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      Will the NY Times Fixation on Russia End After Biden’s Election?

      by

      Will there ever be a vaccine for the not so novel coronavirus, Russiagate-16? It has clearly infected beyond cure various media outlets and the establishment of an entire political party in the US for the past four years. Even though it has been repeatedly debunked and identified as a pathology by rational critics, multiple news outlets and public personalities continue to show symptoms of succumbing to a disease that is clearly not lethal but diabolically chronic.

      Some say that politicians in Washington can never be cured of any disease other than those specifically listed in their generous government health plans. They also point out that there is little hope of cable television networks recovering from the virus of their favorite conspiracy theory because that is what their audience expects them to feed them every night. Some even speculate that network presenters have actually been cured, but because their ratings depend on their playing a role that reassures their audience, they keep coughing out the same exaggerations and lies. In the televised media, it’s crucial to appear consistent even when the message contradicts the obvious truth.

      Is Realism in Foreign Policy Realistic?

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      The case of The New York Times is harder to explain. It has miraculously maintained its reputation as a serious newspaper reporting the news and treating it with some depth. There are no audio-visual tricks. Readers cannot be conquered by the studied vocal and facial effects of officials and experts trained to sound authoritative in front of a camera. A reader who peruses a news story in black and white has the time to process the messages it contains, reflect on the nature of the content, appreciate the points of view cited and assess the level of veracity of the facts and opinions.

      In an internal meeting back in August 2019, Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet admitted that the newspaper had gone too far with its Russiagate obsession. In the meantime, many prominent independent journalists and even a former Russia specialist of the CIA have exposed the charade. But even today, The New York Times insists on putting the most visible symptoms of the disease on display. The Russians may not have tampered with elections, but they have literally invaded the copy of The Times’ coverage of the election if not the brains of its journalists.

      Here is the latest example: “American officials expect that if the presidential race is not called on election night, Russian groups could use their knowledge of the local computer systems to deface websites, release nonpublic information or take similar steps that could sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Expect:

      Speculate

      Contextual Note

      The sentence cited above can be reduced to two verb phrases: “American officials expect” and “Russian groups could.” Everything else could be filled by any creative journalist’s imagination. The single word, “expect,” transforms the meaning of what the authors are reporting.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The same sentence would sound vastly more truthful if the authors added “some” before “experts” and if the word “speculate” were to replace “expect”: But some American officials speculate that if the presidential race is not called on election night…

      When officials expect something, it suggests they dispose of solid evidence that provides a high level of probability for their thesis. But a little investigation shows there is no evidence, just wild ideas.

      It is possible that the officials do expect behavior even without evidence. In that case, the journalists should follow up by explaining why they do so. We know, for example, that some members of the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, expect “the rapture” or the second coming of Christ to occur in their lifetime. Could something similar be taking place in the minds of the officials cited here? Here at The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, we expect that is the case.

      The idea of expectation often includes the hope that the subject of speculation will come true. That certainly applies to Pompeo’s expectation of the rapture. The Times journalists claim that the officials they cite expect Russian groups “to deface websites, release nonpublic information or take similar steps that could sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results.” This leaves the impression that they are hoping to find evidence of such acts. None of those nefarious deeds is likely to seriously compromise the integrity of the US presidential election results, but proof of their existence would validate the experts’ and The Times’ belief in the culpability of the scapegoat they have been promoting for the past four years.

      When analyzing the pathology of the Russiagate syndrome, the language the authors use reveals their intent. They designate the culprit as “Russian groups.” What does that mean? It could be random individual Russians or a complicit association of Russians. It could be Russians using the web for fun, profit or getting even with someone or some other group of people.

      But the word “groups” sounds vaguely sinister. And, of course, Russiagate from the beginning was always about a suspicion of collusion and conspiracy. The journalists clearly want the idea to germinate in the readers’ heads that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a key member of the group and probably the one who ordered and engineered the operation.

      Though they leave the accusation open, they know that they can always count on Democratic Representative Adam Schiff to connect the dots. Schiff came straight out and accused Putin, claiming it is neither expectation or speculation, but knowledge: “We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff told CNN, with nothing to back it up. At the same time, the political scientist Thomas Rid, writing in The Washington Post, inadvertently revealed how the system works when he counseled on Saturday: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation – even if they probably aren’t.”

      Who needs knowledge or even reasonable speculation when you can formulate an “expected” result as a solid truth?

      Historical Note

      In the past, politicians and the media invented stories of attacks, interference and threats only when their aim was to provoke a serious armed conflict. Whether it was the sinking of Maine in 1898 that launched the Spanish-American War, the Bay of Tonkin incident in 1964 that triggered the conflict in Vietnam or the weapons of mass destruction imagined in the collective screenplay authored by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell before invading Iraq in 2003, the accusation of a violation of US political or moral space (even in foreign waters) proved “necessary” only as a prelude to declaring or prosecuting war.

      Russiagate was never intended to provide a pretext for war. Instead, it began as the means for the Democrats to save face and explain away their humiliating defeat in 2016 to the most unpopular and manifestly incompetent presidential candidate of all time, Donald Trump. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton was already a close second in terms of unpopularity. But Trump ultimately proved his claim to the title by losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes while winning the election.

      Any rational observer of politics should have seen and understood the pattern at the time. Most people yawned at the comic absurdity of it. Few imagined that it might still populate the discourse of the Democratic Party four years on. Fewer still would have imagined that The New York Times would keep running with it over those four years.

      And yet, that’s where we are today. Perhaps the real culprit of the story is Fox News. Its insistence on rehashing the same simplistic lies, distortions and libels night after night while refusing to take any critical distance seems to have created a model for all commercial media and especially its Democratic rivals, including The Times, MSNBC, The Post, CNN and others.

      Dante reserved the eighth circle of hell for liars, just one flight up from Satan’s own dwelling. No one doubts that Trump deserves a special spot in that circle, given the number of lies he tells on a daily basis. But media outlets that try to tell the truth while repeating the same single lie day after day, year after year probably also merit their own little corner of that circle.

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

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

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      in World Politics

      Star Trek vs. the Radical Right: Visions of a Better World

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      Science fiction has a long history of progressive politics. Probably the best-known example is the Star Trek franchise that started in the 1960s with an Asian helmsman, a navigator from Russia and a black woman as a communications officer and features non-binary and transgender characters in the upcoming third season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” Such politics are not that of the radical right, be they communicated through doctrinaire texts or (science) fiction(s) of a “better world,” the latter being arguably more persuasive due to their emotive nature and a good story’s ability to psychologically transport the reader away from reality and into the world of a hero’s fictive journey.

      An occasion where these two modes meet is Guillaume Faye’s “Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age,” which was originally published in French in 1998. Faye recently featured on these pages, and it is thus sufficient to say that this key thinker of the radical right puts forward a specific argument against egalitarianism and the philosophy of progress.

      Did a French Far-Right Thinker Predict 2020?

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      Following an introduction, “Archeofuturism” starts with an assessment of the Nouvelle Droite (the New Right), including criticism of “ethno-cultural relativism” that prevented the affirmation of “the superiority of our own civilization.” This is followed by a chapter on archeofuturism; an “Ideologically Dissident Statements”; Faye’s discussion of a two-tier world economy; a chapter entitled “The Ethnic Question and the European”; and, finally, a short science fiction story to which I now turn.

      The Great Catastrophe

      Concerning archeofuturism, Faye introduces archaism in terms of the unchangeable “values, which are purely biological and human,” meaning separated gender roles, defending organic communities and “explicit and ideologically legitimated inequality” among social statuses, while futurism is described as “the planning of the future,” a “constant feature of the European mindset” that rejects “what is unchangeable.” Hence, “Archeofuturism” celebrates technological advancements such as genetic engineering from a distinctly radical-right ethos.

      Not quite Star Trek’s message, but why bother? Although Faye presents “Archeofuturism” in a classic intellectual style, he also attempts to increase its appeal by fictionalizing his ideas. That is, a story at the end of the book conveys not simply its key points, but an entire, alternative future. This final chapter is not simply dystopian, as is the case with so many radical-right fiction novels, but utopian — not foregrounding decadence and catastrophe, but “the good life” and a happy rebirth of “our folk — whether in Toulouse, Rennes, Milan, Prague, Munich, Antwerp or Moscow.” Thus, the story facilitates emotional identification with a not so distant future, warranting a closer look at this fictionalization of radical-right politics.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short story is entitled “A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov: A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times” and introduces the reader to Faye’s future through the eyes of the Plenipotentiary Councillor of the Eurosiberian Federation Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov on a day in June 2073. It describes what happened following the “Great Catastrophe,” a convergence of catastrophes central to Faye’s theory that allegedly manifests the end of the “fairytale ideology” of egalitarianism and progress underpinning modernity.

      According to Faye, this is the convergence of seven main crises: a demographic colonization of Europe; an economic and demographic crisis; the chaos in the South; a global economic crisis; the rise of religious fanaticism, primarily Islam; a North-South confrontation; and environmental pollution, which, interestingly, includes an unambiguous acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. Faye assumed this convergence to take place between 2010 and 2020. The story speaks of 2014-16 and tells the reader that, consequently, 2 billion people had died by 2020.

      Readers furthermore learn that following this Great Catastrophe, the Eurosiberian Federation, resulting from the fusion of the European Union and Russia, was founded. Indeed, the idea of a federal Europe is central to Faye’s approach. In contrast to most of his fellow travelers on the radical right, Faye views the contemporary European Union as an insufficient but necessary step toward this federation. Such an imperial block — like India, China, North America, Latin America, the Muslim world, black Africa and peninsular Asia — would be a semi-autarky and an actor on the world stage while simultaneously enabling strengthening of regional identities across the federation.

      Another key element of Faye’s theory, its unrestricted celebration of technoscience, is also present throughout the story. For example, Oblomov speaks of a base on Mars and spends most of the story on a “planetary train” from Brest to Komsomolsk, a journey which takes only about three hours.

      However, within the federation, only 19% cent of the population participate in the technoscientific economy and way of life which “solve[ed] the problems of pollution and energy waste – the planet could finally breathe again. … Still, it was too late to stop global warming, the greenhouse effect and the rise of sea levels caused by wide-scale toxic emissions in the Twentieth century. Science had made rapid progress, but it only affected a minority of the population; the others had reverted to a Medieval form of economy based on agriculture, craftsmanship and farming.”

      Not only is this program manifestly inegalitarian, Faye also simply assumes that the vast majority, in fiction and reality, will enjoy a pre-industrial, neotraditional way of living. Faye’s technoscientific vision includes chimeras and the genetic manipulation of children, the benefits of which will only be available to a minority.

      Extra-European

      Turning to the representation of women, the story introduces three in particular and not untypical ways: Oblomov’s wife, who looks after the children and who only really enters at the end of the story; a virtual female secretary — not “a fat and repulsive old hag” but one who “had perfect measurements, always appeared in scanty dresses and made suggestive remarks from time to time”; and a “dark-skinned and very beautiful girl.” In fact, it is through the conversation between this Indian girl and Oblomov during the train ride that the reader learns much about Faye’s archeofuturist vision.

      Finally, Faye’s vision of the post-catastrophic age includes the cleansing of Europe from its “extra-European” population. In Faye’s writing, Islam is the main enemy and, consequently, the story reports an invasion of Europe by an Islamic army in 2017 that teams up with ‘“ethnic gangs”’ before a Reconquista (with the help of Russia) leads to victory and the deportation of millions of descendants of extra-European immigrants. Unsurprisingly, deportation is driven by archaic criteria as Faye talks about the “right of blood” and the “collective biological unconscious.” 

      A radical-right publisher in Germany recently released the story as a stand-alone book, and the piece is particularly notable due to its direct transformation of theory into science fiction. Indeed, the story is a prime example of how radical-right fictional accounts “imagine the unimaginable” — the transformation toward what the radical right considers a “better world.” Not only fans of Star Trek should take notice of such worlding as the latter can have real-world consequences.

      *[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

      The Russian Pathology Deepens at The NY Times

      by

      The Daily Devil’s Dictionary cannot help but love The New York Times, with increasingly diabolical ardor. Whenever the news cycle goes dry, we can turn to The Times and its documented paranoia for inspiration. The risk is repetition. The reward is the pleasure of picking and consuming low-hanging fruit.

      Yesterday, we focused on a glossy piece of propaganda designed to dismiss US President Donald Trump’s warnings that the results of the US election will be invalid because the new generation of voting machines will be Russia-proof. Now, we have the pleasure of examining The Times’ latest contribution to the revival of the Cold War. This time it’s a spy-versus-spy story, a true Cold War classic.

      The New York Times Confesses to Paranoia

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      A trio of Times journalists — Ana Swanson, Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes — has penned an article bearing the title, “U.S. Diplomats and Spies Battle Trump Administration Over Suspected Attacks.” It turns out to be a valiant effort of their part to resuscitate a story that officially died in 2018. That was when scientists proved that the sophisticated sonic weapon some American diplomats in Cuba believed was targeting their mental health turned out to be nothing more than the sound produced by a certain species of cricket. At no point in their article do the authors acknowledge the debunking.

      Patient readers will find the piece confusing, like so many other Times articles that flood the reader with random facts, creating the impression that some great investigative work has been undertaken. The following paragraph contains the core of the authors’ accusations (or rather insinuations). It illustrates the type of paranoid reasoning The Times has now routinely adopted as a key feature of its editorial policy.

      “The cases involving C.I.A. officers, none of which have been publicly reported, are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide,” the journalists report. “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims, see Russia as the most likely culprit given its history with weapons that cause brain injuries and its interest in fracturing Washington’s relations with Beijing and Havana.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Culprit:

      For The New York Times (and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff), whatever the crime: Russia.

      Contextual Note

      The article consists of a magma of unverified and contradictory accounts of impressionistically reported cases. What the authors cannot achieve by the quality and accuracy of their reporting they try to accomplish through the quantity of random examples. They punctuate the citations with passages of pseudo-reasoning meant to point the reader toward a conclusion that no responsible authority — political or scientific — appears to have reached.

      The paragraph cited above offers a glimpse of the modes of reasoning used to make the article’s thesis sound credible. It cites “cases” that “are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide.” In other words, the central fact is that suspicions exist, which is undoubtedly true. But whose suspicions, other than Times journalists? They do cite something that is factual rather than a mere suspicion: “The C.I.A. director remains unconvinced, and State Department leaders say they have not settled on a cause.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Admittedly suspicions exist. That should be true for any thesis that isn’t clearly established. In the same vein, if there are suspicions (in the plural), we might expect that there will also be suspects. But for The Times, there is only one: Russia. The journalists cite different categories of individuals who designate Russia as the culprit: “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims.” Now, if “some” Russia analysts see Russia as the culprit, it means that others don’t.

      Readers should always maintain a “suspicion” that journalists who rely on citing “some” of a designated group of people are more likely expressing opinion than reporting news. We know how eagerly climate change deniers love to cite “some scientists” who doubt the majority opinion. The Times reporters never tire of citing “some” authorities for their opinions or assessments. 

      Early in the article, to establish that there was a real and not imaginary health problem, they cite “some officers and their lawyers.” At one point, they tell us, “Some C.I.A. analysts believe Moscow was trying to derail that work.” At another, “Some senior officials at the State Department and former intelligence officers said they believed Russia played a role.”

      They occasionally use “some” disparagingly to identify those who have failed to reach their conclusion about Russian guilt. “Some top American officials insist on seeing more evidence before accusing Russia,” the journalists write. They cite the CIA director, Gina Haspel, who “has acknowledged that Moscow had the intent to harm operatives, but she is not convinced it was responsible or that attacks occurred.” Maybe this article will convince her.

      Critical readers should also be suspicious of sentences that begin with the phrase, “it’s obvious.” Quoting Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the article tells us, “It’s obvious how a U.S. adversary would have much to gain from the disorder, distress and division that has followed.” As Sherlock Holmes might observe, the obvious is the first thing to become suspicious of and the last thing to trust, even if what seems obvious does have a bearing on the truth. The Russians probably do think they have something to gain from disorder in the US. But so do others. That “obvious” fact doesn’t point in any specific direction, nor does it imply agency.

      Historical Note

      In the same edition of The New York Times (October 19), an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg has a rhetorical question as its title, “Is the Trump Campaign Colluding With Russia Again?” Goldberg’s suspects the omnipresent Russians were behind the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious hard disk that enabled The New York Post to publish compromising emails for the Joe Biden election campaign. National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, a Trump administration appointee, claims that there is not an iota of evidence to support the claim that Russia is behind the story. The Times counters with an op-ed by John Sipher, a former CIA man who worked for many years in Russia.

      Sipher complains that Ratcliffe’s denial represents nothing more than his willingness to toe Donald Trump’s line. He offers this astonishing moral reflection: “Rather than operating as an honest steward of the large and important intelligence community, Mr. Ratcliffe appears to regard the nation’s secrets as a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons.”

      Let’s try to decipher Sipher’s thoughts. He may be right about Ratcliffe’s loyalty to Trump and the need to suspect he might be lying. No, let’s correct that and say he is absolutely right about not trusting anything Ratcliffe says. But his contention that a director of intelligence should be “an honest steward” is laughable. The whole point about working in intelligence is to be a loyally dishonest steward of somebody’s political agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director, made that clear when he proudly admitted that the CIA trained its people to lie, cheat and steal.

      Presumably, Sipher worked for the CIA under George Tenet, who famously accepted to lie on behalf of President George W. Bush’s agenda and provide false evidence for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” Tenet later complained that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration “pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a ‘serious debate’ about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.”

      By now, most people are aware of The New York Times’ role in supporting and encouraging the invasion of Iraq and confirming as news the Bush administration’s lies. For some people, it was obvious at the time. That in itself is a lesson in the language of the news. When speaking from a historical perspective about what “some” people did and what was “obvious” in a former time, those much-abused tropes of “some” and “obvious” no longer merit our suspicion. The New York Times doesn’t do history. What it does do, and with much insistence, is contemporary political agendas, despite its claim to be an objective vector of today’s news.

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

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

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      in World Politics

      France’s Problem With Freedom of Expression

      by

      The French nation has expressed its unqualified horror and revulsion at the brutal assassination of a teacher last Friday by a deluded fanatic convinced he was applying some kind of divinely ordained justice. Any crime directed against a person because of their beliefs or positions on issues of political significance effectively wounds the human collectivity itself. It denies the most basic principles of any human society.

      We live in a society in which acts of this kind are repeated frequently enough for us to seek the means of understanding the psychology behind them. Society typically reacts initially with a feeling of dismay and fear. It attempts to purge its emotion before seeking to unearth the meaning behind such acts. In the public accounting that follows inevitably two extreme reactions emerge.

      The first comes from those who focus on the fact that the perpetrator’s motivation stemmed from the perception of a real injustice that needs to be addressed. Because every act of violence, including domestic crimes, contains a meaning and a motive, this analysis is justified. It becomes extreme as soon as the focus on understanding leads to dismissing the act as simply an illegitimate form of protest or even justifying it as an act of war.

      The reaction at the opposite extreme comes from those who use the act to extend responsibility to entire groups of people. This implicitly and sometimes explicitly accuses a significant portion of an entire community of approving such acts to the point of encouraging other individuals to engage in similar acts. The assumption is objectively true in times of political or cultural clash, though it usually applies to a limited number of individuals. It becomes extreme when it attributes complicity to an entire community, threatening retribution beyond the scope of criminal justice.

      Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

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      Alas, both extreme reactions inevitably appear in the aftermath of crimes like this one. For the moment, no one has claimed complicity or sought to justify the murder, certainly not France’s Muslim community. The entire political class in France has mobilized to categorically condemn the act, refusing to emit any sympathy for the killer’s possible motives. Some politicians, however, have detected an opportunity to exploit the shock to further their own ends.

      Emmanuel Macron has long understood the electoral value of casting suspicion on France’s Muslim community. The president recently renewed his effort to stake an anti-immigrant position in anticipation of the 2022 election. As soon as the news of the teacher’s assassination broke, Macron called it “a terrorist attack.” Prime Minister Jean Castex claimed to understand the deceased killer’s deeper, broader motives: “Secularism, the backbone of the French Republic, was targeted in this vile act.”

      Macron managed to suggest the blame should be placed on a vast category of people sharing the same worldview. “They’ll never succeed,” he asserted. “Obscurantism will not win.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Obscurantism:

      A term of insult used by dogmatic rationalists to condemn other people for failing to adhere to every one of their dogmas, including their political opinions, which they firmly believe represent scientific truth and philosophical correctness.

      Contextual Note

      Merriam-Webster offers this definition of obscurantism: “opposition to the spread of knowledge: a policy of withholding knowledge from the general public.” Macron conflates the assassination of a teacher with an attack on knowledge itself. But in the era of sophisticated hyperreality, governments, including Emmanuel Macron’s, systematically seek to suppress the spreading of knowledge they find disagreeable while, in the name of national security, withholding from the general public knowledge they deem too precious to share. They also manipulate the media to circulate knowledge that comforts the beliefs associated with their ideology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The background to this story reveals a series of events that call into question two belief systems: one dogmatically religious, the other dogmatically secular. The assassin believed that the teacher, who claimed to use the cartoon to illustrate the secular dogma of “freedom of expression” was an active infidel assaulting Islam in the classroom. The cartoon in question depicted Mohammed with the message “a star is born” on his naked buttocks. The Muslim girl present saw this as pornographic.

      The teacher could have taught his course on freedom of expression in the way education has done for centuries, by verbally explaining the events surrounding the 2015 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. But in our age of audiovisual media, he chose to use a visual prop. Understanding that the images may be toxic for some — one of his students advised him against showing the photo — instead of changing course, he took the extraordinary initiative of inviting Muslim children to leave the room. Because one girl decided to stay and subsequently described what she had seen to her parents, the lesson provoked a public scandal. The school attempted to deal with the issue in a series of meetings.

      None of the commentators seems to have remarked that, though framed as voluntary, the teacher’s suggestion that the Muslims leave the room was a divisive, humiliating and discriminatory act. Imagine the effect of a German teacher in the 1930s inviting Jewish children to leave the room before a lesson on the “Elders of Zion.” Or a teacher in an American school inviting Christian children to leave the room during an illustrated lesson on pornography in the modern world. What responsible educator could be so lacking in cultural delicacy as to fail to assess the psychological impact of such an initiative?

      Macron’s government calls this an attack on secularism. The absurdity of the complaint becomes evident when we consider that the content of the lesson, illustrated by controversial imagery, refers to religion. The French have elevated the idea of secularism — laïcité — beyond the status of the simple principle of the separation of church and state. It has become a republican dogma, with all the irrationality associated with any ideological dogma. The dogma admits two interpretations: that neutral secularism banishes the question of religious beliefs from public life and that aggressive secularism claims superiority over religion.

      The assassinated teacher appears to have applied the second. For a history teacher, he also seems to have been curiously unaware of the historical context. For three decades, the Western world has experienced the troubling ambiguities of what Samuel Huntington called “the clash of civilizations.” Teachers in today’s multicultural societies should be aware of danger zones and understand how to navigate them with ordinary delicacy. They should also be aware that in the West’s specific culture of exacerbated individualism, unhinged individuals who decide they have a mission often feel empowered by the culture itself to carry out the mission to prove their identity.

      Historical Note

      Treating this assassination as a crime by an unhinged individual would have had no electoral value for Macron. He needed to make it not just political but philosophical. The journal L’Obs quotes Macron as saying: “He wanted to overthrow the Republic and the Enlightenment. This is the battle we are facing, and it is existential.”

      Macron wants us to believe that the 18-year-old assassin is a political and cultural revolutionary intent not only on overthrowing the French republic but endowed with the greater historical mission of canceling the nation’s proudest accomplishment, the 18th century Enlightenment, consigning to the dustbin of history Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet and the other thinkers of the age.

      The Guardian reported this observation by Macron: “One of our compatriots was assassinated today because he taught pupils freedom of expression, the freedom to believe and not believe.” Is that really what the teacher was teaching? The Charlie Hebdo affair was essentially about the freedom to use commercial media to shame a group of believers. That could have been an interesting topic to explore as a feature of modern history. It wouldn’t have required showing provocative cartoons to 13-year-olds, who in any case are too young to appreciate the economic and cultural intricacies of the controversy.

      One interesting historical development might have been to highlight the parallel phenomena of Donald Trump and Charlie Hebdo, who have more than one thing in common. That might have contributed to a reflection on the relationship between politics and the media. But none of that would serve the cause of Macron’s future electoral chances.

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

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

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      in World Politics

      Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

      by

      France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, may be unique on today’s world stage in an era marked by the rise of populism. He came to power in 2017 as a centrist maverick. He had no established party, ideology or tradition to guide him or fight for his future agenda. And yet, in the midst of that uncertainty, the rules of France’s Fifth Republic’s presidential regime gave him a stable position to govern from for a full five years. It was an enviable position. The media could not accuse the centrist Macron of the political sin of the age: populist extremism.

      In 2016, following Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in the US, populist extremism appeared to have overtaken the English-speaking world. It was rapidly spreading across Europe and elsewhere. The most obvious populists are branded right-wing. They demonstrate a taste for nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism. They include Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orban. The left-wing populists appear as reformers and even revolutionaries, ready to upset the status quo and alienate any number of vested interests. They include Bernie Sanders, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

      In 2017, Macron miraculously parted the waters of the French political Red Sea when he managed to split the political spectrum down the middle, neutralizing the traditional ruling parties on the right and left. As a centrist, he claimed to be capable of embracing the diversity of the nation. During his electoral campaign, he reached out to Barack Obama, who publicly supported him. This bolstered the image of Macron as an open-minded, globalizing liberal. The former Rothschild banker also had his neoliberal credentials, affirming his identification with the mainstream values of the existing economic superstructure, the traditional enemy of both right-wing and left-wing populists.

      Emmanuel Macron’s Campaign to Stifle Debate in France

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      So why is Macron now embracing Islamophobia, the policy most clearly associated with right-wing populism? Can it be that the centrist Macron, who has built the strongest part of his reputation on the anti-nationalistic idea of strengthening the European Union, is at heart a populist? 

      Writing in The Conversation, Charles Barthold and Marin Fougère describe what may be called the populist method of French president: “Macron crafts his speeches to cater to the emotions and demands of the public, be it through ramping up the rhetoric on climate change or pushing for further European Union integration — whether or not he actually has the policies to match his words.” He shares with pure populists a deep sense of electoral opportunism. He simply lacks the fanatically loyal base that they cultivate and seek to excite.

      With the trial of the authors of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in the news, Macron has decided to use his pulpit to instruct the nation about the largely discredited thesis Samuel Huntington famously launched in 1993: the clash of civilizations. In what sounds like a call to arms, Macron says “we must attack radical Islamism.” He offers this deliberately vague but hugely provocative historical judgment: “Islam is a religion experiencing a crisis today, everywhere in the world.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Experiencing a crisis:

      The usual diagnosis made by those undergoing a crisis against those whom they seek to use as a scapegoat to explain their own crisis.

      Contextual Note

      Macron attempts to clarify the nature of the crisis when he explains that it concerns “tensions between fundamentalisms.” What does he mean? Is he referring to the rivalry between Sunnis and Shia? Are the “religious and political projects” he mentions those of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran? He never clarifies this. His aim is less to elucidate historical trends than to exploit a sense of fear.

      The full text of Macron’s speech reveals his intentions. He introduces his remarks on the crisis of Islam by proudly pointing to his own “humility.” He admits he is not a specialist. In other words, what he is about to say has no scientific authority. Instead, he generously offers “to share his understanding of things as he sees them.” After all, who needs experts when everyone knows that what counts are the subjective feelings of a leader? The method resembles Donald Trump’s, who routinely excoriates experts as frauds. The gentler and subtler Macron uses the prestige of his office to simply leave the experts on the sidelines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Macron follows this up with a laughably incoherent allusion to a nation he calls “our friend, Tunisia.” He explains that “Thirty years ago, the situation was radically different in the application of this religion, the way of living it, and the tensions that we live in our society are present in this one which is undoubtedly one of the most educated, developed in the region.” Is he more surprised by the fact that some things change over time or that some educated people may not think and act in the same way he does? Both can be attributed to a special form of French, and Macronian, hubris.

      Macron resorts to the method of sounding logical when he announces: “There is therefore a crisis of Islam.” “Therefore” implies that the evidence he has presented concerning Tunisia is conclusive. The debate is over. He has made his case. That enables him to lament a “reinvented jihad” which he oddly defines as “the destruction of the other.” He then describes the litany of horrors routinely cited by Islamophobes across the globe. He even obeys the command enjoined by hosts of Fox News or Bill Maher to “say the words” and identify the evil: “We must name it.” Naming is blaming, and clearly Islam is to blame, a message he expects the non-Muslim voting majority of France to appreciate.

      Macron clearly believes Islamophobia is a winning strategy. But France, unlike the United States, is a nation that also appreciates intellectual nuance. And so the president goes on to admit, in a way that Trump would never be tempted to do, that his nation bears some of the blame for today’s evils by allowing ghettoes to be created and failing to realize mixité, a French word for integration. He even refers to the failure of France to come to terms with the trauma of its colonial past, while at the same time demonstrating his own obvious failure to do so.  

      Historical Note

      Macron’s party, La République en Marche! (Republic on the Move, or EM!), is an example of what the French call bricolage, meaning basically cobbling things together and hoping they work. The fact that his party is still more or less intact says less about Macron’s political skills than it does about the sclerosis of the Fifth Republic’s political institutions and the dominant, if not regal role of the president.

      From the start, EM! was a dog’s dinner. Now it is at risk of spilling out of the bowl at any moment. That may explain why Macron occasionally feels the need for a populist fix, and Islamophobia is the only reliable fix for a centrist. For decades the Le Pens, both father and daughter, have deftly exploited the growing anti-immigrant sentiment of the working class. Thanks to that strategy, Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) managed to capture what was once the Communist Party’s working-class constituency after it had fallen into irrelevance.

      The difference between Macron’s electorally convenient Islamophobia and Marine Le Pen’s becomes clear in his discourse. He wants Muslims to integrate, to become ordinary French people, whereas Le Pen — like Trump in reference to certain young, darker-skinned legislators — simply wants them to “go home.” Presumably, Macron and Le Pen would be satisfied if the Muslims simply stayed out of sight. But that would pose another problem. It would remove the convenient distraction of blaming another culture for the failures of one’s own.  

      France and other European nations share with the United States an underlying problem rooted in their history. Just as the US has never managed to come to grips with its slaveholding past, former European colonial empires have never worked out how to deal not just with their own colonial history. To some extent, this reflects and incapacity to deal with history itself, whose reality they prefer to deny. This is especially true of France, a nation that, like the US, believes its own political culture of human rights and the championing of freedom represents universal norms. Both the French and the Americans should ask themselves this question: Who is experiencing the deepest crisis today? The answer should be obvious.

      *[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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      Britain’s Refugee Policy Is a Fantasy of Fear

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      In December 1938, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet told German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop of a French plan to deport 10,000 Jews to Madagascar, a French colony. After the defeat of France in June 1940, the idea was taken up by the German Foreign Office. On July 3, 1940, Franz Rademacher, an official in the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Internal Affairs, produced a report entitled “The Jewish Question in the Peace Treaty,” in which he wrote: “The imminent victory gives Germany the possibility, and in my opinion also the duty, of solving the Jewish question in Europe. The desirable solution is: All Jews out of Europe.”

      His main suggestion was that France “must make the island Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question,” that the 25,000 French citizens living there already should be resettled and compensated, and that “all Jews deported to Madagascar will from the time of deportation be denied the citizenship of the various European countries by these countries.” The idea was received enthusiastically by Adolf Eichmann’s section of the Reich Main Security Office, the umbrella organization for the German police and security forces, including the SS and its intelligence agency, the SD. His office noted in a memorandum sent to Rademacher on August 15, 1940, that “To prevent lasting contact between the Jews and other nations a solution in terms of an overseas island is superior to all others.”

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      In preparation for deporting Jews to Madagascar, groups of Jews from Alsace-Lorraine and the areas of Baden and the Saarland (into which Alsace and Lorraine were incorporated following the defeat of France) were transported in sealed trains to the Gurs concentration camp in the south of France, to be held there in catastrophic conditions under which many, especially the elderly, died, prior to their journey overseas.

      Stages of Dehumanization

      The propaganda value of the Madagascar Plan was, from the Germans’ point of view, huge: They planned to trumpet their “humanity” in granting the Jews self-government — under German supervision, of course — on the island while preventing the creation of a Jewish “Vatican State of their own in Palestine,” as Rademacher put it. Furthermore, the Jews would “remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”

      The Nazis never managed to deport French or German Jews to Madagascar, as their failure to defeat Britain meant that the British Navy retained control of the Indian Ocean. But the Madagascar Plan had its value: It was an important mental stage in the process by which the Nazis moved from schemes to remove Jews from Germany, then from Europe altogether and then, during the war, to murdering Jews in situ, where they lived, and finally creating specially-designed extermination camps to which Jews were sent from across Europe, beginning with the Jews of occupied Poland.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Notions that the Jews would be left to create their own self-governing society were pure eyewash. The scheme was inherently genocidal in that there were no plans to provide for the deportees on their arrival. As the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning writes, the Madagascar Plan, which, “like a spectacular meteor … blazed across the sky of Nazi Jewish policy, only to burn out abruptly,” was “an important psychological step toward the road to the Final Solution.”

      In the last few days, the UK press has reported that civil servants have been instructed to look at creating offshore centers for “processing” migrants and asylum seekers. The places mooted have been Moldova, Morocco, Papua New Guinea and the South Atlantic islands of Ascension and St. Helena, both British territories. None are straightforward options, for reasons of corruption and internal strife (Moldova, especially over Transnistria); lack of willingness on the part of the local authorities (Morocco), or sheer distance (PNG, to which there are no direct flights from the UK, is 8,500 miles away).

      But the island solutions are the most remarkable. So remote that it is used solely as a transit point for goods on their way to the Falkland Islands, Ascension, like St. Helena, has a minute population, lies 5,000 miles from the UK, and the cost of building and staffing such a center would be astronomical. One begins to wonder whether these plans have been thrown out to the public in order to make the more likely decision to use decommissioned ferries and oil rigs in UK waters seem sensible.

      A Threat Within and Without

      There are important differences between the Nazis’ plans to deport Jews from Europe to Madagascar and the UK Home Office’s investigations into sending migrants as far as possible offshore. I am not suggesting that what the UK government is talking about is genocidal or that the idea is borne of hatred and fear of a specific group of people believed to be part of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy the British people, in the way that leading Nazis believed that Jews were a threat to the Aryan “race.” The Jews were believed to be a threat within, who had to be expelled; migrants to the UK are perceived as a threat from outside, whose entry into the country must be prevented, albeit a “threat” that resonates with those who believe that the UK is already being “Islamized,” meaning that the danger already lies within.

      Nevertheless, the logic of what the Home Office is talking about does stem from the sort of fantasies and fears that have driven the persecution of minorities throughout modern history. The notion that the UK is full and cannot accept more immigrants, despite more than 40,000 deaths from COVID-19; the idea that migrants have chosen to come to Britain because they “know” they will receive better housing and welfare than long-established locals; the fear that migrants bring disease and crime, and that they will refuse to adapt to “our way of life” — all of this lies behind current and mooted policies that are as irrational as they are infantile.

      The Australian policy of holding migrants in PNG or on Nauru in appalling conditions has resulted in spiraling mental and physical illnesses. The spending of huge sums of money by Frontex and by the UK Border Guard in the Mediterranean and the English Channel has not stopped migrants from traveling, and the hypocrisy of blaming people traffickers is eye-watering given that such criminal gangs only exist because of the lack of proper channels for migration.

      It has been shown many times that the migrants who make the journey are among the most enterprising and energetic people in the world, desperate only to make better lives for themselves. Treating them like criminals will make them, many of whom already extremely vulnerable, ill. The cost to the taxpayer of running these centers will be far greater than the gain to the economy of allowing migrants in and letting them work.

      Above all, the idea of sending migrants to far-flung places is a policy of fear and paranoia — a fear of pollution and paranoia about difference. It is a ludicrous, though deeply harmful concept, and one which will not stop migrants trying to get to the UK. Most important, it is one whose logic points only in the direction of increasingly radical measures. When we have a government that is willing to break international law in one context, how long will it be before the UK breaks it in another, with respect to human rights legislation or the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, even if only in a “specific and limited” way?

      *[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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      Europe’s Far Right Fails to Capitalize on COVID-19

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      Europe’s radical-right parties have quickly understood the benefit they can derive from criticizing their respective governments in managing the COVID-19 health crisis. Their communication focuses on three main areas. First, they question the animal origin of the epidemic through the use of several conspiracy theories. Second comes the criticism of globalization presented as the root cause of the pandemic. And, finally, they criticize the threats that lockdowns and other measures, such as the wearing of face masks, impose on the individual freedoms of European citizens.

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      The conspiratorial mindset of the European radical right is evident in the current COVID-19 moment. Like other extremist milieus, the idea of a ​​hidden cause according to which any historical event occurs is prevalent. The search for mysterious reasons that the powerful media and political elites would like to hide from the people is never far away in the far-right diagnosis of the origins of the pandemic. In particular, as the origin of the virus is still disputed in public discourse, the pandemic is the ideal issue for those who are prone to such conspiratorial thinking.

      Orwellian Society

      We shouldn’t get too carried away with ourselves here, however. Not all radical-right actors have reacted to the pandemic with conspiracy theories. One of the most interesting issues is that some of them have reactivated the theme of the West having to fight communism, embodied no longer by the USSR but by China as a new bête noire. Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers, for example, accused China of using opacity and lies to downplay the scale of the epidemic, an attitude which he says stems from the command-and-control nature of communism itself.

      Other parties or figures on the European radical right have raised questions not only about the responsibility of the Chinese government for a late and inappropriate response to the pandemic, but also put forward the idea that the virus escaped from a virology laboratory in Wuhan. This theory, propagated in mid-April by Professor Luc Montagnier, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was relayed in France by the elected representatives of the National Rally (RN), Julien Odoul and Gilbert Collard. The RN, however, did not fully follow in the footsteps of Professor Montagnier and calls for the creation of an international commission of inquiry into the origins of the epidemic.

      Added to this, the pandemic has allowed the European radical right to develop the notion that “elites” are using the health crisis to hasten in an authoritarian form of government. For example, Spain’s Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé accused President Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government of authoritarianism when it withdrew from parliamentary control lockdown measures limiting freedom of movement. The RN, which published “The Black Book of the Coronavirus: From the fiasco to the abyss,” a brochure criticizing the French government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, accused the authorities of using “guilt, infantilization and threats” against the French people in order to enforce a lockdown.

      Other more marginal movements, which do not have to worry about achieving political credibility, have protested against outright “dictatorship,” such as the Italian fundamentalist neo-fascist and Catholic New Force party. In Hungary, the nationalist Jobbik party, which now seeks to defeat Viktor Orban by allying itself, if necessary, with the center-left opposition, decided to denounce government attacks on media freedom during the pandemic.

      The European radical right everywhere has fired bullets at incumbent governments, accusing them of failing to meet the challenges of dealing with the epidemic. In March, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, accused President Emmanuel Macron of ordering the state to lie and cover up the extent of the pandemic by giving the French people incomplete or false information in order to hide his incompetence. It was the only French political party to absolutely refuse any policy of national unity in response to the pandemic and to support the hydroxychloroquine-based treatment recommended by Professor Didier Raoult.

      The Spanish Vox party also issued very strong words against the government, using such phrases as “criminal management,” “obscurantism,” “loss of all credibility” and “insulting” (in respect to the people of Spain). The situation in Italy also prompted the far-right League party to attack the coalition formed by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the center-left Democratic Party. On the night of April 29, for example, the League’s leader Matteo Salvini showed his contempt of parliament by occupying the senate hemicycle with a dozen other elected officials to denounce economic restrictions, delayed aid to Italian citizens and small businesses, the limitations on freedom of movement and the side-lining of parliamentary powers by the Conte government.

      But a poll carried out on May 8 shows that even if the League remains in the lead, with 26.7%, when it comes to voting intentions, its popularity has been declining since the start of the health crisis while another nationalist party, the Brothers of Italy, is credited with 14.1% — more than double of the 6.2% it won in the 2019 European elections.

      No Coherent Response

      Despite all this, the European radical right seems to have failed to develop coherent responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The speed with which the pandemic spread was unrelated to the limited migratory flows observed on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of February, thus depriving the radical right of the possibility of singling out immigration as the cause of the pandemic. Instead, in all European countries, the radical right put the blame on globalization.

      Their idea, therefore, is that the pandemic was caused by globalization itself, which generates continuous flows of travel and international exchange, immigration notwithstanding. Globalization, they say, allows multinationals to make financial profits in times of crisis, while the poorest are hit hardest by unemployment and the overwhelmed national health systems. Thus, as a way of example, the Hungarian Mi Hazànk party writes: “We are happy to note that the government accepted our idea of ​​a special solidarity tax on multinationals and banks” and calls for a moratorium on debts and evictions.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      For the European radical right, the health crisis was an opportunity to denounce the European Union, which leaves the competence over health policy to individual member states, and to underline the absolute necessity of returning control of the borders back to member states. As Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch far-right Forum for Democracy, says, “the Nation-State is the future.” During the COVID-19 crisis, European radical-right parties, including the National Rally, have continued to reiterate that they were the first to have warned of the dangers of bringing “back home” potentially strategic industries such as pharma away from China and India.

      The European radical right has failed for several other reasons as well. In Hungary and Poland, the conservative, illiberal right who are in power very quickly closed their borders, which led to the pandemic being contained. In addition, the governments of the most affected countries, Spain and Italy, have (belatedly) managed the crisis well, as had Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has dropped to its lowest levels in voting intentions since 2017.

      To add insult to injury, the AfD is even faced with the birth of a single-issue party, Resistance 2020, that is even more conspiratorial than the AfD and lobbies for the complete rejection of all government-sponsored measures to fight the pandemic. At this point, Marine Le Pen’s popularity rating only rose by 3%, to 26% in May. Were presidential elections set for 2022 held today, she would lose to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron by 45% against 55% — a sobering thought for theorists who suggest that extremism inevitably grows in a crisis.

      *[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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      Angela Merkel’s CDU Is Still Not Sure How It Feels About Muslims

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      In a 2018 government declaration, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted to growing voices within her party who questioned her policies during the refugee crisis by stating that “There is no question that the historical character of our country is Christian and Jewish. But … with 4.5 million Muslims living with us, their religion, Islam, has become part of Germany.” Back in 2015, her government decided to suspend the EU’s Dublin Regulation and process asylum applications from refugees fleeing war-torn Muslim-majority countries. This challenged society as the potential problems of the (cultural) integration of Muslims dawned on many Germans.

      Divisions within society, with some welcoming Germany’s worldly alignment and others fearing super-alienation, mirrored themselves within Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The refugee crisis heated up a dilemma the CDU has grappled with for years: Can Muslims belong to Germany and a conservative Christian democratic party?

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      Party colleagues instantly rebuked Merkel’s comments. Most prominently, Horst Seehofer, the home secretary in her cabinet who had previously insisted on speeding up deportations of rejected asylum seekers, corrected Merkel by saying that “Muslims who live with us obviously belong to Germany,” but this “does not mean we give up our country-specific traditions and customs out of a misplaced consideration for others.” The CDU/CSU’s struggles to find consensus in assessing the status of Muslims in Germany have been long-running. But why is it a subject of debate at all?

      Valuable Voters

      Whether the CDU/CSU likes it or not, between 4.4 and 4.7 million Muslims currently live in Germany, making up 5.4% to 5.7% of the population. Therefore, Muslims are an inevitable subject of debate for the CDU/CSU for both interest-based and ideological reasons. The growing number of Muslims in Germany is of interest-based significance for the CDU and a chance to secure future electoral success. Some 1.5 million Muslims, or 2,4% of all voters, are eligible to vote, making them a sizeable electoral group.

      Traditionally, Muslims harbor affiliations with center-left parties. Nevertheless, the CDU/CSU has discovered a vital interest in appealing to Muslim voters, as Andreas Wüst, a political scientist at Stuttgart University, indicates: “Merkel brought in a different wind by emphasizing the importance of the immigration society. In the meantime, efforts are also being made in the CDU to support Muslims.” Already in 2004, Bülent Arslan, former chairman of the CDU’s German-Turkish Forum, stressed that “around 50 to 60 percent of the Turks living in Germany are conservative. That is also a potential for the CDU.”

      The second reason for intra-party discussions is the ideological orientation of the CDU/CSU. As a self-proclaimed catch-all party of the center-right, its core voters wish to preserve the ethnic makeup of society as well as the social values and religious beliefs associated with the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. Thus, Muslims challenge two pillars of conservative thinking: the traditional ethnic constitution and religious imprint of German society.

      With its roots in political Catholicism of the 18th and 19th centuries, the CDU was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War as a non-denominational party, incorporating Catholic and Protestant Christians into its structures. Preserving these roots while remaining an urbane party is a balancing act the CDU/CSU has struggled with over the last two decades. The party manifesto and policy still reveal anti-Islamic tendencies. In the latest party manifesto, the terms “Islam,” “Islamism” and “Islamist” appear only nine times. Moreover, they show up exclusively in the context of dangers such as Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism.

      Further evidence for the CDU/CSU’s skeptical attitude toward Islam is the long-raging debate in Germany about Muslim women wearing headscarves. Between 2004 and 2006, eight of Germany’s 16 federal states introduced a headscarf ban for female teachers in public schools and for public servants. The CDU/CSU governed six of them at the time. In 2019, the CDU leadership proposed that Muslim girls shouldn’t wear headscarves in nurseries and primary schools because “Wearing a headscarf makes little children recognizable as outsiders. We want to prevent this from happening in any case.”

      A Party Split

      Another debate in 2019 revealed further divisions within the CDU regarding its attitude toward Islam. It was triggered by the party whip in the German parliament, the Bundestag, Ralph Brinkhaus. When asked the question if a Muslim chancellor from the CDU/CSU in 2030 would be conceivable, he replied, “Why not?” — as long as he is “a good politician” who “represents the values ​​and political views of the CDU.”

      Adverse responses came in thick and fast. According to Christoph de Vries, a CDU spokesman for internal affairs, “Whoever stands for the CDU/CSU as chancellor does not have to be Christian, but must represent Christian Democratic values ​​and feel a part of Germany. Unfortunately, this does not apply to a larger proportion of Muslims who emulate religious fundamentalism and feel attached to foreign heads of state.”

      Still, party colleagues, like the undersecretary for integration in North Rhine-Westphalia Serap Güler, leaped to Brinkhaus’ defense: “Ralph Brinkhaus’s answer simply made clear that in the CDU no one is placed at a disadvantage because of his beliefs as long as he represents our values ​​and political views.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Angela Merkel couldn’t take her party along in her progressive outlook on the status of Islam in Germany. The CDU/CSU remains torn between two attitudes: first of all, recognizing that Germany is an immigration society and, secondly, attempting to preserve its Christian roots and win back conservative voters. Many of them have switched allegiance to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — a party that has thrived on anti-Muslim populism.

      This predicament continues amid the current debate over the succession of party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. She stood for the liberal course set by Merkel but failed to stamp her authority on the party. Conservative circles within the CDU are now pinning their hopes on Friedrich Merz, the former party whip who was driven out by Merkel in 2002 and is now pledging to win back voters from the AfD. Any outcome of the leadership race would only paper over the cracks of the debate over whether or not Muslims can truly belong to Germany and its conservative ruling party.

      Perhaps the wavering attitudes and mixed messages were the results of equally ambiguous leadership. While recognizing Islam as a part of Germany, Merkel simultaneously sowed mistrust in a multicultural society in 2010 by declaring that “The approach of multiculturalism has failed, absolutely failed!” The seems that the CDU is neither willing nor capable of providing a coherent answer to its internal dilemma concerning Islam. It welcomes Muslim immigrants while mistrusting their culture, appealing to Muslim voters while being outraged by the prospects of a Muslim head of state. The reality of Germany as an immigration society and 4.5 million Muslim citizens is clear-cut and stark. The CDU/CSU’s attitude toward this reality isn’t.

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