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    America Is Confused Over What It Means to Be Exceptional

    The deepening Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quickly becoming a game of identifying which acts committed by either side in the course of the most recent fighting are war crimes and which are crimes against humanity. The failure on the part of both international institutions and powerful nations to provide even a minimum of perspective that might lead toward a satisfying resolution has become manifest. In today’s geopolitical hyperreality, perspective has become a luxury that politicians are not even allowed to consider.

    Nothing illustrates this better than the strutting and fretting of the US on the world stage. Most observers suppose that as Israel’s staunchest ally, the US alone has the minimum of moral standing required to influence, ever so slightly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies and Israel’s behavior. The Biden administration actually has a chance to affirm its global leadership. Instead, as AP reports, “the Biden administration — determined to turn U.S. foreign policy focus away from the Middle East and Afghanistan — has shown no immediate sign of getting more deeply involved.” Can “turning away” be deemed a valid tactic in the foreign policy of the world’s mightiest nation?

    Biden Washes His Hands of the Israel-Palestine Affair

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    But the US is not only turning itself away from seeking a solution. It is also actively turning every other nation away. That is how it is using its power. Al Jazeera notes that “the US reportedly twice blocked over the last week resolutions that would have condemned Israel’s military response and called for a ceasefire.”

    On Sunday, the US had a chance to influence events at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. The New York Times gave this account of the US position: “The American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, urged restraint on the part of both Hamas and Israel during Sunday’s Security Council meeting, which was called to try to find a way to end the violence.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Urge restraint:

    Refrain from making one’s own effort to restrain

    Contextual Note

    The United States has often been called “the most powerful nation on earth” (Barack Obama) and sometimes even “the greatest country in the history of civilization” (Mike Pompeo). When the legendary boxer Mohammad Ali insisted that he was “the greatest,” he got in the ring to prove it. On occasion, he failed. Despite his failures, boxing fans remember him as the greatest. In its role as the pinnacle of civilization and the most powerful nation ever, the US owns the ring. From Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (to mention only a few), it repeatedly steps into the ring. It consistently fails.

    Why has no one in the mainstream media dared to point to the painful irony of a recurring situation? The presumed greatest nation in the history of civilization on earth now excels by showing little concern for the earth itself and even less for the safeguard of civilization. The irony becomes extreme when considering the case of Israel. One of the world’s smallest countries has consistently demonstrated its capacity to restrain — if not shackle — the power of the greatest nation on earth, leaving the United States on the sidelines in the role of a spectator with nothing more to do than quietly “urge restraint.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    What is behind the belief Americans continue to have that their nation is the greatest in the history of mankind? Objective observers across the globe might attribute the belief to the triumph over the past century of what is called “the American way of life.” Hollywood and TV have projected the image of a self-satisfied consumer society the rest of the world is called upon to envy. They can see that it also happens to be supported by the dictatorship of the dollar and the massive deployment of military might across the globe.

    In other words, the rest of the world recognizes that the US is an empire, just as most inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin two thousand years ago recognized the omnipresent power of the Roman Empire. Empires are not only coercive political and military forces with a skill for organizing and exploiting the economic resources of other peoples. As Shakespeare’s triumphant Henry V wittily observed in his attempt to persuade his future wife, the Dauphine Catherine, to violate her rigid French customs and kiss him, empires are also “the makers of manners.” They have the psychological power to impose what they have the habit of doing for their own pleasure as the accepted norm for anyone in the purview of their political and economic sovereignty. In that sense, the US may well be the most successful empire in the history of mankind.

    Americans and America’s media refuse to admit they function like an empire. They imagine their nation as a disinterested beacon of democracy and a purveyor of prosperity. When Americans claim their military is “a force for good,” they believe that the only reason the CIA overturns governments or that their troops “pacify” nations is to invite the downtrodden of the earth into the cornucopia of American consumerism. Even the otherwise subtle analyst, Francis Fukuyama, allowed himself to embrace that myth when he predicted the end of history in 1992, before belatedly postponing the date of that Hegelian moment.

    Historical Note

    As the US campaigns to prevent a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s worth noting a mildly surprising fact reported by Al Jazeera. Could this be the beginning of a historical about-face? Concerned by the global reaction to Israel’s annihilation of the building in Gaza that housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken demanded evidence of Israel’s claim that Hamas was operating in the building. In response, “Israeli military spokesman Lt Gen Jonathan Conricus told CNN on Sunday, ‘We’re in the middle of fighting. That’s in process and I’m sure in due time that information will be presented.’”

    Call this the in-due-time defense. In such debates, “due time” means the time it takes to forget the request. It is part of the science and art at which the Israelis excel, moving forward on the strength of never-ending faits accomplis. Ian McCredie has pointed out in these columns four years ago that Israel’s method is similar to the way the US expanded over the 19th century from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Consciously or unconsciously, Israel’s settlement strategy was modeled on America’s Manifest Destiny. McCredie sees another disturbing parallel with France’s Vichy regime during World War II.

    Could it be that US politicians literally believe Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history correlating with the fall of the Soviet Union? Enthralled by the success of what is referred to as Pax Americana, are they tempted to see history frozen into a mythical ideal that appeared to triumph during the Cold War? Donald Trump became president by convincing enough Americans that he could “make America great again.” Most people saw that as an expression of nostalgia for the 1950s. Similarly, Joe Biden represents the best throwback the Democrats could propose: a candidate enamored of the good old days of American power and intent on restoring the vanished American prestige he remembered from his youth.

    Using its veto on Sunday, the US cast the sole vote at the UN Security Council quashing a resolution calling for a ceasefire while condemning Israel’s military responses as excessive. In its absolute subservience to Israel and willingness to buck the unanimity of other nations in the Security Council, perhaps the nostalgia of manifest destiny and the memory of a time when the US won wars and dominated through force are what guide US presidents today to bend before Israel’s will. Israel’s brand of exceptionalism, marked by its tendency to defy all restraint, may be the fantasy that enables Americans — now condemned to do little more than “urge restraint” — to believe in their own myth of American exceptionalism.

    Could that be the real lesson emerging from the current crisis? President Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s right to self-defense — criticized, on the right, by Senator Tom Cotton, who calls it a “policy of weakness and appeasement,” insufficiently supportive of Israel right to unrestrained offense and, on the left, for its failure to take into account Israel’s oppression of Palestinians — demonstrates how what has become truly exceptional is the confusion about what it means to be exceptional.

    *[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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    Biden Washes His Hands of the Israel-Palestine Affair

    Faced with a serious clash in Jerusalem between two communities divided on the subject of religion, the Roman Empire’s man of the hour, its colonial governor Pontius Pilate made the bold decision to suppress his own opinion and not to intervene in the debate. As a patriotic polytheist, he had no time to waste on disputes concerning monotheistic truth. Instead, he washed his hands before the raging mob. He let those who held local power and who shouted the loudest have their way. His action, dating from two thousand years ago, eventually spawned the proverbial expression, “To wash your hands of the affair.”

    When a far more violent crisis broke out in Jerusalem last week, US President Joe Biden demonstrated his own firm resolution to steer clear of an escalating conflict that had begun in East Jerusalem and has now reached beyond Israel’s borders into Lebanon and Jordan. Biden has taken up his post at the washbasin to avoid having to speculate about the truth.

    White America’s Burden in the Holy Land

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    In a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Wednesday, Biden reaffirmed the position traditionally taken by all recent US presidents that consists of deferring to Israel’s every wish. Netanyahu appreciated Biden’s compliance. He reiterated to the media the logic the Biden administration endorsed: “They have upheld our natural and self-evident right to defend ourselves, to act in self-defense against these terrorists who both attack civilians and hide behind civilians.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Self-evident:

    Unquestionably true, especially when the assertion corresponds to one’s self-interest

    Contextual Note

    When a modern politician bandies about the adjective “self-evident,” it inevitably evokes Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    As a child of the European Enlightenment, Jefferson built his reasoning on philosophical grounds that appear beyond the scope of Bibi Netanyahu’s commitment to self-interested expediency. What Jefferson described as self-evident were “truths.” In contrast, Netanyahu evokes “rights” he considers self-evident, specifically the right to violate international law when Israel feels threatened. Jefferson’s “truths” are the equivalent of axioms in mathematics. They stand as true without being derived logically from any other truth. Netanyahu’s “rights” are self-declared rather than self-evident.

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    Jefferson modeled his thought on the political philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, a proponent of government by consent of the governed. Locke insisted on the government’s requirement to respect its citizens’ “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson extended the meaning of “property” by calling it “the pursuit of happiness.” Even non-property owners in a democracy could thus be deemed citizens. (That of course excluded slaves, including Jefferson’s own slaves, who existed as the property of property owners).

    Most modern politicians have lost all interest in philosophy. They prefer to evoke half-remembered philosophical concepts and use them as meaningless rhetorical placeholders. In his attempt to sound Jeffersonian, Netanyahu expediently skips an important step in Locke’s and Jefferson’s political reasoning: the philosopher’s insistence that a government’s legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed. That ultimately means that political rights exist not as self-evident principles but as an effect of the law, which is the expression of a social and political consensus serving to limit rather than expand the government’s capacity for aggression.

    Netanyahu takes the Jeffersonian idea of a self-evident truth about political systems, turns it on its head and transforms it into the inalienable right of the government to violate the rights of the people under its jurisdiction. Concerning self-evident truths, Locke wrote: “I may warn men not to make an ill use of them, for the confirming themselves in errors.”

    Some justly accuse Jefferson of cheating, having glossed over the paradox of slavery while asserting that all men are created equal. Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel’s “self-evident right” to self-defense places him closer to Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of passive obedience to governmental authority, than to Locke. Hobbes’ emphasized the idea of “sovereignty by institution.” It supposes citizens voluntarily yield their rights to the institution and cannot contest its sovereignty.

    Bibi naturally assumes the Jews have transferred their rights to his government. He also expects the Israeli Arabs — citizens who theoretically, but not in practice, have equal rights with the Jews — to do the same, but they now may be revolting. As for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, the only rights they can claim are derived from international law, which the Israeli government routinely flouts.

    The current strife in Jerusalem began with the cynical, supposedly legally justified expulsion of Palestinians, who had been living in their homes in East Jerusalem for decades after the forced reassignment of residency that followed the Palestinian exodus in 1948. This demonstrates how far from the self-evident truths of Jefferson and Locke the supposedly democratic Israeli government has veered. Property even for Arab citizens of Israel is a purely relative concept. As for life and liberty, the Gazans, in their open-air prison, have no hope of enjoying such rights.

    Historical Note

    When the Israelis destroyed the building housing the offices of AP and Al Jazeera in Gaza City on Saturday, they demonstrated their disdain for the liberty of the press. Americans and the US government should be appalled at this violation of what they deem to be sacred “constitutional” values. But it has become evident — if not self-evident — that the Biden administration has no interest in promoting a moral reading of the events in Israel. Calling for a voluntary ceasefire is admirable but will have no effect. When he expressed his “hope … that we will see this coming to a conclusion sooner than later,” he appeared hopeful but helpless. 

    In his victory speech in November, Biden insisted that the nation’s vocation was to “lead by the force of its example and not the example of force.” Faced with the current crisis, he is neither showing an example nor leading, but rather following Israel’s example of leading by force. Many are wondering whether the very idea of leadership by the United States hasn’t lost its former meaning.

    Embed from Getty Images

    In February, clownish UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson effusively announced that “Joe Biden has put the United States back as leader of the free world in a fantastic move that has helped the West to unite.” Johnson was reacting to the speech in which Biden promised to return to the Paris Climate Agreement and move forward with the Iran nuclear deal. The return to the climate accord took place effortlessly but appears to be of little consequence. As for the Iran deal, negotiations have been engaged but possibly too late to expect any enduring success.

    The Biden administration’s anemic reaction to the growing crisis in the Middle East demonstrates that, rather than confirming the nation’s status as “leader of the free world,” it would be more apt to call it “the follower of an apartheid state.” A 2017 article in The Atlantic pointed to the persistent but absurd habit reigning in the media of referring to the US president as the “leader of the free world.” The idea of dividing the globe into the free and the unfree worlds theoretically disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union. This time around, what has disappeared is the very idea of American leadership. Fewer and fewer countries believe in it. Biden’s hesitations and inaction on various important issues illustrate why.

    Martin Indyck, writing for Foreign Affairs, offers a realistic analysis of the stakes and tactics underlying the superficial game the various concerned parties have been playing in the current crisis. He concludes that “the most basic instincts of the Biden administration are correct.” This is reassuring for the administration, but Indyck may not have noticed the long-term deterioration of the world’s perception of US leadership. He may be mistaken when he sees little risk in simply throwing up one’s hands at yet another Middle East crisis and hoping for a return to “normal.”

    Pontius Pilate’s disinfected hands played a role in launching the religion that would eventually dominate Europe. Still, Pilate’s Roman Empire thrived for another three centuries before one of its emperors, Constantine, decided to turn it over to the Christians. How long does Biden expect his empire to last?

    *[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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    White America’s Burden in the Holy Land

    Earlier this week, an Israeli military official evoked “a worst-case scenario” conducted by three Israeli infantry brigades that would amount to crushing Gaza on the ground rather than just bombarding it. Some observers have noticed that the current worse-than-ever-before-but-not-as-bad-as-what’s-to-come scenario has miraculously permitted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to hang on to power after the March 23 election deprived him of the hope of heading a new coalition.

    The Future of Jerusalem Matters to Us All

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    Washington Post reporter Steve Hendrix notes that “the escalation of fighting brought a last-minute reprieve from what could have been the end of [Netanyahu’s] record run at the top of Israeli politics.” Hendrix quotes Gayil Talshir, a professor at Hebrew University: “The riot came just in time to prevent the change of government in Israel.” Despite this “coincidence,” Hendrix avoids suggesting what some suspect: that Netanyahu’s policies and recent actions may have been designed to provoke the current crisis.

    Rather than delve into history, reflect on the meaning or explore possible hidden motives, Hendrix prefers the approach that Western media have long preferred: presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a combined violent chess game and political popularity contest between two obdurate parties whose leaders are unwilling to compromise. Hendrix reduces an enduring historical drama of vast geopolitical dimensions to a petty game of leaders seeking electoral advantage by appealing to their base, à la Donald Trump. He calls the new wave of violence “a boon to the leaders of both camps — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas militants — who have been struggling and scraping to salvage their political standing.” That’s the kind of narrative that appeals to The Post’s readers living in their bubble within the Beltway. History be damned; this is electoral politics.

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    The New York Times came closer to signaling Netanyahu’s implication in the current troubles. Isabel Kershner cites centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, who “blamed the prime minister for the spiraling sense of chaos.” Kershner focuses on the likelihood that Israel will at some point in the near future have a coalition government including Mansour Abbas’ Islamic Raam party, which would mark a monumental change in Israeli politics. In the end, however, Kershner appears to believe that it’s still Netanyahu who will emerge from the rubble as the leader of whatever unstable political coalition he can cobble together.

    As the violence escalates, the world wonders what US President Joe Biden intends to do. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was the first to express the administration’s take, which for the moment sounds like an endorsement of the status quo: “There is, first, a very clear and absolute distinction between a terrorist organization, Hamas, that is indiscriminately raining down rockets, in fact, targeting civilians, and Israel’s response, defending itself.” The idea that Biden’s administration might try, for once, to play the role of honest broker would seem dead in the coastal waters of Gaza.

    Blinken’s recognition of Palestinian suffering only appeared when he claimed that Israel has “an extra burden.” This, of course, implies that its main burden consists of “targeting terrorists” in response to indiscriminately launched rockets. The “extra burden” consists of trying “to prevent civilian deaths, noting that Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli strikes.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Extra burden:

    A responsibility supplementing the one Rudyard Kipling famously identified as “the white man’s burden,” which consisted of dominating “sullen peoples, Half devil and half child,” the kind of people who for their amusement launch rockets indiscriminately at white people.

    Contextual Note

    Thanks to the growing realization that Israel is firmly set on maintaining an apartheid state, for the first time in decades, US politicians have begun to wonder whether it makes any sense to continue the nation’s unconditional support of every Israeli government. Israel has continued expanding its illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in direct violation of UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention. The current troubles began with Israel’s brazen attempt to evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem and replace them with Jewish settlers, followed by the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

    For Blinken, the social and historical context of these events simply doesn’t exist. He wants people to believe it all started with the launching of rockets by the Palestinians. Nor do context and historical reality interest Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who insisted that details are irrelevant when the US has vowed “‘ironclad support’ for Israel’s right to defend itself.” This is totally consistent with Biden’s promise, in a phone call this week to Netanyahu, of “unwavering support” for Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

    Blinken showed less concern for the possible war crimes now taking place than for the bad PR they might generate. “[W]henever we see civilian casualties, and particularly when we see children caught in the crossfire losing their lives, that has a powerful impact,” he said. Blinken worries about what “we see” and its  “impact” in the media. This implies that if we didn’t see it and if the impact was reduced, all would be well. Ignorance is bliss.

    Biden reinforced everyone’s expectation that there would be nothing new under the shining sun of US diplomacy when he offered this comment: “My hope is that we will see this coming to a conclusion sooner than later.” What conclusion is he thinking of? And why is an American president just hoping that something good will happen? Why isn’t he intervening to facilitate not a “conclusion” but a resolution? Some will point out that every US president’s hands are tied by a status quo that holds as its first commandment, thou shalt never criticize Israel, its leaders or its policies.

    Historical Note

    Following World War II, Western nations assumed the entire civilization’s shame at the crimes of Nazi Germany. The British used the newly created United Nations as the instrument by which the West could atone for Germany’s racist sins through the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

    Once that was done, the die was cast. The West, led by the British — who had assumed “responsibility” for the region of the former Ottoman Empire — decided how and at whose expense (not their own) the surviving European Jews might be rewarded. Giving them Palestine seemed like the easy way out for the Western world as a whole. The British wanted out anyway. It also had the advantage of establishing a state in the Middle East whose culture would be basically Western and European.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Neither the British, the Americans nor the French — all in various ways implicated in the new order to be established in the Middle East — imagined that Israel would evolve to become an aggressive nation increasingly focused on bullying its neighbors and claiming its own particular version of exceptionalism. French President Charles de Gaulle was the first to notice it, on the occasion of the Six-Day War in 1967. Western leaders may have naively believed that the same Arabs who allowed themselves to be bullied by the Turks for centuries would accept with docility the rule of their new masters, who claimed to be building a modern nation on socialist and egalitarian principles.

    In the first decade of Israel’s existence, the US refused to identify with the new nation’s interests, notably during the Suez Crisis in 1956 in which the Eisenhower administration countered the Franco-British alliance. It also viewed with hostility the presumed socialist ideology of Israel. At the time, the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite maintained a lingering anti-Semitic bias. But as the Cold War evolved and the importance of the oil economy grew, leading to increasing tensions between the West and the Muslim world, by the 1980s, the US was on track formulating its current “unconditional,” “iron-clad” alliance with Israel.

    This gradual evolution toward a position of increasingly blind support of Israel has had a profound influence on Western media in its reporting on the enduring, increasingly unresolvable conflict between the Jewish state and its Arab inhabitants. Western news media have largely accepted the role of encouraging their audience to sympathize with white, essentially European and American Israelis who feel threatened in an alien, hostile Orient.

    Greg Philo in The Guardian shows that an analysis of Western media in its reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, for decades, reflected “a strong emphasis on Israeli perspectives.” What better illustration than yesterday’s Washington Post: “Israeli jets strike Gaza; Hamas launches rockets as Israeli ground troops stand by”?

    *[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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    Why the US Will Not Achieve Herd Immunity

    The problem with the COVID-19 pandemic is that we don’t know if we’re coming or going. It’s as if we’re swimming far from shore, overwhelmed by one wave after another, and we’re unsure if we’re heading toward land or away from it.

    China was the early face of COVID-19, but it hasn’t faced many infections since spring 2020. Europe, like the United States, has experienced successive outbreaks. Brazil continues to be hit hard, while Turkey is seeing a reduction of cases from a mid-April surge. Thailand and Cambodia are only now dealing with their first major upticks in the disease.

    Where India Went Wrong

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    But the real surprise has been India. Early on in the pandemic, journalists and scientists were trying to figure out why the coronavirus had made so little mark on the subcontinent and left so few deaths in its wake. Now, after a collective sigh of relief following a modest surge in late summer and fall last year, India is now overwhelmed by over 400,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths a day, which are both likely to be undercounts.

    There are several reasons for India’s current catastrophe. A more infectious variant started to appear in the population, which the World Health Organization this week labeled a global health risk. The Indian government was not only unprepared for the crisis, but it was dangerously cavalier in its approach to the disease. After last year’s surge, it grew lax on testing and contact tracing. Nor did it put resources into the country’s inadequate medical system or in stockpiling key supplies like oxygen.

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    Then there are the errors of commission. The government did nothing, for instance, to prevent Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious event last month that drew millions of pilgrims to a holy location on the Ganges, from turning into the largest super-spreader event on the planet. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even continued to hold mass political rallies as the COVID numbers began to rise.

    When it comes to vaccines, the government has been slow to order doses, distribute them to the population and secure the raw materials to scale up manufacturing. Although India is the world’s largest producer of COVID vaccines, less than 3% of Indians are fully inoculated against the disease.

    Well, that’s India, you might be saying to yourself. They have a Trump-like fanatic for a leader. Their medical system has long been inadequate. It’s an obvious place for COVID to have a final encore.

    In the United States, meanwhile, the number of cases has fallen dramatically since January. Hospitals no longer face overcrowding. More than a third of the population is fully vaccinated. The Biden administration is expecting that the country will return to some semblance of normality this July. But wasn’t it a similar complacency that proved India’s undoing? So, is India the ghost of America’s past or a taste of things to come.

    Our Herd Problem

    In early 2020, the scientific community went into hyperdrive to develop not one but several vaccines against COVID-19. In the US, the government and the medical community worked overtime to set up the infrastructure to get doses into arms around the country. Clinics and volunteers have jumped into action at a community level to make sure, as of this week, that 58% of adults have gotten at least one shot and over 70% of those older than 65 are fully vaccinated.

    But all this effort is now hitting up against resistance. Or hesitancy. Or barriers to access. States are cutting back on their vaccine orders from the federal authorities. Daily vaccination rates have dropped nearly 20% from last week. Employers are basically bribing people to get their shots. Millions of people aren’t even bothering to show up for their second doses.

    Barriers to access is perhaps the easiest problem to address. According to a recent survey, 72% of African-Americans and Latinos want to get vaccinated, but 63% reported that they didn’t have enough information about where to get a shot.

    While lack of information may well be the reason why some Americans have yet to sign up for their vaccinations, a hard-core resistance has developed to vaccines in this country — and COVID vaccines in particular. According to polling in April, around 45% of Republicans report that they’ll never get the vaccine. In all, as much as 37% of Americans are now saying that they’re going to opt-out. That means that tens of millions of doses are now chasing the remaining 5% of Americans who want to be vaccinated and haven’t yet gotten their first shot.

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    This resistance has nothing to do with a lack of information about how to sign up for a shot. It’s all about misinformation: that the vaccine is unnecessary, that it’s dangerous, that it comes with a microchip that will track you forever.

    Recently, Republican pollster Frank Luntz set up a focus group of vaccination-hesitant, Donald Trump voters to see what it would take to convince them to get shots. It was not an easy crowd. The husband of one of the participants had gotten seriously ill from COVID — and she stilldidn’t want to get vaccinated. In over two hours of discussion, Luntz brought in such vaccine-boosters as a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Senator Bill Cassidy, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — and still, the participants barely budged.

    Only after several emotional stories from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a final round of facts from the CDC official did they start to change their minds. “I would say I was probably 80% against when this started today,” one man said. “Now I’m probably 50-50-ish.”

    Luntz considered that a success. But in this age of Twitter, it’s not a workable model to expect skeptics to sit still for more than two hours while Republican Party grandees and noted doctors barrage one small group after another with stories and facts.

    A more representative reaction to such attempts by Republican Party influencers is what happened when Ivanka Trump posted selfies of her own vaccination. Twitter responses included: “‘Love your family but this is a huge NO for me & my family. Will be praying you do not get any of the horrible [side-effects].’ Others replied, ‘Please stop promoting this nonsense,’ ‘HARD PASS,’ and ‘Sorry, don’t trust it.’”

    Even more concerning, some anti-vaxxers are already planning to use fake vaccination cards to get into public events. Hundreds of sellers have appeared on eBay, Facebook and Twitter to hawk such cards. In this way, “live free or die” is quickly becoming “live free and kill.”

    In a nutshell, the US won’t achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease. Whatever the reasons for this obstinacy — anti-government, anti-science, anti-liberal — it will ensure that large pockets of this country will continue to play host to a very infectious disease.

    This resistance potentially puts the US in the same category as the Seychelles. An island nation in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles has the highest rate of vaccination in the world. More than 60% of the population is fully vaccinated. But that still hasn’t been enough to ward off COVID. The Seychelles is now experiencing its largest outbreak, which, on a per capita basis, is even larger than what has overtaken India.

    The same thing might happen again in America, for instance in states with very low vaccination rates, like Mississippi and Idaho. When it comes to COVID-19, the US is only as strong as its weakest links.

    Perennial Pandemic

    When I lived in New York City, I used to wonder why my apartment was so overheated in the winter. It turns out that the heating systems in old buildings had been designed (or redesigned) to accommodate open windows in winter. During the flu pandemic in 1918-19, open windows and greater circulation of air were supposed to guard against infection.

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    Modern societies were once structured to handle periodic outbreaks of infectious diseases, from the steam heating in buildings to the TB sanatoriums that dotted the landscape. Americans braced for outbreaks with greater frequency than the cyclical reappearance of the cicadas. Three major waves of cholera struck the United States between 1832 and 1866. Typhoid killed 25,000 people in New York in 1906-07. The flu in 1918, diphtheria in the 1920s, polio in the first half of the 20th century: Americans became accustomed to infectious diseases as a way of life.

    COVID-19 isn’t going to disappear completely. It will return, again and again, just like variants of the flu or that other coronavirus, the common cold. If we’re lucky, it will come back in a less virulent form or the antibodies in our systems — those of us who received vaccinations — will render it so. If we’re not lucky, COVID-19 will generate ever more infectious strains that overwhelm us on a periodic basis.

    In the best-case scenario, what’s happening in India today is COVID-19’s last gasp. With the worst-case scenario, India is our future. So, don’t delete your Zoom app or give up your home office. Don’t throw away those masks. When it comes to infectious disease, we are all dependent on the herd.

    That’s great if you’re living in South Korea or New Zealand where compliance is second nature. But in America, the home of the free, the brave and the stupid, the herd may prove to be our collective undoing.

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

    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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    How Reasonable Are Suspicions Promoted by the Media?

    The New York Times editorial board cannot be accused of a failure of will, a lack of consistency or the cardinal political sin of flip-flopping. Many of The Times critics supposed that, over the past five years, the newspaper’s obsession with any random complaint against Russia — cast in the role of America’s archenemy — could simply be explained by the editorial board’s visceral hatred of President Donald Trump. Knowing their readers were 91% Democrat, they willingly fed their audience’s wish to view Trump as Vladimir Putin’s closest collaborator.

    With Trump gone, things should have changed. His election victory in 2016 now appears to have been merely the catalyst rather than the cause of an obsession that has had the effect of renewing the Cold War animus formerly directed toward what was then a much more powerful adversary, the Soviet Union. A week doesn’t go by without one or more The Times articles either reminding readers of Russia’s multiple attempts at skulduggery. These include cyberterrorism, industrial espionage and even the tendentious use of American social media. 

    Anyone vaguely familiar with what we call “the modern world” should understand that every government of a self-respecting nation-state has by now learned to emulate the institutions, methods and techniques elaborated in the West for the purpose of “gathering intelligence.” But just as departments of “defense” (considered good and moral) are configured to wage aggressive war (considered bad and potentially immoral), intelligence agencies are also hard at work producing and disseminating bad information. Some of these institutions have even been known to engage in “covert activities.”

    The New York Times Has Feelings for China

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    This permanent competition poses a slight problem for many Americans with a keen sense of morality, who don’t know how to deal with the idea of US skulduggery. Rather than denying it, they consider that even its obviously immoral actions — assassination, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, etc. — it is only employed as “a force for good.” Russian skulduggery, on the other, is a force for evil. It’s a lesson every baby boomer learned at school. The baby boomers appear to have passed on the information to the next generation. Curiously, Chinese skulduggery has now begun to worry Americans, but they tend to consider it annoying rather than evil (unless it includes creating and deliberately spreading a global pandemic).

    In the rubric Good Reasons to Hate Russia and Maybe Even Envision Going to War With It, The Times offers two major pieces this week. A new article on directed-energy attacks evokes suspicion of Russia before admitting that “the intelligence agencies have not concluded any cause or whether a foreign power is involved.” Another article with the title “Russian Spy Team Left Traces That Bolstered C.I.A.’s Bounty Judgment” revives the recently discredited story that the Russians offered a bounty for the killing of American military personnel in Afghanistan. The three journalists do their damnedest to persuade readers that this potential pretext for a new cold (or hot) war confirms Ronald Reagan’s famous identification of Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) as the “evil empire.”

    The authors inform us that the evil action of offering bounty is the work of “Russian operatives, known as Unit 29155 of the G.R.U.,” Russia’s military intelligence service. To bolster their case, the authors cite Czechia’s prime minister’s claim that there is “’clear evidence,’” assembled by intelligence and security services there, establishing ‘reasonable suspicion’ that Unit 29155 was involved in two explosions at ammunition depots that killed two Czechs in 2014.” The same people must be involved in the bounty story.

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Reasonable suspicion:

    Either a purely rational hypothesis emitted by an objective observer with no interest in particular outcomes or a self-interested innuendo corresponding to a hidden agenda

    Contextual Note

    “Clear evidence” to support a “reasonable suspicion” is all Times journalists need to justify publishing an article designed to create certainty where none exists. Who needs facts on the ground when you have suspicions to excite your readers? 

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    The journalists laboriously develop a tendentious explanation of the notion of “confidence levels,” at one point even suggesting that “low” really means “high.” Discerning readers might have their own reasonable suspicion of this attempt to conflate supposition with the truth. What emerges from this and many of the Russia-based narratives promoted by The Times and other media, is an earnest effort to persuade the public to take at face value the stories intelligence sources share with their journalists. Behind it lies the idea that intelligence agencies know more than they’re willing to release to the public. 

    The authors actually propose an explanation of why the public should have high confidence in information the agencies have branded as worthy of low to moderate confidence: “When analysts assess something with low confidence … that does not mean they think the conclusion is wrong. Rather, they are expressing greater concerns about the sourcing limitations, while still judging that the assessment is the best explanation of the available facts.”

    Anyone who has studied the human brain knows that thought is a powerful tool. The Times authors see a direct correlation between thinking and truth. “The National Security Council statement,” they write, “identified other ‘nefarious operations’ around the world that the government thought the squad had carried out.” They see as solid evidence the fact that “some military officials based in Afghanistan, as well as some other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, thought the C.I.A. was right.”

    Historical Note

    Playing with our sense of both logic and justice, the authors offer a new line of reasoning when they write that “the intelligence community also had ‘high confidence’ — meaning the judgment is based on high-quality information from multiple sources — in the key circumstantial evidence.” With no real evidence, circumstantial evidence must suffice. 

    In the legal tradition of the United States, circumstantial evidence alone may lead to conviction, but only after testimony and full contradictory debate before a judge and jury. Attribution of guilt requires the unqualified respect of due process, including the accused’s right to a formal defense. As one legal argument puts it, “In order to sustain a conviction based solely on circumstantial evidence, the circumstances must be consistent with his innocence, and incapable of explanation on any other reasonable hypothesis than that of guilt.”

    Intelligence assessments, conducted in secrecy, cannot be compared to a fair trial. But the policy outcomes they provoke may be as extreme as invasion and war. This happened in 2003 when the George W. Bush administration used circumstantial — and in some cases fabricated or manipulated — evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

    In this highly controversial question, the intelligence agencies are given the role of the prosecutor, called upon to align circumstantial evidence to convince the jury that the accused is guilty. The public is the jury. What then should the role of the press be? If intelligence agencies can be compared to prosecutors and the nation’s executive compared to that of the judge, in the absence of the accused, who is left to play the role of defense? Without professional counsel there cannot be a fair trial.

    US Media Still Has Russia on Its Mind

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    Political theorists have traditionally attributed that role, which consists of raising possible objections to foregone conclusions proposed by the government, to the fourth estate — in other words, the press and the media. They alone make it possible to present and weigh the evidence on either side. The contradictory light they throw on a subject makes it possible for the public to understand what is behind the government’s decisions and policies.

    That effort of the fourth estate should be focused on challenging power, casting light on murky issues, reducing their ambiguity and tempering the abuses of the powerful. That was formerly advertised as the badge of honor of a free press. The New York Times is not alone not just in echoing the messages of the national security state, but in actively promoting them as unqualified truth. The corporate media have become the obedient stenographers of the most secret and aggressive governmental initiatives. Some see this as a betrayal of their mission in a democracy.

    Russia is certainly up to all sorts of dirty tricks aimed at the US, just as the US is up to tricks against most other nations, including allies. But obsessively blaming Russia alone for both verified and unverified crimes should not be the business of a serious newspaper.

    *[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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    The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

    At an earlier stage of my life, I had the great pleasure of spending two years teaching at York University in Toronto, Canada. Unlike the University of Toronto, whose campus looks like Harvard or Yale, York resembles British public universities such as Sussex: modern, functional, but without what in French is called “cachet.” York University also happened to be one of the last genuinely left-wing schools in the Western world, at least in the social sciences. I had colleagues who had actually read Karl Marx — and took him seriously. 

    By sheer coincidence, the day I interviewed for a position in the Department of Political Science, York had scheduled a public lecture by Nancy Fraser, a renowned feminist political theorist/philosopher from the New School for Social Research in New York City. The lecture was on the politics of recognition. Given her impeccable left-wing credentials, York was friendly terrain — or so it seemed. I still remember Fraser’s rather stunned expression when confronted with a barrage of attacks by York’s Marxists, who charged her with discounting if not dismissing the central importance of social class. 

    White Trash, White Privilege

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    That was some 20 years ago. Yet ironically, the tension between the politics of recognition and the class-based politics of redistribution is still as pertinent as it was when Fraser theorized it in the late 1990s. In recent years, it has become even more of an issue of vital importance for the future of progressive politics in liberal democracies, not least because of the challenge posed by contemporary radical, right-wing populism.

    Social Justice

    The questions of both redistribution and recognition are about social justice. Above all, social justice concerns leveling the playing field. This is a point Fraser has never tired of repeating. She has adamantly pointed out that struggles for redistribution are anything but “antithetical to struggles for recognition.” The problem is that, more often than not, one tended to be disassociated from the other. In reality, however, social justice involved both questions of redistribution and of “representation, identity, and difference.” 

    Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. In the 1980s, the left, by and large, started to abandon their commitment to what once was called the working class and its aspirations. In its wake, as Axel Honneth noted more than a decade ago, “‘equal distribution’ or ‘equality of good’ no longer form its central categories, but ‘dignity’ and ‘respect.’” To make matters worse, ordinary workers not only lost their privileged position in left-wing narratives. They were also increasingly denigrated, their needs and aspirations dismissed, and their values and views tagged as reactionary and retro, an expression of pervasive working-class authoritarianism. 

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    I remember a column written by the German satirist Wolfgang Ebert that said it all in a few lines. The article appeared in 1985 in the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit. The text was meant to be taken as what it was: satire on Germany’s post-68 new left, their delusions and disillusionment, which finally ended in the complete disavowal of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. On this reading, if the revolution never happened, it was because “the masses — not to speak of the working class as the so-called subject of the revolution — failed.” 

    In fact, Ebert continued, the masses “always fail.” Instead of following their “true interests” or at least listening to their “intellectual leaders,” they preferred to follow the siren calls of consumerism. Ebert’s conclusion: “Who would be stupid enough to risk their neck for these dumb masses?” The German Social Democrats (SPD) certainly didn’t. That’s why they are where they are today. Since the federal election of 1983, their share of the vote has plunged, from 38% to just over 20% in 2017. 

    Fast forward to 2011 in France, a few months before socialist Francois Hollande narrowly defeated the sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the second round of the 2012 election. The election was overshadowed by the downfall of socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who for some time had been seen as a serious candidate for the presidency until his aspirations were sunk by sex scandals. 

    Terra Nova

    The reason Strauss-Kahn is mentioned here is because of his affiliation with Terra Nova, a progressive think tank modeled after the Center for American Progress and charged with “contributing to the intellectual renewal of the Left in France and in Europe.” In 2011, Terra Nova released a strategic paper that essentially advised that the left should forget about French workers. These workers, the authors charged, were no longer concerned with economic and social questions; instead, they had bought into the “cultural issues” promoted by the right. At the same time, they had progressively been seduced by the far-right National Front, both on cultural and socioeconomic questions.

    In short, as a highly critical commentary on the Terra Nova report in France’s premier left-wing daily, Liberation, ironically put it, workers were “dirty and nasty” — at least that was the impression one got from reading the paper. If the socialists were serious about winning the 2012 presidential election, Terra Nova insisted, they had to come up with a new progressive subject. Terra Nova suggested a “future-oriented” coalition (“tomorrow’s France”), “younger, more diverse, more feminized.” This was to be a coalition of the culturally progressive and the economically marginalized — except, of course, traditional workers. 

    The analysis was apparently heavily influenced by American strategists busily constructing the new or “emerging” Democratic majority — the title of an influential book from 2004. Today, as a recent dissertation on this question demonstrates, this (hitherto still quite elusive) majority consists of the “ascendant” and “rising” American electorate — constituencies that, unlike the traditional white working class, are growing as a share of the overall electorate: people of color, the young and well-educated, socially liberal whites and single women. As Christopher Cimaglio, the author of the essay, pointed out, in this framework, “the white working class often serves as a receding reactionary backdrop to emerging, forward-looking groups: ‘a more highly educated and diverse constituency,’ ‘a coalition of transformation, comfortable with demographic and cultural change.’” 

    Political Polarization

    The result of this strategy is what we have today: widespread polarization, mutual recriminations, intense loathing on both sides of the aisle, and a politics of grievances and resentment that makes a mockery of one of America’s most sacred notions: e pluribus unum. Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, roughly 80% of registered voters, both Democrats and Republicans, said “their differences with the other side were about core American values.” Around 90% in both camps “worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    To be sure, the left’s embrace of identity politics and diversity, together with its somewhat callous dismissal of what in French is called the couches populaires (aka “ordinary people”) seeking to make a decent living, has not gone unchallenged. Just a few years ago in Spain, a polemic with the telling title “La Trampa de la Diversidad” (the diversity trap) became a national bestseller — and provoked a vicious backlash. Among other things, the author, the polemicist Daniel Bernabe, was charged with denigrating the feminist, LGBTQ and ecological causes, primarily for suggesting that the oppression of women was fundamentally rooted in economics — i.e., the capitalist system — rather than purely in sexism, which he considered as just another face of capitalism.

    For Bernabe, everything started with Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher managed to reframe economic inequality in terms of individual difference and diversity against a form of socialism that sought to impose “uniformity.” In the years that followed, socialists and social democrats, such as Tony Blair of the UK and Gerhard Schroder of Germany, bought into this narrative — with suboptimal success, to put it kindly.

    Recently in Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leading politician of The Left party (Die Linke), provoked controversy with a new book highly critical of the left’s adoption of identity politics. Identity, according to Wagenknecht, has become the pet project of a self-indulgent, left-libertarian, individualistic, urban, cosmopolitan elite — a “lifestyle” politics reflecting the smug complacency of the morally superior, far removed from the mundane material concerns of ordinary workers. The charge implies that if today’s left embrace causes such as Fridays for Future or Black Lives Matter, it is less out of genuine conviction than out of the need to constantly reaffirm their distinctive identity and habitus, promoted as “the epitome of progressivism and responsibility.”

    Other critics of identity politics have been even less kind. “Blue Labour” theorist Jonathan Rutherford, for instance, in an article for New Statesman, argued that the decline of the British working class had turned Labour into a “party of the bourgeois left,” espousing what he called the cause of “cosmopolitan liberalism.” This, he charged, is the “culture of the elites,” one that is “deeply divisive,” grounded in identity politics. In turn, identity politics at least “in its libertarian pursuit of self-realisation and its judging and dividing into victim status hierarchies, is corrosive of society.”

    Under the influence of cosmopolitan liberalism, Rutherford argued, “progressive and left politics in the 1990s turned away from class politics and solidarity in favour of group identities and self-realisation.” In the process, the politics of recognition turned into a politics of victimization. At the same time, society has moved on. While the postindustrial, postmodern plebs fight over the question of who has been most victimized, the “new revolutionary subject,” the “‘universal educated person’ of urban, higher-educated and networked youth,” is busy conceptualizing a brave new world of material abundance, social harmony and ecological wellbeing — or so I understand what Rutherford is trying to say.

    Identity Politics

    Others have gone even further, charging that identity politics threatens to undermine liberal democracy. On this view, identity politics has led to a fragmentation of social cohesion, undermined a common sense of belonging, and been replaced by a new type of “tribalism” that has largely benefited the right and far right. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out, identity politics reflects “important grievances.” At the top of the list is the long history of denigration, discrimination and outright violence that various ethnic minorities have been subjected to by the white majority. 

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    In some cases, however, identity politics has taken on an “exclusive character where people’s ‘lived experiences’” determine who they are. This, Fukuyama said, has “created obstacles to empathy and communication.” One might add that it has done a disservice to the notion of a shared humanity. 

    In other cases, the combination of identity politics and political correctness has reached absurd dimensions. Take, for instance, the case of Felipe Rose, the iconic member of the Village People. Rose is the guy dressed in Native American garb, which has exposed him to charges of cultural appropriation and playing to stereotypes. As a critic put it, “Rose’s Halloween-style Indian is the only character [among the Village People] to play on the identity of a living culture.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the critic, added: “Why on earth, after American Indians have for decades been successfully waging war against the use of Indian stereotypes in popular culture, is Felipe Rose still parading around on stage in an Indian costume” like a cartoon character come to life? 

    The answer is simple. The singer defines himself as of Native American descent (Lakota Sioux) and has done more for America’s indigenous population than many a well-meaning left-wing culture warrior (pun intended). Skeptics might want to watch Rose’s “Trail of Tears” — a tribute to the “eviction” of the Cherokee and other nations from their ancestral lands resulting in thousands of deaths on the way.

    Does this mean the left should abandon recognition in favor of a return to an exclusive focus on redistribution? Quite the contrary: As Fukuyama has strongly insisted, the politics of recognition reflects a fundamental human desire for dignity, for being esteemed. Taking his cue from the eminent German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he noted that “history itself is driven by the struggle for recognition, by the desire of human beings to have their fundamental dignity recognised by other human beings and that modern democracy emerges when equal dignity, not the dignity of the master, but the mutual recognition of equal dignity, is achieved.” 

    Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and celebrated author of “The Tyranny of Merit,” argues along similar lines. As he wrote in The Atlantic, any “serious response to working-class frustrations must combat condescension and credentialist prejudice. It must also put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda.” In the book, Sandel cited data chronicling the decline of America’s white working class, many of whom have simply fallen out of the labor market, as if “defeated by the indignities of a labor market indifferent to their skills.” The data comes from Isabel Sawhill’s work on what she calls “the forgotten Americans.”  They are the victims of the kind of “misrecognition” that Fraser has theorized. More often than not, they have given up, both with respect to the labor market and to life itself, succumbing to what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair.”

    “White Trash”

    These developments are not only highly unsettling. They also drastically demonstrate the central importance of recognition in the current period of hyperglobalization, accelerated innovation and automation, and run-away individualization. Under the circumstances, it is of paramount importance to bestow a modicum of visibility to the ignored and forgotten, to have their existence acknowledged.

    Yet this is seldom the case. America’s “white trash” underclass is a case in point. Poor and, more often than not, addicted to opioids, structurally irrelevant as both producers and consumers, white trash epitomizes what is wrong with today’s politics of recognition and identity, laying bare its internal contradictions — if not its inherent hypocrisies. White trash might appear to be an American phenomenon but it is not. As Imogen Tyler has shown, the denigration of the white, socially marginalized underclass is also prevalent in Britain, reflected in the notion of the “chav,” a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. In fact, over the past two decades, “chavs” increasingly became a prevalent comedy television trope, exposing poor whites to ridicule and opprobrium by urban elites.

    This suggests that the struggle for recognition, as Fraser has affirmed, is an all-encompassing, comprehensive struggle based on an inclusive notion of hurt and grievances. On this reading, the struggle for recognition and dignity cannot be divorced from the struggle for redistribution or, for that matter, the struggle for equal participation. This, of course, is hardly a new idea. As early as 1918, Max Weber distinguished between three distinct but interrelated foundations of social inequality: resources, power and status. The latter refers to “inequality based on differences in honor, esteem, and respect.” As Stanford sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.” Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.”

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    Historically, this was one of the main selling points of populist leaders, including Juan Peron in Argentina. Peron, who served two terms as president before his death in 1974, accorded workers and the poor and dispossessed “their own voice and a new sense of their relevance.” This was a particular concern of his wife, Evita, who “was instrumental in transforming the sense of identity of the workers and the poor, and in doing so she helped them gain a sense of their own ‘dignity’, as she frequently repeated.”

    As Carlos de la Torre, a leading specialist on Latin American populism, has put it, populism is “a politics of cultural and symbolic recognition of the despised underclasses. It transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption.” 

    Unfortunately, in today’s world, many people are denied the right to be someone. As Senator Bernie Sanders recently noted with respect to rural Americans, “there is not an appreciation of rural America or the values of rural America, the sense of community that exists in rural America.” He added: [S]omehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America. I think we’ve got to change that attitude and start focusing on the needs of people in rural America, treat them with respect, and understand there are areas there are going to be disagreements, but we can’t treat people with contempt.” 

    Unfortunately, this is has happened too often, not only in the United States but also in Europe. Social justice, however, can only be achieved if everyone is brought on board.

    Equal Rights

    There are myriad examples of how these dimensions of social justice are inextricably linked. Take, for instance, the struggle for women’s equal rights. In Germany, until 1958, women were not allowed — by law — to open their own bank account without the explicit permission of their husbands. In other words, it was the men who disposed of the money women brought into the marriage and the money they earned while married. In the United States, until the mid-1970s, banks could refuse to issue unmarried women a credit card. If they were married, their husbands were required to cosign.  

    Germany and the United States are not alone. In 1979, a British general practitioner refused to give former Labour MP Helen Goodman a prescription for contraception on the grounds that she was unmarried. In Switzerland, it took until 1971 for women to be granted the right to vote. Swiss men were largely opposed, as were many Swiss women. The reason why Switzerland agreed to accord women the right to vote was that the country wanted to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. For this to happen, women’s suffrage was a sine qua non, much to the chagrin of Swiss men. In fact, it took until 1990 for the last Swiss canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) to allow its female citizens to vote. Each of these cases confirmed Simone de Beauvoir’s conclusion that women constituted the “second sex.” No wonder the Vatican added her treatise to the index of prohibited books. 

    These examples illustrate the notion that the way in which humans are recognized — or not — has important consequences, material and otherwise. Take the case of gay rights. It took until 1987 for homosexuality to no longer be categorized as some kind of “mental disorder” in the United States. It took three more years for the World Health Organization (WHO) to follow suit. It took another few decades for the WHO to stop classifying gender incongruency as a behavioral and mental disorder. As Patchen Markell noted, “the denigration of non-normative sexualities … helps to sustain the maldistribution of resources ranging from health care to police protection.”

    In fact, take the more recent case of “welfare chauvinism,” which has led to attempts by Western European governments to limit access to social benefits for migrants and refugees while favoring the “native-born.” More often than not, the poor do not vote. Why should they? Nobody cares about them anyway.

    “Deplorables” in America

    Unfortunately but not unexpectedly — here, Fukuyama is right — the political right have, in recent years, hijacked identity politics in the service of division and polarization, driven by resentment and mutual recrimination. A paradigmatic example is the American tea party movement. One of its grievances was that welfare programs went “to ‘undeserving’ immigrants, minorities, and youth” instead of “hardworking” Americans.

    An even more outrageous example is a statement made by Idaho State Representative Priscilla Giddings, who recently justified cuts for Idaho’s universities. She claimed that state lawmakers “don’t want funds expended for courses, programs, services, or trainings that confer support for extremist ideologies, such as those tied to social justice.” Giddings, a member of the Republican Party, also opposed a bill in the Idaho legislature that would have released a federal grant designed to support the development of Idaho’s early childhood care and education system. She was particularly incensed that the program was aligned with a nonprofit organization that in its national catalog stated that “whiteness … confers privilege, as does being male” and that the organization “supports a ‘social justice curriculum.’” Giddings did not believe, she stated, “that you are privileged based on your gender or your race.” The bill failed, depriving Idaho’s children of much-needed funds.

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    Donald Trump, the former US president, built on this base during his first election campaign. To a large extent, he appealed to grievances not met by the dominant politics of recognition, which has tended to privilege minorities while dismissing the plight of the underprivileged, as long as they happen to be white. In 2016, he made restoring dignity to American workers a central trope of his speeches. When Hillary Clinton famously called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” he responded that, for him, they were “hard‐working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people.” But above all else, Trump said, they were Americans, “entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you, and defends you.” He added: “Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.” In the election, around two-thirds of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump.

    There can be no doubt that in recent decades, the question of recognition and dignity has become central in the politics of advanced liberal democracies. A prime example is the notion of multiculturalism, which presumes that all cultures are equal but different. In the process, the question of economic justice has taken somewhat of a back seat, to the detriment of those who have been struggling to keep afloat in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing economic uncertainty.

    One result has been an upsurge in support for political parties. Such parties have been astute in exploiting widespread popular resentment in the service of an exclusionary nativist notion of deservedness based on ethnicity or cultural compatibility. Unfortunately, too often the left have given up on their traditional electoral base, leaving the field wide open for the pied pipers of the radical, populist right. The radical right have promoted themselves as the advocates of ordinary people, claiming to give them a voice and a modicum of visibility and a sense of empowerment.

    Pandora’s Box

    The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the regions that comprise the former East Germany is a case in point. As Jennifer Yoder, a professor at Colby College, recently suggested, support for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia — strongholds for the party — is to a large extent the expression of a “revenge of the East.” As she pointed out, it reflects a profound sense among easterners of “not being taken seriously,” of never being asked what they think.  At the same time, it illustrates the perception “that one’s own status now and in the future is at risk.” It is this combination of the subjective experience of a lack of recognition and materially-related anxieties with regard to the future that has proved a powerful motivation for supporting a political party that purports to speak for both the mental state and the interests of the eastern German population.

    Germany is hardly a unique case. The claim to take ordinary people seriously, to give visibility to the forgotten and invisible has been a major selling point of radical, right-wing populists — from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump. In its election program for the 1985 election, the National Front in France declared that the “dignity of the French people” was one of its priorities. This was at a time of profound disillusionment among French workers over President Francois Mitterrand’s radical reversal of economic policy — aka tournant de la rigueur — of 1983.  Above all, rigueur meant austerity and subservience to Germany’s stringent monetary policy, which left French workers in the cold. Hardly surprising, in the years and decades that followed, many of them found a new home in Le Pen’s National Front.

    It might seem that the politics of recognition and diversity has opened Pandora’s box. To a certain extent, this is true. There is no good reason to recognize the suffering of ethnic, sexual and religious minorities at the hands of the majority, while dismissing the suffering of significant parts of the majority. White trash, as I have previously argued, might be white, but it is still dismissed and denigrated as “trash.” In this case, white privilege not only becomes meaningless, but it serves as an insult, adding to denigration and misrecognition, to use Fraser’s term.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Hardly surprising, the “deplorables,” to use Clinton’s term, overwhelmingly came out in support of Trump, who, as Clinton suggested, “lifted them up.” To be sure, Clinton meant that Trump reaffirmed their sexist, racist and homophobic views. Yet it could also mean that those who voted for Trump were — perhaps for the first time ever — given a sense that they existed, were “visible” and that they counted.  

    Le Pen, after being elected as the leader of the French radical, populist right, made the politics of recognition central to her project. In 2011, a few months before the presidential election, she promoted herself as the candidate of “la France des invisibles,” of all those citizens who never merit being mentioned, who are forgotten, who are — as she put it — “des triples riens.” The notion is an allusion to the triple-A ratings bestowed by international agencies on the creditworthiness of states — the main obsession, or so Le Pen maintained, of France’s political and economic elite.

    Le Pen failed to advance to the second round of the presidential election, which ended in a duel between Sarkozy and Hollande. In 2017, she made it to the second round but lost to Emmanuel Macron. Yet Le Pen’s politics of recognition had clearly hit a nerve, as did her adoption of a socioeconomic project that promised to expand the French welfare state; though this was under the proviso that the expansion would only be for the French.

    Same Boat

    The French case is neither unique nor limited to the radical, populist right. In Denmark, for instance, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, has advanced similar propositions, many of them adopted from the country’s far right. In today’s world, it appears that both recognition and redistribution only work if they are associated with a large dose of exclusion. Unfortunately, “identity politics” has turned into a zero-sum game. More often than not, the result has been more resentment and even less willingness to listen to the other side. The remarks by State Representative Giddings is paradigmatic of these trends. This kind of politics can only exacerbate social tension and increase polarization, in the process diminishing chances for moving forward.

    A progressive politics based on an honest assessment of the multiple crises we face today can only succeed if it includes all sectors of society, independent of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and material circumstances. It might sound a bit trite, but we are all sitting in the same boat. It would be a tragic mistake to throw some passengers overboard for the simple reason that they are deemed not to belong. 

    *[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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    Can Joe Biden Convince America?

    It has become so hard to be hopeful about America. Disappointment awaits around every corner and under every rock. Yet, there he is, Joe Biden, president of the United States of America, telling the nation that we can be so much better than we are and then having the guts to tell us what we need to do to get there. Other “leaders” have given it a try, but there was always one important thing missing. What makes Biden different than the others is having the political courage to tell the nation how we have failed to be what we have for so long told ourselves that we were and are.

    Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days

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    I don’t know of anyone who predicted that this 78-year-old lifelong politician could seize the moment and grip the nation. But somehow, he has. It was to be expected that anything would be better than Trump, and Biden could have coasted on that alone. But that is not what is happening.

    President Biden has used quiet confidence, competence, compassion and a solid moral foundation to propose the most progressive agenda in decades to try to lead Americans to where they didn’t know they wanted to go. Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, understood and articulated the problems and offered a vision of fundamental reform. Now, somewhat out of the clear blue, Biden may prove to be a leader capable of actually delivering some of that reform.

    Biden Has More in Mind

    After the election in 2020, there was much talk about the Biden who most thought to be a transitional figure, at best. But while we were talking to each other, it seems that Biden was actually telling himself and maybe a few others that he had much more than that in mind. Progressives like me didn’t even know he was listening to us. Maybe we had become so often disappointed that we never quite understood how far compassion and empathy can take someone when they are empowered with the opportunity to try to make a real difference.

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    To be clear, it will take much more than compassionate leadership to move America even slowly toward fulfilling its promise. It will take steady and competent administration officials and public servants committed to progressive ideals and then willing and able to turn ideals into public policy. It will take a united Democratic Party at all levels of government to both support and actively promote the policy initiatives. And then it will take President Biden to remind the whole nation that good people not only can accomplish good things, but that there is a moral imperative to do so now.

    There will be no help whatsoever from Republican politicians at the national level, and the right-wing media apparatus will only ramp up its bile. Somewhere, around 70% of those who identify as Republicans still reject the reality that Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. With this in mind, Biden should ignore the national Republican Party and its acolytes until there is a clear and unequivocal affirmation of the results of the last presidential election from their political “leaders,” including the disgraced and seditious losing candidate.

    In the current political environment, the most basic tenet of democratic governance continues to require repetition, so here goes: No one can be entrusted with democratic governance without a commitment to the democratic process, the rule of law and the resulting government. So, for all of you Republicans who still are waiting for Trump’s “triumphant” return and those who try to diminish the institutional significance of the insurrection that shook the nation, you have earned the right to be ignored. No nation can succeed at governance if those who do not believe in government continue to have a seat at the table.

    I have some confidence that Biden knows this as well. And even more confidence that those counseling the president are exploring all of the realistic options to achieve their policy objectives. Further, they know that it will be imperative to negotiate with Democratic officials at all levels of government to increase broad public support for his progressive agenda.

    Republican Officials

    There may also be some state and local Republican officials willing to sign on. However, Biden and his supporters will have to work much harder than they should have to in order to convince state and local Republican officials of the painfully obvious value of federal support for education, health care, child care, roads and bridges, better wages, affordable housing and the like. After years of local community neglect, most Republican officials still seem willing to reflexively resist any federal mandates, no matter how much those mandates might benefit their constituencies.

    In this context, it will not be necessary to fix everything at once. However, it will be essential to initially restore a national faith in the capacity of government to meet collective societal challenges and to convince the nation that solutions to 21st-century problems require an actively engaged national government.

    Embed from Getty Images

    To succeed at this, Biden will have to directly address the most persistent element of resistance to collective national solutions — the perception that to implement policy changes beneficial to all requires that some give up a little individual “liberty” and a measure of individual “security.” There is only one cohesive response. It is that realizing a better America engenders a collective liberty that provides a more secure future for all of us.

    This is what transformation looks like. Over the 40 years since Ronald Regan first stained governance with his disdain for the very government he was chosen to lead, much has been lost. A certain atrophy has set in that has often resulted in government failure, not because government can’t work, but because political leaders never trusted the institutions that were essential to success. It was much easier to find failure than the courage to fix it. And it was even easier to allow delusional waves of national greatness to mask a shameful level of collective despair.

    Convincing Americans

    If President Biden is to be transformational, he will need to convince a cynical nation that government is worthy of the trust needed to meet the challenges ahead. Then, he will need to fight for the resources required to meet those challenges and to demonstrate that we are writing a better chapter this time because we finally realize the distortion of previous chapters.

    To write new and better chapters, the usual national distractions will have to be avoided. Two simple “truths” need to be emphasized. The first is that deficit spending is not a threat to needed reform, while resistance to paying taxes to meet public policy objectives is a threat. The second is that costly international adventures can only be avoided by accepting that “winning” is not a given. In both instances, simple cost/benefit analysis would serve America well and temper the hubris at the core of so much national angst.

    Joe Biden may well be suited to rise above the exaggerated pride and self-confidence that has driven many of his predecessors to achieve far less than they could have or should have achieved and that has shattered promise after promise. Maybe Joe is the guy. I sure hope so. It is nice for the moment to feel like some of us are no longer walking alone.

    *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    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 Pharma’s Big Free Lunch

    A vast majority of the planet’s population had every reason to welcome the Biden administration’s belated backing of a proposed patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccines. To anyone not invested in the pharmaceutical industry or not named Bill Gates, it was a no-brainer. Economist David Adler and Dr. Mamka Anyona, writing for The Guardian, convincingly argue that “the system of pharmaceutical patents is a killing machine.”

    The good news coming from the White House predictably triggered bad news on Wall Street. CNBC reported that within hours, share prices of major vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies “including Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, dropped sharply.” The alarm may have been exaggerated. “Johnson & Johnson shed a modest 0.4%,” and closed higher at the end of the week. Pfizer and the others had also gained ground by Friday.

    It’s Time to Invest in Curiosity

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    The brief Wall Street plummet was enough to provoke the ire of Stephen J. Ubi, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, ready to demonstrate the bad faith everyone might expect from a powerful industrial lobbyist. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic,” he explained indignantly, “the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Public and private partners:

    A euphemism invented to hide the practice of getting taxpayers (the public) to pay for research that will guarantee future profits for commercial firms (private partners) by gifting them a monopoly permitting exorbitant margins on sales to the public, whose tax dollars funded the research

    Contextual Note

    The pharmaceutical industry will tend to judge any political decision made in the name of human health and the prosperity of all as an act of “sowing confusion.” In our ultra-rationalist economy, profit has become the sole measure of value. Compromising profit is evil, and, as Milton Friedman endlessly repeated, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Calling into question the pricing strategies of private companies in the supposed free market is considered a dangerous heresy.

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    When a government puts up money and resources to stimulate research, guarantees massive purchase orders and transfers the intellectual property to private companies, the companies that benefit don’t consider it “a free lunch.” There’s a reason for this: A lunch at an expensive restaurant in New York may set you back $100 or more. A Coney Island hot dog costs less than $5. But the kind of transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector is routinely measured in billions, if not tens of billions.

    The current system of research funding and pharmaceutical production has admittedly produced a certain form of consumer abundance. But the driver of the system even in ordinary times is the management of scarcity and human misery. There seems to be an iron-clad rule that many take to be a law of nature: The misery of the many serves the prosperity of the few. The enduring good fortune of the wealthy enterprises ensures their capacity to partially respond to the needs of the many — but only partially, thanks to the sacrosanct scarcity principle.

    Ubi begins his complaint by reminding us that we are “In the midst of a deadly pandemic.” He doesn’t bother to mention that the pandemic might have been controlled months ago if, from the start, we had followed the advice of those who preached in favor of coordinated research and “patent pools.” As Alexander Zaitchik explained in his New Republic article on the crucial role Bill Gates played in defending patents, there was a brief moment when the World Health Organization and health professionals were ready to coordinate global research by suspending considerations of private interest and monopolistic profit in response to an impending global threat. That, alas, was seen as stealing Big Pharma’s lunch and violating the consecrated principle of public-private partnerships.

    When the pandemic began to spin out of anyone’s control, US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron proudly declared war against the virus. In a veritable world war against a truly evil enemy, with the well-being of every nation’s citizens at stake, reasonable people might expect private interests to give way to the public good. Not in today’s economy. The public sector has accepted its structural dependence on the private sector’s greed to accomplish even its most modest goals. Instead of pooling their efforts, the world’s nations acted as if every other nation was a rival, if not an enemy. Call it the triumph of the spirit of competition.

    Historical Note

    Ubi complains that the Biden administration took “an unprecedented step.” That is simply untrue. The Defense Production Act (DPA), passed in 1950 during the Korean War, authorized “the federal government to shape the domestic industrial base so that, when called upon, it is capable of providing essential materials and goods needed for the national defense.” According to The New York Times, the DPA “has been invoked hundreds of thousands of times” in recent years to ensure the procurement needs of the military. Is global health a less deserving cause than equipping an aircraft carrier?

    Waiving the patents, according to Ubi “will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.” Some might see this as a threat. That actually makes sense, since threats are an item in every effective manager’s toolbox. But it becomes the equivalent of blackmail. In all likelihood, the Big Pharma behemoths would refuse to cooperate with the transfer of technology and know-how at a time when all processes need to be accelerated to achieve a lasting effect. They are the ones who possess the clout required to “undermine our global response” and “compromise safety.”

    Most astonishing is Ubi’s claim that the “decision will sow confusion between public and private partners.” Although President Biden’s initiative is only a modest step forward, the waiver would be a welcome occasion to begin to clarify what a presumed “partnership” means. For the public, it could signal the breakthrough some believe they see in Biden’s stance. For the first time in at least two decades, the idea of putting a valuation on the public contribution and translating it into intellectual property rights becomes conceivable.

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    In the recent past, public investment in all kinds of innovation has been quietly transferred at a fixed price to private interests. In most cases, the price takes little account of actual cost and even less of commercial value. This is as true of Silicon Valley as it is of Big Pharma. The richest billionaires have benefitted from more than a few free lunches.

    Ubi fears that the waiver will “further weaken already strained supply chains.” A year ago, the question of supply chains emerged as a major issue as the wealthy nations discovered they no longer had easy access to the masks, PPE and medical supplies needed to respond to the pandemic. In a competitive globalized world, nearly every nation suddenly found itself at a disadvantage. Ubi is right to signal “strained supply chains.” But the whole point of the waiver is to reduce supply chain bottlenecks at a moment of crisis.

    Ubi’s final point concerns his fear of “counterfeit vaccines.” But liberating intellectual property reduces the attraction of counterfeits, an effect associated with the protected monopoly of exclusive brands. Illicit imitations of every type of commodity will continue to be an issue for local or national law enforcement. The medical profession is far more capable than retail stores to combat counterfeiting.

    The CNBC article concludes with warnings about “China’s ability to piggyback on U.S. innovation to further its vaccine diplomacy aims.” It mentions Russia as well. The idea of cooperation appears nowhere in its reasoning. That is what’s expected from a media whose sole focus is on what affects the stock market. It cites The Washington Post editorial board’s echo of Bill Gates’s self-interested reasoning. With such well-funded resistance in the financial and political world, the likelihood of a serious change of outlook seems limited. DC lobbyists, generously funded politicians and conformist media clearly have more power than the American people and far more than the seven billion people that populate nations not called the United States.

    *[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