Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,296]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

you need to go look at married couples who are on the downslope to divorce, lololol

That's neither here nor there.
Some deeper concepts are involved causing the effect, such as the rapid flow of information, technology gone haywire.

[Vesper 28,275]

lol

zionist jew fail

 

[robsblubot 3,457]

8 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

This is just another nail in the coffin of the decaying US justice system. Alex Jones, my vocabulary (in any language) fails me here, is another obvious case of how some people are simply untouchable these days. It just seems easier than it used to be to avoid real consequences, so we will be seeing more of that unfortunately.

I don't expect anything to go through against Trump; he has incriminated himself so many times... out of the so many lies he tells, as well as his crazy hyperbolic nonsense, the one thing he was right about was, "I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters" except that he wouldn't go to prison either.

Edited September 2 by robsblubot

[Vesper 28,275]

What should Labour aim for in Europe?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/what-should-labour-aim-for-in-europe

The new government’s goals are modest. But economic reality may force it to follow changing public opinion.

 

In its campaign for the general election in the United Kingdom in July, Labour generally kept a low profile on the UK’s departure in 2020 from the European Union. In government, the party said, it would not seek to rejoin the EU—not even the customs union or the single market—despite the outgoing Conservatives being on the defensive on this issue.

Public opinion now firmly holds that ‘Brexit’, stemming from the referendum to that effect in 2016, was a mistake. Only 31 per cent say it was the right decision—indeed, some polls suggest over 60 per cent would vote to rejoin the EU if that question were put to a referendum now.

Improving relationships

What Labour did say in its manifesto was that it would pursue ‘an improved and ambitious relationship with our European partners’. And, since the election, it has moved swiftly to re-establish cordial contacts.

Concretely, the new Labour government is likely to seek, first, to reduce some of the barriers to UK-EU trade. This would include a veterinary agreement, mutual recognition of professional qualifications, visa exemptions for touring performers (such as musicians and actors) and regulatory alignments in key sectors such as chemicals.

An opportunity to do this could arise through the scheduled ‘review’ of the post-Brexit trade and co-operation agreement, concluded when Boris Johnson was premier, due next year. But on that there are various views on mainland Europe about whether the fundamentals can be revised.

A second goal would be to negotiate a security agreement with the EU. This could turn out to be of great significance, given the situation in Ukraine, especially if Donald Trump were to be re-elected as president of the United States in November. It would include security in the widest sense—not just military co-operation but sanctions, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, fighting traffickers, combating climate change and more. The German ambassador to Britain recently advocated a UK-EU ‘security and co-operation agreement’, which would also include agriculture and visa rules.

A third avenue would be to rejoin some of the EU’s technical agencies (at least as an observer or associate member), such as Europol. Finally, the shared commitment to achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse-gas emissions remains to be built on, with co-operation on climate and energy presumably embracing cross-border energy interconnectors and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

This is all well and good. And the new administration might also seek renewed participation in the Erasmus+ student-mobility scheme. The Johnson government pulled out despite the withdrawal arrangements specifically providing for continued involvement—a piece of gratuitous cultural vandalism.

Over-cautious

But the realities of government may force Labour to go further, more quickly. The biggest challenges it faces are the catastrophic state of the public finances and the lethargy of the economy.

After years of austerity, there are pressures for higher public spending on multiple fronts. Yet with both public debt and taxes as shares of gross domestic product heading towards levels not seen since the aftermath of the second world war, finding an extra £3 billion here or £4 billion there has become the subject of intense debates. These figures are however dwarfed by the £40 billion a year of lost tax revenue caused by Brexit.

Economic ‘growth’ was very much the maxim of Labour’s campaign. Yet growth cannot be rekindled while ignoring the annual 4 per cent loss to GDP attributed to Brexit by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, the lost trade with the UK’s main export market (and main source of its supply chains) and the extra transaction costs on businesses imposed by Brexit.

Labour’s over-cautious red lines at the hustings—no to rejoining the customs union, no to full single-market membership—will severely limit the potential improvements it can bring in government. There will be costly border checks for as long as there is a customs border. Frictionless trade in goods (no extra conformity tests, value-added-tax forms, export permits, labelling requirements and so on), including with the wider European Economic Area, will remain a chimera unless the UK aligns with the single-market rules and standards it helped set and endorsed as a member. And there will be little scope to improve trade in services—even for touring performers and musicians—without some freedom of movement.

Biggest beneficiaries

What is holding the new government back? It seems to be a belief that full participation in the single market would require full restoration of the freedom of movement enjoyed by EU citizens. This is seen as an insurmountable obstacle, given the public concerns about record levels of immigration to Britain. Yet most migration to Britain is from outside the EU, which is (as it always was) a matter for national regulation. Within the limits of international law, it is for the UK itself to decide how open or restrictive it wants to be.

The lesser (now much less) migration from the EU was part and parcel of free movement, of which Britons were actually the biggest beneficiaries, with more of them living in other member states than was the case for any other nationality. This freedom was not however unconditional: those exercising it had to find work or be self-sufficient—conditions which Britain failed to enforce, but could if free movement (perhaps referred to as ‘conditional free movement’ to emphasise this point) were to be restored. Nor was it a cost to the UK exchequer: EU citizens in Britain paid far more in taxes than they received in benefits and services combined.

Far from enabling the UK to ‘take back control’ of its borders, Brexit has removed key tools for so doing. In the EU, Britain could use the internal agreement that asylum-seekers should be processed by the country in which they first arrived. One could waive that rule, as Germany did. But Britain used it to send thousands of asylum-seekers back to the member state of initial arrival—something it can no longer do.

The UK was also able to participate fully in the EU’s system of co-operation among police and intelligence forces. This meant it could, when needed, obtain information on individuals when they arrived at the border, from fingerprints to criminal records. It also meant co-operating to fight international gangs of people traffickers. Brexit was a shot in the foot as regards its supposed major benefit of controlling the border.

Maybe popular

If economic reality forces the Labour government to go further, and at least to rejoin the single market and the customs union—even if that includes ‘conditional’ free movement with EU members—it will find that this does not throw up as many problems as it fears. It may even be popular.

Many businesses, universities, artists and others want it. So do Labour Party members. Above all, if the tracker polls show that public opinion continues its gradual but relentless shift in favour of rejoining the EU, then surely these smaller steps, at least, should be easier.

 

[Vesper 28,275]

Taxing the super-rich—more possible than ever

https://www.socialeurope.eu/taxing-the-super-rich-more-possible-than-ever

The concentration of wealth is a global issue and it is getting worse.

 

A mere 3,000 people have amassed $14.4 trillion in wealth, the equivalent of 13 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. While the world’s billionaires controlled less than 3 per cent of global GDP in 1993, the growth of their wealth and political influence has since accelerated.

Regardless of nationality, the world’s ultra-rich share two striking similarities: the vast majority are men and they typically pay much less tax, as a share of their income, than their employees and middle-class workers in general. The concentration of wealth is thus a global issue, one so alarming that the G20 (the group comprising the world’s largest developed and emerging economies) formally addressed it last month.

As G20 finance ministers put it in the final declaration at their conference in Rio de Janeiro in late July,

It is important for all taxpayers, including ultra-high-net-worth individuals, to contribute their fair share in taxes. Aggressive tax avoidance or tax evasion of ultra-high-net-worth individuals can undermine the fairness of tax systems … Promoting effective, fair, and progressive tax policies remains a significant challenge that international tax cooperation and targeted domestic reforms could help address.

Fiscal equity underpins democracy. Without sufficient tax revenues, governments cannot guarantee adequate services such as education, healthcare and social protection, nor can they respond to much larger problems such as the climate crisis (which is already destabilising many countries around the world). Given the dire consequences of inaction in these areas, it is imperative that the wealthiest pay their fair share of taxes.

Important milestone

The Rio declaration is an important milestone. For the first time since the G20 was established in 1999, all members agreed that the way the super-rich were taxed must be fixed and they committed themselves to doing it. But this consensus did not come out of nowhere. Advocates of tax fairness covered much ground in the months leading up to the summit.

Brazil occupies the G20’s rotating presidency this year and in late February the country’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, invited me to speak at a high-level meeting in São Paulo. I was commissioned to write a report on tax fairness and taxation of the super-rich (the focus of my work as founder and director of the EU Tax Observatory in Paris), which I submitted in late June, to inform the July summit discussion.

In the report, A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals, I advanced a proposal for a new effective taxation standard which included a co-ordinated minimum tax of 2 per cent of wealth for such individuals—the world’s 3,000 billionaires. This standard would not only generate significant revenue (around $200-250 billion per year). It would also correct the structural injustice of contemporary tax systems, whereby billionaires’ effective tax rates are lower than for middle-class individuals.

Overwhelming support

The global public overwhelmingly supports fair taxation of the ultra-rich. According to an Ipsos poll in G20 countries, released in June, 67 per cent agree that there is too much economic inequality and 70 per cent support the principle that wealthy people should pay higher income-tax rates.

The Rio declaration signals a significant shift: world leaders can no longer support a system in which the ultra-rich get away with paying less in taxes than the rest of us. Finance ministers have already agreed to important preliminary steps to improve tax transparency, enhance tax co-operation and review harmful tax practices.

True, there was no political consensus to include the 2 per cent minimum tax on billionaires in the final text. The declaration had to be approved unanimously and some countries still have reservations about some aspects of the proposal. For example, while the United States administratiion under Joe Biden supports a billionaire minimum tax domestically, it has been reluctant to advance the issue on the international stage.

No going back

But there is no going back. The minimum tax is now on the agenda and, looking at the history of international tax negotiations, there are concrete reasons to be optimistic about the proposal’s future. In 2013, the G20 acknowledged multinational companies’ rampant tax avoidance, giving political momentum to address the issue. Its initial action plan included improving tax transparency, enhancing tax co-operation and reviewing harmful tax practices—the same wording now used in Rio. Then, in October 2021, 136 countries and territories (now 140) adopted a 15 per cent minimum corporation tax.

Fortunately, we do not need all countries to adopt a 2 per cent minimum tax on billionaires (or on centi-millionaires, if that is what policy-makers decide). We simply need a critical mass of countries to agree on a set of rules to identify and value the wealth of the ultra-rich and to adopt instruments to impose effective taxation, regardless of the billionaires’ tax residency. This way, we can avoid a scenario where the ultra-rich flee to fiscal havens, thus ending the race to the bottom among countries competing to offer billionaires the lowest tax rate.

Over the last ten years or so, international co-operation on taxation has improved significantly. The introduction of automatic exchanges of bank information, for example, has greatly reduced the possibility of tax avoidance. We already have the tools needed to make the world’s billionaires pay their fair share of taxes. It’s now up to the governments to act quickly and effectively.

 

[Vesper 28,275]

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/hitler-rise-to-power-how-democracies-can-give-way-to-dictatorships-by-mark-jones-5-2024-08

Aug 30, 2024

Mark Jones

In the face of renewed threats to democracy, historical knowledge of past dictatorships becomes as important as ever. After all, the Holocaust and World War II show what can happen when democracies allow themselves to be undermined from within.

DUBLIN – In the spring of 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor, Thomas Mann was on holiday in Switzerland with his wife. While there, the Nobel laureate author received a warning from Germany that it would be unsafe for him to return. Now that the Nazis were in power, they wanted to send Mann to a concentration camp for having publicly opposed them.

Mann thus became one of the first German refugees from Hitler’s regime. Until 1938, he spent most of his time in Switzerland. But as Hitler’s power increased and war in Europe looked increasingly likely, he moved to the United States, where he did not stay silent. Even at the height of Hitler’s conquests in Europe, Mann remained doggedly optimistic, promising Americans that “democracy will win” in the end.

Will it, though? Many nowadays are not so sure. As authors like Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University remind us, we are living in a new age of the “strongman,” with democracy retreating in many parts of the world. Hate-inspired violence is becoming more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and things that were once unthinkable have become normalized. This November, in the country where Mann once promised that democracy would prevail, tens of millions of Americans will vote for a candidate who responded to losing the 2020 election by instigating a fascist-style assault on the US Capitol.

The Past as Prologue

Given the need to defend democracy, historical knowledge has become more important than ever. Fortunately, in the lead-up to this year’s US election, historians Richard J. Evans and Timothy W. Ryback have each published books that mine the past to offer guidelines for navigating our increasingly concerning present.

Evans, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, is the more distinguished of the two authors. A prolific historian, he first came to public prominence in the early 2000s for his role as an expert witness in a libel case brought by the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and the historian Deborah Lipstadt. Evans played a key role in the trial, clashing with Irving in courtroom scenes that were later dramatized in the 2016 film Denial.

Up until then, Evans’s major works had largely focused on nineteenth-century Germany; but following the case, he moved forward in time to write a critically acclaimed three-volume social and political history of Nazi Germany, published between 2003 and 2008. Alongside Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, which focuses on the life of the dictator, Evans’s trilogy remains among the most important general works on Nazi Germany.

By contrast, Ryback, an American historian who serves as director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, has never written a general history of Nazism. He is best known for his 2008 best-seller, Hitler’s Private Library, a cleverly conceived study in which the dictator responsible for the “industrial production of corpses” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase) is also revealed to have been a book lover and an avid reader. Then came Ryback’s 2014 book, Hitler’s First Victims, which offered a forensic account of the SS’s first excesses of violence in the concentration camp at Dachau (where the Nazis wanted to send Mann) in 1933.

Fateful Decisions

For all their differences, Evans and Ryback both see German history as a powerful lens through which to view the problems currently facing liberal democracy. Thus, Evans sees the fall of the Weimar Republic as “the paradigm of democracy’s collapse and dictatorship’s triumph,” and Ryback begins his book Takeover in early August 1932, just days after the Nazis reached their electoral high point.

Following a summer of violent street fighting between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists, Hitler’s party won 37% of the vote and 230 seats in the Reichstag in the election on July 31, 1932. The magnitude of the Nazis’ triumph led Hitler to assume that he was entitled to the position of chancellor. But German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose office was supposed to serve as a guardian of the constitution, disagreed.

At a meeting on August 13, 1932, Hindenburg snubbed Hitler and used emergency powers available to him under the Weimar constitution to support the chancellorship of arch-conservative Franz von Papen, the leader of the cabinet that Hindenburg had appointed on June 1, 1932. Papen’s government was entirely dependent on Hindenburg’s support and lacked an electoral mandate of any kind. It was so stacked with aristocratic conservatives that it was known as the “cabinet of barons.”

In late summer 1932, shocking scenes played out in the briefly reconvened German parliament. Reichstag President Hermann Göring, who had received the position in August thanks to the votes of his fellow Nazi Party members, abused the position to humiliate Papen by ignoring him in the Chamber before the Nazis and Communists joined forces to vote through a no-confidence motion in Papen’s government. Hindenburg then called yet another election for that November. But when this failed to produce a workable parliamentary majority, he changed his mind about who should be chancellor, this time appointing General Kurt von Schleicher. Like Papen, Schleicher lacked an electoral mandate, but he did have the support of the army and business.

Schleicher’s cabinet lasted for just eight weeks. Angry about being dismissed, Papen conspired against the new chancellor and sought Hitler’s support for a new government. When Schleicher demanded more support from Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933, the aging president decided to push him to the side.

On January 30, 1933, with Papen’s encouragement, Hindenburg appointed Hitler, who had served as a corporal when Hindenburg was field marshal. The new chancellor would head a coalition government surrounded by “respectable” conservatives led by Papen. The latter believed that he had “boxed” Hitler in, and that he would be able to control and manipulate the new chancellor to force through his own conservative agenda.

Contingencies and Counterfactuals

Ryback offers a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues and scheming that occurred during the 170 days between Hindenburg and Hitler’s meeting on August 13, 1932, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. The figures who feature most prominently include Hitler and his inner circle; his Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser; his rivals for the chancellery, Papen and Schleicher; the conservative politician and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg; and the aging but fully lucid Hindenburg. Ryback’s narrative mixes their voices in with those of contemporary newspapers, including a large selection of quotations from the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent, as well as illustrative observations from well-known diarists like Harry Graf von Kessler.

Written with verve and close attention to detail, Takeover will be a successful book. But is it a good one? Ryback succeeds in capturing the hectic nature of events and the intrigues and scheming that continuously shifted the key players’ positions and prospects. He also offers a powerful historical message: while Nazism was once explained as the product of centuries of German history, the truth is that the story could have turned in another direction right up until the final minutes before Hitler became chancellor. Even on the morning of January 30, 1933, there was a last-gasp debate about whether to back out and abandon the envisaged coalition. There is human agency at every moment in history.

But this point, however well delivered, isn’t really new. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy, published in 2018, is just as much of a page-turner, and it includes a closer examination of why things happened as they did, making it a superior book. Takeover, by contrast, includes hardly any analysis of the Germans who opposed Nazism during the winter of 1932-33. The speeches that ultimately forced Mann to flee the country are not included in Ryback’s story, nor is the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. All we get are a few passing quotes from a Social Democratic newspaper.

This is a glaring omission. In March 1933, just minutes before the passage of the Nazi’s Enabling Act (the legal starting point of the dictatorship), the Social Democratic politician Otto Wels addressed the Reichstag and bravely defended “humanity” and democracy as “eternal” values that would outlive Nazism. As he spoke, he had a suicide pill in his pocket, fearing that he might be arrested and handed over to Nazi torturers immediately afterwards.

Takeover tells us nothing about this scene or the man at its center. This is not only because Ryback ends his book on January 30, 1933, thus leaving out the process by which the dictatorship was created (for that, readers should turn to Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days). More fundamentally, it is because the choices facing those who fought Nazism do not feature in Ryback’s story. Yet as recent events in the Democratic Party have shown, those who oppose populists do have choices, and they can use them to re-energize the defense of democracy.

The Hitler Circle

Evans also says little about the Germans who opposed Nazism, though he does discuss Wels when providing context for Hitler’s establishment of a dictatorship. Hitler’s People is a collection of 24 biographies, each of which tells us something important about who the Nazis were and how the regime worked. Evans starts with Hitler and spends 100 pages providing a short but comprehensive biography of the one-time nobody who became the leader of the Third Reich.

The next section includes chapters on Hitler’s inner circle, whose personal proximity to the leader gave them unique positions within the overall history of the Nazi regime. Among these “paladins,” as Evans calls them, are familiar names such as Göring, the former fighter pilot who rose to become the “second man” in the Third Reich; Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the secret police and the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust; and Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s top propagandist.

Evans next focuses on those just outside the inner circle, such as Julius Streicher, Nazi Germany’s most notorious antisemitic propagandist and a key figure in the Holocaust, as well as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Hans Frank, all of whom bore direct responsibility for the murder of millions of people.

These shorter biographical profiles are all important and well worth reading, but even more disturbing is a third cluster that Evans calls “The Instruments”: the people through whom the top officials carried out their vision of a Nazified world order. Of the nine biographies in this section, the only name many readers will recognize is Leni Riefenstahl. After 1945, the director of Triumph of the Will, the most important propaganda film made about Hitler during the Third Reich, presented herself to the world as an apolitical non-Nazi and got away with it.

The other “instruments” need to be better known, especially in the context of our current politics. They include the generals who ignored the international laws of war; the men and women who ran concentration camps and shot and tortured prisoners for fun; the doctors who killed sick children; and the women who cheered the regime and never apologized or felt remorse for its crimes. For example, Evans’s last chapter focuses on Luise Solmitz, a middle-class woman who fell for Hitler’s promise to return Germany to greatness, even though her own husband was classified as Jewish under Nazi law (he was a conservative nationalist, a veteran, and a Christian convert, but his mother was Jewish).

Hitler’s People is an excellent book, because it shows us who the Nazis really were: upper-class and middle-class Germans who faced downward social mobility, feared equality and social progress, and took out their frustrations over Germany’s defeat in World War I on those least responsible for it, Jews and Social Democrats. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement, they supported or fully tolerated its violence. Even after Hitler launched a genocidal war across Europe, they continued to cheer for him. And most of those who survived Nazism’s final defeat were unrepentant for the rest of their days.

Every reader of Evans’s book will encounter a few figures who stick in his or her mind. For some, it will be Goebbels, who has become the template for those who seek to manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. For others, it will be the architect Albert Speer, whose successful myth-making autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, led many to believe that he was “the good Nazi.” Fortunately, Evans debunks such unhistorical nonsense.

The Past Is Never Dead

For me, the most striking chapter is on Karl Brandt, a doctor who drew on his medical knowledge to become a mass murderer in the service of the regime. No one forced him into it. He could have lived a prosperous life without becoming a Nazi, but he chose not to.

Brandt was a product of the German university system, and my only disappointment with Hitler’s People is that its subjects do not include any of the university presidents who oversaw the academic world that helped transform students of medicine into mass murderers. Many of these men would remain respected figures in their fields long after 1945. They do not deserve to have their complicity in the Nazi-era horrors so conveniently forgotten.

Evans writes with the wisdom and anger of a scholar who has spent a lifetime using history to make political points. He disdains the descendants of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who still live on an estate that was a gift from Hitler. His chapter on Papen, who was released from prison in 1949 and lived until 1969, offers a searingly insightful look at political collaboration with evil. And he is no less appalled by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s organization who remained unrepentant until her death in 1999.

Reading Hitler’s People, one cannot help but recognize the parallels to those who are complicit in, or openly profiting from, undermining democracy today. We should all share Evans’s anger. History has already shown us what happens when democracies allow their enemies to weaken them from within. Though we face an onslaught of manipulative propaganda and technologically augmented lies, there is still time to prove Mann right.

• Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Penguin Press, 2024.
  Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, Knopf, 2024.

 

Mark Jones

Writing for PS since 2023

Mark Jones, Assistant Professor of History at University College Dublin, is the author of 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup (Basic Books, 2023).

[Vesper 28,275]

Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207j6wy332o

Last October, Palestinian grandmother Ayesha Shtayyeh says a man pointed a gun at her head and told her to leave the place she had called home for 50 years.

She told the BBC the armed threat was the culmination of an increasingly violent campaign of harassment and intimidation that began in 2021, after an illegal settler outpost was established close to her home in the occupied West Bank.

The number of these outposts has risen rapidly in recent years, new BBC analysis shows. There are currently at least 196 across the West Bank, and 29 were set up last year - more than in any previous year.

The outposts - which can be farms, clusters of houses, or even groups of caravans - often lack defined boundaries and are illegal under both Israeli and international law.

But the BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

The BBC has also analysed open source intelligence to examine their proliferation, and has investigated the settler who Ayesha Shtayyeh says threatened her.

Experts say outposts are able to seize large swathes of land more rapidly than settlements, and are increasingly linked to violence and harassment towards Palestinian communities.

• BBC InDepth: Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land under cover of war - they hope permanently

Official figures for the number of outposts do not exist. But BBC Eye reviewed lists of them and their locations gathered by Israeli anti-settlement watchdogs Peace Now and Kerem Navot - as well as the Palestinian Authority, which runs part of the occupied West Bank.

We analysed hundreds of satellite images to verify that outposts had been constructed at these locations and to confirm the year they were set up. The BBC also checked social media posts, Israeli government publications and news sources to corroborate this and to show that outposts were still in use.

Our analysis suggests almost half (89) of the 196 outposts we verified have been built since 2019.

Some of these are linked to growing violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Earlier this year, the British government sanctioned eight extremist settlers for inciting or perpetrating violence against Palestinians. At least six had established, or are living on, illegal outposts.

Responding to our findings in this article, a UK Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement: “We strongly condemn the unprecedented levels of settler violence against the Palestinian community, as shown in the report, and have urged the Israeli authorities to end the culture of impunity and clamp down on those responsible.”

A former commander of the Israeli army in the West Bank, Avi Mizrahi, says most settlers are law-abiding Israeli citizens, but he does admit the existence of outposts makes violence more likely.

“Whenever you put outposts illegally in the area, it brings tensions with the Palestinians… living in the same area,” he says.

One of the extremist settlers sanctioned by the UK was Moshe Sharvit - the man Ayesha says threatened her at gunpoint. Both he and the outpost he set up less than 800m (0.5miles) from Ayesha's home, were also sanctioned by the US government in March. His outpost was described as a “base from which he perpetrates violence against Palestinians”.

“He’s made our life hell,” Ayesha says, who must now live with her son in a town close to Nablus.

Outposts lack any official Israeli planning approval - unlike settlements, which are larger, typically urban, Jewish enclaves built throughout the West Bank, legal under Israeli law.

Both are considered illegal under international law, which forbids moving a civilian population into an occupied territory. But many settlers living in the West Bank claim that, as Jews, they have a religious and historical connection to the land.

In July, the UN’s top court, in a landmark opinion, said Israel should stop all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel rejected the opinion as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided.

Despite outposts having no legal status, there is little evidence that the Israeli government has been trying to prevent their rapid growth in numbers.

The BBC has seen new evidence showing how two organisations with close ties to the Israeli state have provided money and land used to set up new outposts in the West Bank.

One is the World Zionist Organization (WZO), an international body founded more than a century ago and instrumental in the establishment of the state of Israel. It has a Settlement Division - responsible for managing large areas of the land occupied by Israel since 1967. The division is funded entirely by Israeli public funds and describes itself as an “arm of the Israeli state”.

Contracts obtained by Peace Now, and analysed by the BBC, show the Settlement Division has repeatedly allocated land on which outposts have been built. In the contracts, the WZO forbids the building of any structures and says the land should only be used for grazing or farming - but satellite imagery reveals that, in at least four cases, illegal outposts were built on it.

One of these contracts was signed by Zvi Bar Yosef in 2018. He - like Moshe Sharvit - was sanctioned by the UK and US earlier this year for violence and intimidation against Palestinians.

We contacted the WZO to ask if it was aware that multiple tracts of land it had allocated for grazing and farming were being used for the construction of illegal outposts. It did not respond. We also put questions to Zvi Bar Yosef, but received no reply.

The BBC has also uncovered two documents revealing that another key settler organisation - Amana - loaned hundreds of thousands of shekels to help establish outposts.

In one case, the organisation loaned NIS 1,000,000 ($270,000/£205,000) to a settler to build greenhouses on an outpost considered illegal under Israeli law.

Amana was founded in 1978 and has worked closely with the Israeli government to build settlements throughout the West Bank ever since.

But in recent years, there has been growing evidence that Amana also supports outposts.

In a recording from a meeting of executives in 2021, leaked by an activist, Amana’s CEO Ze’ev Hever can be heard stating that: “In the last three years… one operation we have expanded is the herding farm [outposts].”

“Today, the area [they control] is almost twice the size of built settlements.”

This year, the Canadian government included Amana in a round of sanctions against individuals and organisations responsible for “violent and destabilising actions against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank”. The sanctions did not mention outposts.

The BBC contacted Amana to ask why it was providing loans used to establish outposts. It did not respond.

There is also a trend of the Israeli government retroactively legalising outposts - effectively transforming them into settlements. Last year, for example, the government began the process of legalising at least 10 outposts, and granted at least six others full legal status.

In February, Moshe Sharvit - the settler Ayesha Shtayyeh says evicted her from her home - hosted an open day at his outpost, filmed by a local camera crew. Speaking candidly, he laid out just how effective outposts can be for capturing land.

“The biggest regret when we [settlers] built settlements was that we got stuck within the fences and couldn’t expand,” he told the crowd. “The farm is very important, but the most important thing for us is the surrounding area.”

He claimed he now controls about 7,000 dunams (7 sq km) of land - an area greater than many large, urban settlements in the West Bank with populations in the thousands.

Gaining control over large areas, often at the expense of Palestinian communities, is a key goal for some settlers who set up and live on outposts, says Hagit Ofran of Peace Now.

“Settlers who live on the hilltop [outposts] see themselves as ‘protecting lands’ and their daily job is to kick out Palestinians from the area,” she says.

Ayesha says that Moshe Sharvit began a campaign of harassment and intimidation almost as soon as he set up his outpost in late 2021.

When her husband, Nabil, grazed his goats in pastures he had used for decades, Sharvit would quickly arrive in an all-terrain vehicle and he and young settlers would chase the animals away, he says.

“I responded that we’d leave if the government, or police, or judge tells us to,” Nabil says.

“He told me: ‘I’m the government, and I’m the judge, and I’m the police.’”

[Vesper 28,275]

The AfD can win on an extremist platform

The results in Saxony and Thuringia show the party does not have to moderate its positions to have electoral success.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-afd-can-win-on-an-extremist-platform

The Thuringia AfD leader, Björn Höcke, relishing his ‘outlaw’ status while sending a defiant eastern message to Berlin

 

 

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has achieved unprecedented results in regional elections in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, both part of former East Germany. The party took around 30 per cent of the vote in each state. In Thuringia, this put the AfD well ahead of any other party. In Saxony, the AfD was a close second behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The result is particularly concerning given the extreme position of the AfD in Thuringia and Saxony. These regional branches of the AfD have been classified as right-wing extremists by German security authorities. The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, uses particularly radical language.

It’s also alarming for German democracy that the AfD has managed to garner significant support while very openly embracing extreme views. Far-right parties in other countries have often had to moderate their rhetoric to achieve electoral success, but the AfD has not, in this case, had to do so.

A rising force

The longstanding taboo in Germany that once rendered far-right positions unacceptable has been eroding for some time. Now this taboo appears to have lost its influence over a third of voters in the east. The threats posed by the AfD to democracy do not seem to be putting them off.

Admittedly, mainstream parties have struggled in Thuringia in recent years, with both the far right and far left having success, especially in areas that struggle economically. There is a sense among some voters in former East German regions that the economic and political system of the unified Germany benefits them less than the rest of the country, which leads to resentment towards mainstream elites.

But while this has likely contributed to the current election result, concerns about crime and immigration also played a key role. Anti-immigrant slogans seem to have been a key mobilising force, particularly for AfD voters. Indeed, voter turnout was very high in these elections—above 70 per cent in both states.

It’s also significant that the AfD gained considerable support among voters under 30, reflecting a wider trend in Europe for younger people, particularly men, to increasingly lean towards far-right positions. The AfD’s strong presence on platforms such as TikTok also seems to be part of the formula.

What next?

State governments hold considerable power over numerous issues that significantly affect the everyday lives of citizens in Germany, including education, which is exclusively determined at the state level. Additionally, state governments participate in federal legislation on matters that affect the regions. The AfD would need a coalition partner both in Thuringia and in Saxony to form a government. Yet all parties running in the elections have committed to avoiding a coalition with the AfD.

Thus all other parties in Thuringia and Saxony face the very challenging task of forming a coalition without the AfD. To achieve this in either Saxony or Thuringia, the electoral arithmetic necessitates unprecedented coalitions between parties with strikingly different ideologies. Whether this will be feasible remains to be seen.

Such a coalition would compel the conservative CDU to work with very left-leaning partners, including the newly formed BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance). It is likely to be extremely challenging for CDU and BSW politicians to find common ground. The BSW, which was formed this year as a splinter group from the Left party, takes a strong stance against immigration. This is in stark contrast to the Left party, which sees immigration much more positively. The latter, however, saw significant losses in both states.

Involving the BSW in a government could have implications for national political discourse, too, particularly as the BSW opposes Germany’s provision of weapons to Ukraine. Thus the AfD and BSW align more closely on certain key policy issues that resonate with voters and it is an open question whether the BSW will continue to rule out working with the AfD.

The successes of the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia will also have immediate ramifications for Germany’s national government and the chancellor, Olaf Scholz. All three of the parties that make up the national government coalition—the social democrats (SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats—suffered losses in these regional elections. The results are likely to exacerbate tensions in Berlin. Questions will be raised about whether the coalition can survive until the federal elections of 2025 and how the three parties can hold together as they try to appeal more to their own core voters.

This first appeared on the Europp blog of the London School of Economics

[Vesper 28,275]

"Proof of Citizenship voting" urged by Trump is a ploy to reduce the number of FEMALE voters eligible to vote in this election.

It's not really about undocumented voters, because there's never been any evidence that illegal immigrants vote in any significant numbers.

But women do. And MANY women wouldn't be easily able to prove their citizenship in November.

Why?

Because many women -- i.e., married women -- changed their names upon marriage, and so a birth certificate with a different name wouldn't prove their citizenship.

They would need either (1) a birth certificate and a marriage certificate and a driver's license (or identity card) with their current name, OR
(2) they'd need a REAL ID or a passport.

But many married women don't have a marriage certificate handy (they'd have to order one, which would take weeks), or have a REAL ID or a passport -- especially women who've been married and voting for decades.

 

Donald Trump Calls For Government Shutdown Over Fake Voter Fraud Fears

Trump says he would "shut down the government in a heartbeat" if Republicans don't pass a bill blocking noncitizens from voting, which is already illegal.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-government-shutdown_n_66d21e56e4b013957161cd53

Former President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Republicans in Congress should shut down the government next month.

Trump said that if Democrats won’t agree to legislation barring noncitizens from voting ― something that rarely happens because it’s already illegal ― then Republicans should block legislation funding basic operations of the federal government.

“I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it and if they don’t get it in the bill,” Trump told podcast host Monica Crowley, a Republican operative who served in his administration.

Earlier this month, the far-right House Freedom Caucus took the official position that any government funding bill must include the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Among other things, the bill would make states require proof of citizenship for voter registration. (Voter registration forms already require people to attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury, per federal law.)

Congress has to pass a spending bill by the end of September to prevent a partial government shutdown that would interrupt a wide variety of departments and services, but not major programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The Freedom Caucus doesn’t have enough members to actually block a clean government funding bill, which would likely pass the House with lots of support from Democrats and Republicans alike. Trump’s support for the SAVE Act could sway some Republicans, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who also supports the measure, hasn’t said he would insist on it in a funding bill.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been reportedly working behind the scenes to get the Freedom Caucus members to drop their demands. Senate Democrats won’t support the measure, and neither would President Joe Biden — and a chaotic government shutdown would probably not help Republicans with Election Day just a month away.

Trump suggested Republicans should actually increase their unrealistic demands by adding a bill restricting legal immigration.

“If they don’t get these bills, they should close it down, and Republicans should not approve it,” Trump said.

At a press conference over the summer, Johnson essentially admitted there was no evidence that undocumented immigrants vote in significant numbers in federal elections. Instead, he claimed to know it was happening “intuitively.”

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said. “We don’t have that number.”

Trump and Johnson’s false statements about illegal voting have stoked fears among Democrats and even some Republicans that they will undermine confidence in November’s election and prompt another outburst of violence like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

end

 

The article below isn't directly about the voting issue, but it discusses how many people still don't have a REAL ID, and why. And though it mentions that 44% of people still didn't have a REAL ID license, it didn't mention the difference between men and women. Married women will have a much higher rate of failing to get a REAL ID than married or single men, because REAL ID requires the extra step of locating a marriage certificate or other proof of name change.

https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/08/30/save-act-attached-to-spending-bill/

[Vesper 28,275]

 

[Vesper 28,275]

The Continuing Adventures

[Vesper 28,275]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-04-sound-of-one-maga-attacking/

In 2016, a Twitter account called “FutureRickPerlstein” appeared, then suddenly went inactive. It documented convergences that spoke to the surreal nature of the new political era that was aborning with the political emergence of Donald J. Trump; the kind of things the titular Perlstein might feature in a book on the history of the 2016 election written 50 years from now in the style of his (OK, my) books like Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. Like, you know, the time Donald Trump said the reason Mitt Romney lost was that he didn’t run a video of Donald Trump saying, “Barack Hussein Obama, you’re fired!” at the 2012 Republican National Convention. “They thought it was too controversial. Stupid people. The cinematographer said it was one of the best things he ever did.”

I was flattered by how well this mysterious tweeter captured what I try to accomplish: to convey the thump and thrum of history, how it feels to people living through it. I stress that political change is never only about political change; it is also driven by—and simultaneously drives—changes in popular culture, religion, economics, and many other “nonpolitical” variables.

Change is often best discerned in unlikely synchronicities. Like when two very different groups of Americans—Irish working-class Catholics in Boston and hillbilly fundamentalists in West Virginia—simultaneously lashed out violently in the fall of 1974 to purify their children’s public schools from the pollution of liberals. Or how an offhand joke on a TV sitcom, better than any “scientific” poll, sent up a flare that foretold not just who would next occupy the White House, but the unexpected new voting bloc that sent him there. (“Archie Bunker, a Democrat, is one of us!” a delighted New Right activist proclaimed the night after a December 1976 episode of All in the Family in which the blue-collar tribune informed his shocked hippie son-in-law that Reagan would be elected in 1980.)

Well, if FutureRickPerlstein were pressed back into service to tweet about 2024, PresentRickPerlstein suggests he or she might start with a remarkable convergence that took place last week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, A DERANGED MAN rushed the press pen at a Trump rally in Johnstown, a depressed old steel town about an hour from Pittsburgh, and one of the onetime “sundown towns” where Trump has been dog-whistling his way across America of late. These details are necessary, but not quite sufficient, aspects of what made it exemplary of our twisted times. The other part wasn’t the tree that fell in the forest; deranged, violent men, after all, are a dime a dozen these days. It’s how little sound it made. That’s what FutureRickPerlstein might pay attention to most.

The assault wasn’t mentioned at all in the biggest newspaper in the election’s most important swing state, The Philadelphia Inquirer. The story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the paper of record in the western part of the state, did reference the press riser scuffle—in the 20th paragraph, and then for three sentences.

What was not in the Associated Press’s dutiful dispatch, by contrast, tells us more than what was; and the number of places where that dispatch did not appear tells us more than anything.

More from Rick Perlstein

AP items are useful tools for historians: With a database like Newspapers.com, you can gin up a rough estimate of how deeply a story penetrated into the media consciousness by counting how many newspapers ran it, at what length, and on what page. When it comes to the present, you can do the same thing with LexisNexis. This is how I learned that the AP story appeared in precisely one American newspaper, the Chicago Daily Herald (I live in Chicago and I don’t recall ever hearing of it; it covers the northwestern suburbs), and also only one in Canada (in Red Deer, Alberta—population 100,844—home of the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame and Museum).

It did for some reason appear in lots of outlets in India and Africa. Perhaps readers there find comfort in confirming that the “Third World” ain’t the only place local authoritarians assault the free press, and editors are just giving their readers what they want. Giving readers what they want is also what editors do all too often here, unfortunately. Think of all those editorials responding to the kind of vicious savagery the rest of us know is routine in American life by doggedly insisting that “this is not us.”

Or the way they don’t report much on America’s metastasizing slow civil war at all.

The missing Johnstown story is a nice illustration of the argument I’ve been making often these days about how systematically American political journalism represses the story of right-wing political violence. And combined with that, how rarely the media adequately analyzes what might come next.

Think about it. As the AP reports, the fellow was immediately subdued by authorities armed with tasers. In an update, they added how “the man was arrested, released and will be formally charged next week,” to “face misdemeanors in municipal court for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting a public assembly.”

Not so burdensome, right? Easy to imagine him building a minor MAGA career from his heroics. Easy, also, to imagine the next guy trying the same thing with five, ten, or fifty buddies at his back. Maybe, then, the story deserves representation on a few American front pages here and there?

THE AP DISPATCH INCLUDED ONE OF THOSE absurdly rigid genre conventions of American political journalism, the one where the mere fact of puddles on the ground in the morning cannot be taken for evidence it had rained during the night:

“It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.”

Came next another rigid genre convention, the one that requires reporters to run a verbatim response from the Trump campaign, thus turning their notion of “objectivity” into a conveyor belt for disinformation: “‘Witnesses, including some in the press corps, described a crazed individual shouting expletives at President Trump,’ said campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez. ‘His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area.’”

Well, who are you going to believe, Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez or Donald Trump?

Scroll down for the video as it appears on the website of thugocrat Pamela Geller. Note a textbook fascist technique: blithely insisting that two plus two equals five, should the demands of propaganda require it. The headline is “Deranged Democrat Tries to Charge at Trump During Pennsylvania Rally.” The video shows Trump plainly saying, “That’s beautiful,” as police violently subdue an agent of disorder, then correcting himself when he realizes that the man is attacking the press. Trump then, correctly, said, “No, no, he’s on our side.”

IN FAIRNESS, THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE did bother to mention Trump’s words; the AP, no dice. Since the AP only rates the story as worth less than 300 words, that level of detail is not possible. That means what just happened—Trump identifying with an attempted assault on journalists—had been rendered invisible to readers who think they have received the full story.

Even more crucially, if a bit more subtly, the AP makes it impossible to grasp the story’s broader context: the main reason, really, stuff like this ought to be on all the front pages.

Second paragraph: “The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and had dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.”

Readers like responsible journalism, right? But a much bigger tree also crashed in that forest. In every last media account I tracked down, including this one, it didn’t even register a whisper.

Return to that video (this time at a friendlier link). Trump is in the middle of one of his favorite stories. He was talking about the assassination attempt on his life in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania, just a month earlier, and the pattern visible in the sky that day: “… two American flags, very far apart, held up by different frames, they were very big flags, beautiful flags, they were waving … the wind blew the flags together, and they formed a perfect angel … a perfect angel was formed!”

Google it: “Trump,” “shooting,” “angel,” “flags”—and don’t forget to put in “God.” The story of the flags God braided into angels at the exact moment he laid hands on Donald J. Trump offers proof to the skeptical that Trump’s survival revealed him as the instrument of His will. It’s manifestly possible that what most motivated the attacker was this notion that those getting in Donald Trump’s way are not merely enemies of the people, but enemies of God. That millions of people now think this way is something future historians will surely latch onto in trying to make sense of whatever comes next.

When elite agenda-setting political journalists start wrapping their minds around that reality is the precise moment they will start actually doing their jobs.

---

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at [email protected].

Edited September 4 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,275]

 (just one poll, but still, MI is absolutely vital and Harris has been up for weeks)

'

New Poll Shows Tight Race In Michigan

A new poll out of Michigan shows a statistical toss-up between Harris and Trump in the state. The survey, conducted by WDIV/Detroit News, found Trump ahead 44.7% to 43.5% among likely voters, with 4.8% of respondents undecided.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has failed to remove his name from the ballot, garnered 4.7% in the poll.

When definite voters were counted, the race shifted to show Harris holding a 1.6% lead over Trump, 45.7% to 44.1%.

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,662]

Silence about raping kids

 

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Kant, Einstein and ‘perpetual peace’

In today’s runaway world, Einstein’s ideal of ‘abolishing war’ becomes unavoidable rather than impractical.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/kant-einstein-and-perpetual-peace

A world-weary Albert Einstein commemorated at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington: ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones’ (Bill Perry / shutterstock.com)

 

 

Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to successive secretaries-general of the United Nations, has published an important proposal, based on ten principles, for a possible reform of the UN as its Summit on the Future looms later this month in New York. Noting that next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay, ‘Toward perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch’, Sachs writes:

The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed a dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time.

Although Kant could not have imagined the destructive potential of nuclear arms and other contemporary technologies—from bacteriological weapons to artificial intelligence—that make it practically impossible to draw a clear dividing line between civil society and the military arena today, the worrying international situation indeed threatens an atomic conflagration between great powers. And Sachs’ ten principles for gradually reforming the UN and promoting a peace process, based on a greater willingness to co-operate between large and small powers, are valid. But two additional considerations are necessary, to broaden the available forces and to outline more precisely the long-term institutional goal which Kant outlined—a world federation.

Economic governance

The first observation concerns the peace process, which does not necessarily have to involve the military potential of the great powers. Recall the initiative of the postwar French government for pacification with defeated Germany via what became the European Coal and Steel Community, the start of the process of European unification. The Schuman Declaration of May 1950, prepared by the senior official Jean Monnet and presented by the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, affirmed:

The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.

Today the international situation is very different. The wealth gap between rich and poor countries cannot be solved without a serious reform of the governance of the international economy—also demanded by the threat of irreversible ecological disaster. And while nuclear technology is being used by national governments to threaten a world war, the climate crisis is forcing all nations to co-operate for the salvation of their citizens.

At the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 in the United States on the postwar international financial order, the British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed a new international currency, the bancor. Keynes’ proposal was rejected in favour of the US dollar acting as a global reserve, a policy Washington abandoned in 1971. Today what is required is a reform of the International Monetary Fund—one of the Bretton Woods institutional products—to enable its Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to act as an international reserve.

This plan was developed by Robert Triffin in the 1960s and proposed many times since. Five currencies make up the basket of SDRs: the dollar, the renminbi, the euro, the pound sterling and the yen. A world reserve currency—let’s call it the bancor—would enable global economic governance among the US, China, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan, which could soon be extended to other G20 countries. In addition to the IMF’s global monetary reform, a new Bretton Woods, engendered by inclusive multilateral co-operation among great powers, would make it possible to relaunch the World Trade Organization, paralysed by the failure of its dispute-settlement mechanism.

Baruch plan

The second concern is the ambiguity contained in any disarmament plan that leaves intact the system of international political and legal relations. Here the postwar resonance is the failed Baruch plan developed by the US financier and governmental adviser Bernard Baruch.

Urged by the peace movements following the explosion of the two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, the following year the US government proposed to the Soviet Union a plan for a world authority, within the UN, to which all nuclear weapons and the resources necessary for their construction would be entrusted. This authority would have the power to inspect places of production and report to an international court individuals responsible for violating the rules it established.

The Baruch plan however soon ran aground. Washington proposed abolition of the right of veto held by the ‘permanent five’ in the Security Council, on which the Soviet government would not relent. Conversely, Moscow demanded the destruction of US nuclear weapons stockpiles—the Soviets did not then yet have the atomic bomb—which the Americans rejected. So in the end the plan failed. A historian of those events observed:

As the essence of the American proposal was limitation of sovereignty, so that of the Soviet was equality of sovereign power. The Americans demanded agreement on a control system before abolition of nuclear weapons; the Soviets, abolition before control.

Today, with a plurality of nuclear powers—some big, some small—the historical and political situation is much more complex than at the time of the Baruch plan, when there were only two superpowers. Moreover, technological development is such that even a conventional war could cause endless destruction, as with the war between Russia and Ukraine and that between Israel and Hamas. As in the two world wars, there are countless casualties among the military forces and the civilian population.

Now between war and civilian technology the boundaries are uncertain. The system of information and data transmission is based on satellite networks that are becoming a target for world governments. China has developed lasers for the destruction of satellites. Russia and the US are working on possible forms of space sabotage of satellite communication networks, through the explosion of nuclear bombs in extra-terrestrial space.

Global public good

Global security—and therefore the lives of the citizens of the world and the future of young people—has become a public good that can no longer be guaranteed by national governments. A treaty among a few great powers today could not prevent some other power from building new instruments of domination based not only on nuclear technologies (think of genetic manipulation, for instance).

When the Baruch plan was under discussion, Albert Einstein observed: ‘It is not feasible to abolish one single weapon as long as war itself is not abolished.’ His institutional proposal was inspired by Kant’s perpetual peace. In 1947 he wrote:

The nation-state is no longer capable of adequately protecting its citizens; to increase the military strength of a nation no longer guarantees its security. Mankind must give up war in the atomic era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity. The only military force which can bring security to the world is a supranational police force, based on world law. To this end we must direct our energies.

Today, in a climate of serious international political and military tensions, Einstein’s proposals will be considered by political ‘realists’ an unattainable utopia. Utopias are however the modern formulation of the great perspectives of common life, hope and transcendence, articulated in the past in the language of the great religions and still shared by millions of the planet’s inhabitants. ‘Progress,’ said the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, ‘is the realisation of Utopias.’

Humanity has organised itself in its history into different civilisations but the civilisation of the citizens of the world does not yet exist. It is therefore necessary to initiate a dialogue among all the civilisations of the planet to identify the necessary path, step by step, to ‘abolish war’ and build a ‘supranational police force, based on world law’.

Without a compass, it is very difficult to reach the destination. Einstein’s proposal must be the North Star for all those who intend to reform the UN with the intention of guaranteeing perpetual peace to the citizens of the world.

[Vesper 28,275]

What’s behind the massive protests in Israel? | The Take

 

[Vesper 28,275]

22 hours ago, Vesper said:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-04-sound-of-one-maga-attacking/

In 2016, a Twitter account called “FutureRickPerlstein” appeared, then suddenly went inactive. It documented convergences that spoke to the surreal nature of the new political era that was aborning with the political emergence of Donald J. Trump; the kind of things the titular Perlstein might feature in a book on the history of the 2016 election written 50 years from now in the style of his (OK, my) books like Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. Like, you know, the time Donald Trump said the reason Mitt Romney lost was that he didn’t run a video of Donald Trump saying, “Barack Hussein Obama, you’re fired!” at the 2012 Republican National Convention. “They thought it was too controversial. Stupid people. The cinematographer said it was one of the best things he ever did.”

I was flattered by how well this mysterious tweeter captured what I try to accomplish: to convey the thump and thrum of history, how it feels to people living through it. I stress that political change is never only about political change; it is also driven by—and simultaneously drives—changes in popular culture, religion, economics, and many other “nonpolitical” variables.

Change is often best discerned in unlikely synchronicities. Like when two very different groups of Americans—Irish working-class Catholics in Boston and hillbilly fundamentalists in West Virginia—simultaneously lashed out violently in the fall of 1974 to purify their children’s public schools from the pollution of liberals. Or how an offhand joke on a TV sitcom, better than any “scientific” poll, sent up a flare that foretold not just who would next occupy the White House, but the unexpected new voting bloc that sent him there. (“Archie Bunker, a Democrat, is one of us!” a delighted New Right activist proclaimed the night after a December 1976 episode of All in the Family in which the blue-collar tribune informed his shocked hippie son-in-law that Reagan would be elected in 1980.)

Well, if FutureRickPerlstein were pressed back into service to tweet about 2024, PresentRickPerlstein suggests he or she might start with a remarkable convergence that took place last week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, A DERANGED MAN rushed the press pen at a Trump rally in Johnstown, a depressed old steel town about an hour from Pittsburgh, and one of the onetime “sundown towns” where Trump has been dog-whistling his way across America of late. These details are necessary, but not quite sufficient, aspects of what made it exemplary of our twisted times. The other part wasn’t the tree that fell in the forest; deranged, violent men, after all, are a dime a dozen these days. It’s how little sound it made. That’s what FutureRickPerlstein might pay attention to most.

The assault wasn’t mentioned at all in the biggest newspaper in the election’s most important swing state, The Philadelphia Inquirer. The story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the paper of record in the western part of the state, did reference the press riser scuffle—in the 20th paragraph, and then for three sentences.

What was not in the Associated Press’s dutiful dispatch, by contrast, tells us more than what was; and the number of places where that dispatch did not appear tells us more than anything.

More from Rick Perlstein

AP items are useful tools for historians: With a database like Newspapers.com, you can gin up a rough estimate of how deeply a story penetrated into the media consciousness by counting how many newspapers ran it, at what length, and on what page. When it comes to the present, you can do the same thing with LexisNexis. This is how I learned that the AP story appeared in precisely one American newspaper, the Chicago Daily Herald (I live in Chicago and I don’t recall ever hearing of it; it covers the northwestern suburbs), and also only one in Canada (in Red Deer, Alberta—population 100,844—home of the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame and Museum).

It did for some reason appear in lots of outlets in India and Africa. Perhaps readers there find comfort in confirming that the “Third World” ain’t the only place local authoritarians assault the free press, and editors are just giving their readers what they want. Giving readers what they want is also what editors do all too often here, unfortunately. Think of all those editorials responding to the kind of vicious savagery the rest of us know is routine in American life by doggedly insisting that “this is not us.”

Or the way they don’t report much on America’s metastasizing slow civil war at all.

The missing Johnstown story is a nice illustration of the argument I’ve been making often these days about how systematically American political journalism represses the story of right-wing political violence. And combined with that, how rarely the media adequately analyzes what might come next.

Think about it. As the AP reports, the fellow was immediately subdued by authorities armed with tasers. In an update, they added how “the man was arrested, released and will be formally charged next week,” to “face misdemeanors in municipal court for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting a public assembly.”

Not so burdensome, right? Easy to imagine him building a minor MAGA career from his heroics. Easy, also, to imagine the next guy trying the same thing with five, ten, or fifty buddies at his back. Maybe, then, the story deserves representation on a few American front pages here and there?

THE AP DISPATCH INCLUDED ONE OF THOSE absurdly rigid genre conventions of American political journalism, the one where the mere fact of puddles on the ground in the morning cannot be taken for evidence it had rained during the night:

“It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.”

Came next another rigid genre convention, the one that requires reporters to run a verbatim response from the Trump campaign, thus turning their notion of “objectivity” into a conveyor belt for disinformation: “‘Witnesses, including some in the press corps, described a crazed individual shouting expletives at President Trump,’ said campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez. ‘His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area.’”

Well, who are you going to believe, Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez or Donald Trump?

Scroll down for the video as it appears on the website of thugocrat Pamela Geller. Note a textbook fascist technique: blithely insisting that two plus two equals five, should the demands of propaganda require it. The headline is “Deranged Democrat Tries to Charge at Trump During Pennsylvania Rally.” The video shows Trump plainly saying, “That’s beautiful,” as police violently subdue an agent of disorder, then correcting himself when he realizes that the man is attacking the press. Trump then, correctly, said, “No, no, he’s on our side.”

IN FAIRNESS, THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE did bother to mention Trump’s words; the AP, no dice. Since the AP only rates the story as worth less than 300 words, that level of detail is not possible. That means what just happened—Trump identifying with an attempted assault on journalists—had been rendered invisible to readers who think they have received the full story.

Even more crucially, if a bit more subtly, the AP makes it impossible to grasp the story’s broader context: the main reason, really, stuff like this ought to be on all the front pages.

Second paragraph: “The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and had dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.”

Readers like responsible journalism, right? But a much bigger tree also crashed in that forest. In every last media account I tracked down, including this one, it didn’t even register a whisper.

Return to that video (this time at a friendlier link). Trump is in the middle of one of his favorite stories. He was talking about the assassination attempt on his life in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania, just a month earlier, and the pattern visible in the sky that day: “… two American flags, very far apart, held up by different frames, they were very big flags, beautiful flags, they were waving … the wind blew the flags together, and they formed a perfect angel … a perfect angel was formed!”

Google it: “Trump,” “shooting,” “angel,” “flags”—and don’t forget to put in “God.” The story of the flags God braided into angels at the exact moment he laid hands on Donald J. Trump offers proof to the skeptical that Trump’s survival revealed him as the instrument of His will. It’s manifestly possible that what most motivated the attacker was this notion that those getting in Donald Trump’s way are not merely enemies of the people, but enemies of God. That millions of people now think this way is something future historians will surely latch onto in trying to make sense of whatever comes next.

When elite agenda-setting political journalists start wrapping their minds around that reality is the precise moment they will start actually doing their jobs.

---

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at [email protected].

An Author’s Note

An update on this morning’s story, "The Sound of One MAGA Attacking"

This morning you received a column from me reflecting on news reports that a pro-Trump rally attendee in Johnstown, Pennsylvania attempted to hop a barrier and assault members of the press. From that report, and accompanying video that appeared to confirm it, I observed how frightening it was that the man carried out his attack amid a recitation by Trump of a favorite story of his about an angel supposedly appearing in the form of two American flags just as he dodged a would-be assassin’s bullet. The man, I speculated, may have believed Trump was carrying out God’s will, and that the media was standing in his way. I also noted the fact that news reports of the event noted that the attempted assault came after a rant against the media, but did not mention the story about the angel. I argued that this symbolized how the media falls short in grasping just how terrifying the worshipful nature of Trump’s support has become. I also complained about how few American news outlets reported on the event. I thereby concluded that both the assault, and the failure of the media to take it seriously, was an exemplary symbol of this particular moment in American politics. I was wrong! It turns out I based my interpretation on incorrect, incomplete, and misleading accounts of what had actually taken place. Reports now indicate that the arrested man was attempting to hang an anti-Trump banner from the press pen. I’ve asked TAP editor David Dayen to take down the story. I’m grateful to him for doing so. One part of it, to be sure, was correct, and disturbing: Donald Trump thought the man was trying to assault the press, and uttered the words "No, no, he’s one of ours," in apparent encouragement of that would-be assault. But I was errant in mocking the Associated Press for reporting, "It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic"; and in calling Trump campaign advisor Danielle Alvarez a liar for stating, "His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area." I apologize to the AP and to Ms. Alvarez. I apologize to you, too, my readers. I cherish the trust you repose in me, and am terribly sorry for projecting what I presumed to be true, based in my broader narrative about what’s going on in America, instead of hanging back, keeping cool, and waiting for more facts to develop before going off half-cocked. The world’s already plenty scary enough without stoking any extra fear. Accuracy has to come first. Onward.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

[cosmicway 1,296]

On 04/09/2024 at 13:38, Vesper said:

The AfD can win on an extremist platform

The results in Saxony and Thuringia show the party does not have to moderate its positions to have electoral success.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-afd-can-win-on-an-extremist-platform

The Thuringia AfD leader, Björn Höcke, relishing his ‘outlaw’ status while sending a defiant eastern message to Berlin

 

 

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has achieved unprecedented results in regional elections in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, both part of former East Germany. The party took around 30 per cent of the vote in each state. In Thuringia, this put the AfD well ahead of any other party. In Saxony, the AfD was a close second behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The result is particularly concerning given the extreme position of the AfD in Thuringia and Saxony. These regional branches of the AfD have been classified as right-wing extremists by German security authorities. The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, uses particularly radical language.

It’s also alarming for German democracy that the AfD has managed to garner significant support while very openly embracing extreme views. Far-right parties in other countries have often had to moderate their rhetoric to achieve electoral success, but the AfD has not, in this case, had to do so.

A rising force

The longstanding taboo in Germany that once rendered far-right positions unacceptable has been eroding for some time. Now this taboo appears to have lost its influence over a third of voters in the east. The threats posed by the AfD to democracy do not seem to be putting them off.

Admittedly, mainstream parties have struggled in Thuringia in recent years, with both the far right and far left having success, especially in areas that struggle economically. There is a sense among some voters in former East German regions that the economic and political system of the unified Germany benefits them less than the rest of the country, which leads to resentment towards mainstream elites.

But while this has likely contributed to the current election result, concerns about crime and immigration also played a key role. Anti-immigrant slogans seem to have been a key mobilising force, particularly for AfD voters. Indeed, voter turnout was very high in these elections—above 70 per cent in both states.

It’s also significant that the AfD gained considerable support among voters under 30, reflecting a wider trend in Europe for younger people, particularly men, to increasingly lean towards far-right positions. The AfD’s strong presence on platforms such as TikTok also seems to be part of the formula.

What next?

State governments hold considerable power over numerous issues that significantly affect the everyday lives of citizens in Germany, including education, which is exclusively determined at the state level. Additionally, state governments participate in federal legislation on matters that affect the regions. The AfD would need a coalition partner both in Thuringia and in Saxony to form a government. Yet all parties running in the elections have committed to avoiding a coalition with the AfD.

Thus all other parties in Thuringia and Saxony face the very challenging task of forming a coalition without the AfD. To achieve this in either Saxony or Thuringia, the electoral arithmetic necessitates unprecedented coalitions between parties with strikingly different ideologies. Whether this will be feasible remains to be seen.

Such a coalition would compel the conservative CDU to work with very left-leaning partners, including the newly formed BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance). It is likely to be extremely challenging for CDU and BSW politicians to find common ground. The BSW, which was formed this year as a splinter group from the Left party, takes a strong stance against immigration. This is in stark contrast to the Left party, which sees immigration much more positively. The latter, however, saw significant losses in both states.

Involving the BSW in a government could have implications for national political discourse, too, particularly as the BSW opposes Germany’s provision of weapons to Ukraine. Thus the AfD and BSW align more closely on certain key policy issues that resonate with voters and it is an open question whether the BSW will continue to rule out working with the AfD.

The successes of the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia will also have immediate ramifications for Germany’s national government and the chancellor, Olaf Scholz. All three of the parties that make up the national government coalition—the social democrats (SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats—suffered losses in these regional elections. The results are likely to exacerbate tensions in Berlin. Questions will be raised about whether the coalition can survive until the federal elections of 2025 and how the three parties can hold together as they try to appeal more to their own core voters.

This first appeared on the Europp blog of the London School of Economics

 It's a long swim for AFD to win in Germany, although it seems they are gaining in popularity.
Germany is defferent from the other countries of Europe in that the traditional conservative and socialist parties (CDU and SPD) don't hate each other - certainly not to the same extent as everywhere else. Therefore they will oppose AFD and won't allow it to infiltrate them.
Meanwhile ISIS wanted to help AFD in the Thuringia election by staging the terror attack on election day.