Narcissists don't accept any criticism. They consider themselves
infallible. That sounds suspiciously like Donald Trump. Behind such a
big mouth is often a very troubled person, says therapist Bärbel
Wardetzki.
Remote diagnosing is a controversial practice among psychologists.
But for a while now, many in the field have been concerned about US
President Donald Trump's seemingly dire mental state. In February last year, a letter written by 33 psychiatrists and psychologists was published in The New York Times. They warned of the risks the US president poses.
In "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", a book published in October,
27 psychiatrists and mental health experts describe the president's
severe personality disorder. The most frequent diagnosis in the book is
narcissistic personality disorder.
Read more: New book paints strange picture of Trump family ties
Bärbel
Wardetzki is a psychotherapist in Germany who has written several books
about narcissism. In an interview with DW, she explains what narcissism
is.
DW: Am I a narcissist if I like myself?
Bärbel Wardetzki: No, the term narcissism is not easy to define. I
see narcissism as a way of dealing with the world. It ranges from
positive narcissism to pathological narcissism. People who say "I like
myself" simply have high self-esteem. They do not experience self-doubt
but they are still able to structure their inner life, help and comfort
themselves. They are aware of their capabilities and limits. Actually,
many people view this attitude as negative narcissism but it is actually
positive. A narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a
deeply disturbed sense of self-esteem that is compensated for by creating a larger-than-life image of oneself.
What about negative narcissism? Does US President Donald Trump suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder?
It
is difficult to diagnose Trump as I do not actually know him and can
only interpret his behavior. Maybe he suffers from a completely
different personality disorder but the narcissistic aspect is what
catches the eye. He's a prime example of narcissism. His behavior and
way of dealing with others by simply dividing the world into good and
evil is typical of this disorder.
What type of behavior do psychologists associate with a narcissistic personality disorder?
There
are several criteria that must be met before one can speak of a
disorder. Criticism is met with anger as it is associated with shame and
humiliation. People with this disorder are manipulative. Relationships
with others are exploited for personal gain. Another factor is overblown
self-esteem. The person feels unique and great. Those who have a
personality disorder constantly fantasize about infinite success, power,
beauty, brilliance and idealized love. They make great demands on
themselves and others. They constantly expect attention and admiration.
Furthermore, narcissists lack empathy. This point however, is a topic of
contention at the moment. People with a personality disorder can show
empathy but not in the sense of compassion, which means feeling for
others. Last but not least, people with a narcissistic personality
disorder are extremely envious of others.
You say that a narcissistic personality disorder is based on low self-esteem. So if Trump brags about having a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong Un, does he actually fear having a smaller one?
Exactly.
"I am not good enough" is the underlying fear in this disorder and it
can be an existential fear. People who develop narcissistic structures
often do not even know who they are. They have often been manipulated as
children who had to live up to a specific image. They draw their
self-esteem from external accomplishments: power, big cars or important
positions. But all this conceals an emotionally neglected child who was
never given the attention it actually needed.
What's the best way to deal with a narcissist like Trump?
Well,
that's the million dollar question. When dealing with people like that,
your own self-esteem is challenged. After all, they can quickly make
you feel worthless and miserable and no longer the person you are. It is
important to learn to take a stand against them, to raise your voice
and not be intimidated. And to leave when the relationship becomes too
destructive. Which, unfortunately, we cannot do in this case.
Bärbel
Wardetzski is a psychotherapist and the author of the book "Narzissmus,
Verführung und Macht in Politik und Gesellschaft" ("Narcissism,
seduction and power in politics and society")
The interview was conducted by Julia Vergin.
Showing posts with label critics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critics. Show all posts
Friday
The Resurgence of Political Authoritarianism: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
Following the end of World War II, liberal democracy began to
flourish in most countries in the Western world, and its institutions
and values were aspired to by movements and individuals under
authoritarian and oppressive regimes. However, with the rise of
neoliberalism, both the institutions and the values of modern democracy
came rapidly and continuously under attack in an effort to extend the
profit-maximizing logic and practices of capitalism throughout all
aspects of economic and social life.
Sketched out in broad outlines, this story explains the resurgence of authoritarian political trends in today’s Western societies, including the rise of far-right movements whose followers feel threatened by the processes unleashed by neoliberal economic policies. In the former communist countries and in the non-Western world, meanwhile, authoritarianism is also on the rise, partly as a residue of authoritarian legacies, and partly as a reaction to perceived threats posed to national culture and social order by global capitalism.
Is it possible to counter this rise in extreme populism? In this exclusive Truthout interview, the world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky — the author of more than 100 books and thousands of academic articles and popular essays — offers his unique insights on this and more, bringing into the analysis issues and questions that are rarely addressed in the current debates taking place today about the resurgence of political authoritarianism.
C.J. Polychroniou: In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published an intellectually embarrassing book titled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he prophesied the “end of history” after the collapse of the communist bloc, arguing that liberal democracy would become the world’s “final form of human government.” However, what has happened in this decade in particular is that the institutions and values of liberal democracy have come under attack by scores of authoritarian leaders all over the world, and extreme nationalism, xenophobia and “soft fascist” tendencies have begun reshaping the political landscape in Europe and the United States. How do you explain the resurgence of political authoritarianism in the early part of the 21st century?
Noam Chomsky: The “political landscape” is indeed ominous. While today’s political and social circumstances are much less dire, still they do call to mind Antonio Gramsci’s warning from Mussolini’s prison cells about the severe crisis of his day, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
One morbid symptom is the resurgence of political authoritarianism, a highly important matter that is properly receiving a great deal of attention in public debate. But “a great deal of public attention” should always be a warning sign: Does the shaping of the issues reflect power interests, which are diverting attention from what may be more significant factors behind the general concerns? In the present case, I think that is so, and before turning to the very significant question of the resurgence of political authoritarianism, I’d like to bring up related matters that do not seem to me to receive the attention they merit, and in fact are almost totally excluded from the extensive public attention.
It’s entirely true that “the institutions and values of liberal democracy are under attack” to an unusual extent, but not only by authoritarian leaders, and not for the first time. I presume all would agree that primary among the values of liberal democracy is that governments should be responsive to voters. If that is not the case, “liberal democracy” is a farce.
It has been well established that it is not the case. Ample work in mainstream political science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their own elected representatives, who listen to different voices — the voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector (Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton University Press, 2014; Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It, University of Chicago press, 2017; Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2018, among others). Furthermore, the penetrating work of Thomas Ferguson reveals that for a long time, elections have been substantially bought, including Congress, continuing right to the present, 2016.
These facts alone show that the furor about alleged Russian interference with our pristine democratic process reveals profound indoctrination — in capitalist, not democratic, values.
Furthermore, those who find foreign interference to be especially troublesome despite its marginality should clearly be looking elsewhere. It is not even in question that Israel interferes massively in US elections and governance, proudly and ostentatiously. One recent case that was unusually brazen was in 2015, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress without even informing President Obama in order to undermine his Iran program, a mere fragment of Israel’s constant and far-reaching efforts to influence US politics.
Putting aside these secondary matters, the major attack on the institutions and values of liberal democracy is by the powerful business classes, intensifying since Reagan as both political parties have drifted toward greater subordination to their interests — the Republicans to such an extreme that by now they barely can be considered a political party. Anyone who finds this surprising must be uninformed about American society and how it functions. By now, as business power has been unleashed by its servants in the Republican Party, the traditional business attack on “the institutions and values of liberal democracy” has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, if even then.
Of course, it is quite legal to buy elections, to send lobbyists to congressional offices to write legislation, and in other ways “to shape public policy in a way that serves [private power’s] narrow interests” — indeed, these comprise “an essential, nonaccidental part of … business strategy,” Zephyr Teachout writes in a valuable study. Investigation has shown, she adds, that a CEO’s investment in changing laws to decrease corporate tax rates yields a vastly greater return than investment in reducing cost of production. Small wonder that all of this is normal business strategy.
Teachout cites a Supreme Court decision of 1874 which concluded that, “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves [for] the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption.” That was, of course, before the ideology of business supremacy had risen to the level of “hegemonic common sense,” in Gramscian terms. The sharp transition well illustrates the force of indoctrination in a society with a powerful and highly class-conscious business community.
The Reagan-Thatcher project of enhancing untrammeled business power, carried forward and extended by their successors, has been the political reflection of a dedicated and coordinated campaign by the business classes to reverse the “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s that deeply troubled liberal international elites, who devoted the first major publication of the Trilateral Commission to this serious malady. Their prime concern was the increased engagement of popular classes in the political arena to press their demands, all of which imposes too much pressure and the state, threatening (though this remains implicit) the dominance of the business world. As the American rapporteur, Harvard professor of government Samuel Huntington, observed nostalgically, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” but those happy days were disappearing under the attack of the great majority, whose role in a liberal democracy is to be passive and acquiescent, a doctrine with a rich pedigree, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.
That was the liberal end of the political spectrum. Toward the conservative end, at the same time, the influential “Powell memorandum,” directed to the Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), called for open war by the business world to defend itself from the virtual takeover of the country by radical forces that were destroying “free enterprise” under the leadership of Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other “dangerous extremists.”
The messages are pretty much the same, but the rhetoric is quite different. The liberal rhetoric is largely reserved, while the business rhetoric reaches the frenzied pitch of a 3-year-old who has all the toys and laments that one might be taken away.
The business world, of course, did not need these reminders to dedicate its resources to reversing the democratic progress and highly successful regulated capitalism of the postwar era that was indeed infringing on business power, and crucially threatening the rate of profit, as political economist Robert Brenner has shown. The neoliberal counterattack substantially beat back these threats, sharply increasing private power and the wealth of a tiny segment of the population while leaving the majority to face economic stagnation or decline, increasingly precarious lives, and the natural loss of political influence as concentrated private economic power gains even greater dominance than before.
All of this continues under the revival from the housing-financial crisis that proceeds under Obama and Trump. The latest report of the Department of Labor finds that, “From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted. The decrease in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.6-percent increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.5-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.” Meanwhile, surging corporate profits are inflated still further by the tax scam that is the jewel in the crown of Trump’s Republican Party, overwhelmingly used for buyouts and other devices to enrich the wealthy rather than productive investment that would benefit society and lift wages.
The other side of the coin is the Reagan-Thatcher assault on unions, now advanced by the authorization of right-to-scrounge laws (in Orwellian terminology, “right-to-work” laws) by the most reactionary Supreme Court in over a century. The guiding doctrine is to create a world of isolated individuals at the mercy of concentrated private power in accord with the Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no society,” Thatcher’s unwitting paraphrase of Marx’s bitter condemnation of authoritarian leaders who sought to turn society into a “sack of potatoes.”
There are other sources for the malaise of the general population. The radical financialization of the economy during the neoliberal years and the prioritization of shareholder value, expedited by Reagan’s “Chicago Boys,” has shifted corporate behavior sharply from the retain-and-invest model of the great growth years of regimented capitalism to the “buyback economy” of the neoliberal reaction, matters explored with much insight by William Lazonick.
Apple, the world’s largest corporation in market value, was once devoted to product innovation and development. Under its new CEO, Tim Cook, it has become the “buyback king,” enriching shareholders (and management). Others are doing much the same. Lazonick estimates that “trillions of dollars that could have been spent on productive investment have instead been used to buy back stock in order to boost share prices,” enriching the rich but not providing meaningful and steady work or useful goods. The Republican tax scam of 2018 is having the same effects, all to the detriment of working people and the general population. The rapid increase in speculation has had similar consequences. The same is true of the repeated financial crises following deregulation, severely harming the poor and working people, though no longer the culprits in the financial industry, who are bailed out by the public and emerge richer than before.
There are remedies, but their advocates remain for now at the fringes of the political economy. Though perhaps not for long.
These are, to be sure, generalities. Like most complex processes, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the concomitant anti-social tendencies are over-determined. There are many more specific factors but the essence, I think, is along the lines just outlined.
Today’s most powerful authoritarian leaders — e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel and Donald Trump in the US, to name just a few — are enjoying widespread popularity with the masses and happen, in fact, to have risen to power via democratic means. What’s going on? Is something wrong with today’s democracy?
Here specific causes intrude.
In the case of Western democracies — Trump, Western Europe — what’s wrong with today’s democracy is its decline, with the attendant attack on prospects for a decent life as the political system falls even more than usual under the control of concentrated private power and hence becomes less responsive to human needs. These are natural consequences of the concentration of wealth under the neoliberal assault against the social democratic tendencies of the early postwar decades. It should be recalled that the Great Depression and World War II unleashed radical democratic forces over much of the world, and although the reaction of the business world was quick to come (e.g., Taft-Hartley in 1947), it was muted until the economic disruptions of the 1970s, which provided an opportunity for vigorous class war.
It’s also worth recalling the rather belated recognition in 1978 by United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser that businessmen had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country, a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.” In fact, the class war was underway in the latter days of the pre-war New Deal years, but it was not yet one-sided, since a vigorous labor movement existed — the target of bitter and increasingly one-sided class war in the postwar years.
In Europe, the attack on democracy is amplified by the strongly undemocratic institutions of the European Union. Major decisions over policy are made by the unelected Troika — European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank — with the northern banks right at their shoulders. The population has little to say, and knows it — a large reason for the general collapse of the centrist parties that have governed the countries since World War II.
In a very revealing inquiry, economist Mark Weisbrot reviews the reports of the regular IMF consultations with member governments of the European Union. He discovered “a remarkably consistent and disturbing pattern.” The financial crisis was exploited as an opportunity to lock in the neoliberal reforms: spending cuts in the public sector rather than tax increases, reduced benefits and public services, cuts in health care, undermining of collective bargaining, and in general, moves to create a society “with less bargaining power for labor and lower wages, more inequality and poverty, a smaller government and social safety nets, and measures that reduce growth and employment.”
“The IMF papers,” Weisbrot concludes, “detail the agenda of Europe’s decision-makers, and they have accomplished quite a bit of it over the past five years.” The agenda is quite familiar in the US and in fact, wherever the neoliberal assault has proceeded.
In England, Thatcher-Major and Blair’s New Labour, followed by Tory austerity, had similar effects. The Corbyn movement is an encouraging reaction, bitterly opposed by the Labour establishment and most of the media.
The other cases mentioned have their own special features.
Putin seems to have been genuinely popular throughout his tenure. Crimeans, it appears, support the takeover by Russia. There seemed to be possibilities for social democratic developments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, possibly even for mutually supportive linkages to social democratic Europe. Such hopes were dashed by the harsh effects of the US-backed market reforms, which devastated the economy and led to millions of deaths, along with opening the way for immense corruption as oligarchs took over state assets. Putin was seen by the public as a corrective to the neoliberal disaster and the decline of Russia on the world scene. Authoritarian no doubt, often brutal, but, it seems, popular.
In Israel, too, the right-wing nationalist-religious coalition is genuinely popular. Threats to Netanyahu are primarily from his right. This is quite a change from the time when Israel conquered Palestinian lands in the 1967, and soon set forth on its illegal settlement programs. The change was predicted early on by those who understood the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot. One commentator who was particularly outspoken was the respected Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He condemned the occupation bitterly, not because of concern for the Palestinians, for whose fate he expressed only contempt, but because of the predictable effect on Jews, who, he warned, would become “Judeo-Nazis” as they carried out the tasks of repression and displacement.
The signs by now are dramatic, both in actions and in legislation, both with regard to the criminal acts in the occupied territories and the shift to unconcealed racism at home. The occupied territories include Gaza, despite Israel’s claim to the contrary, which is not even accepted by its loyal US supporter. In the full knowledge that the home of 2 million people is likely to become literally “unlivable” within a few years, as international monitors have predicted, Israel maintains its stranglehold, designed officially to keep the population on a “diet” while the self-described “most moral army in the world” pounds away with atrocities that are appalling the world.
Turkey, too, is a special case, with a long and complex history since the current Turkish state took form after World War I. Keeping to recent times, in the ‘90s, Turkey was the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the period during the state terror campaign against the Kurds. Tens of thousands were killed, thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — were driven from their homes, some now barely surviving in abandoned buildings in Istanbul. The main support for the state crimes was Washington: Clinton provided 80 percent of the arms in an increasing flow as atrocities increased. Little was reported even though the major press had bureaus in Turkey, of course. Much of the information available comes from the detailed reports of the outstanding researcher for Human Rights Watch, Jonathan Sugden — so outstanding that he was finally expelled by the government. Particularly significant were a remarkable group of Turkish intellectuals – leading writers, artists, journalists, publishers and others — who not only protested the crimes, but undertook civil disobedience, facing and sometimes enduring long and severe punishment. I know of no group like them anywhere.
By the turn of the century, the situation was improving, soon quite considerably, including the early Erdoğan years. But soon regression began under his leadership, and it has become extremely severe.
Turkey held the worst record in the world for persecuting journalists, and the repression has extended to academics and many others. Vicious attacks on Kurdish areas have increased. The country is divided between a secular liberal-left sector and a deeply religious, mostly rural population. A dedicated Islamist, Erdoğan has rallied support among this sector and is relying on it to create a harsh and repressive authoritarian state with strong Islamist elements. What is happening is particularly painful to observe, not just because of the crimes, but because of the hopeful prospects that were lying ahead only a few years ago and the fact that Turkey could serve as a valuable bridge, culturally as well as economically, between West and East.
Hungary is another special case. It is a cultural/linguistic island, which has had remarkable cultural achievements and also an ugly record of fascism and cooperation with the Nazis. From what I have read — I have no close knowledge — the country has long been obsessed with the fear of decline, even disappearance — fears exacerbated by the passage of refugees through Hungary to Western Europe. The population is declining, partly from low fertility, partly from a large exodus to the West. Orbán has exploited these fears to construct an “illiberal democracy” dedicated to “saving Hungary” and “traditional values,” with the usual xenophobic and racist elements of such appeals.
There’s a good deal more to say about racism in Europe, not visible when the populations are highly homogenous, but quickly apparent as soon as there is any “contamination” by those who are a bit different. And there is no need to comment on the history of the Jews, and of the Roma right to the present.
Speaking of authoritarian leaders, I’ve been dumbfounded by the US political establishment’s reaction to Trump’s handling of the Helsinki summit with Putin. What’s wrong with the idea of the US and Russia working together to address major international issues facing the world today, including the threat of nuclear weapons? What’s your own reaction to this matter? Was Trump wrong? Was he being “anti-American”?
There’s surely nothing wrong with the US and Russia seeking rapprochement and cooperation on such issues. It is essential for hopes for a better future, even survival. Russia should not refuse to deal with the US and (were it imaginable) impose sanctions on the US and UK because they invaded and devastated Iraq with all of the hideous regional consequences, or (with France) destroyed Libya with terrible effects from West Africa to the Levant, along with other crimes too numerous to mention. Or conversely (putting aside the scale of crimes).
There are numerous issues on which the countries must cooperate, and sometimes do, as in Syria to avoid clashes that could set off war. The needs are far greater at the Russian border, where, as a result of NATO expansion and build-up of forces, accidents with indescribable consequences could easily occur. There are many other cases where serious interchange is necessary. On nuclear issues, even more so. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Obama’s programs of modernization of nuclear weapons increased “killing power” sufficiently to create “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” as explained in an important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Trump’s nuclear programs enhance the threat even beyond, with new and very dangerous weapons systems and severe lowering of the threshold for nuclear war — an existential threat to Russia, and the world; even the attacker would be devastated by a first-strike. Under George W. Bush, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, another serious threat to Russia. Russian weapons initiatives and reactions also enhance the threat of terminal destruction.
Turning to Trump, his actions make no sense at all if they are guided by some geopolitical strategy.
On the one hand, he is talking politely with Putin (some say genuflecting) and calling for reduction of tensions, while on the other hand, he is significantly escalating tensions and threats. The nuclear program just mentioned is one very serious example. He is also sending arms to Ukraine and increasing NATO forces and operations on the Russian border — actions that any Russian leader would regard as a severe threat. Harsher sanctions have been imposed on Russia, which is by no means unaware of the increasing threats – how could they be? The business press, citing US Treasury reports, observes that Russia is “liquidating dollar assets at a record pace, selling four-fifths of its cache of U.S. government debt, $81 billion worth, over a two-month period” in order to safeguard assets in case relations continue to deteriorate.
While Trump’s policies make no sense from a geostrategic perspective, they fall into place on the assumption that he is continuing to pursue his “Me First” agenda, damn the consequences for the world, matters we’ve discussed before. The agenda requires maintaining the loyalty of his base and ensuring that they will remain loyal if the Mueller investigation comes up with something that damages him. The centerpiece of his press conference with Putin, bitterly condemned by elite opinion, was his effort to discredit Mueller. The tactic is succeeding quite well. A large majority of Republicans approve of the way Trump dealt with Putin, and polls show that Mueller’s public image is at an all-time low.
Meanwhile, the sharp escalation and threats satisfy the national security hawks.
The latter constitute a broad spectrum. While it is sometimes hard to believe, we cannot overlook the fact that the most highly regarded moderates firmly uphold doctrines that are, quite literally, too outlandish to discuss. For example, Richard Haass, a respected scholar and diplomat and long-time president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, instructs us with a straight face that “International order for 4 centuries has been based on non-interference in the internal affairs of others and respect for sovereignty. Russia has violated this norm by seizing Crimea and by interfering in the 2016 US election. We must deal [with] Putin’s Russia as the rogue state it is.”
Words fail.
In Israel, a controversial bill about the “Jewish nation-state” was just passed that makes no mention of minority rights. Is there something new behind the passing of this bill that wasn’t always a reality from Israel’s standpoint of view?
Regrettably, within Israel itself, the new nationality law of July 2018 was not very controversial, though it has appalled liberal opinion throughout the world. Rather typical is what is happening in the US, which since the 1967 war, has been Israel’s leading supporter. For a long period, Israel was the darling of liberal and progressive opinion. By today, that has changed considerably. “According to a Pew Research Center survey in April [2018], self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.”
Support for Israel has shifted to the ultranationalist right and Christian evangelicals — many of whom combine passionate support for Israel with the doctrine that the Second Coming, perhaps very soon, will consign all Jews to the torments of eternal perdition apart from a very few who will find Christ in time — a level of anti-Semitism unmatched even in Nazi Germany.
Israel is well aware that it is losing support among sectors of world opinion that have at least some concern for human and civil rights. It is therefore seeking to expand its base of support to the East, primarily to China and India, the latter becoming a very natural ally for a number of reasons, including the drift in both societies toward ultranationalism, reactionary internal policies and hatred of Islam. It is also firming up what have been tacit alliances with the most reactionary and brutal Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, joined now by Egypt under the current harsh military dictatorship.
The new nationality law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, downgrades the status of Arabic and formally authorizes Jewish-only communities. It does break some new ground, but not very much. What is new is primarily the elevation of these racist principles to the Basic Law — constitutional status. Long ago, Israel’s highest court determined that Israel is “the sovereign state of the Jewish people” … but not the state of its 20 percent non-Jewish citizens, essentially the same doctrine.
One of the few articulate critics of the new law, the fine Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor, reminds us that in debates on the Land Law of 1960, Zerach Warhaftig, a founder of the National Religious Party and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, declared that, “We wish it to be clear that the land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel. Nation of Israel is a wider concept than the nation that lives in Zion, because the nation of Israel is found in the entire world…. [In this new law] there is a very great judicial novelty: we are giving a legal cover to the regulations of the Keren Kayemet leYisrael [Jewish National Fund, or JNF]” (translated from Hebrew).
The JNF regulations in turn obligate the organization to work for the benefit of “persons of Jewish race, religion, or origin.” It may be added that these radical violations of civil rights are funded by American taxpayers thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF as a charitable organization.
Warhaftig was quite right almost 60 years ago. An array of legal and administrative rules was established to ensure that the JNF would have authority over all state lands – 93 percent of the territory of the country – hence, authority to ensure that lands would be reserved for Jews alone, with minor and derisory exceptions. Details are spelled out and documented in my Towards a New Cold War (1982).
Laor reminds us that since the law was established, “700 settlements were established, all for Jews, apart from a few cities for [displaced] Bedouins (which merit ridicule).” Meanwhile, the 20 percent non-Jewish minority has been restricted to the 2 percent of the land allotted to them when the state was established 70 years ago.
In 2000, the racist land administration arrangements finally reached Israel’s High Court. It issued a narrow ruling that granted the petitioners, a professional Arab couple, the right to move to the all-Jewish town of Katzir. Very soon, arrangements began to be contrived to get around the law, but now it is no longer necessary, since segregation is legally authorized by the Basic Law.
Much of this should be familiar to Americans. New Deal public housing projects were restricted to whites by laws that remained in effect until the late 1960s, when it was too late to help African Americans because the postwar years of rapid and egalitarian growth, which offered them some opportunities, were coming to an end, and the neoliberal assault was soon to come, imposing stagnation. Another grim chapter in the history of racism in America.
Also familiar to Americans is US isolation in support of such measures (with the attractive exceptions noted earlier), now reaching new levels in the Trump administration. In the last days of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Reagan was alone in the world in supporting it, even denying the existence of Apartheid, even after Thatcher and Israel had abandoned the sinking ship. We might also recall that during the last throes of Apartheid, in 1988, the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be “one of the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world. While greatly honored internationally, Mandela remained on the US terrorist list until 2008, when at last a congressional resolution allowed him to enter the “land of the free” without special dispensation.
Often, there is indeed little new under the sun.
The World Bank continues to support authoritarian regimes throughout the Global South by providing funds and bailouts. How can the UN and Western democratic governments tolerate such a stance on the part of the World Bank?
Unfortunately, the answer is all too clear. As their own practice consistently illustrates, the “Western democratic governments” pursue similar policies with enthusiasm. It should be superfluous to illustrate, but since we live in an atmosphere of self-celebration, it might be useful to consider at least one example. Take the Congo, which should be one of the richest and most advanced countries of the world, with huge resources and no threats — from its neighbors, that is. When Europe was despoiling Africa, the Congo was the domain of King Leopold of Belgium, whose hideous crimes surpassed even the normal standards of the “enlightened” West. He didn’t pass without censure. In the famous 11th edition of the Britannica, the article on the monarch lauds his achievements, but does add a phrase at the end saying that he treated his subjects harshly – slaughtering millions and ordering atrocious tortures to gain more rubber for his overflowing coffers.
“The horror, the horror” finally came to end in 1960, when Congo declared independence. Its leading figure was the young charismatic Patrice Lumumba, who might have extricated Congo from the misery of colonialism. But it was not to be. The CIA was assigned the task of murdering him, but the Belgians got there first, and together with other liberal democracies, helped plunge Congo back to terror and destruction under the leadership of the Western favorite, the murderous kleptomaniac Mobutu, who ensured that the riches of the Congo would flow in the right direction. Fast forwarding to today, all of those who enjoy smart phones and other technical delights benefit from the rich minerals of Eastern Congo, handed over to the multinationals hovering nearby by warring militias and marauders from US-backed Rwanda while the death toll mounts to many millions.
That Western democracies should tolerate support for authoritarian regimes is not much of a mystery.
What do you think will take to halt the spread of political authoritarianism across the globe?
The familiar advice, easy to state, hard to follow, but if there’s another way, it’s been kept a dark secret: honest, dedicated, courageous and persistent engagement, ranging from education and organization to direct activism, carefully honed for effectiveness under prevailing circumstances. Hard work, necessary work, the kind that has succeeded in the past and can again.
Sketched out in broad outlines, this story explains the resurgence of authoritarian political trends in today’s Western societies, including the rise of far-right movements whose followers feel threatened by the processes unleashed by neoliberal economic policies. In the former communist countries and in the non-Western world, meanwhile, authoritarianism is also on the rise, partly as a residue of authoritarian legacies, and partly as a reaction to perceived threats posed to national culture and social order by global capitalism.
Is it possible to counter this rise in extreme populism? In this exclusive Truthout interview, the world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky — the author of more than 100 books and thousands of academic articles and popular essays — offers his unique insights on this and more, bringing into the analysis issues and questions that are rarely addressed in the current debates taking place today about the resurgence of political authoritarianism.
C.J. Polychroniou: In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published an intellectually embarrassing book titled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he prophesied the “end of history” after the collapse of the communist bloc, arguing that liberal democracy would become the world’s “final form of human government.” However, what has happened in this decade in particular is that the institutions and values of liberal democracy have come under attack by scores of authoritarian leaders all over the world, and extreme nationalism, xenophobia and “soft fascist” tendencies have begun reshaping the political landscape in Europe and the United States. How do you explain the resurgence of political authoritarianism in the early part of the 21st century?
Noam Chomsky: The “political landscape” is indeed ominous. While today’s political and social circumstances are much less dire, still they do call to mind Antonio Gramsci’s warning from Mussolini’s prison cells about the severe crisis of his day, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
One morbid symptom is the resurgence of political authoritarianism, a highly important matter that is properly receiving a great deal of attention in public debate. But “a great deal of public attention” should always be a warning sign: Does the shaping of the issues reflect power interests, which are diverting attention from what may be more significant factors behind the general concerns? In the present case, I think that is so, and before turning to the very significant question of the resurgence of political authoritarianism, I’d like to bring up related matters that do not seem to me to receive the attention they merit, and in fact are almost totally excluded from the extensive public attention.
It’s entirely true that “the institutions and values of liberal democracy are under attack” to an unusual extent, but not only by authoritarian leaders, and not for the first time. I presume all would agree that primary among the values of liberal democracy is that governments should be responsive to voters. If that is not the case, “liberal democracy” is a farce.
It has been well established that it is not the case. Ample work in mainstream political science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their own elected representatives, who listen to different voices — the voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector (Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton University Press, 2014; Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It, University of Chicago press, 2017; Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2018, among others). Furthermore, the penetrating work of Thomas Ferguson reveals that for a long time, elections have been substantially bought, including Congress, continuing right to the present, 2016.
These facts alone show that the furor about alleged Russian interference with our pristine democratic process reveals profound indoctrination — in capitalist, not democratic, values.
Furthermore, those who find foreign interference to be especially troublesome despite its marginality should clearly be looking elsewhere. It is not even in question that Israel interferes massively in US elections and governance, proudly and ostentatiously. One recent case that was unusually brazen was in 2015, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress without even informing President Obama in order to undermine his Iran program, a mere fragment of Israel’s constant and far-reaching efforts to influence US politics.
Putting aside these secondary matters, the major attack on the institutions and values of liberal democracy is by the powerful business classes, intensifying since Reagan as both political parties have drifted toward greater subordination to their interests — the Republicans to such an extreme that by now they barely can be considered a political party. Anyone who finds this surprising must be uninformed about American society and how it functions. By now, as business power has been unleashed by its servants in the Republican Party, the traditional business attack on “the institutions and values of liberal democracy” has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, if even then.
Of course, it is quite legal to buy elections, to send lobbyists to congressional offices to write legislation, and in other ways “to shape public policy in a way that serves [private power’s] narrow interests” — indeed, these comprise “an essential, nonaccidental part of … business strategy,” Zephyr Teachout writes in a valuable study. Investigation has shown, she adds, that a CEO’s investment in changing laws to decrease corporate tax rates yields a vastly greater return than investment in reducing cost of production. Small wonder that all of this is normal business strategy.
Teachout cites a Supreme Court decision of 1874 which concluded that, “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves [for] the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption.” That was, of course, before the ideology of business supremacy had risen to the level of “hegemonic common sense,” in Gramscian terms. The sharp transition well illustrates the force of indoctrination in a society with a powerful and highly class-conscious business community.
The Reagan-Thatcher project of enhancing untrammeled business power, carried forward and extended by their successors, has been the political reflection of a dedicated and coordinated campaign by the business classes to reverse the “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s that deeply troubled liberal international elites, who devoted the first major publication of the Trilateral Commission to this serious malady. Their prime concern was the increased engagement of popular classes in the political arena to press their demands, all of which imposes too much pressure and the state, threatening (though this remains implicit) the dominance of the business world. As the American rapporteur, Harvard professor of government Samuel Huntington, observed nostalgically, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” but those happy days were disappearing under the attack of the great majority, whose role in a liberal democracy is to be passive and acquiescent, a doctrine with a rich pedigree, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.
That was the liberal end of the political spectrum. Toward the conservative end, at the same time, the influential “Powell memorandum,” directed to the Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), called for open war by the business world to defend itself from the virtual takeover of the country by radical forces that were destroying “free enterprise” under the leadership of Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other “dangerous extremists.”
The messages are pretty much the same, but the rhetoric is quite different. The liberal rhetoric is largely reserved, while the business rhetoric reaches the frenzied pitch of a 3-year-old who has all the toys and laments that one might be taken away.
The business world, of course, did not need these reminders to dedicate its resources to reversing the democratic progress and highly successful regulated capitalism of the postwar era that was indeed infringing on business power, and crucially threatening the rate of profit, as political economist Robert Brenner has shown. The neoliberal counterattack substantially beat back these threats, sharply increasing private power and the wealth of a tiny segment of the population while leaving the majority to face economic stagnation or decline, increasingly precarious lives, and the natural loss of political influence as concentrated private economic power gains even greater dominance than before.
All of this continues under the revival from the housing-financial crisis that proceeds under Obama and Trump. The latest report of the Department of Labor finds that, “From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted. The decrease in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.6-percent increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.5-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.” Meanwhile, surging corporate profits are inflated still further by the tax scam that is the jewel in the crown of Trump’s Republican Party, overwhelmingly used for buyouts and other devices to enrich the wealthy rather than productive investment that would benefit society and lift wages.
The other side of the coin is the Reagan-Thatcher assault on unions, now advanced by the authorization of right-to-scrounge laws (in Orwellian terminology, “right-to-work” laws) by the most reactionary Supreme Court in over a century. The guiding doctrine is to create a world of isolated individuals at the mercy of concentrated private power in accord with the Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no society,” Thatcher’s unwitting paraphrase of Marx’s bitter condemnation of authoritarian leaders who sought to turn society into a “sack of potatoes.”
There are other sources for the malaise of the general population. The radical financialization of the economy during the neoliberal years and the prioritization of shareholder value, expedited by Reagan’s “Chicago Boys,” has shifted corporate behavior sharply from the retain-and-invest model of the great growth years of regimented capitalism to the “buyback economy” of the neoliberal reaction, matters explored with much insight by William Lazonick.
Apple, the world’s largest corporation in market value, was once devoted to product innovation and development. Under its new CEO, Tim Cook, it has become the “buyback king,” enriching shareholders (and management). Others are doing much the same. Lazonick estimates that “trillions of dollars that could have been spent on productive investment have instead been used to buy back stock in order to boost share prices,” enriching the rich but not providing meaningful and steady work or useful goods. The Republican tax scam of 2018 is having the same effects, all to the detriment of working people and the general population. The rapid increase in speculation has had similar consequences. The same is true of the repeated financial crises following deregulation, severely harming the poor and working people, though no longer the culprits in the financial industry, who are bailed out by the public and emerge richer than before.
There are remedies, but their advocates remain for now at the fringes of the political economy. Though perhaps not for long.
These are, to be sure, generalities. Like most complex processes, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the concomitant anti-social tendencies are over-determined. There are many more specific factors but the essence, I think, is along the lines just outlined.
Today’s most powerful authoritarian leaders — e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel and Donald Trump in the US, to name just a few — are enjoying widespread popularity with the masses and happen, in fact, to have risen to power via democratic means. What’s going on? Is something wrong with today’s democracy?
Here specific causes intrude.
In the case of Western democracies — Trump, Western Europe — what’s wrong with today’s democracy is its decline, with the attendant attack on prospects for a decent life as the political system falls even more than usual under the control of concentrated private power and hence becomes less responsive to human needs. These are natural consequences of the concentration of wealth under the neoliberal assault against the social democratic tendencies of the early postwar decades. It should be recalled that the Great Depression and World War II unleashed radical democratic forces over much of the world, and although the reaction of the business world was quick to come (e.g., Taft-Hartley in 1947), it was muted until the economic disruptions of the 1970s, which provided an opportunity for vigorous class war.
It’s also worth recalling the rather belated recognition in 1978 by United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser that businessmen had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country, a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.” In fact, the class war was underway in the latter days of the pre-war New Deal years, but it was not yet one-sided, since a vigorous labor movement existed — the target of bitter and increasingly one-sided class war in the postwar years.
In Europe, the attack on democracy is amplified by the strongly undemocratic institutions of the European Union. Major decisions over policy are made by the unelected Troika — European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank — with the northern banks right at their shoulders. The population has little to say, and knows it — a large reason for the general collapse of the centrist parties that have governed the countries since World War II.
In a very revealing inquiry, economist Mark Weisbrot reviews the reports of the regular IMF consultations with member governments of the European Union. He discovered “a remarkably consistent and disturbing pattern.” The financial crisis was exploited as an opportunity to lock in the neoliberal reforms: spending cuts in the public sector rather than tax increases, reduced benefits and public services, cuts in health care, undermining of collective bargaining, and in general, moves to create a society “with less bargaining power for labor and lower wages, more inequality and poverty, a smaller government and social safety nets, and measures that reduce growth and employment.”
“The IMF papers,” Weisbrot concludes, “detail the agenda of Europe’s decision-makers, and they have accomplished quite a bit of it over the past five years.” The agenda is quite familiar in the US and in fact, wherever the neoliberal assault has proceeded.
In England, Thatcher-Major and Blair’s New Labour, followed by Tory austerity, had similar effects. The Corbyn movement is an encouraging reaction, bitterly opposed by the Labour establishment and most of the media.
The other cases mentioned have their own special features.
Putin seems to have been genuinely popular throughout his tenure. Crimeans, it appears, support the takeover by Russia. There seemed to be possibilities for social democratic developments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, possibly even for mutually supportive linkages to social democratic Europe. Such hopes were dashed by the harsh effects of the US-backed market reforms, which devastated the economy and led to millions of deaths, along with opening the way for immense corruption as oligarchs took over state assets. Putin was seen by the public as a corrective to the neoliberal disaster and the decline of Russia on the world scene. Authoritarian no doubt, often brutal, but, it seems, popular.
In Israel, too, the right-wing nationalist-religious coalition is genuinely popular. Threats to Netanyahu are primarily from his right. This is quite a change from the time when Israel conquered Palestinian lands in the 1967, and soon set forth on its illegal settlement programs. The change was predicted early on by those who understood the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot. One commentator who was particularly outspoken was the respected Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He condemned the occupation bitterly, not because of concern for the Palestinians, for whose fate he expressed only contempt, but because of the predictable effect on Jews, who, he warned, would become “Judeo-Nazis” as they carried out the tasks of repression and displacement.
The signs by now are dramatic, both in actions and in legislation, both with regard to the criminal acts in the occupied territories and the shift to unconcealed racism at home. The occupied territories include Gaza, despite Israel’s claim to the contrary, which is not even accepted by its loyal US supporter. In the full knowledge that the home of 2 million people is likely to become literally “unlivable” within a few years, as international monitors have predicted, Israel maintains its stranglehold, designed officially to keep the population on a “diet” while the self-described “most moral army in the world” pounds away with atrocities that are appalling the world.
Turkey, too, is a special case, with a long and complex history since the current Turkish state took form after World War I. Keeping to recent times, in the ‘90s, Turkey was the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the period during the state terror campaign against the Kurds. Tens of thousands were killed, thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — were driven from their homes, some now barely surviving in abandoned buildings in Istanbul. The main support for the state crimes was Washington: Clinton provided 80 percent of the arms in an increasing flow as atrocities increased. Little was reported even though the major press had bureaus in Turkey, of course. Much of the information available comes from the detailed reports of the outstanding researcher for Human Rights Watch, Jonathan Sugden — so outstanding that he was finally expelled by the government. Particularly significant were a remarkable group of Turkish intellectuals – leading writers, artists, journalists, publishers and others — who not only protested the crimes, but undertook civil disobedience, facing and sometimes enduring long and severe punishment. I know of no group like them anywhere.
By the turn of the century, the situation was improving, soon quite considerably, including the early Erdoğan years. But soon regression began under his leadership, and it has become extremely severe.
Turkey held the worst record in the world for persecuting journalists, and the repression has extended to academics and many others. Vicious attacks on Kurdish areas have increased. The country is divided between a secular liberal-left sector and a deeply religious, mostly rural population. A dedicated Islamist, Erdoğan has rallied support among this sector and is relying on it to create a harsh and repressive authoritarian state with strong Islamist elements. What is happening is particularly painful to observe, not just because of the crimes, but because of the hopeful prospects that were lying ahead only a few years ago and the fact that Turkey could serve as a valuable bridge, culturally as well as economically, between West and East.
Hungary is another special case. It is a cultural/linguistic island, which has had remarkable cultural achievements and also an ugly record of fascism and cooperation with the Nazis. From what I have read — I have no close knowledge — the country has long been obsessed with the fear of decline, even disappearance — fears exacerbated by the passage of refugees through Hungary to Western Europe. The population is declining, partly from low fertility, partly from a large exodus to the West. Orbán has exploited these fears to construct an “illiberal democracy” dedicated to “saving Hungary” and “traditional values,” with the usual xenophobic and racist elements of such appeals.
There’s a good deal more to say about racism in Europe, not visible when the populations are highly homogenous, but quickly apparent as soon as there is any “contamination” by those who are a bit different. And there is no need to comment on the history of the Jews, and of the Roma right to the present.
Speaking of authoritarian leaders, I’ve been dumbfounded by the US political establishment’s reaction to Trump’s handling of the Helsinki summit with Putin. What’s wrong with the idea of the US and Russia working together to address major international issues facing the world today, including the threat of nuclear weapons? What’s your own reaction to this matter? Was Trump wrong? Was he being “anti-American”?
There’s surely nothing wrong with the US and Russia seeking rapprochement and cooperation on such issues. It is essential for hopes for a better future, even survival. Russia should not refuse to deal with the US and (were it imaginable) impose sanctions on the US and UK because they invaded and devastated Iraq with all of the hideous regional consequences, or (with France) destroyed Libya with terrible effects from West Africa to the Levant, along with other crimes too numerous to mention. Or conversely (putting aside the scale of crimes).
There are numerous issues on which the countries must cooperate, and sometimes do, as in Syria to avoid clashes that could set off war. The needs are far greater at the Russian border, where, as a result of NATO expansion and build-up of forces, accidents with indescribable consequences could easily occur. There are many other cases where serious interchange is necessary. On nuclear issues, even more so. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Obama’s programs of modernization of nuclear weapons increased “killing power” sufficiently to create “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” as explained in an important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Trump’s nuclear programs enhance the threat even beyond, with new and very dangerous weapons systems and severe lowering of the threshold for nuclear war — an existential threat to Russia, and the world; even the attacker would be devastated by a first-strike. Under George W. Bush, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, another serious threat to Russia. Russian weapons initiatives and reactions also enhance the threat of terminal destruction.
Turning to Trump, his actions make no sense at all if they are guided by some geopolitical strategy.
On the one hand, he is talking politely with Putin (some say genuflecting) and calling for reduction of tensions, while on the other hand, he is significantly escalating tensions and threats. The nuclear program just mentioned is one very serious example. He is also sending arms to Ukraine and increasing NATO forces and operations on the Russian border — actions that any Russian leader would regard as a severe threat. Harsher sanctions have been imposed on Russia, which is by no means unaware of the increasing threats – how could they be? The business press, citing US Treasury reports, observes that Russia is “liquidating dollar assets at a record pace, selling four-fifths of its cache of U.S. government debt, $81 billion worth, over a two-month period” in order to safeguard assets in case relations continue to deteriorate.
While Trump’s policies make no sense from a geostrategic perspective, they fall into place on the assumption that he is continuing to pursue his “Me First” agenda, damn the consequences for the world, matters we’ve discussed before. The agenda requires maintaining the loyalty of his base and ensuring that they will remain loyal if the Mueller investigation comes up with something that damages him. The centerpiece of his press conference with Putin, bitterly condemned by elite opinion, was his effort to discredit Mueller. The tactic is succeeding quite well. A large majority of Republicans approve of the way Trump dealt with Putin, and polls show that Mueller’s public image is at an all-time low.
Meanwhile, the sharp escalation and threats satisfy the national security hawks.
The latter constitute a broad spectrum. While it is sometimes hard to believe, we cannot overlook the fact that the most highly regarded moderates firmly uphold doctrines that are, quite literally, too outlandish to discuss. For example, Richard Haass, a respected scholar and diplomat and long-time president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, instructs us with a straight face that “International order for 4 centuries has been based on non-interference in the internal affairs of others and respect for sovereignty. Russia has violated this norm by seizing Crimea and by interfering in the 2016 US election. We must deal [with] Putin’s Russia as the rogue state it is.”
Words fail.
In Israel, a controversial bill about the “Jewish nation-state” was just passed that makes no mention of minority rights. Is there something new behind the passing of this bill that wasn’t always a reality from Israel’s standpoint of view?
Regrettably, within Israel itself, the new nationality law of July 2018 was not very controversial, though it has appalled liberal opinion throughout the world. Rather typical is what is happening in the US, which since the 1967 war, has been Israel’s leading supporter. For a long period, Israel was the darling of liberal and progressive opinion. By today, that has changed considerably. “According to a Pew Research Center survey in April [2018], self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.”
Support for Israel has shifted to the ultranationalist right and Christian evangelicals — many of whom combine passionate support for Israel with the doctrine that the Second Coming, perhaps very soon, will consign all Jews to the torments of eternal perdition apart from a very few who will find Christ in time — a level of anti-Semitism unmatched even in Nazi Germany.
Israel is well aware that it is losing support among sectors of world opinion that have at least some concern for human and civil rights. It is therefore seeking to expand its base of support to the East, primarily to China and India, the latter becoming a very natural ally for a number of reasons, including the drift in both societies toward ultranationalism, reactionary internal policies and hatred of Islam. It is also firming up what have been tacit alliances with the most reactionary and brutal Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, joined now by Egypt under the current harsh military dictatorship.
The new nationality law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, downgrades the status of Arabic and formally authorizes Jewish-only communities. It does break some new ground, but not very much. What is new is primarily the elevation of these racist principles to the Basic Law — constitutional status. Long ago, Israel’s highest court determined that Israel is “the sovereign state of the Jewish people” … but not the state of its 20 percent non-Jewish citizens, essentially the same doctrine.
One of the few articulate critics of the new law, the fine Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor, reminds us that in debates on the Land Law of 1960, Zerach Warhaftig, a founder of the National Religious Party and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, declared that, “We wish it to be clear that the land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel. Nation of Israel is a wider concept than the nation that lives in Zion, because the nation of Israel is found in the entire world…. [In this new law] there is a very great judicial novelty: we are giving a legal cover to the regulations of the Keren Kayemet leYisrael [Jewish National Fund, or JNF]” (translated from Hebrew).
The JNF regulations in turn obligate the organization to work for the benefit of “persons of Jewish race, religion, or origin.” It may be added that these radical violations of civil rights are funded by American taxpayers thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF as a charitable organization.
Warhaftig was quite right almost 60 years ago. An array of legal and administrative rules was established to ensure that the JNF would have authority over all state lands – 93 percent of the territory of the country – hence, authority to ensure that lands would be reserved for Jews alone, with minor and derisory exceptions. Details are spelled out and documented in my Towards a New Cold War (1982).
Laor reminds us that since the law was established, “700 settlements were established, all for Jews, apart from a few cities for [displaced] Bedouins (which merit ridicule).” Meanwhile, the 20 percent non-Jewish minority has been restricted to the 2 percent of the land allotted to them when the state was established 70 years ago.
In 2000, the racist land administration arrangements finally reached Israel’s High Court. It issued a narrow ruling that granted the petitioners, a professional Arab couple, the right to move to the all-Jewish town of Katzir. Very soon, arrangements began to be contrived to get around the law, but now it is no longer necessary, since segregation is legally authorized by the Basic Law.
Much of this should be familiar to Americans. New Deal public housing projects were restricted to whites by laws that remained in effect until the late 1960s, when it was too late to help African Americans because the postwar years of rapid and egalitarian growth, which offered them some opportunities, were coming to an end, and the neoliberal assault was soon to come, imposing stagnation. Another grim chapter in the history of racism in America.
Also familiar to Americans is US isolation in support of such measures (with the attractive exceptions noted earlier), now reaching new levels in the Trump administration. In the last days of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Reagan was alone in the world in supporting it, even denying the existence of Apartheid, even after Thatcher and Israel had abandoned the sinking ship. We might also recall that during the last throes of Apartheid, in 1988, the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be “one of the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world. While greatly honored internationally, Mandela remained on the US terrorist list until 2008, when at last a congressional resolution allowed him to enter the “land of the free” without special dispensation.
Often, there is indeed little new under the sun.
The World Bank continues to support authoritarian regimes throughout the Global South by providing funds and bailouts. How can the UN and Western democratic governments tolerate such a stance on the part of the World Bank?
Unfortunately, the answer is all too clear. As their own practice consistently illustrates, the “Western democratic governments” pursue similar policies with enthusiasm. It should be superfluous to illustrate, but since we live in an atmosphere of self-celebration, it might be useful to consider at least one example. Take the Congo, which should be one of the richest and most advanced countries of the world, with huge resources and no threats — from its neighbors, that is. When Europe was despoiling Africa, the Congo was the domain of King Leopold of Belgium, whose hideous crimes surpassed even the normal standards of the “enlightened” West. He didn’t pass without censure. In the famous 11th edition of the Britannica, the article on the monarch lauds his achievements, but does add a phrase at the end saying that he treated his subjects harshly – slaughtering millions and ordering atrocious tortures to gain more rubber for his overflowing coffers.
“The horror, the horror” finally came to end in 1960, when Congo declared independence. Its leading figure was the young charismatic Patrice Lumumba, who might have extricated Congo from the misery of colonialism. But it was not to be. The CIA was assigned the task of murdering him, but the Belgians got there first, and together with other liberal democracies, helped plunge Congo back to terror and destruction under the leadership of the Western favorite, the murderous kleptomaniac Mobutu, who ensured that the riches of the Congo would flow in the right direction. Fast forwarding to today, all of those who enjoy smart phones and other technical delights benefit from the rich minerals of Eastern Congo, handed over to the multinationals hovering nearby by warring militias and marauders from US-backed Rwanda while the death toll mounts to many millions.
That Western democracies should tolerate support for authoritarian regimes is not much of a mystery.
What do you think will take to halt the spread of political authoritarianism across the globe?
The familiar advice, easy to state, hard to follow, but if there’s another way, it’s been kept a dark secret: honest, dedicated, courageous and persistent engagement, ranging from education and organization to direct activism, carefully honed for effectiveness under prevailing circumstances. Hard work, necessary work, the kind that has succeeded in the past and can again.
Thursday
Wednesday
Trump Cabinet’s Bible Study Minister Justifies Child Separation as Consequence of Immigrants’ “Illegal Behavior”
By Lee Fang
Amid increasing scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, criticisms have been lodged against the policy of family separation at the border by, among others, members of his own party and otherwise stalwart Christian right allies of the GOP. One Christian ally of the White House, though, came out swinging in favor of taking children away from their parents: Capitol Ministries.
Ralph Drollinger, the head of the private Christian group, which leads Bible study sessions for Republican lawmakers and senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, led the charge to defend the administration even as photos and stories emerge showing children crowded into cages and snatched from their mothers.
“No one, especially my personal friend, the kind-hearted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, desires that a mother or father be separated from their children,” wrote Drollinger, in a message to supporters on Friday. But, the Capitol Ministries leader said, there are “three classifications of people in every country, as was true in ancient Israel in the Old Testament.” In Drollinger’s interpretation, there are citizens, legal immigrants, and foreigners — the latter were known as being “illegal,” he said — and the Bible only forbids family separation for citizens and legal immigrants.
“It follows that when someone breaks the law of the land that they should anticipate that one of the consequences of their illegal behavior will be separation from their children,” Drollinger wrote. “Such is the case with thieves or murderers who are arrested and put in jail.”
Sessions attracted controversy after citing a Bible verse to defend the administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement strategy. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” the attorney general declared during a speech in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last Thursday.
Despite the support from a right-wing Christian group that’s especially close to the administration, other conservative Christians are pressuring the Trump administration to change its practices. Earlier this month, a group of evangelical pastors signed a letter harshly condemning the child separation policy. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long lasting, are of utmost concern,” stated the letter, which was signed by the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who gave an opening prayer at Trump’s inauguration and is reportedly close to the president, among other evangelical leaders.
Drollinger, who has become immensely influential following the 2016 election, believes Sessions correctly invoked the scripture.
“The passage the Attorney General cited, Romans 13, bespeaks of this: there are and there should be serious, known consequences for breaking the laws of the land — otherwise the law becomes toothless and inconsequential and it is no longer a deterrent to harmful behavior, which is what God designed it to be,” Drollinger wrote, citing his own Bible study on illegal immigration, published on the Capitol Ministries website two years ago.
In the 2016 Bible study, Drollinger wrote that “immigration laws of every nation should be Biblically based and strictly enforced — all with the utmost confidence that assurance that God approves such actions by the nation’s leaders.” He added, “To procedurally exclude foreign individuals who might be criminals, traitors, or terrorists, or who possess communicable diseases is not racist in the least!”
Drollinger, a former college basketball star turned spiritual adviser to conservative politicians, has quietly amassed power in Washington, D.C., through his Monday evening Bible studies with conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several Cabinet members, including the vice president and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, pray on a regular basis with Drollinger’s group. As the minister recently told a German newspaper, he provides the administration with “the high-protein diet of the Word of God.” In the past, Drollinger bashed gay rights and called Catholicism the “world’s largest false religion.”
As The Intercept first reported, shortly after the presidential election, Drollinger could barely conceal his excitement that members of his inner circle would soon occupy the White House. He published a press statement celebrating the fact that Trump’s appointments for his administration were drawn from “long time sponsors of the Members Bible Studies.”
“It follows then that the sudden rise of Pence, Sessions, and Pompeo — all men who are disciples of Jesus Christ — serve to vividly illustrate the truth of 1 Timothy 2:1-4!” Drollinger announced, referring to a Bible verse that calls for prayer “for kings and all who are in authority.”
Drollinger’s controversial interpretations extend to other areas of GOP orthodoxy. Capitol Ministries claims “that Islam and its Koran are nothing more than a plagiarism of OT truths” — a reference to the Old Testament — “and a non-chronological, sloppy one at that — topped off with a falsified diminution of Jesus Christ.”
Amid increasing scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, criticisms have been lodged against the policy of family separation at the border by, among others, members of his own party and otherwise stalwart Christian right allies of the GOP. One Christian ally of the White House, though, came out swinging in favor of taking children away from their parents: Capitol Ministries.
Ralph Drollinger, the head of the private Christian group, which leads Bible study sessions for Republican lawmakers and senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, led the charge to defend the administration even as photos and stories emerge showing children crowded into cages and snatched from their mothers.
“No one, especially my personal friend, the kind-hearted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, desires that a mother or father be separated from their children,” wrote Drollinger, in a message to supporters on Friday. But, the Capitol Ministries leader said, there are “three classifications of people in every country, as was true in ancient Israel in the Old Testament.” In Drollinger’s interpretation, there are citizens, legal immigrants, and foreigners — the latter were known as being “illegal,” he said — and the Bible only forbids family separation for citizens and legal immigrants.
“It follows that when someone breaks the law of the land that they should anticipate that one of the consequences of their illegal behavior will be separation from their children,” Drollinger wrote. “Such is the case with thieves or murderers who are arrested and put in jail.”
Sessions attracted controversy after citing a Bible verse to defend the administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement strategy. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” the attorney general declared during a speech in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last Thursday.
Despite the support from a right-wing Christian group that’s especially close to the administration, other conservative Christians are pressuring the Trump administration to change its practices. Earlier this month, a group of evangelical pastors signed a letter harshly condemning the child separation policy. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long lasting, are of utmost concern,” stated the letter, which was signed by the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who gave an opening prayer at Trump’s inauguration and is reportedly close to the president, among other evangelical leaders.
Drollinger, who has become immensely influential following the 2016 election, believes Sessions correctly invoked the scripture.
“The passage the Attorney General cited, Romans 13, bespeaks of this: there are and there should be serious, known consequences for breaking the laws of the land — otherwise the law becomes toothless and inconsequential and it is no longer a deterrent to harmful behavior, which is what God designed it to be,” Drollinger wrote, citing his own Bible study on illegal immigration, published on the Capitol Ministries website two years ago.
In the 2016 Bible study, Drollinger wrote that “immigration laws of every nation should be Biblically based and strictly enforced — all with the utmost confidence that assurance that God approves such actions by the nation’s leaders.” He added, “To procedurally exclude foreign individuals who might be criminals, traitors, or terrorists, or who possess communicable diseases is not racist in the least!”
Drollinger, a former college basketball star turned spiritual adviser to conservative politicians, has quietly amassed power in Washington, D.C., through his Monday evening Bible studies with conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several Cabinet members, including the vice president and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, pray on a regular basis with Drollinger’s group. As the minister recently told a German newspaper, he provides the administration with “the high-protein diet of the Word of God.” In the past, Drollinger bashed gay rights and called Catholicism the “world’s largest false religion.”
As The Intercept first reported, shortly after the presidential election, Drollinger could barely conceal his excitement that members of his inner circle would soon occupy the White House. He published a press statement celebrating the fact that Trump’s appointments for his administration were drawn from “long time sponsors of the Members Bible Studies.”
“It follows then that the sudden rise of Pence, Sessions, and Pompeo — all men who are disciples of Jesus Christ — serve to vividly illustrate the truth of 1 Timothy 2:1-4!” Drollinger announced, referring to a Bible verse that calls for prayer “for kings and all who are in authority.”
Drollinger’s controversial interpretations extend to other areas of GOP orthodoxy. Capitol Ministries claims “that Islam and its Koran are nothing more than a plagiarism of OT truths” — a reference to the Old Testament — “and a non-chronological, sloppy one at that — topped off with a falsified diminution of Jesus Christ.”
U.S. withdraws from U.N. Human Rights Council over perceived bias against Israel
The Trump administration withdrew from the United
Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday in protest of what it perceives
as an entrenched bias against Israel and a willingness to allow
notorious human rights abusers as members.
U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has sought major changes on the council
throughout her tenure, issued a blistering critique of the panel, saying
it had grown more callous over the past year and become a “protector of
human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.” She cited the
admission of Congo as a member even as mass graves were being discovered
there, and the failure to address human rights abuses in Venezuela and
Iran.
“I want to make it crystal clear that
this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments,” she said
during a joint appearance with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the
department. “On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment
does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving
organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”
Haley accused governments with woeful human rights
records of seeking seats on the council to avoid scrutiny and then
resisting proposals for reform.
“When we made
it clear we would strongly pursue council reform, these countries came
out of the woodwork to oppose it,” she said. “Russia, China, Cuba and
Egypt all attempted to undermine our reform efforts this past year.”
The decision to leave the 47-nation body was more definitive than the
lesser option of staying on as a nonvoting observer. It represents
another retreat by the Trump administration from international groups
and agreements whose policies it deems out of sync with American
interests on trade, defense, climate change
and, now, human rights. And it leaves the council without the United
States playing a key role in promoting human rights around the world.
The United States is midway through a three-year
term on the council, which is intended to denounce and investigate human
rights abuses. A U.S. departure deprives Israel of its chief defender
at a forum where Israel’s human rights record comes up for discussion at
every meeting, a standing “Item 7” on the agenda.
“By withdrawing from the council, we lose our leverage and allow the
council’s bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked —
including running roughshod over Israel,” said Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.),
the top Democrat on the House committee that oversees the State
Department.
“However, this administration’s approach when it
sees a problem is to take the United States off the field,” he added.
“That undermines our standing in the world and allows our adversaries to
fill the void.”
But Pompeo was scathing in his
assessment of the council, calling it an “exercise in shameless
hypocrisy, with many of the world’s worst human rights abuses going
ignored, and some of the world’s most serious offenders sitting on the
council itself.”
“The only thing worse than a
council that does almost nothing to protect human rights is a council
that covers for human rights abuses, and is therefore an obstacle to
progress and an impediment to change,” he said.
The decision came a day after the U.N. human rights chief slammed the administration’s policy
of separating migrant parents from their children after they enter the
United States at the Mexican border, calling it “unconscionable” and
akin to child abuse.
This is the first time since the Human Rights Council was formed in
2006, replacing the disbanded Human Rights Commission, that a sitting
member volunteered to step aside, though Libya was suspended in 2011
after a government crackdown on unarmed protesters.
The United States initially shunned the panel over
President George W. Bush’s concerns that so many human rights offenders
could be seated through noncompetitive elections for members nominated
by their regional colleagues. The Obama administration sought a seat in 2009 in an effort to showcase that human rights were an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy.
Before
the United States joined, half the country-specific votes condemned
Israel. During the first six years the United States was a member,
resolutions critical of Israel dropped to one-fifth. U.S. membership
also led to a sharp decrease in the number of special sessions that
focused exclusively on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“It’s
true, the Human Rights Council continues to disproportionately focus on
Israel,” said Peter Yeo, an official with the United Nations Foundation
that connects the organization with private and nongovernmental groups
and foundations. “But with U.S. leadership, the attention Israel brought
has dropped significantly. U.S. leadership matters. We’re still the
only ones with credibility on human rights on the world stage.”
The Trump administration’s irritation with the
council makeup and its agenda has been telegraphed with drumbeat
regularity by Haley. A year ago, she denigrated it as a “forum for
politics, hypocrisy and evasion,” and threatened a U.S. exit if the
council did not kick out abusive regimes and remove Item 7, the standing
resolution critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. She repeated
her ultimatum two weeks ago.
Since 2006, the
Human Rights Council has passed more than 70 resolutions critical of
Israel, 10 times as often as it has criticized Iran. On one day alone in
March, the council passed five resolutions condemning Israel.
The
council’s current membership includes 14 countries that are ranked as
“not free” by Freedom House: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, China, Cuba,
Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
Haley said many
countries agree with U.S. accusations of anti-Israel bias on the council
and hypocrisy by abusers but would not openly challenge the status quo.
“We
gave them opportunity after opportunity, and many months of
consultations, and yet they would not take a stand unless it was behind
closed doors,” she said. “Some even admitted they were fine with the
blatant flaws of the council, as long as they could pursue their own
narrow agenda within the current structure.”
Bret Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation scholar who analyzes U.N. actions, called the withdrawal a “measured” response.
“The
Trump administration seems to be the only government that seriously
wanted the Human Rights Council to promote universal respect and
protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in a fair and equal
manner,” he said.
But some questioned whether a U.S. withdrawal will lead to reforms, or further undermine the council’s mission.
“The
Trump administration’s withdrawal is a sad reflection of its
one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from
criticism takes precedence above all else,” said Kenneth Roth, executive
director of Human Rights Watch. “The U.N. Human Rights Council has
played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria,
Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending
Israel.”
Thursday
Why does Trump lie? Just ask Billy Bush.
The tireless mendacity of President Trump has roared back into the top of the news. “How to know when Trump is lying,” notes the headline on a CNN piece. Slate: “Trump’s Saturday of Lies:
President Says Official Who Briefed Reporters ‘Doesn’t Exist.’ ” The New York Times has an article on how Trump’s repeated allegations about an FBI informant who cultivated sources on his 2016 presidential campaign squares with his history: “With ‘Spygate,’ Trump Shows How He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust.”
President Says Official Who Briefed Reporters ‘Doesn’t Exist.’ ” The New York Times has an article on how Trump’s repeated allegations about an FBI informant who cultivated sources on his 2016 presidential campaign squares with his history: “With ‘Spygate,’ Trump Shows How He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust.”
Bring
up Trump’s frequent lies, and White House officials will seek to change
the topic. They’ll talk about the robust economy; they’ll talk about
the move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem;
they’ll talk about the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; they’ll
talk about the blameworthiness of Trump’s Democratic critics. All of
the programs of the Trump administration, however, are built to some
degree of deception; lying, after all, was the central plank of Trump’s
presidential election campaign.
In their look at
Trump’s hyping of “Spygate,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman
of the New York Times summed up the latest in presidential
misinformation:
Last week, President Trump promoted new, unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative: that a “criminal deep state” element within Mr. Obama’s government planted a spy deep inside his presidential campaign to help his rival, Hillary Clinton, win — a scheme he branded “Spygate.” It was the latest indication that a president who has for decades trafficked in conspiracy theories has brought them from the fringes of public discourse to the Oval Office.
Citing
two former Trump officials, the New York Times reports that Trump
resisted deploying the term “deep state” in his rhetoric, “partly
because he believed it made him look too much like a crank.” So the guy
who gripes incessantly and with no evidence about the “fake news” media
is worried about appearing like a crank.
Notes the New York Times: “Students of Mr. Trump’s life and
communication style argue that the idea of conspiracies is a vital part
of his strategy to avoid accountability and punch back at detractors,
real or perceived, including the news media.”
True, no doubt. Yet the most clarifying point on
this matter comes from Billy Bush, who is, if nothing else, a student of
Mr. Trump’s life and communication style. Bush was the fellow chatting
with Trump on the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape
in which the mogul bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. Bush
was fired from the “Today” show over the incident. It just so happened,
however, that Bush had spent a lot of time with Trump back in his years
as an entertainment correspondent, and he discussed his experiences on
an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher” in March. Maher noted that Trump had exaggerated the ratings of his program “The Apprentice,” prompting Bush:
Well, he’s been saying No. 1 forever, right. Finally I’d had enough. I said, “Wait, Donald. Hold it. Wait a minute. You haven’t been No. 1 for five years, four years — whatever it is. Not in any category, not in any demo.” He goes, “Well, did you see last Thursday? Last Thursday, 18-49 … last five minutes.” I said, “No. I don’t know that stat.” So he was like, “I told you.” And then later, when the cameras were off … he says, “Billy, look, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That’s it, you just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And I said, “Ah, okay.”
That’s called telling the truth about lies.
Being
a blabbermouth, Trump apparently cannot stop himself from confiding
about his malicious tactics — to media types, of all people. Lesley
Stahl of “60 Minutes” recently revealed
that Trump had told her about the thinking behind his media-bashing
ways. “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you
all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe
it,” Trump told Stahl shortly after his election, as she recalls it.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted:
The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!
News outlets scrambled to characterize the allegation. CNN: “Trump says, without proof, that Mueller team will meddle in midterm elections.” Associated Press via New York Times: “Trump: Mueller’s Team Is ‘Meddling’ in Midterm Elections.” Politico: “Trump says Mueller probe will meddle in midterms.”
“Without
proof,” huh? CNN cannot call this particular tweet a lie because it
doesn’t know 100 percent for certain that Mueller won’t meddle; and it
doesn’t know 100 percent for certain that Trump doesn’t believe this
allegation. Which is to say, the media has standards in covering a
president who doesn’t. It has been a mismatch from Day 1.
Trump violated the Constitution when he blocked his critics on Twitter, a federal judge rules
President Trump's decision to block his Twitter
followers for their political views is a violation of the First
Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump's effort
to silence his critics is not permissible because the digital space in
which he engages with constituents is a public forum.
The ruling
rejects administration arguments that the First Amendment does not
apply to Trump in this case because he was acting as a private
individual. In a 75-page decision, Judge Naomi Buchwald said Trump, as a
federal official, is not exempt from constitutional obligations
to refrain from "viewpoint discrimination."
"No
government official — including the President — is above the law," wrote
Buchwald for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New
York.
The decision marks a victory for free-speech
activists representing seven Twitter users who alleged that their rights
had been infringed after they tweeted at Trump critiquing his policies.
Trump blocked them on Twitter, preventing them from seeing his tweets
from their account or interacting with them.
"We
are extremely pleased that the judge held that the president’s blocking
of critics from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account violates the First
Amendment,” Katie Fallow, a senior staff attorney with the Knight First
Amendment Institute who argued the case, said.
While
the ruling narrowly targets the Trump administration and is not binding
on other public officials, it establishes an important legal precedent
that they will be likely to follow. Importantly, the ruling identifies
only parts of Trump's account as a public forum subject to First
Amendment protections, not the entire account nor the rest of Twitter.
"The
decision may have implications for other government officials' blocking
of critics on social media," said Joshua Geltzer, an expert in
constitutional law at Georgetown University, "but it doesn't even come
close to making all of Twitter a public forum, as the vast majority of
the Twittersphere is not being converted into a public forum by
government actors."
The government does not dispute that Trump blocked the Twitter users for political reasons. But the Justice Department had argued Trump was largely acting in a personal capacity, much like "giving a toast at a wedding or giving a speech at a fundraiser."
But through
his Twitter bio and the way in which he frequently uses the medium to
comment on public policy, Trump portrays his account as presidential
"and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be
taken only by the President as President," Buchwald wrote.
What's
more, Buchwald said, the space below Trump's tweets that show the
public's replies are a public forum, because it is "generally accessible
to the public" and anyone with a Twitter account is able to view those
responses, assuming that the user has not been blocked.
While
presidents retain their own First Amendment rights even when they take
public office, the judge said, Trump "cannot exercise those rights in a
way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who
have criticized him."
Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said he
thinks the case was wrongly decided and expects it to be reversed. For a
public forum to exist, the government has to own or control it, he
said, but in this case, Twitter also controls Trump's account.
Twitter
has long been dogged by questions about how far its users’ right to
speech may extend. In the past, its own executives have described the company
as being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” holding that
Twitter takes no position on the messages posted by its users.
But
the rise of online bullying, hate speech and harassment on Twitter’s
platform has forced the company to confront its insistence on
neutrality. Last year, the company unveiled new policies
to address threats of violence or reports of abuse. And it has barred
some controversial right-wing figures, such as the writer Milo Yiannopolous, from the platform for violating its policies.
Wednesday's
ruling could complicate that debate, said Feldman, potentially giving
people such as Yiannopolous grounds to sue Twitter and demand that they
be permitted back on Twitter to view Trump's account and to participate
in the public forum surrounding it.
"That is crazy," he said. "But it is a possible logical outcome of this decision."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter declined to comment.
Wednesday
Jimmy Carter calls Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton his ‘worst mistake’
Politics
Former President Jimmy Carter criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton as his national security adviser, telling the PBS NewsHour in an interview Monday that it was Mr. Trump’s “worst mistake” since taking office.
Bolton, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, “has been very eager to go to war with different people including North Korea and Iran,” Mr. Carter told NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff.
Trump announced last week that Bolton would take over for national security adviser H.R. McMaster in April. The shakeup followed Trump’s decision earlier this month to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo must be confirmed by the Senate to lead the State Department; Bolton’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation. Trump’s nomination to replace Pompeo, Gina Haspel, will also requires Senate confirmation. The deputy CIA director, a 30-year veteran of the agency, will likely be questioned during her hearings for her role in enhanced interrogation techniques and destroying tapes of those tactics.
Democrats have warned that Bolton and Pompeo’s ascension marks a sharp turn to the right in U.S. foreign policy. Carter joined the chorus of critics, saying that he was skeptical the U.S. could convince North Korea to give up its nuclear program with Bolton in a top White House post. “I just have very little confidence in him,” Carter said of Bolton.
Carter said he believed the U.S. was on a path to “nuclear confrontation” with North Korea, and warned that Trump “doesn’t realize the threat that he faces” if the two nations go to war. Carter added that “the North Korean issue may be the most difficult we face at this point.”
Trump agreed earlier this month to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un sometime in May, though a date has not officially been set. Carter said he offered to help Trump resolve the issue, including flying to North Korea to help broker an agreement. The former president said he has been briefed on North Korea by Trump administration officials but didn’t say if his offer had been accepted.
Carter, who is now 93, has remained active on the world stage and met with foreign leaders since leaving the White House in 1981. He visited North Korea in 2011 as part of an effort to calm tensions between North and South Korea. The former president also visited in 1994 and 2010.
Former President Jimmy Carter criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton as his national security adviser, telling the PBS NewsHour in an interview Monday that it was Mr. Trump’s “worst mistake” since taking office.
Bolton, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, “has been very eager to go to war with different people including North Korea and Iran,” Mr. Carter told NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff.
Trump announced last week that Bolton would take over for national security adviser H.R. McMaster in April. The shakeup followed Trump’s decision earlier this month to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo must be confirmed by the Senate to lead the State Department; Bolton’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation. Trump’s nomination to replace Pompeo, Gina Haspel, will also requires Senate confirmation. The deputy CIA director, a 30-year veteran of the agency, will likely be questioned during her hearings for her role in enhanced interrogation techniques and destroying tapes of those tactics.
Democrats have warned that Bolton and Pompeo’s ascension marks a sharp turn to the right in U.S. foreign policy. Carter joined the chorus of critics, saying that he was skeptical the U.S. could convince North Korea to give up its nuclear program with Bolton in a top White House post. “I just have very little confidence in him,” Carter said of Bolton.
Carter said he believed the U.S. was on a path to “nuclear confrontation” with North Korea, and warned that Trump “doesn’t realize the threat that he faces” if the two nations go to war. Carter added that “the North Korean issue may be the most difficult we face at this point.”
Trump agreed earlier this month to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un sometime in May, though a date has not officially been set. Carter said he offered to help Trump resolve the issue, including flying to North Korea to help broker an agreement. The former president said he has been briefed on North Korea by Trump administration officials but didn’t say if his offer had been accepted.
Carter, who is now 93, has remained active on the world stage and met with foreign leaders since leaving the White House in 1981. He visited North Korea in 2011 as part of an effort to calm tensions between North and South Korea. The former president also visited in 1994 and 2010.
CNN Journalists Resign: Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat
By Glenn Greenwald
In the same time period — December 2016 — The Guardian published a story by reporter Ben Jacobs
claiming that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had “long had a
close relationship with the Putin regime.” That claim, along with
several others in the story, was fabricated, and The Guardian was forced to append a retraction to the story:
Perhaps the most significant Russia falsehood came from CrowdStrike,
the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of its email servers.
Again in the same time period — December 2016 — the firm issued a new
report accusing Russian hackers of nefarious activities involving the
Ukrainian army, which numerous outlets, including (of course) the
Washington Post, uncritically hyped.
“A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election,” the Post claimed. “The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.”
Yet that story also fell apart. In March, the firm “revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign” after several experts questioned its claims, and “CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.”
What is most notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.
There are great benefits to be reaped by publishing alarmist claims about the Russian Threat and Trump’s connection to it. Stories that depict the Kremlin and Putin as villains and grave menaces are the ones that go most viral, produce the most traffic, generate the most professional benefits such as TV offers, along with online praise and commercial profit for those who disseminate them. That’s why blatantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience:
because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true (and, conversely, expressing any skepticism about such stories results in widespread accusations that one is a Kremlin sympathizer or outright agent).
Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday
night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story
linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund
under congressional investigation. That article — like so much Russia
reporting from the U.S. media — was based on a single anonymous source,
and now, the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central
claims.
In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci:
Several factors compound CNN’s embarrassment here. To begin with, CNN’s story was first debunked by an article in Sputnik News,
which explained that the investment fund documented several “factual
inaccuracies” in the report (including that the fund is not even part of
the Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, that is under investigation), and by Breitbart, which cited numerous other factual inaccuracies.
And this episode follows an embarrassing correction CNN was forced to issue earlier this month when several of its highest-profile on-air personalities asserted — based on anonymous sources — that James Comey, in his congressional testimony, was going to deny Trump’s claim that the FBI director assured him he was not the target of any investigation.
When Comey confirmed Trump’s story, CNN was forced to correct its story. “An earlier version of this story said that Comey would dispute Trump’s interpretation of their conversations. But based on his prepared remarks, Comey outlines three conversations with the president in which he told Trump he was not personally under investigation,” said the network.
But CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.
Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post. On December 30, the paper published a blockbuster, frightening scoop that immediately and predictably went viral and generated massive traffic. Russian hackers, the paper claimed based on anonymous sources, had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid” through a Vermont utility.
In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci:
And this episode follows an embarrassing correction CNN was forced to issue earlier this month when several of its highest-profile on-air personalities asserted — based on anonymous sources — that James Comey, in his congressional testimony, was going to deny Trump’s claim that the FBI director assured him he was not the target of any investigation.
When Comey confirmed Trump’s story, CNN was forced to correct its story. “An earlier version of this story said that Comey would dispute Trump’s interpretation of their conversations. But based on his prepared remarks, Comey outlines three conversations with the president in which he told Trump he was not personally under investigation,” said the network.
But CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.
Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post. On December 30, the paper published a blockbuster, frightening scoop that immediately and predictably went viral and generated massive traffic. Russian hackers, the paper claimed based on anonymous sources, had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid” through a Vermont utility.
That, in turn, led MSNBC journalists, and various Democratic
officials, to instantly sound the alarm that Putin was trying to deny
Americans heat during the winter:
Literally every facet of that story turned out to be false. First, the utility company — which the Post had not bothered to contact
— issued a denial, pointing out that malware was found on one laptop
that was not connected either to the Vermont grid or the broader U.S.
electricity grid. That forced the Post to change the story to hype the
still-alarmist claim that this malware “showed the risk” posed by Russia
to the U.S. electric grid, along with a correction at the top
repudiating the story’s central claim:
But then it turned out that even this limited malware was not
connected to Russian hackers at all and, indeed, may not have been
malicious code of any kind. Those revelations forced the Post to
publish a new article days later entirely repudiating the original story.
Embarrassments of this sort are literally too numerous to count when
it comes to hyped, viral U.S. media stories over the last year about the
Russia Threat. Less than a month before its electric grid farce, the
Post published a blockbuster story — largely based
on a blacklist issued by a brand new, entirely anonymous group —
featuring the shocking assertion that stories planted or promoted by
Russia’s “disinformation campaign” were viewed more than 213 million
times.
That story fell apart almost immediately. The McCarthyite blacklist of Russia disinformation outlets on which it relied contained numerous mainstream sites. The article was widely denounced. And the Post, two weeks later, appended a lengthy editor’s note at the top:
Weeks earlier, Slate published another article
that went viral on Trump and Russia, claiming that a secret server had
been discovered that the Trump Organization used to communicate with a
Russian bank. After that story was hyped by Hillary Clinton herself, multiple news outlets (including The Intercept) debunked it, noting that the story had been shopped around for months but found no takers. Ultimately, the Washington Post made clear how reckless the claims were:
A few weeks later, C-SPAN made big news when it announced that it had been hacked and its network had been taken over by the state-owned Russian outlet RT:
That, too, turned out to be totally baseless, and C-SPAN was forced to renounce the claim:
That story fell apart almost immediately. The McCarthyite blacklist of Russia disinformation outlets on which it relied contained numerous mainstream sites. The article was widely denounced. And the Post, two weeks later, appended a lengthy editor’s note at the top:
“A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election,” the Post claimed. “The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.”
Yet that story also fell apart. In March, the firm “revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign” after several experts questioned its claims, and “CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.”
What is most notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.
There are great benefits to be reaped by publishing alarmist claims about the Russian Threat and Trump’s connection to it. Stories that depict the Kremlin and Putin as villains and grave menaces are the ones that go most viral, produce the most traffic, generate the most professional benefits such as TV offers, along with online praise and commercial profit for those who disseminate them. That’s why blatantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience:
because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true (and, conversely, expressing any skepticism about such stories results in widespread accusations that one is a Kremlin sympathizer or outright agent).
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