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      in World Politics

      Paranoia and the Perils of Misreading

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      In the summer of 2021, genocide scholar Dirk Moses published an article in the Swiss online journal Geschichte der Gegenwart (History of the Present) titled, “The German Catechism.” He argued that Germany’s sense of its special obligation to Jews after the Holocaust has become a debilitating blockage to thinking through some of the most pressing issues of the present.

      Practice and Practitioners of Holocaust Denial

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      In Moses’ words, the “catechism” consisted of five strands: 1) the Holocaust is unique because it was the unlimited extermination of Europe’s Jews for the sake of extermination, without the pragmatic considerations that characterize other genocides; 2) it was thus a Zivilisationsbruch (civilizational rupture) and the moral foundation of the nation; 3) Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany and a special loyalty to Israel; 4) anti-Semitism is a distinct prejudice and a distinctly German one — it should not be confused with racism; 5) and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

      Leading to Debate

      Moses’ claims, not least his use of the term “catechism” with all of its religious connotations, gave rise to considerable debate in Germany and beyond. (The key texts are now collated on the New Fascism Syllabus website.) Notably, many female scholars, especially women of color, engaged in this debate, which opened a space for a discussion of issues relating to German colonial history, postcolonial approaches to German history and the Holocaust.

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      But when the discussion took place in the feuilletons of distinguished German-language newspapers, the authors were mainly middle-aged white men. Here, the criticisms, now bound up with the belated German publication of Michael Rothberg’s 2009 book, “Multidirectional Memory,” tended to be more defensive of German memory culture and critical of Moses’ supposed intentions. Left-liberal historians such as Gotz Aly and Dan Diner, who had been instrumental in freeing the federal republic from its self-exculpatory and conservative-nationalist postwar culture, bringing the Holocaust into the center of the national discussion, seemed especially incensed; though this is hardly surprising since these were the very people Moses had in his sights, using an Arendt-inspired tone that seemed designed to enrage.

      The “catechism debate” has revealed some intriguing fault lines in the German politics of memory. Moses’ insistence that the terms of his catechism mean that what began as a progressive movement to make Holocaust memory central to the Berlin republic’s self-understanding has gradually become a conservative shutting down of critical voices who want to address German colonialism and current-day racism has touched a nerve. The responses can be read on the New Fascism Syllabus website, where many fair-minded respondents, such as historian Frank Biess, have attempted to grapple honestly with Moses’ claims and to set out what they think their limits are.

      Yet the debate is significant not just in its own right, but because it has spilled over into the reception of Moses’ new book, “The Problems of Genocide,” a reception that is itself inseparable from the debate over Rothberg’s book, which turned — contrary to Rothberg’s intention to facilitate open discussion — on the extent to which the Holocaust in German memory culture prevents discussion of German (or wider) colonial atrocities or modern-day racism.

      What Does He Say?

      What does Moses argue in his book? The clue lies in the subtitle, “Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression.” By this, he signals that his argument is less about the politics of Holocaust memory — though this features in the book — than the way in which the concept of genocide, contrary to the intentions of many lawyers, historians and political theorists, facilitates rather than hinders atrocities and human rights abuses across the world.

      Critics, especially Holocaust historians, have been quick to condemn what they regard as a conspiracy theory at the heart of the book, namely that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and campaigned all his life to have it incorporated into international law, was a Jewish exclusivist who worked with non-Jewish groups in a way that allowed him to get them to take his concept seriously, but who was only concerned with the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.

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      Moses does indeed set out something like this argument, saying that to “mobilise action about Jews … it made strategic sense to link the fate of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazis under a single conceptual umbrella. This is the task that Lemkin’s genocide concept was designed to perform. Far from unthinkingly eliding the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish victims as supposed by Lemkin’s critics decades later, uniting them was the point of the concept.” His conclusion is that “if anyone is to blame for the problems of genocide, it is Lemkin.” In response, Omer Bartov, exemplifying the critical reading of Moses’ book, claimed in an Einstein Forum debate that Moses was putting forward what sounds like a “Jewish–Zionist plot.”

      Moses’ reading is debatable. Putting it forward requires dismissing Lemkin’s own autobiographical claims that he was moved, as a child, by learning of the Ottoman Empire’s massacres of Armenians and, more importantly, asserting that Lemkin remained a Jewish Zionist-nationalist from the 1920s — an orientation well documented by James Loeffler — through to the wartime and postwar period. But this is a reading that, albeit contestable, is well within the norms of intellectual history.

      Revisionism is what historians do all the time, and there is nothing about Moses’ position that justifies reaching for one’s metaphorical gun. Besides, this is not the heart of the book, which has a far more expansive remit than Lemkin and Holocaust historiography, taking in a remarkable range of references in world history. He has set out his argument plainly and in detail on numerous occasions. (See, for example, his talk with Geoff Eley at the University of Michigan or his interview on the New Books in Genocide Studies website.)

      What Does This Mean?

      It seems that what is happening here exemplifies Moses’ argument that Holocaust studies is riven by paranoia. Why should seeing the Holocaust as exemplifying the “problems of genocide” — understood in Moses’ terms — mean that one is downplaying the Holocaust? The opposite is the case: The Holocaust should tell us something about the destructive potential of modern states, but it has been siloed in a way that reduces the force of its potential critique, permitting “business as usual” in the modern world. Why, to return to old debates in genocide studies, should placing the Holocaust in a comparative context diminish its significance?

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      If one were to compare the Holocaust with the Boston Tea Party or the Peterloo Massacre, the critics would be justified in objecting. But analyzing it alongside other horrific occurrences, such as the Armenian, Rwandan or Cambodian genocides or cases of genocide in settler-colonial contexts, not only allows one to understand genocide as a generic phenomenon, but it also throws into sharper relief what distinguishes the Holocaust from other genocides — since none are the same. One can be a responsible Holocaust historian and still subscribe to the idea that motivates genocide studies.

      This is a case of fighting the wrong enemy. In the same way that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) sometimes seems more concerned about which historians have signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and reinforcing its own singular and narrow definition of anti-Semitism than about combating the radical right, especially as it seeps into mainstream politics in the United States and elsewhere, Moses’ critics have embarked on seeking to have him “canceled” in a kneejerk fear that his critical takedown of the “genocide” concept paves the way to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

      What Dirk Moses is seeking to do is to show how the idea of genocide has had opposite effects to those intended, if not by Raphael Lemkin, then by his followers today. He is hardly proposing a world of anarchy or an opening the floodgates to scholarly anti-Semitism. One does not have to agree with everything that Moses says to accept that this is a serious book. Dismissing it as anti-Semitic is nothing more than paranoia in action.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      When the Green Deal Is a No Deal

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      Let’s start with a tricky question. Is the European Union’s Green New Deal a path toward the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050, as European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen sees it? Or do you agree with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s view of the deal as a “utopian fantasy”? Whatever interpretation you are leaning toward, the question itself reveals the current polarization across Europe.

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      As in many other situations when an urgent EU response is needed, like when human rights violations are happening right on the bloc’s borders and shores, the roots of this political polarization are an intended result of populist anti-EU rhetoric spearheaded by the likes of Orban and other illiberal leaders. Nevertheless, the supposed dividing line between “old” and “new” EU member states on the perception of the green transformation is a by-product of failing Europeanization, something Orban and his consorts cannot be blamed for exclusively.

      Fear of Falling Behind

      Card players know the expression “new deal” as the reshuffling of a deck of cards that squares the players’ chances of victory. The Green New Deal, introduced in December 2019 by the European Commission, however, will not reset economic and social inequalities either globally or within the European Union itself. In the case of Hungary, for instance, among its nearly 10 million inhabitants, “income inequality has increased over the past decade and inequalities in access to public services remain high,” according to the 2020 country report by the European Commission.

      Cohesion reports show that although previous policies have made significant contributions, economic and social disparities between member states persist. That’s why the European Commission installed the Just Transition Mechanism and the Just Transition Fund alongside other measures such as the Social Economy Action Plan to compensate possible losers of the transition with funding and social inclusion measures.

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      Experts point out the open questions regarding exactly how much public money will flow to the east. A big part of the transition is to be lifted by private investments. Heated debates on green taxation and investments are partly fueled by fears of “falling further behind the West.”

      Concerns like this engender a general mistrust toward EU policies in the eastern European region. While the current framing of the Green New Deal focuses on the promise of a growth strategy with winners only, recipients in the east traditionally have doubts. Looking back to the 20th century, Europe has had plenty of experience with transitional processes, but lessons learned from various approaches vary tremendously across the continent.

      Bad Memories

      The Czech Republic, for example, is often presented as a transition success story. Yet a more differentiated view shows that the country is still struggling with the destructive effects of an unfinished transition. More than three decades after the change of regime, the political elite is dominated by businesspersons who gained economic power in the 1990s and have established a clientelist system characterized by a cascade of corruption scandals. Still facing a “wage curtain” vis-à-vis the West, the voters’ frustration with such legacies spelled defeat for Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ party in this year’s parliamentary election.

      The new government in Prague is trying to distance itself from previous paths and promotes a transition toward a green economy, emphasizing sanctions against polluters. The rhetoric, however, shows that the government’s commitment to change has its limits when prosperity is at risk. “The Green Deal represents a huge opportunity for Europe to invest in sustainable development, renewable energy and the circular economy. We will support any such measures which will not economically affect the living standards of the population of the Czech Republic,” Petr Hladík, deputy-mayor of Brno, stated recently.

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      Hungary has undergone several economic transitions after World War II. During the 1960s, a centrally-planned economy became more open. Then the so-called “goulash communism” paved the way toward a market economy, which was realized after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

      The economic transition has brought market integration and foreign investments, but also, 17 years after Hungary’s EU accession, welfare levels have not reached those of the original member countries. In the years after 1989, Hungarians experienced high unemployment, social insecurity and a general decline in productivity that has often been seen as the material shock of the transition process.

      In the country’s collective memory, the transition has strong connotations with the rise in social inequality or, as Herman Hoen put it, the reforms that encompassed “welfare gains for some at the expense of others.” Negative experiences from transition periods, therefore, fuel the mistrust and general pessimism toward narratives of change and progress.

      When it comes to environmental awareness that forms the basis for climate action, we must understand that both Marxist and capitalist ideologies have been strongly shaped by a worldview that sees nature as an obstacle to economic growth. Environmentalists in countries like Hungary, former Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria had successfully channeled a broad critique of the system by raising environmental concerns. But soon after the initial democratic transition, attention shifted toward economic priorities.

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      Some argue that the transitions of 1989-90 in Eastern Europe have ended with the accession to the EU in 2004 but, facing a democratic backlash, clientelism and attempts at state capture today, it seems more appropriate to describe it as an incomplete transition. Particularly, civil society and social movements offer insights into the non-linearity of democratic consolidation processes.

      Although post-communist countries have very different transition processes and experiences, some suffering more, others less, they still share common struggles with social injustice and corruption as well as bad memories of the era of transformation.

      Disillusionment

      As a result of this disillusionment, many post-communist countries experienced a massive exodus to the West. According to Ivan Krastev, “With social inequality rising and social mobility stagnating in many countries in the world, it is easier to cross national borders than class barriers.” Many of those who stayed have become supporters of Orban and other populists who claim to be treated as second-class members of the EU and call out alleged double standards. Blaming Brussels for high energy prices, for example, falls on fertile ground.

      In addition, growing disparities in fundamental values and migration practices fuel fears over further disintegration of the EU along an increasing east-west divide. If we look at the perception of climate action in Europe, this divide can be detected here too. In fact, although all member states agreed on the Green New Deal, it has many stumbling blocks in its path.

      A study by the European Council on Foreign Relations shows that “Europeans are divided over a range of climate issues, including the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), the role of nuclear energy in Europe’s future energy mix, bridging technologies with which to facilitate the transition to net zero, and the socio-economic consequences of closing down carbon-intensive industries.” The study also reveals that alliances along this fault line do not align in two diametrically opposed camps. This enables varying alliance-building measures and avoids stagnation when it comes to major decisions ahead.

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      According to a Eurobarometer survey from 2019, the awareness for necessary actions against climate change is increasing in all member states. When it comes to the question of whether climate change is one of the most serious problems, countries like Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania are at the other end of the scale. Socio-demographic data show a clear correlation between awareness and the financial stability of respondents. Those with fewer financial difficulties are most likely to consider climate change as the most serious problem.

      In the case of Hungary, there is a true clash of perceptions with the European Commission. But Viktor Orban is facing an election in early 2022 that might lead to a change in the power balance. In the end, the benefits from the financial resources of the Green New Deal might speak in its favor.

      Bedtime Stories of Growth

      “This transition will either be working for all and be just, or it will not work at all,” said Von der Leyen after the College of Commissioners had agreed on the European Green Deal. According to the Commission’s Just Transition Mechanism, the most vulnerable regions and sectors should receive compensation for disadvantages. When facing informed criticism of gender-blind environmental policies, studies on energy poverty in former communist countries, the concept of “black ecologies” as well as the colonial legacy and the continuing global injustice of the Anthropocene, we must admit that it is impossible for today’s policies — and politicians — to predict who will make up tomorrow’s vulnerable groups.

      There is no doubt that Europe needs inclusive and smart policies, but regulations alone will not be enough. All green transformation mechanisms must be accompanied by multi-dimensional democratic reform. This means, first of all, the establishment of transnational agoras for grassroots participation in environmental policymaking. There needs to be a strong and broad democratic foundation as policy can only succeed once the trust in institutions is restored. Political culture and path dependencies are powerful and often underestimated barriers of change that can hardly be addressed by policy alone and require strong local civil societies.

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      Speaking of trust, the European Commission’s current narrative of a “new growth strategy” carries the risk of creating a false promise of a “transition without losers” while not being able to think ahead to identify all obstacles. Even if serious endeavors can alleviate most of the social costs of the transition, the measures will fail if structural reforms of the social welfare systems and education are being neglected.

      Coping with the climate emergency uncovers the EU’s biggest weakness, namely its various divisions. Cohesion policies need to be more inclusive to guarantee effectiveness. While many actors within the bloc and on its margins have already joined the new gold rush for renewables, the scramble for the enormous EU funds brings severe risks of corruption and exploitation of natural resources in countries with weak economies and democracies, like the Jadar project in Serbia clearly demonstrates.

      Universal Change of Perspective

      Nationalistic and ethnic biases have led to dysfunctions and hampered cooperation among civil society actors before and after 1989. Donatella Della Porta and Manuela Cainai’s demands for a “Europeanization from below” should not be caught up in the dynamics of a green transition. We have a historic chance for environmental concerns to be expressed on all levels of society, and the ears of EU institutions are wide open.

      With the liberal opposition in Hungary joining forces against illiberal politicians in power, civil society’s ability to compromise and cooperate will decide its success. If it takes its role as watchdog and mediator between society and state seriously, it will need to develop trustworthy narratives of transition.

      From a global perspective, the current story is built on risky grounds. The old growth strategy cannot be simply supplanted by a new one. If the Green New Deal means an agreement where, in the end, power and money stay concentrated in the global north while resources and advantages of the EU’s margins — such as the western Balkans — are exploited, the outcome of the transition will be a total disintegration of the EU accompanied by severe social upheavals. 

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      For many people then, the Green New Deal will not be a deal at all. The main responsibility for decarbonization lies with the global north. In this sense, the EU’s framing of climate action must be aligned with an honest inconvenient truth that it is not a trade deal with winners only but a unilateral sacrifice of privileges and a total change of perspective for the sake of all humanity.

      As Mariana Mazzucato recently stated in Nature Sustainability, “What is needed now is to move beyond the static debate about growth or no growth and instead focus on fundamentally redirecting development towards achieving the goal of a more inclusive and sustainable planet. We need to pivot from a reactive market-failure-fixing approach towards a proactive market-shaping one.”

      It is crucial that the Green New Deal is not just seen as a top-down policy bundle or a golden pot of money from Brussels, but a chance to reduce inequalities and to create a “good jobs economy.” The EU’s climate policies are indeed paving the way for decarbonization, but divisions within the bloc will always remain and might even further increase once the motor of growth revs up. The fight against climate change and injustice will then once again be led by civil society and proactive citizens, who need to follow a shared vision and hold politicians and corporations accountable for their actions.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe.]

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

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      in World Politics

      The Value of EU Citizenship in a Post-Brexit World

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      In the 1980s, I was born having freedom of movement across Europe, when Britain was part of the European Economic Community. The concept of EU citizenship was formally established in 1993, as part of the creation of the European Union itself, under the Maastricht Treaty.

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      Freedom of movement in Europe was always something I took for granted. I saw Europe as part of our heritage, despite the grumblings of euroskeptics and sly articles in the British press about the perils of straight bananas and the metric system. 

      I traveled a lot in my youth, but travel was never really the issue. Citizens of many countries from outside the EU can stay in the Schengen zone for up to 90 days without a visa. It wasn’t until 2009 that the benefits of being an EU citizen became obvious to me. 

      Free to Work and Study in Europe 

      I signed up for a master’s degree in Brussels, Belgium. The beauty of this was, as an EU citizen, the entire degree cost me only €500 ($560). It was taught in English and full of students from all over the world.

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      There was no paperwork to deal with, no need to prove income, no need to apply for any student visas. Education in Belgium was as open to me as education in my country of origin. And that would have been the same for education in any country in the EU. 

      I stayed in Belgium for two years. During that time, I could work freely without any authorization. I taught English at the European Parliament. I also did a number of freelance jobs on the side. But I could have worked anywhere, from behind a bar, to the top levels of the European institutions. 

      As an EU citizen, I had the right to live and work in Belgium, just as I did with any other country in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). No sponsorship needed, no work visa, no permission of any kind. 

      I often traveled back and forth between London and Brussels. The Eurostar was, and still is, the best mode of transport. It takes you directly from the center of one capital into the center of the other. With an EU passport, going through immigration was quick and simple. In contrast, passport holders from outside the EU had to wait in a separate queue, all herded together. 

      I didn’t use my EU freedom of movement rights again for 10 years. But that would be for the final time, as a big change was coming. 

      The Vote That Changed Everything

      In 2016, a majority of British voters decided the UK should leave the European Union. Millions of British citizens would soon lose their EU rights. People with Irish or other European relatives were desperately applying for second passports.

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      The next few years were chaotic, full of political turmoil and tribalism. The Brexit referendum had split the country down the middle, and things would never be the same again.

      After the vote, there was a rapidly closing window of opportunity to move to the EU. I knew that was the only option for me. So, in the early weeks of 2020, I moved to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Time was running out by then, with the Brexit transition period in full swing. Within months, UK citizens would be officially relegated to third-country national status. 

      There was no time to waste in securing residency in Portugal. As an EU citizen, it was easy. I landed in Lisbon, took my passport and showed up at the nearest municipal office. Thirty minutes and €15 later, I had a five-year temporary residency document for Portugal. 

      Portugal’s citizenship timeline is five years. All being well, that document will allow me to regain my EU rights sometime in 2025, this time as a proud citizen of Portugal — the country I chose.  

      The EU project is far from perfect. Like any large-scale collaboration of humans, it’s fraught with issues. Yes, there’s corruption. Yes, there’s waste and inefficiency. Despite that, the EU is an ambitious project that emerged out of the devastation of the Second World War. The resulting economic cooperation has kept Europe peaceful ever since. In that sense, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

      Citizen of Another Somewhere

      I don’t like nationalism. It’s too easily misused. And I can’t be proud of something that I didn’t achieve: the coincidence of being born on a certain piece of land. Does that mindset make me a “citizen of nowhere”? If so, that’s good. Thanks for the compliment, Theresa. 

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      As the late John le Carre once said, “If you want to make me a citizen of nowhere, I will become a citizen of another somewhere.” An Englishman all his life, le Carre died an Irish citizen, so disappointed was he at the fallout from Brexit. He was fortunate to have that Irish heritage. Not everyone does. And those that don’t have become second-class citizens in Europe.

      National pride is artificially constructed to hold the nation-state together. It plays on our natural inclinations toward tribalism, which is merely an evolutionary hangover. Benedict Anderson’s classic book, “Imagined Communities,” explains these ideas better than I ever could.

      Perhaps the EU is an “imagined community” too. But countries working together, no matter how flawed the process, is the only route we have to improving the world. It’s a project I’m determined to be part of. And if I can’t do so as a British citizen, then I’ll happily do so as a Portuguese. 

      *[Samantha North is the founder of Digital Émigré, an EU citizenship consultancy.]

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

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      in World Politics

      Could There Be War With Russia?

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      First, let’s be clear: Russia already invaded Ukraine. At the end of February 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia seized key facilities in Crimea and then helped secessionists in eastern Ukraine some weeks later. Crimea is now under Russian control and a civil war continues to flare up over the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.

      Second, the United States has repeatedly provoked Russia by pushing the boundaries of NATO ever eastward. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is part of the military alliance, and so are parts of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Ukraine is in a halfway house called “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners” and it has contributed to NATO-led missions.

      The Response to Russia’s Brinkmanship Over Ukraine

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      A majority of Ukrainians — those not living in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk — support NATO membership, according to a November 2021 poll. Such poll results are no surprise given that membership would provide Ukraine with the additional insurance of NATO’s collective defense clause. Of all the countries considering membership in NATO, Ukraine is the one that most threatens Russia’s national interests in what it calls the “near abroad.”

      That’s some of the necessary context to the recent news that Russia has been massing around 100,000 soldiers along its border with Ukraine, coupled with medium-range surface-to-air missiles. Russia argues that such maneuvers are purely precautionary. Ukraine and its supporters think otherwise.

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      The United States has rallied its allies to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. It has promised to levy additional economic sanctions against Moscow as well as send more US troops to Eastern Europe to add to the several thousand American soldiers in Poland as well as those stationed at four US military bases in Bulgaria, a military facility on Romania’s Black Sea coast and elsewhere. The Biden administration has been clear, however, that it wouldn’t send US soldiers to Ukraine to confront Russian invaders.

      Putin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s membership in NATO be taken off the table. He has also called for an immediate security dialogue with the United States and has been strategizing with China’s Xi Jinping on how to coordinate their policies.

      The transfer of troops to the Ukrainian border may simply be a test of the West’s resolve, an effort to strengthen Putin’s hand in negotiations with both Kyiv and Washington, a way of rallying domestic support at a time of political and economic challenges or all of the above. Given enormous pushback from the Ukrainian army among other negative consequences of a military intervention, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not likely in the cards. Putin prefers short wars, not potential quagmires, and working through proxies wherever possible.

      A hot war with Russia is the last thing the Biden administration wants right now. Nor is an actual détente with Moscow on the horizon. But could Putin’s aggressive move raise the profile of US-Russia relations in such a way as to lay the foundation for a cold peace?

      Fatal Indigestion?

      The civil war in Ukraine does not often make it into the headlines these days. Ceasefires have come and gone. Fighting along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian army from secessionist forces breaks out sporadically. Since the beginning of the year, 55 Ukrainian soldiers have died and, through the end of September, so have 18 civilians, including four children. Many residents of the border towns have fled the fighting, but millions who remain require humanitarian assistance.

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      For the Russian government, this low-level conflict serves to emphasize its main message: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country. Moscow claims that its seizure of Crimea was at the behest of citizens there who voted for annexation in a referendum. It argues that the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are simply exercising their right of self-determination in a political climate that discriminates against Russian speakers. Such fissures in the territory of Ukraine, according to this logic, suggest that the government in Kyiv doesn’t have complete control over its borders and has thus failed at one of the principal tests of a nation-state.

      For Ukraine, the issue is complicated by the presence of a large number of Russian-language speakers, some of whom feel more affinity for Moscow than Kyiv. A 2019 law that established Ukrainian as the country’s primary language has not helped matters. Anyone who violates the law, for instance, by engaging customers in Russian in interactions in stores, can be subjected to a fine. So far, however, the government hasn’t imposed any penalties. That’s not exactly a surprise given that the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the law when he was running for office, is more comfortable speaking Russian in public.

      Despite its domestic challenges and the recent history of Russian military incursions, Ukraine is very much a country. It is a member of the United Nations. Only a handful of states — Somalia, Palau — have neglected to extend it diplomatic recognition. There is no strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s place in the international order as compared to, say, Taiwan.

      Not even Putin, despite his paeans to “one Russia,” realistically contemplates trying to absorb a largely resistant country into a larger pan-Slavic federation with Russia and Belarus. After all, Moscow has had its challenges with the much smaller task of integrating little Crimea into the Russian Federation. Upgrading the peninsula’s infrastructure and connecting it to the Russian mainland has cost tens of billions of dollars even as the sanctions imposed by the West have cost Russian corporations more than $100 billion. A water crisis in Crimea — because Ukraine blocked the flow from the Dnieper River into the North Crimean Canal — has offset the infrastructure upgrades Moscow has sponsored, leading to speculation last year that Russian would invade its neighbor simply to restart the flow of water.

      Invading Ukraine to resolve problems raised by the earlier invasion of Crimea would turn Vladimir Putin into the woman who swallowed a fly (and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider and so on). Such a strategy promises larger and more diverse meals followed by the inevitable case of fatal indigestion.

      An Improbable Peace?

      So far, the Biden administration has offered a mix of threats and reassurances in the face of a possible Russian invasion. New sanctions and the dispatch of additional troops to Eastern Europe have been balanced by the refusal of the administration at this point to consider any direct involvement in Ukraine to counter Russian forces. Biden communicated this strategy not only in speeches, but in a two-hour telephone call with Putin last week. It was, by all accounts, a diplomatic conversation, with no bridge-burning and no Donald Trump-like fawning.

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      Biden and Putin may meet in early 2022. If that sounds like deja vu, you’re right. After Russia mobilized troops on Ukraine’s border last April, a Biden–Putin summit took place in mid-June in Geneva. Long ago, North Korea discovered that missile launches were an effective way of getting Washington’s attention. Russia can no longer count on Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders to secure summits, so it has now adopted the North Korean approach.

      The important thing is that Putin and Biden are talking and that the respective diplomatic establishments are engaging with one another. The problem is that both leaders face domestic pressure to take a more aggressive stance. In the United States, bipartisan efforts are afoot to send Ukraine more powerful armaments and escalate the threats against Moscow. In the Russian Duma, far-right nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and putatively left-wing leaders like Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov have at one point or another called for the outright annexation of Ukraine’s Donbass region. Also, the approval ratings of both Putin and Biden have been dropping over the last year, which provides them with less maneuvering room at home.

      To resolve once and for all the territorial issues involving Ukraine, the latter has to be sitting at the table. The civil war, although still claiming lives, is thankfully at a low ebb. But it’s important to push through the implementation of the 2014 Minsk accords, which committed Ukraine to offer special status to Donetsk and Luhansk that would provide them greater autonomy within Ukrainian borders. Ukraine can bring such a compromise to the table by pushing stalled constitutional amendments through the parliament.

      Crimea is a different problem. Even if Ukraine has international law on its side, it cannot easily roll back Russian integration of the peninsula. As the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer points out, success might be the best form of revenge for Ukraine. If the country manages to get its economic act together — a difficult but not impossible task — it will present itself as a better option for Crimeans than being Moscow’s charity case. Queue a second referendum in which Crimea returns to Ukraine by popular demand.

      The question of NATO membership should be treated with a measure of strategic ambiguity. The US government won’t categorically rule out Ukrainian membership, but it also can deliberately slow down the process to a virtual standstill. Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO troops massed on its border. Putin’s demand that the alliance not engage in a military build-up in countries bordering Russia is worthwhile even outside of its value as a bargaining chip.

      Another major thorn in US-Russia relations is Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Obviously, it should be up to Germany where it gets its energy, and surely Russia is no worse than some of the places the US has imported oil from in the past (like Saudi Arabia). But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is yesterday’s problem. The pipeline will soon become a huge stranded asset, a piece of infrastructure that will send unacceptable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will be made redundant by the falling price of renewable energy. The European Union, additionally, is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that will only add to the cost of imported natural gas, stranding that particular asset even earlier than expected.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Everyone talks about the United States and China working together to battle climate change. The same spirit of cooperation should animate US-Russia relations. The Russian government has been a little bit more forthcoming of late on setting decarbonization goals, but it has a long way to go, according to the analysis of these three Russian environmental activists.

      Imagine Washington and Moscow working together to wean themselves off of their mutual dependency on fossil fuels. Let’s call it a “green détente” that includes regular “carbon control” summits designed to reduce mutual emissions, much as arms control confabs have aimed to cut back on nuclear armaments.

      Of course, there are plenty of other issues that can and will come up in talks between the two superpowers: denuclearization, cyberwarfare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the future of Afghanistan, UN reform. Sure, everyone is talking about avoiding worst-case scenarios right now. The conflict over Ukraine and the conflict inside Ukraine are reminders that the United States and Russia, despite powerful countervailing pressures, can indeed go to war to the detriment of the whole world. Perhaps Putin and Biden, despite the authoritarian tendencies of the former and the status-quo fecklessness of the latter, can act like real leaders and work together to resolve mutual problems that go well beyond the current impasse in Ukraine.

      *[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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      Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Complicated Puzzle

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      On Friday, December 10, the parliament of the Republic of Srpska, one of the constitutive entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, adopted a Declaration on Constitutional Principles that states that the legislation imposed by the high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina should be considered unconstitutional since the required procedure was not followed. The parliament also adopted conclusions by which it withdraws the formerly given consent to delegate some of Republic of Srpska’s authority to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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      The same conclusions also require the government to propose adequate legislation within six months, which would enable normal functioning in view of the transfer of authority and competencies, formerly given to the federal level, back to the Republic of Srpska. The opposition parties criticized this move as a risky one, which can potentially bring more harm than good.

      Postwar Design

      This news provoked outrage in the centers of Western political power as well as in many mainstream Western media. The European Union and the governments of the US, UK, Germany and France have condemned these conclusions, calling for the respect of the Bosnian state institutions and the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and established the state in its postwar design.

      This may seem a somewhat paradoxical situation given that the Western governments that criticize the leadership of the Republic of Srpska affirm the Dayton Accords, while the leadership in Banja Luka and especially Milorad Dodik — the Serb member of the collective presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by far the strongest political figure in the Republic of Srpska — likewise express their unreserved support Dayton. Dodik has repeatedly claimed that the only way for Bosnia and Herzegovina to continue to exist as a state is the return to the Dayton Agreement and stick to all its articles.

      The problem, however, is not simply a formal one. It is deeply political. The current crisis was triggered by the former high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, who outlawed the denial of the Srebrenica massacre as well as any questioning of the qualification of this crime as genocide.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This was the last straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were, leading the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs immediately to declare that if this legislation — perceived as anti-Serb — is not annulled, they would take steps toward protecting Bosnian Serbs and their entity from illegitimate and oppressive measures coming from the Office of the High Representative. The high representative is best described as the foreign governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina — acting, in reality, as an exponent of the most influential Western governments — with enormous powers and no democratic legitimacy. 

      The Dayton Agreement may have put an end to the war back in 1995, but it created a state which, in one sense, was stillborn. The Bosnian–Herzegovinian Serbs obtained the Republic of Srpska, with which they have primarily identified ever since. Bosnian–Herzegovinian Croats, as the third major ethnic/national community in Bosnia and Herzegovina — although much smaller than the Muslim/Bosniak and Serb ethnic/national groups — ended up without their own entity within the newly established Bosnia and Herzegovina.

      Instead, they were included into the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the other constitutive part of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in addition to the Republic of Srpska. This is what is still provoking dissatisfaction among many Bosnian Croats and the reason why many, if not the majority of them, perceive Croatia, not Bosnia and Herzegovina, as their “home” country.

      Small Yugoslavia

      This means that only among Bosnian Muslims/Bosniaks one can find an overwhelming commitment to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this political dynamic lies the reason why many Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak politicians advocate for a unitary state — and the eventual dissolution of the Republic of Srpska by taking away its key competencies — and for the abandoning of any ethnic/national principles in the election of political representatives under the pretext that this is in accordance with liberal-democratic principles.

      However, this is precisely what is perceived as a threat among many Bosnian Serbs and Croats, since the Muslim/Bosniak ethnic group is the largest one, which means that in practice it would be able to impose its will unto the other two major ethnicities and the institutions that were initially designed to prevent such discrimination.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This means that the “small Yugoslavia,” as Bosnia and Herzegovina used to be called because of its diverse religious and ethnic landscape reminiscent of Yugoslavia as a whole, is facing similar problems that former (big) Yugoslavia failed to resolve. The position of Muslims/Bosniaks (and their leadership) in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be seen in parallel to the position of Serbs in Yugoslavia.

      As the Serbs were the biggest ethnic group present in significant numbers in most Yugoslav republics, the overwhelming majority of Serbs were in support of Yugoslavia as a state. This, however, was perceived by many other ethnic communities as potential oppressiveness. The Serbs thus ended up being the only ones trying to save Yugoslavia from dissolution.

      Similarly, Muslims/Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, being the biggest ethnic/national community, perceive Bosnia and Herzegovina as their country and are trying to centralize and preserve it at all costs, even though this is perceived as oppression by the members of other ethnicities. For many Bosnian Serbs, the survival of Bosnia and Herzegovina is also a question of principle. They often posit the question that if former Yugoslavia could collapse and new states be established from its constitutive parts, why can’t the same happen in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

      Here we come to another major piece of the complicated Bosnian puzzle: the international factor. It was the Western governments — and primarily the US — under whose auspices postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina was created, with its highly inefficient structures and with the Office of the High Representative who, over time, obtained pharaonic powers. Naturally, the governments of the countries that have sponsored this arrangement are unwilling to admit that the whole experiment was a tremendous failure and that their interventions have actively prevented the development of democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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      In addition, Bosnia and Herzegovina, just as the Balkans as a whole, is also the terrain for bigger games and powerplay between the US-led alliance (which, in reality, is much less coherent than it is claimed), Russia and Turkey. Western politicians and the media are trying to explain the situation to the Western audience by blaming the local politicians, especially the Bosnian Serb leadership, as pro-Russian. What they are selling to their citizens is the story that everything will be fine as soon as the old politicians go and new ones, loyal to the West, take over.

      However, blaming everything on corrupt and irresponsible political elites will not resolve the structural problems that are, to a large extent, created by generous Western support. Yes, political elites — and not only in the Balkans — tend to be corrupt, irresponsible and ready to exploit people’s misery and nationalistic sentiments to their own advantage. This is, however, only one dimension to the complex story that tends to be grossly oversimplified in the mainstream Western media. The real problems are deeper, and the policies of influential Western governments are still only adding fuel to the fire.

      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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      Washington’s Tawdry Victory Over Julian Assange

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      Last week witnessed the 80th anniversary of a moment in history qualified by Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy.” On December 8, 1941, the president announced that the United States was declaring war after Japan’s unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor a day earlier. A nation that had spent two decades wallowing in isolationism instantly became one of the principal and most powerful actors in a new world war. Victory on two fronts, against Germany and Japan, would be achieved successively in 1944 and 1945.

      Last week ended with its own day of infamy when a British court overturned an earlier judgment banning the extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Following in the footsteps of the Trump administration, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department successfully appealed the ban in its relentless effort to judge Assange for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, itself a relic of the history of the First World War.

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      Back then, President Woodrow Wilson’s government pulled no jingoistic punches when promoting America’s participation in Europe’s war. It actively incited the population to indulge in xenophobia. Public paranoia targeting Germany, the nation’s enemy, reached such a pitch that Beethoven was banned from the concert stage, sauerkraut was officially renamed “liberty cabbage” and hamburger “liberty steak.”

      The manifestly paranoid Espionage Act sought to punish anyone who “communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver or transmit to any foreign government … any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, etc.” The law, specifically for a state of war, was so extreme it was rarely used until Barack Obama unearthed it as the elegant solution for suppressing the whistleblowers he had vowed to defend in his first presidential campaign.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Despite overindulging his taste for punishing whistleblowers, Obama refrained from seeking to extradite Assange. He feared it might appear as an assault on freedom of the press and might even incriminate The New York Times, which had published the WikiLeaks documents in 2010. In the meantime, Democrats found a stronger reason to blame Assange. He had leaked the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential primary campaign. Democrats blamed the Australian for electing Donald Trump.

      During his 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly praised WikiLeaks for its willingness to expose the undemocratic practices of the Clinton campaign. But once in power, Trump’s administration vindictively demanded Assange’s extradition from the UK for having revealed war crimes that deserved being hidden for eternity from the prying eyes of journalists and historians. 

      Many observers expected Biden to return to the prudent wisdom of Obama and break with Trump’s vindictive initiative. He could have quietly accepted the British judge’s decision pronounced in January. Instead, his Justice Department appealed. Unlike Trump, who sought to undermine everything Obama had achieved, Biden has surprisingly revealed a deep, largely passive respect for his predecessor’s most dangerous innovations — not challenging corporate tax cuts, the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and Trump’s aggressive support for Israel’s most oppressive policies with regard to Palestinians.

      Biden’s eagerness to follow Trump’s gambit aimed at subjecting Assange to the US brand of military-style justice allowed New York Times journalists Megan Specia and Charlie Savage to describe Friday’s decision by the British court as a success for the administration. “The ruling was a victory,” they wrote, “at least for now, for the Biden administration, which has pursued an effort to prosecute Mr. Assange begun under the Trump administration.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Victory:

      Triumph in combat, including, at two extremes, cases marked by heroic action and others prompted by malicious self-serving motives and driven by the perpetrator’s confusion of the idea of justice with sadistic, vindictive pleasure

      Contextual Note

      The Times journalists quote Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, who “said the government was ‘pleased by the ruling’ and would have no further comment.” At no point in the article do the authors evoke the hypothesis that Biden might have sought to overturn Trump’s policy. Nor do they analyze the reasons that could undermine the government’s case. They do quote several of Assange’s supporters, including one who called “on the Biden administration again to withdraw” the charge. Serious observers of the media might expect that a pillar of the press in a liberal democracy might be tempted to express its own concern with laws and policies that risk threatening its own freedom. Not The New York Times. This story didn’t even make its front page. None of its columnists deemed it deserving of comment.

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      Journalist Kalinga Seneviratne, writing for The Manila Times, offered a radical contrast. “If this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is about promoting ‘press freedom,’” he speculates, “the Norwegian Nobel Committee missed a golden opportunity to make a powerful statement at a time when such freedom is under threat in the very countries that have traditionally claimed a patent on it.” He quotes the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, who claims that “what has been done to Julian Assange is not to punish or coerce him, but to silence him and to do so in broad daylight, making visible to the entire world that those who expose the misconduct of the powerful no longer enjoy the protection of the law.” 

      Deutsche Welle’s Matthias von Hein noted the interesting coincidence that three converging events took place on the same day. “In a bitter twist of irony,” he writes, “a court in London has essentially paved the way for Assange’s prosecution on Human Rights Day — of all days. And how ironic that it happened on the day two journalists were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Last, but not least, it coincided with the second day of the Summit on Democracy organized by US President Joe Biden.”

      Von Hein added this observation: “We’re constantly hearing how Western democracies are in competition with autocratic systems. If Biden is serious about that, he should strive to be better than the world’s dictators.” But, as the saying goes, you can’t teach a 79-year old dog new tricks.

      Historical Note

      The coincidences do not end there. On the same day the news of Julian Assange’s fate emerged, Yahoo’s investigative reporter Michael Isikoff recounted the story of another man “brought to justice” by US authorities: Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The Mauritanian citizen had the privilege of spending 14 years in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba without ever being charged with a crime, even after confessing to the crimes imagined by his torturers.

      It turns out to be a touching moral tale. Even after years of imprisonment and gruesome torture, Slahi “holds no personal animus against his interrogators.” According to Isikoff, “he has even met and bonded with some of those interrogators,” years after the event. “I took it upon myself,” Slahi explained, “to be a nice person and took a vow of kindness no matter what. And you cannot have a vow of kindness without forgiving people.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      It wasn’t the Prophet Muhammad who said, “turn the other cheek” or “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Those words were spoken by the man George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld claimed to revere and whom Bush considered his “favorite philosopher.” The Quran did continue the original Christian insight, pronouncing that “retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it,” and that reconciliation and forgiveness will be rewarded by Allah.

      There has clearly been no forgiveness in Washington for the “evil” committed by Assange: exposing war crimes conducted in secret with American taxpayers’ money. Slahi’s torture was conducted by the declared proponents of “Judeo-Christian” culture. Shahi’s forgiveness stands as an example of what that culture claims as a virtue but fails to embrace in its own actions.

      Shahi is reconciled with his interrogators. But does he also feel reconciled with those who gave them their orders? In 2019, he said, “I accept that the United States should follow and put to trial all the people who are harming their citizens. I agree with that. But I disagree with them that if they suspect you, they kidnap you, they torture you, and let you rot in prison for 15 or 16 years. And then they dump you in your country and they say you cannot have your passport because you have already seen so many things that we don’t want you to travel around the world to talk about.”

      Despite appearances, Mohamedou Ould Shahi’s case is not all that different from Julian Assange’s.

      *[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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      Right Think: Jane Austen Against Terrorism

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      A creative British judge has demonstrated how judgments in criminal cases need not be about meting out humiliating, painful punishment to the guilty. In the case of 21-year-old Ben John, accused of acts identifying him as a “terror risk,” the punishment prescribed by Judge Timothy Spencer QC consists essentially of reading works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy. John will return to court three times a year “to be tested on his reading.”

      Ben John’s crime consisted of downloading exactly 67,788 documents that appeal to right-wing terrorists. Call it downloading with intent to read. According to the BBC, “He was arrested in January 2020 and later charged with offenses under the Terrorism Act, including possessing documents on combat, homemade weapons and explosives.” To be clear, he didn’t actually possess weapons and explosives, merely documents about them. According to John’s attorney, even the prosecution didn’t believe he was planning a terrorist attack. 

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      Understanding the diminished nature of the threat, alongside the fact that he technically did violate a modern law that some complain encourages abuse by law enforcement, the judge gave this account of John’s taste in downloading: “It is repellent, this content, to any right-thinking person. This material is largely relating to Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired ideology.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Right-thinking person:

      Someone who understands the importance of limiting their thinking not only to approved topics but also to approved takes on those topics while accepting to make a concerted effort not to let their thinking wander into unsavory areas

      Contextual Note

      Britain is a nation and a culture that lives and breathes through its awareness of its centuries-old traditions. The idea of “right-thinking” cannot be defined by any law, but instead of being discarded, as it would be in the US, thanks to the British perception of the weight of its inherited culture, the concept can be credibly invoked in a courtroom and even figure in a verdict. Judge Spencer apparently believes the key to becoming a right-thinking citizen is to practice being a right-reading citizen. A clear-headed judge in the US applying the same logic would impose reading the law, not works of fiction.

      Judge Spencer understands that knowing the law isn’t enough. Thinking like a good Englishman requires familiarity with great English writers of the past. And it must be the past. In his list there is no Martin Amis, Ali Smith, Ian MacEwan or even 20th modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Joyce Cary or D.H. Lawrence. Right-thinking English society reached its pinnacle more than a century ago.

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      It stopped evolving at the beginning of the 20th century, by which time all British citizens were expected to understand at least that part of a dying empire’s heritage. This judgment reveals that the nostalgia for a society of the queen’s right-thinking subjects remains a powerful cultural force in British society.

      John’s lawyer described his client’s character as “a young man who struggled with emotions; however, he is plainly an intelligent young man and now has a greater insight.” Perhaps the judge expects that John’s reading of great works from the past will inspire him to become a writer himself, making him not only right-thinking but even an active contributor to the perpetuation of the literary tradition that defines the nation’s greatness. John may even be inspired to take up writing his own dramatic story. Instead of engaging in the crime of downloading with intent, he may start uploading with creative ambition. 

      This legal episode may leave the reader of the article with the impression that the judge regrets not having pursued a vocation in academia and is using the opportunity to hone his skills as a literature teacher. On that score, Judge Spencer may risk falling into the trap of the great British tradition of imitating a cast of despotic, if not sadistic headmasters and superintendents, on the model of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in “Hard Times.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      There is a hint of Dickensian severity in Spencer’s formulation of the young man’s sentence: “On 4 January you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.” But unlike Gradgrind — who condemned “fancy” (“You are never to fancy”) and promoted “fact, fact, fact” — by imposing fiction, Spencer may even be encouraging the development of John’s fancy, so long as it stays close to what right-thinking people fancy.

      John’s barrister, Harry Bentley, reassured the judge: “He is by no means a lost cause and is capable of living a normal, pro-social life.” The term “pro-social” should be taken as a synonym of “right-thinking,” which means not “Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired.”

      Historical Note

      The judge mentioned some specific titles of works that John will be expected to read, all of them works that belong to the prestigious history of English literature. Judge Spencer gave this specific instruction: “Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.” Apart from Shakespeare, these are all 19th-century writers. In their works, they describe the material, social and economic conflicts that concerned people living in a world that has little in common with today’s reality.

      These novels reflect in different ways the impact of the momentous change as a formerly rural society was overturned by industrialization. Is it reasonable to think a young extremist of the 21st century will be able to learn from such examples?

      Embed from Getty Images

      We are left wondering at what the chosen titles mean for the judge himself and what impact he expects them to have on the man accused of terrorist tendencies. Will the preoccupations of a destitute gentry in the early 19th century in “Pride and Prejudice” provoke some epiphany for the young man? Will the absurdly melodramatic pseudo-political events Dickens situates during the French Revolution in “The Tale of Two Cities” clarify his ideas about radical politics?

      Does the judge expect that the subtle confusion about a twin playing at reversing her gender role in Shakespeare’s sublime comedy will effectively educate John on the subtleties of sexual identity and help him to nuance his opinions on homosexuality?

      Depending on how he conducts the discussion sessions around the convicted man’s readings, the magistrate may be creating a precedent that is worth imitating in other cases of individuals with terrorist inclinations. Calling great writers of the past as witnesses of what right-thinking people believe will at least rob such individuals of the time they would dedicate to reading downloaded extremist literature. It’s a question not of fighting fire with fire, but with comforting warmth. 

      There is a problem, however. Understanding what Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and others had to say requires delving into the history of their times and the modes of thought that accompanied those times. We might even wonder how right-thinking these authors were. Shakespeare in particular left hints that he wasn’t very fond of the oppressive order he was living under. His form of protest was not to download instructions provided by Guy Fawkes (who did attempt to blow up Parliament), but the texts of his tragedies that indirectly express his doubts about the existing political order.

      Embed from Getty Images

      For Shakespeare, something was rotten in England as well as Denmark, and the time was clearly out of joint. He carefully avoided appearing too subversive from fear of the temporal power that would inevitably accuse him under the Elizabethan version of the Terror Act.

      Judge Spencer has nevertheless defined a noble course of action in this particular case. Let us hope that he is up to the task as a teacher. If he does succeed, we should recommend his example for handling future cases of intelligent individuals so disturbed by the reigning hypocrisy that they become ready to embrace ideas pointing in the direction of terrorism. Given the constant degradation of our political culture and of the trust people are willing to put in our political leaders and the justice system itself, such examples in the near future are likely to be legion. 

      *[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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      COVID-19: The Lab Leak Theory Makes a Comeback

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      The sudden reemergence of the lab leak theory earlier this year — that COVID-19 was made in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — has hit international media and occasioned nervous reactions from the Biden administration, which demanded a conclusive report on the origins of the pandemic within 90 days. That deadline has just expired, with little result. As the head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies program, Michael Ryan, stated last week, “The current situation is that all of the hypotheses regarding to the origins of the virus are still on the table.”

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      The radical right has, in the meantime, become obsessed with the lab leak idea. Those of us who have experienced — and survived — coordinated campaigns of abuse on social media recognize the signs: Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, people you have never heard of begin to spam your email or social media accounts. Someone has pointed the trolls in your direction, and you start to wonder, who and why?

      Someone’s Errands

      In the final days of May, “Mikael” emailed me: “So the most likely truth about Corona is a conspiracy idea that is a threat against democracy? What kind of nut are you that is so wrong? Who’s errands do you run?”

      The background to his kind email, followed up by another a few days later, was an article published a week earlier in the right-leaning Swedish journal Kvartal. Here, journalist Ola Wong suggested that a report — I happen to be its author — published by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) aims to serve the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In a gross simplification of what the report actually stated, Wong alleged that it “cautions against blaming China” and “goes so far as to claim that searching for an answer to the origin of the virus and the responsibility for its spread basically amounts to a desire to find a ‘scapegoat’. MSB says that this is the hallmark of conspiracy theories and a threat to democracy.”

      What I did in my report was provide an overview of how conspiracy theories around COVID-19 are part of what the WHO has branded the “infodemic” — an infected infoscape in which different actors spread disinformation for various purposes, such as to denigrate their political opponents and attack expert knowledge. I distinguish between six areas of conspiratorial imagination in relation to the pandemic: origins, dissemination, morbidity and mortality, countermeasures in politics and public health, vaccination and metatheories.

      Both separately or in various combinations, all these six categories have fueled conspiratorial meaning-making. In some cases, they have driven processes of radicalization toward violent extremism, such as attacks against 5G technology, mass demonstrations leading to political violence or disgusting displays of racist stereotypes.

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      Moreover, as a historian of ideas, I don’t study the root causes of or treatments for a contagious virus that has killed millions across the globe but rather the conceptions and discourses connected to it. In that sense, I am less interested in what really caused the pandemic and more invested in studying how different concepts — for instance about its origins — are used in (conspiratorial) rhetoric around the subject. It is also not my ambition or task to investigate the likeliness of a lab leak or the possibility that the COVID-19 vaccine contains a microchip. So, first of all, Wong — and, as we will see, others alongside him — has failed to capture the basic premises of the report. Just to make my case, the passage Wong reacted to (the MSB report will soon be available in an English translation), reads:

      “The question about the origin of the virus and the disease is infected because there is an underlying accusation of guilt. Could anyone who might have known about the existence of the virus also have stopped its dissemination? Was the outbreak of the virus covered up? Was the virus created in a lab or by transmission from animal to human? Questions like these are of course reasonable to ask, but already early on they were connected to what is an attribute of conspiracy theories: to place blame on someone and point out scapegoats. … By calling COVID-19 ‘the China-virus’ a narrative was established in which China was made responsible for the pathogen, disease and in extension its dissemination. In the trail of imposing guilt, racist Sino/Asiaphobic stereotypes were expressed against people with Asian appearance across the globe.”

      I then made a parallel to the famous claim made by former President Donald Trump and his followers that climate change is a “Chinese hoax to bring down the American economy” and that, in continuation of this line of thought, COVID-19 now is inserted into the narrative with the twist that it would benefit the Democrats in the 2020 election. I concluded that “in both conspiratorial narratives, scientific expertise is rejected.” Furthermore, I quoted an expert from Yale Medical School (Wong wrongly frames it as my opinion) stating that it is both incorrect and xenophobic to “attach locations or ethnicity to the disease.” I also mentioned that the spread of the virus was blamed on a cabal between the CCP and the Democrats.

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      Nowhere in the entire report is it ever claimed or even hinted at that it somehow would be wrong or illegitimate to investigate the origins of the virus as a lab leak. It is true that conspiracy theories typically use scapegoating as one of many rhetoric strategies, and that they are, by extension, threatening democracy for multiple reasons. But it is utterly wrong to suggest, as Wong does, that the report somehow alleges that it would be a threat to democracy to investigate the origins of the pandemic as a lab leak or that the report dismissed such claims as a conspiracy theory.

      Wong writes: “But if you mention China, you risk being labeled as a racist or accused of spreading conspiracy theories. Why has the origin of the virus become such a contentious issue?” But anyway, “MSB’s message benefits the CCP” and its narrative “that the pandemic is a global problem” (well, isn’t it?) and “not a problem originating from China to which the world has the right to demand answers.”

      Chinese Propaganda Machine

      Wong identifies such deflection as an outcome of a cunning Chinese propaganda machine, quoting an article that remembers how the US was blamed for the origin of AIDS/HIV in the 1980s in a similar conspiracy mode. Well, had Wong turned a page of the MSB report, he would have found a passage with the heading “The US-virus,” which exactly explains that another conspiratorial narrative about the origin of the virus also exists. Consequently, it would have similarly been completely absurd to state that the report “serves the interests of the US” since it treats the narrative about the “US virus” as a typical conspiracy theory.

      But such inconsistencies are of no interest to Wong. Instead, he now delves into the by now well-established “new evidence” (it was always suggested as a possibility) that he claims to have “disappeared from the global agenda” (did it really?) about the lab leak theory. The reason why the theory was suppressed, he argues, was because “The media’s aversion to Trump created a fear of association,” and “Because of the general derision for Trump, the established media chose to trust virologists such as [Dr. Peter] Daszak rather than investigating the laboratory hypothesis.”

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      Wong then extensively quotes from science journalist Nicholas Wade pushing for the explanation that “gain-of-function” experiments were carried out in Wuhan and that zoonotic transmission seems unlikely: “What Wade describes is not a conspiracy, but rather an accident for which no one has wanted to assume responsibility.” Wong is obsessed with responsibility and “the day of reckoning” that yet is to come, when China’s guilt finally will be revealed to the global audience. As much as he seems to long for this day when justice will prevail, he implores at the very end of his article to not “let sweeping allegations of conspiracy theories and racism undermine the work to trace the origins of the virus.”

      Wong’s article left me puzzled in many ways, almost unimpressed. I did not state anything in my report that Wong purports I did, so it is difficult to understand why a journalist would find it worthwhile challenging the Swedish Civil Contingency Agency with an argument that has no basis whatsoever.

      Lab Leak Whispers

      Just two days later, Swedish public service radio P1 invited both myself a Wong to come on its morning program to address the question of “What are you allowed to say about the origin of COVID-19?” — stipulating that there is some sort of censorship around the subject. Wong was unable to produce any credible evidence that the CCP ever has called the lab leak theory a conspiracy. There might be, and I am interested to read more about this attribution and its rhetorical function; the Chinese embassy in Washington later used such terminology.

      By then, the fringes of the Swedish radical right had already sniffed out the potential of the story, propelled by the tabloid Expressen, which in bold letters ran the story, “MSB dismisses the lab-leak entirely: follows the line of China.” The article reiterates Wong’s one, but manipulates the content of the MSB report further, alleging that accusations of racism and conspiracy theories stifle the investigation of the origins of COVID-19.

      Radical-right agitator Christian Palme posted Wong’s article on one of Sweden’s Facebook pages for academics, Universitetsläckan, which kicked off a wave of conspiratorial debate. Per Gudmundsson, of the right-wing online news outlet Bulletin, stated in an op-ed that the MSB report made him suspicious. Hailing Hunter S. Thompson’s paranoid style of reporting, Gudmundsson alleges that the Swedish Civil Contingency Agency wants to pacify the people with calming messages. He ridiculed attempts to discuss what is reasonable to do when planning interventions and designing counternarratives to toxic disinformation that can act as drivers of radicalization while at the same time exercating Islamist extremism, without any interest in countering it.

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      Finally, the gross simplifications of Wong’s article had reached the outer orbits of the alternative radical-right media in Sweden, Fria Tider and Samnytt. Fria Tider referenced the controversial Swedish virologist Fredrik Elgh, stating that it is “senseless” that MSB had dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory (it did not). Samnytt, in turn, amplified the Chinese whispers started in Kvartal to a completely new level. In its own version of reality, the MSB report was allegedly released in order to prevent any investigation of China (not true). Under the heading “Prohibited to ask questions,” Samnytt states: “the message of the report is that it is not allowed to ask questions about the origin of the virus” (also not true).

      Moreover, referring to and quoting Gudmundsson’s article on Bulletin, it goes on to state that “instead of questioning the established truths, the report recommends ‘to be in the present and to plant a tree’” — right quote but wrong context — “or to use other methods to calm your thoughts.” The author of the article is Egor Putilov, a pseudonym of a prolific character in the Swedish radical-right alternative media.

      And now back to Mikael. Curious to drag out trolls from under their stones (they might explode in daylight), I answered the first email he sent to me; he replied. Mikael characterized himself as a disabled pensioner (Asperger’s) living in a Swedish suburb among “ISIS-fans, clans, psychopath-criminals and addicts etc. which you most likely have taken part in to create/import.” He asserted to have insights about what is happening behind the scenes related to COVID-19 and that the recent reemergence of the lab leak theory only demonstrated his superiority in analyzing world matters: “If I think something controversial, the rest of Sweden frequently thinks the same twenty years later.”

      He recommended I look for knowledge outside the small circle of disinformed and obedient yes-people within the “system.” I must admit that Mikael’s email was one of the friendlier online abuses I have experienced. On the same day, I also received a message from “Sten” titled “C*ck” and containing a short yet threatening line, “beware of conspiracy theories and viruses… .”

      What If the Scientists Were Wrong?

      As historian and political analyst Thomas Frank eloquently has pointed out, we should expect a political earthquake if a lab leak is indeed confirmed. Frank claims that what is under attack is science itself. Science, we were told, held the answers on how to combat the pandemic. Experts in public health provided scientific evidence for political countermeasures, despised by those who routinely reject science or feel that their liberties have been infringed upon.

      If it is proven that “science has failed the global population,” either by accident, by gain-of-function research getting out of control or, worse, by deliberately creating a bioweapon, both scientists and those who rely on their expertise will come under attack and their authority will be seriously undermined, with unpredictable consequences. Why would people have reasons to believe that climate change is real, that 5G technology is harmless or that cancer might be cured with rDNA treatment? Frank posits that what is at stake is a liberal “sort of cult” of science that was developed against the “fool Trump.” Should it turn out that scientists and experts were wrong, “we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.”

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      Frank and others, such as Wade and his Swedish apologist Wong, allege that it somehow was the media’s fault to cement the lab leak origin as a crazy conspiracy theory just because it was peddled by a president who made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims while in office. When the “common people of the world” find out that they might “have been forced into a real-life lab experiment,” a moral earthquake will be on its way since they will come to the ultimate realization “that here is no such thing as absolute expertise.”

      In the end, this will imply that populism was right all along about the existence of an existential dualism between “the people” and the well-to-do, well-educated ruling “elite” minority that creates and manages an eternal cycle of disasters affecting the majority. I tend to agree: This dualism is in fact a strong driver of populist mobilization and one that reoccurs in most conspiracy theories: we, the suffering people, the victims, against them, the plotting elite, the perpetrators.

      But I would like to add to Frank’s conclusions, that the (social) media outlets as much as the radical-right propagandists were immediately able to smell out the potential of the lab leak as a typical frame by which “the people” like Mikael, Sten, Martin and Per (more and more of them — all male — have started contacting me directly) could be pitched against “fake science,” government agencies and politicians.

      I would say that this, in fact, is the real purpose. In reality, the radical right does not care one bit about the origins of the virus but has discovered a perfect trope with which public distrust in authority can be deepened further. This is the reason why Wong needed to unleash an unsubstantiated attack against the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. He, as much as Gudmundsson, despises any attempt to provide citizens with tools to decode disinformation and conspiracy theories as to allow informed members of society to judge the accuracy of various claims beyond populist apocalypticism. If media literacy and the ability to detect conspiratorial messages increase, sensationalist media outlets will lose their power.

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      One of the three key elements of populism as defined by Benjamin Moffit is a permanent invocation of crisis, breakdown or threat. If this perpetuum mobile is disrupted, the source of populist power is dismantled, which is why Wong and others have to target the firefighters, and why Gudmundsson doesn’t want to hear about how to counter radicalization. The eternal flame of catastrophe is the campfire of populist socialization. Right now, the lab leak theory is a giant burning log providing heat for all these gratifying marshmallows to be grilled and fed to “the people.”

      But there might also be other reasons. By pushing the lab leak hypothesis, the radical right makes the case that “Trump was right” about the “China virus” and, if so, he might also be right about the “stolen” election and all other 29,998 lies uttered during his presidency. Moreover, it was the liberal mainstream media’s fault that the lab leak was “buried” (which it never was) because they are all agents of Chinese disinformation (and communism, as we all know, is the great evil of the 20th century), classical guilt by association. So, in the bigger picture, the lab leak is needed as proof of the infallibility of the great leader in his quest to “drain the swamp.” QAnon will celebrate on the ruins of Capitol Hill.

      However, what worries me most is that the lab leak theory is used by the radical right as an attempt to minimize the danger of anti-Asian racism or any other racist attribution and abuse in case of earlier or later crises and catastrophes. Somehow, not only will science be proven wrong and the great leader right, but racism will be defended as a rational and normal reaction to pandemics. Wait, didn’t the Jews poison our wells at one point?

      *[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