and consistently. The following days will show how the domestic situation evolves, and whether an external response will follow.

      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 Brain Malfunction Affecting the US and Its Respectable Media

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      Ever since Dwight Eisenhower denounced the military-industrial complex in no uncertain terms, the intelligence community (IC) can be seen as the literal brain of an immense, tentacular but poorly-structured system of economic and political governance. The clandestine nature of its activities within an officially democratic system of government means that this reality will never be publicly acknowledged. 

      Without IC, the Democratic Party could not have entertained the nation for four years with the Russiagate show. One of the unintended consequences of the media’s obsession with alleged Russian interference in US elections has been to highlight both the central role of the IC brain and its fatal weaknesses. 

      A Double Twist in Russiagate

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      The New York Times and The Washington Post have relied on the IC to provide the substance of unending streams of stories revealing the functions of the brain. MSNBC and CNN have rivaled against each other to recruit and then display the insight of former intelligence chiefs, presenting them as paragons of objectivity.

      The NY Times provided an example of this last week in an article by Robert Draper concerning the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a classified report on Russiagate. A close reading of Draper’s analysis reveals some of the subtleties both of how the IC brain works and how The Times has become the voice of that brain.

      Here is an example in which Draper quotes veteran national intelligence office, Christopher Bort: “The intelligence provided to the N.I.E.’s authors indicated that in the lead-up to 2020, Russia worked in support of the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as well. But Bort explained to his colleagues … that this reflected not a genuine preference for Sanders but rather an effort ‘to weaken that party and ultimately help the current U.S. president.’”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Genuine:

      In the language of intelligence agencies, the official interpretation of facts that should be retained to the exclusion of the facts themselves

      Contextual Note

      Draper and Bort want Americans to understand that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is committed to one thing alone: maintaining their man, Donald Trump, as the US president. If Russia speaks kindly of Senator Bernie Sanders, it can only be a tactic to comfort Trump’s reelection. It certainly cannot be the hope that, if elected, Sanders might be less rigid than past presidents — including both Trump and Barack Obama — in terms of his Middle East policy, for example. Elections are not about concrete issues. They are only about personalities and loyalties.

      As the brain of the system, the IC has the role of defining acceptable and unacceptable codes of behavior for itself and for the population as a whole. It can define, for example, what is “genuine.” Unlike moral codes, the behavioral code it defines is a single ethical criterion called “interest.” This is particularly evident in the realm of foreign policy, where actions can always be justified as the defense of “American interests.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The system’s most obvious feature is the nature of what fuels it: money. But the IC doesn’t understand money as an allocated budget measured in dollars and cents. Instead, money exists in a far more abstract sense, taking it beyond any form of traditional reckoning. The IC uses unlimited amounts of unaccounted-for means of payment to conduct operations designed precisely to optimize the national and global environment in ways that will boost the production of unaccounted for streams of profit.

      The profit will ultimately accrue to the commercial beneficiaries of the system. These are the famous “American interests,” though they are never specifically named. The system functions as a community structure but with no dimension of personal kinship. In its opaqueness and focus on money, it resembles the mafia, but devoid of the cumbersome sense of honor that can sometimes get in the way of straight business.

      The IC has traditionally steered clear of electoral politics. Because the US is technically a democracy, the IC must play the role of the influencer rather than a manipulator. The task of manipulation has been confined to the media, essentially privately-owned tentacular structures whose role is to orient and stabilize an ideology and worldview shared by the population. Influenced by the brain, the media define what is normal (good and reassuring), what is tolerable (not so good but non-threatening) and what is extreme (to be banished or shamed). Such a system is designed to ensure the stability that will permit the perpetuation of profits for the entire corporate class, of which the media is a part.

      In normal times, the IC prefers to remain invisible. But Trump’s election victory in 2016 forced the Democratic Party and its sympathizers in the media to bring it into the spotlight. Together, they provided the American public with four years of Russiagate entertainment. They also revealed how close the ties are between the Democratic Party and the brain of the oligarchic system.

      Historical Note

      In a Foreign Affairs article published on August 5 bearing the title, “There Is No Russian Plot Against America” and the subtitle, “The Kremlin’s Electoral Interference Is All Madness and No Method,” seasoned analyst Anna Arutunyan examines the history of Russia’s purported interference in the 2016 US presidential election. In contrast with Christopher Bort, who, among other things, claimed to know that Russia did not have “a genuine preference for Sanders,” the author warns that “ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent.”

      Arutunyan notes that the intelligence community has unearthed plenty of evidence of “activities of Russian actors with ties to the Kremlin during the 2016 election.” But the IC possesses “comparatively little information about the real impact of these measures on the election’s outcome—and still less about Moscow’s precise objectives.” In other words, the brain is doing only half its job. It fails to see the connection between what it sees as causes and the reality of the effects produced.

      The author concludes that the campaign to subvert the 2016 election was essentially “a series of uncoordinated and often opportunistic responses to a paranoid belief that Russia is under attack from the United States and must do everything it can to defend itself.”

      Concerning the motives, Arutunyan describes a chaotic environment encouraging the “activities of this or that activist, or special forces group, or businessmen and entrepreneurs—these people are always active in fields like this. It’s what they do.” And what do they want? “They are trying to earn money or political capital that way,” she writes. 

      As for the 2020 election, she speculates: “If there is another Russian operation, expect contrarian messages targeting both candidates’ campaigns and highlighting generally divisive issues such as the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic. The messaging will not be coherent, and it will have no further purpose than to provoke arguments.”

      Could this be Vladimir Putin’s ultimate stroke of genius? The Russian president understands how to exploit, with the least amount of effort, the fact that Americans love nothing more than to argue, insult, cancel, shame and, by any other means possible, put in their place fellow Americans who don’t agree with them. It requires far less effort than dialogue or debate. Addressing the issues implies listening, revising one’s judgments, seeking nuanced understanding of complexity, and finally agreeing on collaborative actions adapted to the nature of the challenge.

      If the 2020 election continues to focus on nothing more than the increasingly visible inadequacies of the two candidates — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — their failure to understand the historical context in which they are living and their lack of vision for the future, Putin’s strategy will have paid off. 

      The big question facing electors today seems to be: Which of the two men is the most cognitively impaired? Which has the worst history of corruption? Neither appears to want to focus on the concrete measures required to address the issues that Americans are struggling with today, whether it’s race, the economy or health care. 

      On the other hand, there will be plenty of room for arguments. But the satisfaction of a good dispute may not appease those about to be evicted or deprived both of the prospect of finding a job and, in the midst of a pandemic, the guarantee of health care that would accompany it.

      *[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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      Belarus Election Unleashes Unprecedented Anti-Government Protests

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      The victory of Alexander Lukashenko in Sunday’s presidential election in Belarus was expected. It would take a certain level of naiveté to believe that any opposition candidate could unseat the strongman who has ruled over the post-Soviet state for over a quarter of a century. The institutional system of Belarus — the security services, the constitution, the courts and election officials — are firmly under the president’s control. After all, he is nicknamed “bat’ka,” a familiarly affectionate term for “dad” — the father of modern Belarus. However, the incumbent’s dire approval ratings in unofficial polling earned him another nickname, “Sasha 3%,” which has been appearing as graffiti across cities, on homemade signs and t-shirts (as a portmanteau with the Russian word for “psychosis,” ПСИХ03%.)

      Those in Belarus who were visibly ready for change took to the streets already in the run-up to the election. Complaints over economic stagnation have been perennial, but these are more apparent in this period of a global financial crisis. The people of Belarus look to neighboring Poland and its vast social services programs with some envy, even though the government of Andrzej Duda has just faced its own headline-grabbing election.

      What’s Going On in Belarus?

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      Belarusians are also frustrated with Lukashenko’s approach to COVID-19. He did not mandate a national lockdown, allowed the continuation of sporting events with crowds in the stands, stating that vodka, banya (sauna) and tractor work in the fresh air acted as protection, and called proactive measures “a frenzy and psychosis.” Still, the virus found its victims, with over 69,000 infections and 592 deaths to date. Lukashenko himself claimed he survived the virus.

      Public Anger

      The protest movement that brought massive crowds onto the streets before the election is unique in many ways. Its leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a teacher and interpreter, is not a politician by trade. She registered as an independent candidate after her husband Sergey, a presidential candidate running against the incumbent, was arrested and jailed by the authorities. The mother of two said her decision to continue her husband’s campaign was done “out of love” for him.

      The rise of a female politician — in fact, all three challengers to Lukashenko’s presidency were women — exposed issues rooted in misogyny. While stating his overall respect for women, Lukashenko expressed the opinion that a woman was not prepared to lead a country like Belarus because its “society is not mature enough to vote for a woman,” only to add that any theoretical female president would “collapse, poor thing.” These sentiments were echoed by reports that female political challengers typically face threats of sexual violence, assault and state intervention into their families.

      Tikhanovskaya stated that she indeed was on the receiving end of such intimidations and sent her children abroad in fear they would be taken from her and placed in an orphanage. (In a video released following her disappearance the night after the election, Tikhanovskaya, visibly distressed, mentions children again, saying she hopes no one ever faces the choice she had to make, suggesting pressure.) But even despite these threats, Maria Kolesnikova, a member of the campaign team for another detained opposition figure, Viktor Babariko, and Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of former Belarusian ambassador to the United States, Valery Tsepkalo (another barred candidate), joined forces with Tikhanovskaya and led the rallies.

      These eruptions of public anger were the largest and most prolonged since the demonstrations over the so-called law against social parasites, which mandated that those who work less than six months a year compensate the government $250 for lost taxes, forced a U-turn. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Minsk at the end of July, with momentum spreading to other major cities like Brest, Gomel, Grodno and Vitebsk. In the capital, some 63,000 people attended a pro-Tikhanovskaya rally in what some suggested could have been “the most massive political rally in Belarus history” not seen since the 1990s. However, Belarusian law enforcement and security services wasted no time in making numerous arrests.

      A recent event demonstrated just how unprepared the Lukashenko administration is to counter such a vast protest moment. Days prior to the election, the government planned a music fest in central Minsk to bolster support ahead of the election. Some 7,000 protesters organized on social media and showed up to the event with the intention to disrupt it. In a show of solidarity, sound engineers Kiryl Halanau and Uladzislau Sakalouski played the song “Changes!” by the Soviet rock band Kino, one of the anthems of the final years of the USSR, followed by chants of “Long live Belarus!” from the crowd. Halanau and Sakalouski were consequently arrested and convicted to 10 days in jail, but the incident showed that the police struggled to cover all protest locations at all times.

      No Peaceful Exit

      Once the electoral commission announced that Lukashenko had been reelected with 80.23% of the vote compared to 9.9% accrued by Tikhanovskaya, the streets of Belarus filled with voices of discontent yet again. No one accepted these results as legitimate, and Tikhanovskaya even points out there were cases in which she led by 70%-90% at certain polling stations. In fact, Tikhanovskaya considers herself the winner, though she does not seek power. Rather, her ideal situation includes talks between a unified opposition and the government so that Lukashenko can have a peaceful exit from power.

      Even before the polls closed, military and police vehicles were on display throughout Minsk, with law enforcement and security services cracking down as protests began to spark across the capital and beyond. While the use of rubber bullets and flash grenades is in line with Western policing measures, as seen in the protests that have rocked the United States recently, but the limits of acceptability in one jurisdiction do not necessarily apply in another.

      Over 3,000 protesters were arrested, with the Belarusian authorities reporting 39 police and over 50 civilian casualties, including one death, which the Belarusian Ministry of Health slammed as “fake news.” The Belarusian Association of Journalists reports over 50 instances of detention and beating of journalists since August 4, and an internet blackout has been imposed as the clashes began on Sunday night. In the meantime, Belarusian state TV streams footage of badgers and other forest-related activities.

      Embed from Getty Images

      So, where does the Belarusian protest movement go from here? The organizers have stated that they are committed to long-term protests. It will be interesting to see how all these plans unfold, given the severity of the government response. Tikhanovskaya has already fled to Lithuania, issuing what appears to be a forced statement calling for an end to violence, following her detention at the central electoral commission office on Sunday. Lukashenko has vowed to quash any and all opposition protesters. As usual, the president claimed the protesters were “sheep” manipulated by foreign powers and entities who did not know what they are doing, claiming many of them were high on drugs and drunk. The 65-year-old authoritarian went on to assert that “We will not allow them to tear the country apart.” This sentiment should be juxtaposed with a protester who told a member of law enforcement in the midst of protest: “You are humans! You are also Belarusian!”

      It is difficult to determine exactly who wants to tear the country apart when the opposition movement states its intended purpose is to produce a viable future for Belarus. Lukashenko shows no intention of resigning or even lending an ear to complaints espoused by the people. If the protest movement is to continue, one should expect more arrests and detentions. 

      Belarus finds itself in a political crisis that must be managed with the utmost care. Neither side seems willing to budge on its demands, and so it comes down to who has the most endurance in terms of power and energy. Lukashenko has the power of government and its vast repressive apparatus at his disposal. The protest movement is energized and full of voices that have united in the sole goal of a change of leadership. Alexander Lukashenko cannot afford to make concessions as it would mean his hold on the presidential office is shaky. As it currently stands, even if this round of opposition is quashed, it will undoubtedly emerge again, perhaps at a time when the authorities may be ill-prepared.

      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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      A Double Twist in Russiagate

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      The New York Times never tires of finding new pretexts to repeat the same message. Its journalists have been regularly updating it with the same lack of substance over the past four years. The latest iteration, published on August 7, bears the title, “Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says.”

      In the very first sentence, the author, Julian E. Barnes, presents it as breaking news, the release of a “first public assessment” of a never-to-be-doubted source: “intelligence officials.” The intelligence revealed turns out to be little more than confirmation of the theme familiar to Times readers: “that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President [Donald] Trump.”

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      In their vast majority, Times readers are anti-Trump and mostly lifelong Democrats. For a moment last year, The New York Times seemed to admit the failure of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election to validate its favored thesis. In March 2019, The Guardian sensibly published an op-ed with the title, “Enough Russia: after Mueller, it’s time for Democrats to focus on America.” Its subtitle read: “With this distraction finally out of the way, it’s time to deal with issues that the majority of the electorate actually cares about.”

      Now, 18 months on, The Times, faced with the serious task of getting Joe Biden elected and defeating Trump, cannot avoid returning to its past habits. Still, to keep a stale story alive and make it look like news, something new had to be added. It needed a twist. Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, revealed the scoop. It isn’t just Russia. It’s also China and Iran. In other words, Russiagate on steroids.

      The senator framed it by saying that William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular, also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system.” King spoke in reference to a statement made by Evanina on August 7 regarding the release of an intelligence report over foreign interference in this year’s US presidential election.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Undermine:

      Call into question the political credo all upstanding citizens of a powerful nation are required to recite and adhere to because failure to affirm their faith would endanger the complex political systems, potentially causing it to implode

      Contextual Note

      Any serious journalist with a sense of logic should question King’s reasoning when he asserts that foreign powers are “trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system.” After all, in the age of social media, anyone and everyone can try to meddle. Trying doesn’t imply succeeding. But the jump from “meddle” to “undermine” poses a more fundamental logical problem.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The three foreign nations cited — Russia, China and Iran — certainly have the capacity to meddle. Everyone does. That reality existed even before social media. Furthermore, meddling is what all reasonably solid national structures are expected to do. Why else would they have intelligence services? What does the CIA do?

      But can they undermine? That requires more than simply trying to meddle. Undermining means hollowing out the ground below to destabilize the structure. It requires means that go well beyond spreading rumors and publishing lies. For the past four years — as The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, admitted in private — there has been no causal link established between Russians “trying to meddle” and the effective undermining of American democracy. Publications that encourage the belief that meddling is tantamount to effective undermining are guilty, at the very least, of faulty logic.

      The real irony in this attempt to produce new scoops with stale news is that the real scoop of this entire four-year drama emerged two days later. On August 9, a whistleblower, Steven P. Schrage — a former White House, State Department and G8 official — came forward in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News to put the entire Russiagate narrative in a new perspective, essentially validating President Trump’s thesis known as “Spygate.” Although Fox News can legitimately be suspected of pro-Trump bias, this is an important emerging story covered by the respected investigative journalist, Matt Taibbi.

      At the end of the Fox News interview, Schrage makes this interesting comment: “This is about officials undermining our democracy and it needs to be known long before the election.” If what he describes is true, this is not a case of meddling from afar but, as he says, actively undermining the workings of US democracy from the inside.

      Historical Note

      The latest intelligence report that The New York Times used as the basis of its story attempts to create a new historical perspective. Building on the belief embraced by the Democratic Party for the past four years that there is a secret link between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the intelligence community now adds China and Iran to the list of meddling nations.

      The designation of three villains may harken back to George W. Bush’s 2002 strategy when he launched the trope of a three-pronged “axis of evil.” It worked for President Bush on the eve of his invasion of Iraq in 2003. It led to the successful multiplication of unsuccessful wars in the Middle East, a fact that has dominated the trajectory of US history ever since. Because the uncertainty of facing off against a single enemy entails the risk of losing — a humiliation the US endured in Vietnam — having three enemies to choose from strengthens the case of a power that wishes to project its strength, fearlessness and unparalleled spirit of domination. 

      As a candidate for the presidency in 2000, Bush had demonstrated his keen awareness of having at least one identifiable enemy when he said, in his inimitable style: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

      Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, under the Clinton administration, the US no longer had an identifiable enemy. Bush provided three in 2002. The IC now wants to make sure that we have three today, with China replacing North Korea, a nation with whom Trump seems to have made some kind of peace.

      The intelligence community’s report is embarrassingly vague on all its findings. But that doesn’t seem to bother The Times. We read, for example: “They may also seek to compromise our election infrastructure for a range of possible purposes.” A sentence relying on “may” can be logically extended to state the opposite with the same degree of truth: Then again, they may not.”

      The Time mentions that the report “was short on specifics, but that was largely because the intelligence community is intent on trying to protect its sources of information.” Who needs specifics? And there is a noble intention of “trying to protect” sources. “Trying” is like “may.” It admits of its opposite.

      The Times itself acknowledges the lack of substance in the report. “Outside of a few scattered examples, it is hard to find much evidence of intensifying Chinese influence efforts that could have a national effect.” This sudden critical acumen may be due to the fact that the intelligence community finds that China would prefer meddling in favor of Joe Biden, assessing that “China prefers that President Trump … does not win reelection.” The Democrats should be alarmed. What would happen if Biden were to win the election and the Republicans spent the next four years complaining that it was all due to Chinese meddling?

      The article is filled with sentences containing the verb “try.” “Russia tried to use influence campaigns during 2018 midterm voting to try to sway public opinion, but it did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure,” The Times reports. And what about “nevertheless” alongside “could try” in the following sentence? “But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting process or take steps aimed at “calling into question the validity of the election results.”

      If anything, the report makes clear that the intelligence community, like The New York Times, is “trying” very hard to get across its message. It is easy to identify its targets. As Matt Taibbi notes, “The intelligence leak claiming Russia supported Bernie Sanders over Vice President Biden in 2020’s critical Nevada Democratic caucuses, shows how our national security powers could just as easily be deployed against Democrats as against Republicans.”

      Steven P. Schrage perhaps deserves the final thought: “Nothing excuses foreign meddling in U.S. elections. Yet it is hypocritical and absurd to use that as an excuse to hide abuses by U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and political officials against our own citizens.”

      *[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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      Was the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Mother of All War Crimes?

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      This year marks the 75th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is reason enough to mull over its meaning and its implications. In a recent article for Fair Observer, Peter Isackson has made a strong case that the annihilation of the two Japanese cities by American bombers represents the “mother of all war crimes.” Given the long history of atrocities committed during times of war, I find this a rather bold statement that should not go unchallenged.

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      The case for the defense rests on two claims. First, the demonstration of American nuclear capabilities heralded in a period of stability, which quite likely saved Western Europe’s nations from being overrun and conquered by the Soviet Union and subjected to its rule. Second, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are far from exceptional as war crimes go, if indeed the bombing of the two cities was a war crime at all.

      Balance of Terror

      In my younger years, in a very different world, I served for a couple of years in the German air force. I never flew a plane. I spent most of my time on duty in a tower close to the border to what at the time was the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic (CSSR), a member of the Warsaw Pact and a satellite of the Soviet Union. We did electronic surveyance of the CSSR airspace, following Czech and Slovakian fighter planes as they performed their exercises as best as they could (more often than not they couldn’t, lacking basic motivation). It was a tedious job, boring as hell, particularly when the weather was bad and the pilots were grounded.

      Excitement, however, surged once a month, when we waited for the arrival of Russian long-range bombers. They took off from Minsk in what at the time was the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their mission: attack the towers along the West German border with the CSSR and the German Democratic Republic. We saw them coming, small dots on our radar screens. When they were in front of our tower, there was a small red blip, a fleeting flicker, and we knew if this had been der Ernstfall — an actual real-life attack — we would all be dead, gone up in smoke in a small nuclear mushroom.

      At the time, we did not think much of what had just happened. It was part of a game, along the lines of MAD magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” — inane, a waste of time, and somehow not very real. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the regime in Prague and the unraveling of the Soviet empire that we learned that the game had been much more serious and potentially deadly than what we suspected. There were plans on the other side of the border to overrun West Germany, conquer Western Europe and subject it to Soviet rule. Among the scenarios was a nuclear attack on Bonn, West Germany’s sleepy capital, designed to decapitate West Germany’s political elite.

      What prevented the Soviets and their toadies from carrying out their plans was not human compassion but a realist assessment of the distribution of military forces and the resolve of the Western allies to use them. At the time, this was called MAD — mutually assured destruction. It was grounded in the notion that any attack on the part of the Soviets would immediately trigger a full response of Western nuclear forces, resulting in the complete annihilation of the Soviet Union. The leadership in Moscow was fully aware of this logic. They did not like this “balance of terror,” but they ultimately submitted to its logic. Others, by the way, did not.

      Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s long-term foreign minister, claims in his memoirs that at one time, Chinese leader Mao Zedong tried to get the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, arguing that “his country could survive a nuclear war, even if it lost 300 million people, and finish off the capitalists with conventional weapons,” thus guaranteeing the triumph of communism. Unsurprisingly, the Soviets were not convinced and increasingly distanced themselves from Beijing.

      The logic of mutually assured destruction fundamentally altered the behavior of great powers, at least with respect to each other. It is to be hoped that the logic of the “balance of terror” is going to be enough to keep the US and China level-headed in the future, despite rapidly growing tensions between the two.

      The Breakdown of Civilization

      Unfortunately enough, war crimes are the norm rather than the exception when it comes to armed conflict. The claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ontologically different rests on a technological assumption. For some reason, nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from conventional ones. I am not sure what constitutes the basis of this assumption. Take the firebombings of the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg during the Second World War, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary people — women, children, the elderly. Take the massacre of Babi Yar, in Ukraine, where in two days nearly 34,000 Jews were killed by German Einstazgruppen. Or, going back further in history, take the death toll during the Thirty Years War, which cost the lives of half of the population of what is today Germany.

      Massacres of the most atrocious form are hardly an invention of the 20th century, as Goya’s renditions of the barbarities visited on his fellow countrymen during the war against the French between 1808 and 1814, depicted in most horrifying detail. This was a war against an enemy that invaded the country in the name of the Enlightenment and revolutionary fervor. Or, as the Germans would say, Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag ich dir den Schädel ein — If you don’t want to be my brother, I will smash your skull.

      For the victims of war crimes — more often than not civilians — it probably does not really matter how they were killed and why they were killed. It is quite understandable — human all too human, as Nietzsche would say — that horrendous deeds provoke retribution. The firebombing of German cities, the rape of German women caught be advancing Soviet armies — both are understandable given the atrocities committed by Germans during the war, in the name of Hitler and the Third Reich. Most Germans, or so most recent research suggests, were more than comfortable supporting a regime that guaranteed them a modicum of prosperity. Few asked where it came from.

      For that, Germans were punished in the most horrendous fashion. Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne and many other towns and cities went up in flames, leaving behind a landscape hardly different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombing of Hamburg was named Operation Gomorrah, after the Biblical city destroyed by “sulfur and fire” for its sins, and, according to historian Keith Lowe, was on completely different level than the German raids on Coventry and London, “comparable with what happened in Nagasaki.” It was a just retribution for the crimes committed in their name, a retribution for the tens of millions of victims who paid with their lives for Hitler’s ambitions to conquer the world.

      Embed from Getty Images

      I would suggest that the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the retribution for the crimes committed by Japanese forces, in the name of racial superiority hardly different from Nazi ideology, against the peoples subjugated during the war. I have grave doubts that the victims of the Nanjing massacre or of the hundreds of young Asian “comfort women” pressed into sexual slavery by Japanese forces would consider the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime, but rather than an act of just retribution for Japanese atrocities committed during the war.

      Whether or not the United States was justified in meting out redistribution is a different question. After all, given America’s self-declared status as a leading Christian nation, it should perhaps have heeded the words of the Bible exhorting believers not to take revenge, “but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). But then, Americans have a tendency to pay lip service to the scripture while doing the opposite in real life.

      The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of these turning points in history that define a whole epoch. It demonstrated, once and for all, humanity’s ability to destroy itself. Had Hitler been in a position to get hold of “the bomb,” he surely would have used it to obliterate London, Moscow, perhaps even New York. The same goes for Stalin, only this time it would have been Berlin that would have gone up in a mushroom. If the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime, it was nothing more than another episode in a long history of atrocities committed in the course of wars, not more, not less — an episode which reaffirms once again the sad reality that the veneer of civilization is merely skin deep.

      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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      Shamima Begum: The Sensitive Case of IS Returnees

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      Born in the UK to Bangladeshi parents, Shamima Begum left London as a 15-year-old in 2015. Using her British passport, she traveled to Turkey with two of her friends from school. From there, Begum and her friends crossed into Syria, where they met their Islamic State (IS) contacts. While in Syria, Begum married an IS fighter. On February 19 this year, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission had stripped Begum of her citizenship as she was deemed to be a national security threat. On July 16, however, UK authorities granted this now adult British woman, who had joined a terrorist group as a teenager four years earlier, the right to return to Britain to challenge the UK government’s removal of her citizenship.

      The commission ruled that the decision to revoke Begum’s British citizenship did not render her stateless as, by default, the United Kingdom also considered her a Bangladeshi citizen “by descent.” However, the Bangladeshi Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it did not consider her as a citizen of that country. A statement released by Begum’s British lawyers argued that she indeed had never visited Bangladesh, nor had she ever applied for dual nationality.

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      In the meantime, the press has chastised Begum, who remains a detainee in a camp operated by ethnic Kurdish militias in northern Syria, for making controversial statements such and saying that seeing her first severed head did not faze her “at all” and suggesting that people should “have sympathy” toward her for everything she has been through.

      Why Women?

      England’s Court of Appeal, in turn, unanimously agreed that Begum should be granted the right to have a fair and effective appeal of the decision to strip her of her citizenship, but only if she is permitted to come back to Britain. Of course, that does not guarantee the reinstatement of her citizenship rights, just that she has a right to present her case in person. Regardless of the legal wrangling and the debate about the legality that her case has sparked, this example sheds some light on the issue of contextualizing female IS supporters and terrorists and the legality of stripping Western-born suspects of their European or North American citizenship.

      There has been some academic discussion of why women, especially young women, who were born, raised and educated in the West, migrate to IS-held territory and join terrorist groups, leaving behind family, friends and a way of life while abandoning liberal values and opportunities that countries such as the UK offer them. It is difficult to ascertain whether a particular female, such as Shamima Begum, was a victim of IS, an active supporter or both. The widely circulated stories of “jihadi brides” have projected an image of confused and naïve girls and women traveling to join the Islamic State. While certain dynamics lured a number of females to IS-held territories, many went of their own free will. Yet it is highly debatable to what extent a 15-year-old understands the realities of this extremist group.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Muslim women have migrated to IS-held areas for a multitude of reasons, including the romantic ideal of marrying a “lion” — a supposedly brave and noble warrior — looking for an adventure and contributing to the establishment of an Islamic “caliphate” regulated by strict enforcement of Sharia law. The sense that joining the Islamic State empowers people to live meaningful lives draws many of the migrant women. One study suggests that besides issues of belonging and identity — and a skewed interpretation of Islam — it is, in the case of young women like Begum, online social networks that appeared to be the primary venue and driving factor for radicalization. It turns out that the vast majority of foreign women who traveled to Syria and Iraq served IS primarily as one of several housewives or sex slaves.

      It is only by understanding the motivations and experiences of those who have gone to fight abroad that governments can prevent the recruitment of another generation of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. The enemies of the Islamic State have ostensibly defeated the group in the Middle East, yet unknown numbers of surviving IS fighters have found the means to relocate to Afghanistan. Permutations of IS and other extremist groups are also active in many African countries like Burkina Faso, Chad, Nigeria and  Somalia, among others. Aside from Afghanistan, other places in South Asia are not immune.

      Displaced Burden

      The UK, US and some other countries have chosen to prevent the return of foreign fighters by revoking their citizenship. Although such actions may prevent the return of foreign fighters in the short term, they do not solve the problem and may also be illegal under both national and international laws. In several instances, this will simply displace the burden and force weakened states such as Syria and Iraq to deal with the consequences of radicalization. It may also instill further grievances and act as a trigger for radicalization into surviving Western-born radicals who may plot terrorist attacks against Western targets.

      In certain cases, citizenship revocation has led to concerns over statelessness. Rendering an individual stateless runs against Western legal principles and is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In several legal systems, there is a lack of sufficient evidence to prosecute female returnees because of their domestic roles in Syria and Iraq. Another challenge associated with prosecutions of foreign fighters lies with demonstrating intent. This applies both to the intent of the actions committed while in the war zone and the intent of travel for aspiring foreign fighters. There is also an argument that many such individuals, especially the juveniles, were victims of human trafficking.

      A more fruitful approach would be to allow a panel of experts to determine whether an individual returning to the home country is dangerous or disillusioned. The prime example of this approach is Denmark, which has already implemented assessment protocols that allow authorities to determine the individual circumstances for each returnee. Based on the results of such screenings, Danish police, together with social services, develop a plan of action for each returnee. Together, they decide whether a returnee is imprisoned, placed in a rehabilitation program or is assigned a combination of both approaches. It is extremely difficult to separate a victim from a perpetrator, and the boundaries can be particularly murky for foreign fighters.

      *[Gulf State Analytics is a partner organization of Fair Observer.]

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