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lailoken · 3 years

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“Sir Francis Drake:

The Elizabethan sea captain, privateer and navigator, temains of course a figure of global fame, particularly in connection with the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada His connection with Devon is also well known, but less well known is his legendary status as a powerful magician, witch, and leader of Devonshire covens.

In c. 1540, Sir Francis Drake was born in the west Devon town of Tavistock. In 1580 he purchased Buckland Abbey, a seven hundred near Yelverton on the south-western edge of Dartmoor. Anyone who was seen to have made great achievements and remarkable feats, in the days when witchcraft was widely believed in, was likely to have their successes put down to magic, and some form of pact with spirits. Such was certainly the case with Drake, who was said to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for victory and success, and there are numerous tales and traditions of his magical powers and his working relationship with the spirit world. One such tale concerns his alterations to Buckland Abbey.

During the building work, the workmen would down their tools at the end of the day, only to return in the morning to find the previous day's work undone and interference from the spirit world was suspected. Drake decided to find out for himself what was happening and that he would spy on the culprits. As night fell, he climbed a great old tree overlooking the house, and waited. When midnight came, out of the darkness emerged a horde of marauding demons, gleefully clambering about over the house and dismantling all the stonework put up during year old manor house the day.

Loudly, Drake called out 'Cock-a-doodle-do!" in the manner of a cockerel, crowing in the dawn. The mischievous spirits suddenly stopped their shenanigans in confusion, and Drake lit up his smoking pipe. As they spotted the glowing light in the tree, the spirits believed the sun was coming up and departed back into the shadows from whence they came. Presumably, they were so embarrassed at having been so easily fooled that they never returned, and the building work continued unhindered.

Traditionally housed in Buckland Abbey, is Drake's legendary drum. Beautifully painted and decorated with ornate stud-work, the drum is popularly said to have accompanied sir Francis Drake on his voyages around the world. As he lay on his deathbed on his final voyage, it is said Drake ordered that his drum be returned to England and kept at Buckland Abbey, his home. Here, the drum should be beaten in times of national threat, and it will call forth his spirit to aid the country. Indeed, there have been numerous occasions when people have claimed to have heard Drake's drum beating, including during the English Civil War and the outbreak of the Frist World War.

In 1918, a celebratory drum roll was reported to have been heard aboard the HMS Royal Oak following the surrender of the Imperial German Navy. An investigation was carried out with the ship being thoroughly searched twice by officers and again by the captain. As neither a drum nor a drummer could be found, the matter was put down to Drake's legendary drum.

During World War II, much weight was added to the drum's legendary protective influence, particularly over the city of Plymouth which, it was said, would fall if the drum was ever removed from its home at the Abbey. When fire broke out at Buckland Abbey in 1938, the drum was removed to the safety of Buckfast Abbey.

Bombs first fell on Plymouth 1940, and again in 1941 in five raids which reduced much of the city to rubble. In 1172 civilians lost their lives in the 'Plymouth Blitz’. Drake's drum was returned to Buckland Abbey, and the City remained safe for the remainder of the war.

Like many reputed witches and magicians, Sir Francis Drake was said to possess a familiar spirit to aid him in his work. The presence and influence of this spirit turns up in the stories surrounding his marriage in Like 1585 to Elizabeth Sydenham, daughter of Sir George Sydenham the Sheriff of Somerset. Some sources that Elizabeth's parents we disapproving of the union due to Drake's reputed involvement in the black artes and that the marriage took place shortly before he departed for a long voyage. After no news had been heard from Drake for a number of years, Elizabeth's parents took the opportunity to persuade her to declare herself a widow. Another account states that Drake's departure for his voyage took place before the wedding. In both versions however, The Sydenhams arranged for their only child to be married instead to a wealthy son of the Wyndham family.

It is said that Drake had left his familiar spirit to keep watch over his beloved while he was away, and that the spirit made him aware of her planned wedding to another man. On the day of the wedding, there was a loud clap of thunder, and a meteorite came crashing through the roof of the church. Some said that this had been a cannonball shot from Drake's ship to halt the wedding. In any case, it was taken as a bad omen against the wedding between Elizabeth Sydenham and the son of the Wyndham family.

The meteorite itself, known as ‘Drake's Cannonball' has been housed at Combe Sydenham ever since.

Another popular legend featuring Drake's reputed and remarkable magical abilities concerns the creation of the Plymouth Leat. As Plymouth had suffered problematic water shortages through dry summer months, it is said that Drake took his horse and rode out onto Dartmoor to search for a water source. Upon finding a small spring, he uttered a magical charm over it and it burst forth from the rocks as a flowing stream. Drake galloped o on his steed, commanding the flowing waters has he die so to follow him back to the city. Today, the Plymouth Leat has its beginning at Sheepstor on the western side of Dartmoor and ends in a reservoir just outside the city.

There are, of course, a number of traditions of magic and witchery surrounding Sir Francis Drake's defeat of the Spanish Armada. He is said to have presided as Man in Black' over a number of covens, and that during the threat of invasion, he and his covens assembled on the cliffs at Devil's Point to the south west of Plymouth. There they performed magical operations to conjure forth a terrible storm to destroy many of the Spanish ships. It is said that to this day that Devil's Point is haunted by Drake and his witches, still convening there in spirit form.

Another, more famous legend, tells of Sir Francis Drake playing a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe when news was brought to him of the approach of the Spanish fleet. In one version he is said to have casually continued his game to its conclusion which, it has been suggested was a magical spell; with the bowls he was scattering with his drives representing the invading fleet. In another version, he stops his game to order a hatchet and a great log to be brought to the Hoe. He then proceeded to chop the wood into small wedges whilst uttering a magical charm over them as each one was thrown into the sea, and as each one hit the water they transformed into great fire ships; sailing out to burn the Armada.

The folklore surrounding Sir Francis Drake also includes his deep association with the Wild Hunt. Sometimes he is seen as leading the ghostly pack of Wisht Hounds', and at others he is the riding companion of the Hunt's more traditional leader; the Devil. In some Stories Drake rides in a spectral black coach, drawn by black, headless horses and followed by a great pack of black, otherworldly hounds with eyes burning red in the night. Sometimes his coach horses are seen with their heads, and have eyes blazing like hot coals.

One such story tells of a young maid, running desperately across the moors to escape an evil man on horseback she is being forced by her adoptive family to marry. Upon reaching a remote crossroads, and collapsing there in exhaustion, the ghostly pack of hounds and horse drawn coach approach from the darkness. Stopping at the crossroads, a man steps out of the coach, and the young woman recognises him to be the ghost of Sir Francis Drake.

He enquired of the young woman, why she was out on the moor alone and in a state of desperation and exhaustion, and she told him of her plight. Drake pulled from beneath his cloak a box and a cloth, and gave these to the young woman telling her to continue gently on her way, and not, under any circumstance, to look back.

The maid did as she was instructed, and when her pursuer reached the crossroads, he asked of the dark figure in the coach if he had seen a young maid passing by. Drake asked the man to step into his coach, and as he did, its door shut fast and the coach and hounds disappeared back into the darkness. The man was never to be seen again, and it is said that when morning came, his horse was found at the remote crossroads and had apparently died of fright.

According to research by the Devonshire cunning man Jack Daw, there is said to be a family line of Pellars, descended from the girl who encountered the spirit of Sir Francis Drake on the Moor. Their powers, it is claimed, are derived from the gift of the box and cloth he had given to her on that night.”

—

Silent as the Trees:

Devonshire Witchcract, Folklore & Magic

by Gemma Gary

#sir Francis drake #Gemma Gary #silent as the trees #Devonshire witchcraft #Devonshire magic #traditional withcraft #witchcraft #magic #quote

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bustedbernie · 3 years

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Over the past few years, anti-authoritarians on the left have been paying increasing attention to “tankies.”

A derogatory term, “tankies” was originally applied to members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who supported Moscow’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, which was infamously carried out with the heavy deployment of Soviet tanks.

Today the word refers to leftists, primarily Western, who resort to all kinds of justifications for authoritarian regimes in the so-called “global south,” such as in Syria, Hong Kong, and Nicaragua, and/or in countries with an ambiguous status within “the West,” like Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. These countries can be referred to collectively as countries of “the periphery,” to use Istanbul-based Mangal Media’s terminology, so as to emphasize the centrality of “the West” in tankie ideology.

On domestic issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, tankies tend to take progressive positions. This makes their politics on peripheral countries all the more confusing, especially for those of us on the receiving end of our governments’ brutalities. Tankies would thus condemn American cops yet praise Hong Kong cops, or condemn the Israeli military while praising the Russian army.

This contradiction at the heart of tankie logic derives from a simplistic interpretation of imperialism, and with it, of anti-imperialism. This “alt-imperialist” logic divides the world into two camps : those who are “pro-West” and those who are “anti-west.” In the words of the late theorist Moishe Postone, this is essentially a manifestation of the “dualistic political imaginary of the Cold War.” The Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami, meanwhile, called it “the anti-imperialism of idiots.”

Activists who are otherwise progressive and even revolutionary can therefore end up, at best, reproducing the narratives propagated by authoritarian governments in peripheral countries; at worst, they could be actively supporting brutal repression.

The broad scope of this brand of “anti-imperialism” has also allowed right-wing types to make their way into various left-wing circles in the West, as part of a broader phenomenon in which fascist movements co-opt left-wing talking points in support of illiberal regimes or ideologies. This is amply illustrated by programs on the Russian state-affiliated outlet RT or Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” both of which regularly feature far-right and left-wing “anti-imperialist” personalities.

In these news and social media circles, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric is often accompanied by a disregard for facts that has been increasingly visible in the aftermaths of the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential victory in 2016.

Yet this phenomenon was already apparent in the conversations on Syria and Ukraine years before, as Russian military interventions in both countries were coupled with substantial online dis/misinformation campaigns. Such tactics have become the calling cards of authoritarian leaders around the globe, including Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, China’s Xi Jinping, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, India’s Narendra Modi, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Having followed these trends for years, I anticipated a similar reaction from tankies during and after Lebanon’s October 2019 uprising; the government we have been opposing and charging with corruption is dominated by the vocally “anti-imperialist” Hezbollah and its allies, Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement. This dynamic has been worsened by the fact that the traditional sectarian parties that consider themselves to be Lebanon’s “opposition” are pro-West and pro-Gulf Arab states, and thus according to alt-imperialist logic, are inherently “pro-imperialist.”

This talking point has been further buttressed by both the Israeli and U.S. governments’ singling out of Hezbollah as the sole source of Lebanon’s evils. According to tankie logic, Lebanese anti-government protesters are in fact on the side of U.S. imperialism, despite the protestors’ vocal opposition to all the major political parties. Many Lebanese activists have also been puzzled by the online reactions of various prominent figures on the left, particularly Americans, who repeatedly ignored the activists’ lived experiences in service of their own “alt-imperialism.”

This distorted anti-imperialism exposed Lebanon’s protest movement to the usual accusations that they were being paid by foreign governments and were part of a global conspiracy against Hezbollah and the “Resistance” against Israel. Lebanese Shi’a protesters were particularly targeted by Hezbollah supporters, who smeared them as “embassy” Shi’as (i.e. paid by foreign embassies). This has since taken on dangerous dimensions such as death threats and physical assaults, with some activists opting for online anonymity or withdrawing from public life; many others are planning to leave Lebanon entirely.

[...]

Many left-wingers seem to be either unaware or in denial about the fact that fascist anti-imperialists exist as well. As a result, authoritarians are effectively given permission to accuse anti-authoritarians of being pro-West imperialists. Combined with the fact that activists in peripheral countries usually have more to risk and more to lose than Western tankies, this process ends up taking a heavy emotional and mental toll on the activists.The solution to this state of affairs is both straightforward and complex.

It is straightforward because opposing Russian or Chinese imperialism can be done in the same vein as opposing U.S. imperialism. Yet pressing this argument also requires tankies to decenter “the West” — where they are overwhelmingly located — from their analysis, and in doing so also requires them to decenter themselves. Only then would these “anti-imperialists” truly oppose that which they claim to oppose: destruction and injustice, regardless of who is committing them. Abandoning such binary camps in favor of truly transnational and anti-authoritarian principles would benefit these activists and their causes.

#long post #long #poetessinthepit and similar ought to read this type of thing tbqh

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waqasseo · 3 years

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Why UK Tobacco Companies Should Be in Your Retirement Portfolio

Tobacco companies have produced great returns for shareholders.

Many investors dismiss tobacco companies as "boring ".Others dismiss tobacco companies altogether on ethical grounds. However, by their very nature, tobacco companies are huge producers of cash.

Creating a killing

Many investors refuse steadfast to buy tobacco companies purely on ethical grounds. It's been proven that their main products - cigarettes and cigars - harm the health of a large proportion of its users.pepe tabak Smoking regularly usually takes a long period off a person's life expectancy.

Putting ethical concerns aside for an instant, who wouldn't wish to be selling something which will be legal and that folks are now actually addicted to, and for which there's no real substitute? Remember what multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said about tobacco companies:

"I'll let you know why I such as the cigarette business. It costs a dollar to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty ".

The tobacco companies'products is for thousands of people a'need to have'product rather than a'nice to own'product. They keep returning for more to feed their addiction. Sometimes they trade down to purchase cheaper brands, which are often produced by the same company.

Some customers quit the smoking habit but most just keep on buying, even though their income falls during a recession. Often, people reach for'fags and booze'when things turn grim economically.

Whatever the economic situation, tobacco companies'earnings remain strong as a result of perceived pricing power of these products which stems from the potency of their brands, and the diversity of these product range on offer.

Smoking politics earning big money

The largest risk with tobacco companies is political risk in developed countries. Tobacco related illnesses kill people and given its perceived cost to society, governments must be seen as doing something to prevent people from (starting to) smoking, such as for instance smoking bans in public areas places, limiting advertisements directed at younger people, restricting the freedom of the tobacco industry to introduce services, making tobacco products available in the same generic packaging, restrictions on point-of-sale advertising, etc.

However, critics of further anti-smoking legislation are quick to point out that both the US and UK governments are'addicted'to tobacco tax revenues. For example, the UK's tax take via duty and VAT, totaling some 10bn in 2008/2009 alone and is forecasted to be substantial higher in 2010 consequently of further tax hikes.

We must also not forget that, in the UK, smokers pay more in taxes than it costs the National Health Service to deal with smoking-related illnesses (the current figures are that roughly 2 of taxes is collected for every 1 spent on treatment). Smokers also "benefit" society because they do not collect the State Pension for as long as non-smokers. Additionally, smokers provide lots of jobs in healthcare and revenues for pharmaceutical companies.

Developing markets are the future

Nowadays, you will find four truly global suppliers, including two in the United Kingdom: British American Tobacco ("BAT") and Imperial Tobacco - both of which are in the FTSE 100 index - Philip Morris International and Japan Tobacco (the owner of Gallagher).

In the long term, the earnings of Western tobacco companies will soon be driven by increasing volumes in emerging markets. Lately, cigarette consumption in developing countries has increased by 1 - 3 per cent while it has declined 2 - 4 per cent in older markets such as for instance Western Europe and the USA. As emerging countries develop, increased discretionary income will ensure that tobacco products become more affordable

The long run growth of Western tobacco companies clearly depends on them spreading the smoking habit through the entire globe, particularly in the newly industrialising countries and the next world. Western companies like BAT and Imperial Tobacco have the advantage that their aspirational Western brands are highly valued in developing countries.

Growth by acquisition

While the days of the mega-mergers in the tobacco industry are likely to be over, in reality Philip Morris International itself was created as a spin off from Altria in 2008, both British American Tobacco along with Imperial Tobacco have recently increased their experience of faster growing developing countries by acquisition.

In June 2009, British American Tobacco acquired Bentoel which will be the fourth largest tobacco company in Indonesia. Following this acquisition, the Asia Pacific region accounts now for 25 per cent of BAT's sales volume. Per year earlier, BAT completed the purchase of Tekel in Turkey, boosting its position because country fivefold.

BAT nowadays claims that it's "the world's most international tobacco group" along with the world's second largest listed tobacco company. BAT's five most important markets, include Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Australia and Canada - all commodity-based economies, whilst it's also having significant experience of Latin America, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East - all significant growth areas.

While Imperial Tobacco's "catching up" acquisition of Altadis of Spain, in early 2008, substantially expanded its presence in African and Eastern European emerging markets, which makes it the world's fourth largest listed tobacco company. However, over 75 per cent of Imperial's revenues remain derived from Europe, whilst controlling 45 per cent of the UK market.

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sciencespies · 4 years

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Seabird Poop Is Worth More Than $1 Billion Annually

https://sciencespies.com/nature/seabird-poop-is-worth-more-than-1-billion-annually/

Seabird Poop Is Worth More Than $1 Billion Annually

When Don Lyons, director of the Audubon Society’s Seabird Restoration Program visited a small inland valley in Japan, he found a local variety of rice colloquially called “cormorant rice.” The grain got its moniker not from its size or color or area of origin, but from the seabirds whose guano fertilized the paddies in the valley. The birds nested in the trees around the dammed ponds used to irrigate the rice fields, where they could feed on small fish stocked in the reservoirs. Their excrement, rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, washed into the water and eventually to the paddies, where it fertilized the crop.

The phenomenon that Lyons encountered is not a new one—references to the value of bird guano can be found even in the Bible, and an entire industry in South America grew around the harvesting of what many called “white gold.” What is new is that scientists have now calculated an exact value for seabird poop. This week, researchers published a study in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that estimates the value of seabird nutrient deposits at up to $1.1 billion annually. “I see that [many] people just think you care about something when it brings benefits, when they can see the benefits,” says Daniel Plazas-Jiménez, study author and researcher at the Universidade Federal de Goiás in Brazil. “So, I think that is the importance of communicating what seabirds do for humankind.”

Given that 30 percent of the species of seabirds included in the study are threatened, the authors argue that the benefits the birds provide—from fertilizing crops to boosting the health of coral reefs—should prompt global conservation efforts. Government and interested parties can help seabirds by reducing birds accidently caught during commercial fishing, reducing the human overfishing that depletes the birds’ primary food source and working to address climate change since rising seas erode the birds’ coastal habitats and warming waters cause the birds’ prey fish to move unpredictably.

To show the benefits seabirds provide, Plazas-Jiménez and his coauthor Marcus Cianciaruso, an ecologist at Goiás, set out to put a price tag on the animals’ poop. Scientists and economists lack sufficient data on the direct and indirect monetary gains from guano. So the ecologists had to get creative; they used a replacement cost approach. They estimated the value of the ecological function of bird poop as an organic fertilizer against the cost of replacing it with human-made chemical fertilizers.

Guano bags ready for distribution and sale in Lima, Peru

(Photo by Manuel Medir/Getty Images)

Not all seabirds produce guano, which is desiccated, or hardened, excrement with especially high nitrogen and phosphoric content, so the authors took a two-step process to figure out how much waste the birds produce. First, the authors calculated the potential amount of poop produced annually by guano-producing seabirds based on population size data. They valued the guano based on the mean international market price of Peruvian and Chilean guano, which represented the highest-grossing product. Next the scientists estimated the value produced by non-guano-producing seabirds, who also excrete nitrogen and phosphorus. The researchers valued the chemicals based on the cost of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus traded on the international market. The primary value of the poop based on replacement costs was around $474 million.

The scientists then estimated that ten percent of coral reef stocks depend on nutrients from seabirds, a back of the envelope number that they admit needs more study. Since the annual economic return of commercial fisheries on Caribbean reefs, Southeast Asian reefs and the Great Barrier Reefs is $6.5 billion, the scientists estimated secondary economic benefits from seabird guano to be at least $650 million. That brought the estimated total benefit of guano up to $1.1 billion.

Still, that number, Lyons says, is likely a pretty significant underestimate since there are secondary benefits to not producing chemical fertilizers. “Another aspect of that is the replacement product, fertilizers, are generally derived from petroleum products,” says Lyons. “And so, there’s a climate angle to this—when we can use more natural nutrient cycling and not draw on earth reserves, that’s a definite bonus.”

Though the billion dollar-plus price on poop is impressive, it is likely much lower than the comparative value before seabird numbers declined over the past roughly 150 years. The richness of guano in South America, particularly on the nation’s Chincha Islands, has been documented for centuries. Birds nest along the island’s granite cliffs where their excrement builds up and the hot, dry climate keeps it from breaking down. At one point, an estimated 60 million birds—including guanay cormorants, boobies and pelicans—built 150-foot-high mounds of poop. The Incans were the first to recognize guano’s agricultural benefits, supposedly decreeing death to those who harmed the seabirds.

By the early 1840s, guano became a full-blown industry; it was commercially mined, transported and sold in Germany, France, England and the United States. The 1856 Guano Islands Act authorized one of the United States’ earliest imperial land grabs outside of North America, stating that the nation could claim any island with seabird guano, as long as there were no other claims or inhabitants. This paved the way for major exploitation and the establishment of Caribbean, Polynesian and Chinese slave labor to work the “white gold” mines.

The industry crashed around 1880 and revived in the early 20th century. Today, interest in guano is resurgent as consumer demand for organic agriculture and food processing has risen. However, only an estimated 4 million seabirds now live on the Chincha islands, drastically reducing the amount of guano produced. This loss is part of a global trend. According to one study, the world’s monitored seabird populations have dropped 70 percent since the 1950s.

The decline of seabird populations, says Plazas-Jiménez, is devastating to local cultures that have used the organic fertilizers for generations, local economies that depend on fisheries, and the world’s biodiversity. One study found that guano nutrient run-off into the waters of the Indian Ocean increasing coral reef fish stocks by 48 percent. Another study found that dissolved values of phosphate on coral reefs in Oahu, Hawaii, were higher where seabird colonies were larger and helped to offset nutrient depletion in the water caused by human activities.

Improving the health of coral reefs is important. Roughly a quarter of ocean fish depend on nutrient-rich reefs to survive. And seabirds’ contributions to coral reef health provide ecosystem services beyond increasing fish stocks; they also drive revenue through tourism and coastline resilience. Coral reefs function as important natural bulkheads protecting remote island and coastal communities from storm erosion and rising water. “It’s really compelling to think in terms of billions of dollars, but this is also a phenomenon that happens very locally,” says Lyons. “And there are many examples of where unique places wouldn’t be that way without this nutrient cycling that seabirds bring.”

#Nature

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mohitmaximize · 2 years

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Base Metal Mining Market Based On Development, Scope, Trends, Forecast By 2027

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Identification and analysis of micro and macro elements that influence and will influence market growth.

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#Base Metal Mining Market growth

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hallsp · 3 years

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When Fred Halliday—scholar, activist, journalist and teacher—died two years ago at the too-early age of 64, obituaries and tributes swamped the British press; the New Statesman subtitled its remembrance “The death of a great internationalist.” Halliday was a truly original thinker, a combination of Hannah Arendt (in her concern for the connection between ethics and politics) and Isaac Deutscher (in his materialist yet supple approach to history). Halliday also knew a little something about the Middle East: he spoke Arabic, Farsi and at least seven other languages, and he traveled widely throughout the region, including in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Israel, Libya and Algeria. He is one of the very few writers who, after 9/11, understood the synthesis between fighting radical Islam and opposing the brutal inequities of the neoliberal global order. He was an uncategorizable independent, supporting, for instance, the communist government in Afghanistan and the US invasion of that country. He embodied the dialectic between utopianism and realism. In his scholarship and research, in his outspokenness and courtesy, in the complexity of his thinking, he was the model of a public intellectual. It is Halliday’s writings—not those of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens or Tariq Ali—that can elucidate the meaning of today’s most virulent conflicts; it is Halliday who represented radicalism with a human face. It says something sad, and discouraging, about intellectual life in our country that Halliday’s death—which is to say, his work—was ignored not only by mainstream publications like The New York Times but by their left-wing alternatives too (including this one).

It is cheering, then, that a selection of essays, written by Halliday for the website openDemocracy between 2004 and 2009, has just been published by Yale University Press. Called Political Journeys, it gives a taste—though only that—of the extraordinary range of Halliday’s interests; included here are analyses of communism , the cold war, Iran’s revolution, post-Saddam Iraq, violence and politics, radical Islam, the legacies of 1968 and feminism. The book gives a sense, too, of Halliday’s dry humor—he loved to recount irreverent political jokes from the countries he had visited—and his affection for lists, as in the essay “The World’s Twelve Worst Ideas” (No. 2: “The only thing ‘they’ understand is force”). But most of the articles, written as they were for the Internet, are comparatively short and represent a brief span in a long career; this necessarily sporadic volume will, one hopes, lead readers to some of Halliday’s two dozen other books and more extensive essays.

Political Journeys is a well-chosen title for the collection. It alludes not just to Halliday’s travels but also to the ways his ideas—especially about revolution, imperialism and human rights—changed in reaction to tumultuous world events over the course of four decades. For this he has often been attacked, even posthumously. Earlier this year, Columbia University professor Joseph Massad opened a piece about Syria, published on the Al Jazeera website, by dismissing Halliday—along with his “Arab turncoat comrades”—as a “pro-imperial apologist.” (Massad also put forth the novel idea that Syria “has been…an agent of US imperialism,” which might be news to Bashar al-Assad and the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, Syria’s allies in the so-called axis of resistance.) Yet it was precisely Halliday’s intellectual flexibility—his ability to derive theory from experience rather than shoehorn the latter into the former—that was one of his greatest strengths. Pace Massad,

Halliday didn’t move from Marxism into imperialism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism or “turncoatism”; rather, he developed a deeper, more humane and far sturdier kind of radicalism. It was one that refused to hide—much less celebrate—repression, carnage and virulent nationalism behind the banner of progress, world revolution, selfdetermination or anti-colonialism. Halliday sought not to reject the socialist tradition but to reconnect it to its heritage—derived from the Enlightenment, from 1789, from 1848— of reason, rights, secularism and freedom. He would also develop an unsparing critique of the anti-humanism that, he thought, was ineradicably embedded in the revolution of 1917 and its successors.

Halliday believed that the duty of committed intellectuals is to keep their eyes open, to learn from history, to be humble enough to be surprised (and to admit being wrong). The alternative was what he called “Rip van Winkle socialism.” He sometimes told his friends, “At my funeral the one thing no one must ever say is that ‘Comrade Halliday never wavered, never changed his mind.’”

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Fred Halliday was born in 1946 in Dublin and raised in Dundalk, a town near the northern border that, he pointed out, The Rough Guide to Ireland advises tourists to avoid. The Irish “question” and Irish politics remained, for him, a touchstone—though more as a warning than an inspiration, especially when it came to Mideast politics. The unhappy lessons of Ireland, he wrote in 1996, included “the illusions and delusions of nationalism” and “the corrosive myths of deliverance through purely military struggle.” He added: “A good dose of contemporary Irish history makes one sceptical about much of the rhetoric that issues from dominant and dominated alike.… [A] critique of imperialism needs at the very least to be matched by some reserve about most of the strategies proclaimed for overcoming it.” Growing up in the midst of the Troubles, Halliday developed, among other things, a healthy aversion to histrionic nationalism and the repugnant concept of “progressive atrocities.”

Halliday graduated from Oxford in 1967 and then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Later he would earn a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), where, for over two decades, he taught students from around the world and was a founder of its Centre for the Study of Human Rights. (The intellectual and governing classes of the Middle East are sprinkled with his graduates.) He was an early editor of the radical newspaper Black Dwarf and, from 1969 to 1983, a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, a journal for which he occasionally wrote even after he broke with it over key political issues. He immersed himself in the revolutionary movements of his time and gathered an enviable range of friends, interlocutors and contacts along the way: traveling with Maoist Dhofari rebels in Oman; working at a student camp in Cuba; visiting Nasser’s Egypt, Ben Bella’s Algeria, Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan and Marxist Ethiopia and South Yemen (the subject of his dissertation). He wasn’t shy: he proposed a two-state solution to Ghassan Kanafani of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, infamous for its hijackings; argued with Iran’s foreign minister about the goals of an Islamic revolution; told Hezbollah’s Sheik Naim Qassem that the group’s use of Koranic verses denouncing Jews was racist—“a point,” Halliday dryly noted, “he evidently did not accept.”

Halliday received, and accepted, invitations to lecture in some of the Middle East’s most repressive countries, including Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Qaddafi’s Libya and Saddam’s Iraq, where a government official told him, without shame or embarrassment, that Amnesty International’s reports on the regime’s tortures and executions were correct. Clearly, he was no boycotter. But neither was he seduced by these visits: in 1990, he described Iraq as a “ferocious dictatorship, marked by terror and coercion unparalleled within the Arab world”; in 2009, he reported that the supposedly new, rehabilitated Libya was just like the old, outcast Libya: a “grotesque entity” and “protection racket” that was regarded as a joke throughout the Arab world. His moral compass remained intact: that year, he warned the LSE not to accept a £ 1.5 million donation from the so-called Charitable and Development Foundation of the dictator’s son, Saif el-Qaddafi. Alas, greed trumped principle, and Halliday’s arguments were rejected—which led, once the Arab Spring reached Libya, to the LSE’s public disgrace and the resignation of its director.

* * *

In May 1981, Halliday published an article on Israel and Palestine in MERIP Reports, a well-respected Washington journal that focuses on the Middle East and is closely identified with the Palestinian cause. It is an astonishing piece, especially in the context of its era, more than a decade before the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel’s right to exist and the signing of the Oslo Accords. It is no exaggeration to say that, at the time, the vast majority of the left, Marxist and not, held anti-Israel positions of various degrees of ferocity; to do otherwise was to risk pariahdom.

While harshly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and of the occupation , Halliday proceeded to question—and forcefully rebuke—the bedrock beliefs of the left: that Israel was a colonial state comparable to South Africa; that Israelis were not a nation and had no right to self-determination; that Israel was a recently formed and therefore inauthentic country (most states in the Middle East—including, for that matter, Palestine— are modern creations of imperialist powers); that a binational state was desired by either Israelis or Palestinians and, therefore, could be a recipe for anything other than civil war and a harshly authoritarian government. (Halliday asked a question often ignored by revolutionaries: Why would anyone want to live under such a regime?)

Most of all, he challenged the irredentism of the Palestinian movement and its supporters. Partition, he presciently warned, is “the only just and the only practical way forward for the Palestinians. They will continue to pay a terrible price, verging on national annihilation, if they prefer to adopt easier but in fact less realizable substitutes, and if their allies and supposed friends continue to urge such a course upon them.” Halliday stressed that a truly revolutionary strategy cannot be “at variance with reality.” Solidarity without realism is a form of betrayal.

The reality principle, and its absence, was a theme Halliday would return to frequently, as in his reappraisal of the legacy of 1968. “It does not deserve the sneering, partisan dismissal,” he wrote in 2008. But nostalgic celebration was also unearned, for “the problem is that in many ways, we lost.” Despite triumphal rhetoric, the year of the barricades led not to worldwide revolution but to conservative governments in France, England and the United States (Richard Nixon). In the communist world, the situation was even worse: “It was not the emancipatory imagination but the cold calculation of party and state that was ‘seizing power.’” In Prague, socialist reform was crushed; in Beijing, the Cultural Revolution’s frenzy reached new heights.

Yet Halliday, like most of us, was sometimes guilty of letting wishful thinking cloud his vision too. In 2004, he called for the United Nations to assume authority in Iraq, which was then in free fall. This ignored the fact that Al Qaeda’s shocking bombings of the UN’s Baghdad mission the previous year—resulting in the death of Sergio de Mello, the secretary general’s special representative in Iraq, and so many others—had disposed, rather definitively, of that issue; the UN had withdrawn its staffers and, clearly, could not ask them to undertake another death mission. (Nor was there any indication that the UN’s member nations—many of whom opposed any intervention in Iraq—would have supported such a proposition.) And his claim, made in 2007, that “a set of common values is indeed shared across the world,” including a commitment to “democracy and human rights,” is hard to square with much of Halliday’s own reporting—such as his 1984 encounter with a longtime acquaintance named Muhammad, who had formerly been a member of the Iranian left. Now a supporter of the regime, Muhammad visits Halliday in London and explains, “We don’t give a damn for the United Nations.… We don’t give a damn for that bloody organisation, Amnesty International. We don’t give a damn what anyone in the world thinks.… We have made an Islamic Revolution and we are going to stick to it, even if it means a third world war.… We want none of the damn democracy of the West, or the socalled freedoms of the East.… You must understand the culture of martyrdom in our country.” Indeed, Halliday’s optimism of the intellect here is belied by even a casual look at any of the world’s major newspapers— whether from New York or Paris, Baghdad or Beirut—on any given day.

* * *

Iran, which Halliday first visited in the 1960s as an undergraduate, was foundational to his political development; he analyzed, and re-analyzed, its revolution many times, as if it was a wound that could not stop hurting. (Iran is the only country to which Political Journeys devotes an entire section of essays.) His initial study of the country, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, was written just before the anti-Shah revolution of early 1979. Based on careful observation and research, the book scrupulously analyzed Iran’s class structure, economy, armed forces, government, opposition movements, foreign policy—everything, that is, but the role of religion, which Halliday seemed to regard as essentially a front for political demands, and which he vastly underestimated. The book’s last sentence reads, “It is quite possible that before too long the Iranian people will chase the Pahlavi dictator and his associates from power… and build a prosperous and socialist Iran.”

Events moved quickly. In August 1979, Halliday filed two terrifying dispatches from Tehran, published in the New Statesman, documenting the chaotic atmosphere of fear and xenophobia, the outlawing of newspapers and political parties, and the brutal crackdown on women, intellectuals, liberals, leftists and secularists. “It does not take one long to sense the ferocious right-wing Islamist fervour that grips much of Iran today,” he began. Later, he would write, “I have stood on the streets of Tehran and seen tens of thousands of people…shouting, ‘Marg bar liberalizm’ (‘Death to liberalism’). It was not a happy sight; among other things, they meant me.” A revolution, he realized, could be genuinely anti-imperialist and genuinely reactionary.

But the problem wasn’t only Iran or radical Islam. As the ’70s turned into the ’80s, it became clear—or should have—that most of the third world’s secular revolutions and coups (in Algeria, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia and, especially, Iraq) had failed to fulfill their emancipatory promises. Each became a one-party dictatorship based on repression, torture and murder; each stifled its citizens politically, intellectually, artistically, even sexually; each remained mired in inequality and underdevelopment. None of this could be explained, much less justified, by the legacy of colonialism or the crimes of imperialism, real as those are. These were among the central issues that led to Halliday’s rift with the New Left Review—and that continue to divide the left, both here and abroad. Indeed, it is precisely these issues that often underlie (and sometimes determine) the debates over humanitarian intervention, the meaning of solidarity, the US role as a global power, the centrality of human rights and of feminism, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. (In 2006, Halliday would sum up his points of contention with his former comrades, especially their support of death squads and jihadists in the Iraq War : “The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah.”)

Halliday’s revised thinking—his emphasis on democracy and rights; his aversion to the particularist claims of tribe, nation, religion or identity politics; his unapologetic secularism; his questioning of imperialism as a purely regressive force—is evident in his enormously compelling book Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, published in 1996. (Halliday dedicated it to the memory of four Iranian friends, whom he lauded as “opponents of religiously sanctioned dictatorship.”) In this volume he took on two still prevalent, and still contested, concepts: the idea of human rights as a Western imposition on the third world, and the theory of “Orientalism.”

Halliday argued that, despite the assertions of covenants such as the 1981 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (which defines “God alone” as “the Source of all human rights”) and the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (which defines “all human beings” as “Allah’s subjects”), there is no such thing as Islamic human rights—or, indeed, of rights derived from any religious source. Such rights apply to everyone and, therefore, must be based on man-made, universalist principles or they are nothing: it is the “equality of humanity,” not the equality before God, that they assert. (That is why they are human rights.) Because rights are grounded in the dignity of the individual, not in any transcendent or divine authority, they can be neither granted nor rescinded by religious authorities, and no country, culture or region can claim exemption from them by appealing to holy texts, a history of oppression, revered traditions or because rights “somehow embody ‘Western’ prejudice and hegemony.”

In this light, the search for a kinder, gentler version of Islam—or, for that matter, of any religion—as the basis of rights is “doomed” to failure; for Halliday, the question of a religion’s content was entirely irrelevant. “Secularism is no guarantee of liberty or the protection of rights, as the very secular totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have shown,” he argued. “However, it remains a precondition, because it enables the rights of the individual to be invoked against authority.… The central issue is not, therefore, one of finding some more liberal, or compatible, interpretation of Islamic thinking, but of removing the discussion of rights from the claims of religion itself.… It is this issue above all which those committed to a liberal interpretation of Islam seek to avoid.” The issues that Halliday raised in 1996 are by no means settled today, and they are anything but abstract; on the contrary, the Arab uprisings have forced them insistently to the fore. In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, secularists and Islamists struggle over the role (if any) of Islam in writing new constitutions and legal codes; at the United Nations, new leaders such as Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi and Yemen’s Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi argue that the right to free speech ends when it “blasphemes” against Islamic beliefs.

But more than a defense of secularism is at stake here. Halliday argued that the very idea of a unitary, reliably oppressive behemoth called the West—on which so much antiimperialist and “dependency” theory rested— was false. “Far from there having been, or being, a monolithic, imperialist and racist ‘West’ that produced human rights discourse, the ‘West’ itself is in several ways a diverse, conflictual entity,” he wrote. “The notion of human rights was not the creation of the states and ruling elites of France, the USA, or any other Western power, but emerged with the rise of social movements and associate ideologies that contested these states and elites.” The West embodied emancipation and oppression, equality and racism, abolitionism and slavery, universalism and colonialism. Political theories and practices that refuse to acknowledge this—proudly brandishing their “anti-Western” credentials—will be based on the shakiest foundations.

* * *

The argument between advocates of the concept of “Orientalism,” put forth most famously by Edward Said, and its critics—often associated with the scholar Bernard Lewis—was close to Halliday. Lewis had been a mentor of his at SOAS, and one he admired; Said, whom Halliday described as “a man of exemplary intellectual and political courage,” was a friend. (Though not forever: Said stopped talking to Halliday when the two disagreed on the first Gulf War.) Yet on closer look, Lewis and Said shared an orientation: both had rejected a materialist analysis of Arab (and colonial) history and politics in favor of a metadebate about literature. “For neither of them,” Halliday argued, “does the analysis of what actually happens in these societies, as distinct from what people say and write about them…come first.” Increasingly, Halliday would regard the Orientalist debate as one that deformed, and diverted, the discipline of Mideast studies and helped to foster a vituperative atmosphere.

Said had argued that, for several centuries, British and French writers, statesmen and others had created a static, mythical Middle East—sometimes romanticized, sometimes denigrated, always objectified— as part of an unwaveringly racist, imperialist project. (Indeed, Said’s book has turned the word “Orientalist,” which used to refer to scholars of the Muslim, Arab and Asian worlds, into a term of opprobrium.) With sobriety and respect, Halliday considered and, in the end, devastatingly refuted the theory’s major tenets. With its sweeping, all-encompassing claims, he argued, the concept of Orientalism was a form of fundamentalism: “We should be cautious about any critique which identifies such a widespread and pervasive single error at the core of a range of literature.” It was based on a widely held yet entirely unsubstantiated belief that Europe bore a particular hostility toward the Muslim world: “The thesis of some enduring, transhistorical hostility to the orient, the Arabs, the Islamic world, is a myth.” It was undialectical, ignoring not only the myths that Easterners projected against the West—ignorant stereotyping is, if nothing else, a busy two-way street—but the ways the East itself reproduced the tropes of Orientalism: “A few hours in the library with the Middle Eastern section of the Summary of World Broadcasts will do wonders for anyone who thinks reification and discursive interpellation are the prerogative of Western writers on the region.” In fact, Islamists can be among the greatest Orientalists, for many insist on an Islam that is eternal, opaque and monolithic.

Most of all, though, Halliday questioned the assumption that the presumably impure origin of an idea necessarily negates its truth value. “Said implies that because ideas are produced in a context of domination, or directly in the service of domination, they are therefore invalid.” Carried to its logical conclusion, of course, this would entail a rejection of modernity itself—from its foundational ideas to its medical, technological and scientific advances—for all were produced “in the context of imperialism and capitalism: it would be odd if this were not so. But this tells us little about their validity.” (“Antiimperialism” and “self-determination” are, we might note, Western concepts, just as penicillin, the computer, the machine gun and the atom bomb are Western inventions.) And he questioned a key tenet of postcolonial studies and postcolonial politics: that the powerless are either more insightful or more ethical than their oppressors. “The very condition of being oppressed…is likely to produce its own distorted forms of perception: mythical history, hatred and chauvinism towards others, conspiracy theories of all stripes, unreal phantasms of emancipation.” Suffering is not necessarily the mother of wisdom.

But if Halliday was a foe of the simplicities of Orientalism, he was equally opposed to Samuel Huntington’s notion of “the clash of civilizations”—a concept that, he pointed out, was as beloved by Osama bin Laden as by neoconservatives—and to essentialist fictions like “the Islamic world” and “the Arab mind.” (On this, he and Said certainly agreed.) More than fifty diverse countries contain Muslim majorities; the job of the intellectual—whether located inside or outside the region—was to specify and demystify rather than deal in lumpy, ignorant generalities. “Disaggregation and explanation, rather than invocations of the timeless essence of cultures,” was the Mideast scholar’s prime task, Halliday insisted. He rejected mystified concepts such as Islamic banking and Islamic economics (“Anyone who has studied the economic history of the Muslim world…will know that business is conducted as it is everywhere, on sound capitalist principles”); the Islamic road to development (Iran’s economy was “a perfectly recognisable ramshackle rentier economy, laced with corruption and inefficiency”); and Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia, Halliday noted, has virtually no basis in the Koran). Echoing E.P. Thompson, Halliday argued that much of what passes for the ancient and authentic in the Islamic world—including Islamic fundamentalism itself—is the creation of modernity, and can be productively analyzed only within a political context.

Halliday proposed that even the Iranian Revolution—with its mobilization of the masses, consolidation of state power, repressive security institutions and attempts to export itself—had, despite its peculiar ideology, reprised the basic dynamics of modern, secular revolutions: “not that of Mecca and Medina in the seventh century but that of Paris in the 1790s and Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1920s.” Islam, Halliday insisted, could not explain the trajectory of that revolution or, for that matter, the politics of the greater Middle East.

Was Halliday right? Surely yes, in his refusal of essentialist fantasies and apolitical thinking. And in some ways, the Arab uprisings have confirmed everything for which he had spent a lifetime arguing. Here were populist movements demanding democratic institutions, transparency, and an end to tyranny and corruption; here were hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding entry into the modern world, not its negation; here was the assertion of participatory citizenship over passive subjecthood. Yet the subsequent trajectory of those initial revolts also proved him wrong: nowhere else in the contemporary world have democratic elections led to the triumph of religious parties. Nowhere else do intra-religious schisms result in the widespread carnage of the Shiite-Sunni split. Nowhere else do the democratic rights to freely speak, publish and create collide with strictures against blasphemy—even among some presumed democrats. Nowhere else does the fall of dictatorship and the assertion of self-determination translate, so quickly and so often, into attacks on women’s equality. “Islam explains little of what happens” in Turkey and Pakistan, Halliday wrote in 2002, and he believed this to be true of the region as a whole. Yet I doubt there are many Turks or Pakistanis (or, for that matter, Iranians, Egyptians, Algerians, Lebanese, Afghans, Saudis or Yemenis) who would agree. Can they all be the victims of false consciousness?

Here, I think, lies the problem: in his fight against lazy generalizations about Islam and its misuse as a univocal explanation, Halliday sometimes sought to scrub away, or at least radically minimize, Islam itself, as was demonstrated by his early book on Iran. It is almost as if he—the confirmed skeptic, the lover of reason, the staunch secularist, the self-proclaimed bani tanwir (“child of enlightenment”)—could not quite believe in religion as a force unto itself, and an astonishingly powerful one at that. “What people actually do,” he wrote in 2002, “is not determined by ideology.” This is, we might note, a classic Marxist position, in which the “superstructure” of belief is subsumed beneath class and politics. Yet Halliday’s erstwhile Iranian friend Muhammad— and, indeed, so many of the events that Halliday himself witnessed—told him otherwise. And as organizations as diverse as the Nazi Party and Al Qaeda have shown, rational, politically focused strategies and utterly lunatic ideologies can, alas, coexist.

* * *

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Halliday was clear about several points: that the attacks would resonate throughout global politics, changing them for many decades to come; that Al Qaeda was a “demented” product not of ancient Islam but of modernity, and represented “the anti-imperialism of racists and murderers”; and that terrorist violence “from below,” though not directly caused by poverty, could not be severed from the grotesque inequalities that international capital had created. In 2004, he wrote, “The central challenge facing the world, in the face of 9/11 and all the other terrorist acts preceding and following it, is to create a global order that defends security while making real the aspirations to equality and mutual respect that modernity has aroused and proclaimed but spectacularly failed so far to fulfil.” This was not a question of either/or, but of and/ and. Ever the dialectician, Halliday observed that imperialism and terrorism are hardly antagonists; rather, they share a “central arrogance,” each “forcing their policies and views onto those unable to protect themselves, and proclaiming their virtue in the name of some political goal or project that they alone have defined.” And he noted with anger and sorrow how terrorism—which has killed far more people in the East than in the West —had transformed millions of people throughout the world into bewildered bystanders, creating an internationale of fear.

Afghanistan had been one of Halliday’s key areas of study, and he repeatedly pointed to several crucial facts that many Americans still resist understanding. Al Qaeda did not spring out of nowhere, much less from its beloved eighth century. It was Ronald Reagan’s arming of the anti-Soviet guerrillas— even after the Soviet pullout in early 1989, when Kabul’s communist government still stood—that was instrumental in creating the Islamist militias and warlord groups, some of which transformed themselves into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Thus had our fanatical anti-communism led to the empowerment of “the crazed counter-revolutionaries of the Islamic right.” For Halliday there was no schadenfreude in this, no gloating, no talk of chickens coming home to roost or of blowback (a concept that fundamentally misunderstands— and moralizes—historic causation: was Sobibor the blowback from the Versailles Treaty?). But he insisted, rightly, that the crisis of 9/11 could not be understood, much less successfully confronted, in the absence of engaging this “policy of world-historical criminality and folly.”

Halliday had supported the US overthrow of both the Taliban and Saddam (in addition to military intervention against Saddam in the first Gulf War, and against Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo). He criticized three tendencies of the post-9/11 world with increasing dismay, though not quite despair: the retreat into rabid nationalism in both East and West; the Bush administration’s conduct in Iraq and in international affairs generally (“The United States is dragging the Western world…towards a global abyss,” he warned in 2004); and the left’s romance with jihad, especially in relation to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iraqi “resistance.” And indeed, it was somewhat shocking to read Tariq Ali, writing in the New Left Review in the especially bloody year of 2006, exulting in the rise of “Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij.… A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth.” Or, more recently, to find his colleague Perry Anderson arguing that the “priority” of Egypt’s new, post-Mubarak government should be to annul the country’s “abject” peace treaty with Israel as a way of recovering “democratic Arab dignity.” Rip van Winkle socialism, indeed.

After September 11, Halliday focused much of his intellectual energy on explaining the ways the attacks and their serial, convulsive aftermaths were decisively changing international relations. While classic internationalism—in the sense of humane solidarity with the suffering of others—was imperiled, a kind of militarized internationalism was on the rise. Conflicts that had been relatively distinct, except on a rhetorical level, had become ominously entwined and the ante of violence—especially against civilians—cruelly raised. “Events in Lebanon and Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, Turkey and Libya are becoming comprehensible only in a broader regional and even global context,” he wrote in 2006. This new dispensation, which he dubbed the “Greater West Asian Crisis,” represented a struggle for political supremacy in a region that now included not just the Arab world and Israel but also Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among others—including a plethora of volatile nonstate militias that are beholden to no constituencies and recognize no restraints. While some conflicts, such as Hezbollah versus Israel, might still be geographically confined, none could be politically or, because of the existence of transnational guerrillas, operationally confined. (Consider, for instance, the reported presence of Islamist fighters from Chechnya and Pakistan in Syria’s civil war.) Halliday warned that the resulting strife would be “more complex, multilayered and long-lasting than any of the individual crises, revolutions or wars that characterized the Middle East.” This was written six years ago; despite the hopefulness of the subsequent Arab Spring revolts, it would be difficult to dispute the alarming vision contained therein.

* * *

In the last decade of his life, Halliday turned, with an urgency both intellectual and moral, to the legacy of revolution in the twentieth century. His writings on this topic—precisely because they are the work of a writer deeply embedded in, and respectful of, the Marxist tradition and committed to the creation of what one can call, without cynicism, a more just world—are important for anyone who seeks to understand the history of the past century or the bewilderments of the present one. These essays make for painful reading, too—especially, I think, for leftists—in their willingness to question, and discard, comforting beliefs.

Halliday’s re-evaluation shared nothing with the smug rejection of revolution that had become so fashionable after 1989, or with the disparagement of communism as an “aberrant illusion.” To the contrary: “Millions of people struggled for and believed in this ideal,” he wrote in 2009. “As much as liberalism, communism was itself a product of modernity…and of the injustices and brutalities associated with it.” Nor had Halliday signed on to a celebration of the neoliberal world order: “The challenge that confronted Marx and Engels,” he wrote in 2008, “still stands, namely that of countering the exploitation, inequality, oppression, and waste of the contemporary capitalist order with a radical, cooperative, international political order.” Against flat-earthers like Thomas Friedman, he argued that the globalized world of the twenty-first century is more unequal than its predecessors.

And so the question of what is to be done still remained, but had to be faced with far more humility and critical acumen than ever before. If Halliday had little sympathy for talk of failed gods, he was equally impatient with the “vacuous radicalisms” and romanticized revival of tattered revolutionary ideals that permeate too much of the left, including—or perhaps especially— the anti-globalization and solidarity movements. The idealization of violence (“the second intifada has been a disaster for the Palestinians”); the eschewing of long-term political organizing in favor of dramatic but impotent protests; the failure to study the complex and blood-soaked trajectory of the past century’s revolutions; the Pavlovian identification with virtually every oppositional movement, regardless of its real political aims: all of this was, in Halliday’s view, the road to both tragedy and farce. “The anti-globalization movement has taken over a critique of capitalism without…reflecting on what actually happened in the 20th century,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “I read the stuff coming out of Porto Alegre and my hair falls out.”

For despite communism’s commitment to, and partial achievement of, certain economic and social values (including a planned economy, women’s equality and secularism)—values that, Halliday believed, must be preserved—its record of murder and authoritarianism could not be evaded. “The history of revolution in modern times is one not only of resistance, heroism and idealism,” he wrote in 2003, “but also of terrible suffering and human disaster, of chaos and incompetence under the guise of revolutionary transformation, of the distortion of the finest ideals by corrupt and murderous leaders, and of the creation of societies that are far more oppressive and inefficient than those they seek to overthrow.” What distinguished Halliday’s argument, however, was his insistence that these failures could not be rationalized as the divergence between “Marxist theory and communist practice”; twentieth-century revolution must be judged an inevitable failure, he concluded.

Thus Halliday rejected all “what if” forms of analysis: what if Lenin had not died, or Bukharin had come to power, or the Germans had turned to the left instead of to the Nazis. (These are questions that, I admit, still haunt me.) He did not believe that a more liberalized version of communism could have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his view, the key issue— one that many leftists want to avoid—is that communism’s “failure was necessary, not contingent.” This was because of four elements that were central to any communist program and, he argued, to Marxism itself: “the authoritarian concept of the State; the mechanistic idea of Progress; the myth of Revolution; and the instrumental character of Ethics.” (However, Halliday did not—at least as far as I know—ever adequately explain the relationship between the socialist tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment and the fatal flaws of communism.)

A kind of ethical wasteland was, in his view, socialism’s greatest failure. No socialist state, at least none derived from the Bolshevik revolution, had developed institutions that defended the rights of the individual or articulated any “justifiable criteria” for the use “of violence and state coercion.” The Russian Revolution had led not to a withering away of the state but, rather, to the establishment of fearsome regimes with almost unlimited powers to control, repress and terrorize their citizens. Halliday added tartly that many leftists “appear not to have noticed this…an index of how little they have learnt, or have noticed the sufferings of others. Unless and until they do, they have no right to claim that they are advancing the cause of human emancipation.”

The seriousness of such revolutionary failures, the massiveness of such defeats, led Halliday to revisit even such cherished notions as internationalism and solidarity: not as values but as practices. In a brilliant 2008 essay called “Revolutionary Internationalism and Its Perils,” he noted that internationalism, though always heralded by revolutionaries, has historically divided rather than united the left (think of the First, Second and Third Internationals, the Sino-Soviet split, etc.). And he noted a fascinating if counterintuitive process: it is nationalism, not its opposite, which has “spread across the world as a transnational force, crossing boundaries and cultures, to become the universally accepted normative code of modern politics.” At the same time, internationalism had, “in the practice of twentieth century revolutions, become an instrument of states”—had been used, that is, to further the interests and fortify the power of individual states rather than to create global unity. Within this dialectic, Halliday wrote, lies “much of the dynamic, and not a little of the tragedy, of the politics of the past century.” Stirring calls for international solidarity will have to confront this history, and these contradictions, if they wish to move from rhetoric to reality.

* * *

From the time of his break with the New Left Review (and haunted, I suspect, by the bitter fates of slaughtered friends in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere), Halliday increasingly, and consistently, affirmed the defense of others’ rights—to civil, intellectual and political freedoms, to self-determination, to an unfettered press, to women’s equality, to human dignity and bodily integrity—as the nonnegotiable foundation of solidarity: “The concept of solidarity presupposes that of rights, and the two were so combined, in rhetoric and policy, in the French revolution.” But he opened a circa-2007 essay called “The Fate of Solidarity: Uses and Abuses” with a troubling observation: “In the course of the twentieth century something strange, and distorting, appears to have happened to the concept of ‘solidarity.’” He traced the circuitous history of solidarity—and the left’s practice of it—from the French Revolution through the era of colonialism to the anti-imperialist independence movements and the fall of communism. “Among the many ironies of this process has been the way in which solidarity has been declared with states, movements, and individuals who in their practice deny the very concepts of rights on which the solidarity is supposedly justified in the first place,” he argued. “At the same time, the ideal and practice of solidarity has been turned against those, in the communist movement, who most sought to espouse it.” To declare solidarity while ignoring human rights abuses and the suffering they entail was the worst sort of empty posturing.

For Halliday, to evade the concept of rights was to reject the very notion of a shared humanity—a tendency that, he argued, had only increased since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, a weird convergence had transpired, whereby the right (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales) joined with Islamists, jihadis and their Western supporters in a mutually enthusiastic denigration of human rights, an embrace of “moral particularism” and a rejection of the laws of war. (From there it is a very short step—really no step at all— to waterboarding, Guantánamo, suicide bombings, and the murder of UN and humanitarian aid workers.) What made this more repellent was that each side proudly proclaimed its internationalist commitments while trampling them to death.

Halliday also questioned the very idea of revolution, and of whether it will prove to be the best way—either ethically or practically—to transform global capital in the twenty-first century. “We are much more certain about the structures, and inherent inequities, in the present system than we are about the alternatives, and the ways to get there,” he admitted in a 2003 essay. Had the traditional opposition between reform and revolution led to productive change, or was it a historic dead end? In any case, he noted, it was late modern capitalism, not revolutionary socialism, that had “formed the global vision of the future” in the 1990s; to succeed, a radical critique of the existing order would have to reverse this momentum and “wrest the initiative within a world of growing inequality and rancor.” This would necessitate the creation of new ideas, new strategies, new ethics and a new capacity for realism in place of reliance on 100-year-old truisms. Even so, it remains to be seen whether revolution—and, if so, what kind—can “fulfill the promise, in terms of economic distribution and the implementation of rights, which modernity has always propounded.” The explosions in the Arab world since December 2010 (and in Iran in 2009)—stirring and heartbreaking, inspiring and ominous—have proved how vital Halliday’s questions, hopes and doubts remain.

Fred Halliday did not live to see the democratic uprisings that have swept the Arab world, which seems like a cruel irony. (One might think of Moses gazing at the Promised Land, except that Halliday didn’t believe in promised lands.) In the days since, it is his voice—calm, knowledgeable, realistic, empathic yet sharply honest—that has been so sorely needed: to explicate the meanings of those events, to look beneath their surfaces, to place them within history, to discover their political and ethical contradictions, just as he did after 9/11. In a lovely essay written in 2005, Halliday praised his intellectual mentors, the Marxist historians Maxime Rodinson and Isaac Deutscher, for their skepticism, universalism, wisdom and independence. “Amid a world scarred by state and terrorist violence and debased public debate,” he wrote, these men—these values—are necessary “more than ever.” The same could be said of Halliday and his incisive yet generous intelligence; I never met the man, but I can’t stop missing him.

Susie Linfield, The Nation

#halliday #linfield

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fightersforpeace · 3 years

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A critique of the WPS agenda … from a postcolonial perspective

𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒃𝒚 𝑯𝒂𝒍𝒂 𝑨𝒃𝒊 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒉

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is now considered a global “norm,” deriving legitimacy from the Beijing declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325, and nine subsequent resolutions. Taken together, these instruments and the norms that underpin them are referred to as the WPS agenda. Nevertheless, after the adoption of these resolutions, several debates broke out on a global level about whether the WPS agenda and the concepts and practices it inspires have any purchase in the Global South, and how the postcolonial feminist perspective might have extended the scrutiny and critique.

One of the main critics of the WPS agenda is that the latter is inattentive to gender relations, masculinities, and gender hierarchies in the Global South. It assumes that peace is the natural outcome of women’s involvement in post-conflict processes.

Moreover, other critics were discussed and debated between postcolonial feminists and mainstream feminists such as the global South is accountable to western concepts and practices used in case studies in all over the world and where specificity and singularity are put aside. Plus, the discourse, used by feminists from the global North towards women of the global south, contains a lot of empowerment and protection as if the southern women are only victims and not a main player in the society. In the end, most feminists forgot that women coming from formerly colonized countries face two levels of oppression: one related to its own culture and the other is a residue from the colonization period.

All these criticisms can be related to two fundamental actions happening within the UN: the first one is that the Global North has access to funds and resources and, barring China and Russia, constitutes the three main actors within the UN Security Council, entrusted with passing critical resolutions that form the core of WPS. And the other is that large scale military interventions to restore peace are adopted by the UN Security Council is reviving colonial “rescue narratives” in sites of conflict in the Global South.

Women from the Global South are made accountable to western concepts and practices

When the 1325 Resolution was adopted by the Security Council (UNSC), most of the feminist activists and scholars were happy by the result and thought that the global road to gender equality and security have begun. Nevertheless, the incoming years revealed many loops in this resolution and agenda such as the internalization of western concepts and practices, if not domination, in the WPS agenda.

The WPS agenda is associated with successful advocacy efforts of non-governmental organizations, gender activists and feminist’s scholars with offices in New York, London and Geneva and mostly with the western members of the UNSC. Also, efforts to push the agenda forward are identified with governments, NGOs, and international organizations that are based primarily in the Global North. This has resulted to push an agenda with concepts culturally related to these countries values, which contributed to the widely shared assumptions about the Global North as the “conceptual, material and institutional home” of UN Security Council Resolutions related to the gender and security agenda. Thus, this situation can be translated into that Global South states and non-state actors are being accountable to Western concepts and practices and undermining local concepts and values.

The problem of case studies and best practices

One of the other criticism of the WPS agenda is regarding the case studies and best practices, where studies are done all the time to give a discursive meaning and universal character to this agenda. In this case, the Global South must perform the site of innumerable case studies, where people and societies are framed in a perpetual state of conflict and violence, and where local values and culture are forgotten.

The problem by deploying the concept of best practices in the implementation of the WPS agenda is that from one conflict region to another context, local values, culture differ. Even two situations of conflict in the same temporal and spatial geographies can demonstrate completely different gender norms, before, during, and after the conflict. “Best practices” thus, may be a useful policy term, but it does not capture the complexity of the situation on the ground. It, also, fails to highlight the complexities of these conflicts in which states are parties waging wars against their citizens or inter-state conflicts with foreign intervention or even separatist groups or terrorist groups.

Furthermore, case studies are carefully selected to suit the Western governments’ strategic priorities, intervention goals, and funding rationale; some areas are over-researched (like sexual violence in wars), while others are marginalized (such as state violence against indigenous people and gender minorities). How this is happening? For some, the weak states and civil society agendas of the Global South are controlled and influenced by donor grants, research funding, and support for outreach activities who mostly comes from Western agencies and Governments.

Therefore, based on these ideas discussed above, for some postcolonial feminists, the WPS discourse endorses a particular liberal vision of equality and peace that does not appear to be inclusive of all interests and experiences. Besides, state-led National Action Plans (NAP) which are emphasized as part of the WPS agenda, end up endorsing the state’s narrative of the conflict and its marginalization and discrimination plus these “Western” concept of peace, security and gender. This lead to some feminists to shed the light on the dual oppression that women are facing in the Global South in general.

Dual oppression of women in postcolonial states

For many feminists in the Global South and postcolonial theorists, women in general, are facing dual oppression in postcolonial states based on the residue of oppression from the colonial area, the native oppression, and the fluidity of gender norms that were challenged under colonial masculinity.

Many feminists and postcolonial theorists pointed out that “anti-colonial resistance” was not “anti-colonial critique,” and that the chauvinism and authoritarianism of colonial states had to be challenged, and there were many struggles within the larger anti-colonial movements, such as women’s movements against patriarchal traditions and violence. The priority is for what independence or changing society?

The debates around the situation of women particularly and gender, in general, have addressed the issue of the dual colonization of women, oppressed by both native and foreign patriarchies. As well these debates highlighted the lack of acknowledgement of differences in feminist understandings of women’s global oppression, where the difference is not just between the West and the other areas of the world but even within these areas or even in the same country. Furthermore, these debates highlighted the problematic history of feminism as imperialism, where feminists have been complicit in both the production and the marginalization of the gendered subaltern.

Other criticism towards the WPS agenda explained that most literature and debates perceive women in the Global South as victims.

Improve the woman “out there”

Throughout the discourse towards gender issues in the Global South, many terms have used that lead to “Empowerment” and “save the women” in this region, which continues to be co-opted and invoked by many. This discourse leads many scholars to point out that this scenario of “saving women” is part of the colonial/imperial literature.

Let’s take for example the references to 1325 (UNSC Resolution) in the preamble of Security Council Resolution 1483 on Iraq. These references could be seen as a positive case if we take into consideration that it gives legitimacy to women’s role and inclusion in the reconstruction and nation-building process in Iraq. Nevertheless, we could also analyse it another way: 1325 is being used as a tool to justify military occupation on behalf of “liberating” women. Furthermore, “The Global War on Terror” is another appropriate example of Western efforts aimed to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. The problem is that feminists were complicit in supporting that effort of “saving and liberating women” in both cases as if they are providing a moral compass to governments and the people. And nobody asked the “women” in these countries what do they want? Maybe for them, they are other ways to ameliorate their situation outside of the discourse and practices of “gender equality”. In fact, in specific contexts, women may value gender complementarity rather than gender equality. In such situations, “gender equality” and “empowerment,” as defined can be unproductive and even potentially damaging concepts.

As discussed above, the discourse aimed at issues of the Global South is focused on the “protection” of women in this area and not an actor with its tools and values. And for some scholars, this can be seen as a considerable pressure to improve a lot of the women “out there,” from state agencies, neoliberal global institutions and even corporate interests, who fund both WPS research and practical initiatives.

References:

Aoláin, F. N. “Situating Women in Counterterrorism Discourses: Undulating Masculinities and Luminal Femininities.” Boston University Law Review 93, no. 3 (2013): 1085–1122.

D’Costa, B. “Learning to Be a Compassionate Academic.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 1 (2016): 3–7.

Grewal, I., and C. Kaplan. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2000), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/ jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm.

Otto, D. “Women, Peace, and Security: A Critical Analysis of the Security Council’s Vision.” London: LSE Women, Peace and Security Working Paper Series, 2016.

Parpart, J. L. “Imagined Peace, Gender Relations, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Anti- Colonial and Post-Cold War Conflicts.” In Women, Gender Equality, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Lessons Learned, Implications for the Future, edited by J. P. Kaufman and K. P. Williams, 51–71. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Article supported by IFA-ZIVIK

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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How Should We Evaluate Lockdowns? Disentangling Effectiveness, Context, and Politics

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/how-should-we-evaluate-lockdowns-disentangling-effectiveness-context-and-politics/

How Should We Evaluate Lockdowns? Disentangling Effectiveness, Context, and Politics

With thanks to Kalipso Chalkidou for valuable feedback How should we evaluate measures taken in response to COVID-19? An early precautionary stance was to act first against an immediate threat, and later work out the evidence-base. Even now, as the UK government considers the range of options for tackling the ongoing outbreak, its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (better known as SAGE) published a summary of the effectiveness and harms of different non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), and concluded that “The evidence base into the effectiveness and harms of these interventions is generally weak. However, the urgency of the situation is such that we cannot wait for better quality evidence before making decisions.” However, many different NPIs—actions apart from taking medicines—have now been tried in a range of global settings, and thus we have the evidential means to begin evaluating them. In this blog we discuss some recent evidence from Africa, and we present some thoughts on how lockdowns can be evaluated, using some of the Bradford Hill “criteria.” While our examples are from Africa, we believe this blog is relevant to ongoing debates globally.

What works?

In the early stages of the pandemic, there was significant pressure and urgency to respond, and across the globe we witnessed the widespread adoption of stringent lockdown measures. At the time, decisionmakers had to operate amidst a dearth of evidence while models projected the worst in terms of COVID-19 cases and fatalities, with dire implications for eclipsing health systems’ capacity. Now, several months into the response, we are better equipped to assess the effectiveness and necessity of lockdowns, and to bring evidence to bear in determining the most appropriate package of interventions for different contexts in ongoing efforts to combat COVID-19. This includes assessing both the benefits and the harms of lockdowns (for different durations and levels of stringency) as well as their effectiveness compared to other options. Questions about lockdowns will continue as many countries see increasing case counts and new spikes. Even after the first generation vaccines are approved for use, there are concerns about global availability and uptake in the face of vaccine hesitancy. With vaccines only forming part of the response strategy, we must critically evaluate other public health tools at our disposal. Below we present some emerging evidence on lockdowns across different settings and considerations that should inform future adoption of lockdown measures.

Context matters

Similar regulations mean different things from both an epidemiological and a human perspective in different places, and for different people in the same place. Thus, a lockdown requiring people to stay at home might reduce social contact in a suburb, but might actually increase social contact in a crowded informal settlement (as appears to have been the case in Accra). This means that intensity scales measuring the stringency of a government’s policy response to COVID–like the one developed by the University of Oxford–cannot be used as a proxy for degree of reduction in social contact, which is the key variable in most models, including the influential Imperial College London model. Preregulation levels of social contact may vary widely too, as may compliance with regulations. All of this means that a physical distancing recommendation in Stockholm might yield a greater reduction in social contact than a hard lockdown in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, meaning the effectiveness of a regulatory intervention cannot be established independently of the local context. Context also matters for the indirect health effects of lockdown. Wealthier nations and wealthier people are better able to withstand the economic shock of lockdown. In sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector accounts for about two-thirds of total employment, according to some estimates. GDPs in the region are among the lowest in the world, and governments may not be any more able to protect citizens from the ill-effects of loss of livelihood than are individuals themselves. Malnutrition, disruption to treatment programs for other diseases such as HIV and TB, the long-term health consequences of disrupted education, and outbreaks of other diseases are probable consequences of lockdown in many parts of the developing world.

Recent evidence from Africa and the Bradford Hill “criteria”

Given that lockdown carries a more serious health risk in poorer regions and for poorer people in those regions, the evidence for its effectiveness in those contexts is especially important for decision-makers. Two recent papers look for correlations between regulatory regime and COVID-19 epidemic trends in Africa. In the first, the authors (including some of us) fail to identify any changes in the trajectory of the epidemic in South Africa that might be attributed to “lockdown,” (see Figure 1 below). The earliest measures introduced on 17th March by the South African government included restrictions on large gatherings, on restaurants and bars, and similarly “mild” measures. South Africa moved into a very restrictive lockdown from 27th March, coinciding with a decline in the trajectory of new cases. Deaths follow the same pattern some time later. This can be nothing more than coincidence since it takes some days for regulatory measures to have an effect on detected cases. South Africa remained in “Level 5” lockdown, as it became known, until the end of April, and “Level 4”—which was almost as hard—until the end of May. Cases, followed by deaths, continued on a constant, although exponential, trajectory during this period, and remained on the same trajectory until the latter part of July, when the curve flattened out. (South Africa carried out widespread random testing.) There was no regulatory change in July, and when regulations were further eased to “Level 2” in August, there was no change in the—by then, falling—rate of infection, either.

Figure 1. COVID-19 caseload in South Africa, overlaying the dates of the different “levels” of the lockdown

One cannot simply “read off” causality from a line graph. However, we can look for features that might indicate causality, such as the nine “criteria” (strength, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility, coherence, experiment, and analogy) famously proposed by Austin Bradford Hill many years ago to provide epidemiological evidence of a causal relationship between a presumed cause and an observed effect. Bradford Hill’s “criteria” are still widely used by epidemiologists today (note that Bradford Hill was clear that these are not criteria in the sense of sine qua nons for causality, but rather intended them as viewpoints or perspectives from which to consider whether an observed association might be causal). One of these is biological gradient (or dose-response relationship), meaning the greater the exposure (the “dose”) to the presumed cause, the greater the response. However, there appears not to be a dose-response relationship in South Africa between lockdown level and reduction of transmission. This corroborates the point made earlier, that scales measuring policy stringency may not be a proxy for any epidemiologically significant variable. Another Bradford Hill criterion for establishing a causal relationship is strength (or effect size). South Africa’s lockdown measures in mid-March correlated with a reduction in the rate of transmission, but there was no correlation between further regulatory changes and other changes in the epidemic’s trajectory. Similarly, a second recent study examines the nature of regulatory regimes in nine African countries, and looks for patterns in the trajectory of the epidemic in these countries. There is no single definition of “lockdown,” the authors argue, with different countries enacting regimes that differed in important details. The authors offer a helpful two-by-two matrix to characterize lockdowns two-dimensionally (an improvement on one-dimensional intensity scales). They also point out that, in overcrowded contexts, regulations with the effect of keeping people at home could plausibly have led to an increase in infection rates. They find a strong relationship between testing and cases, predictably, but observe “no obvious pattern” in the different lockdown measures imposed in different countries and the shape of the respective national epidemics, even though they reason that there must have been some effect of measures designed to reduce social contact.

Lack of plausibility– when lockdown measures achieve the opposite of what they intended

Another of Bradford Hill’s criteria for assessing causality is plausibility, i.e. whether a plausible biological mechanism exists for the proposed causal link. Bradford Hill recommended taking extra care here, since biological plausibility is relative to current biological knowledge, which might tail behind the causal knowledge derived from observations. The mechanism by which lockdown regulations are supposed to work is generally clear, although details are sometimes not. Following the blanket ban on outdoor exercise during lockdown Level 5, for example, the South African government decided to permit exercise only between 6am and 9am. This time restriction meant that all citizens wishing to exercise did so at roughly the same time, increasing the degree of social contact due to exercise. (Similar remarks might be made about the closing of pubs in the UK at 10pm, reducing what might otherwise be a staggering effect.) Restricting certain activities is intended to lead to a reduction in the number of contacts between new individuals over short time periods (e.g., daily contacts). However, this mechanism is not plausible where people live in crowded conditions, share communal ablutions, and queue for social grants and food. Thus, the biological plausibility of strict lockdowns having a significant causal effect on the COVID-19 pandemic in such conditions is limited, and these conditions are widespread in the regions covered by both the studies we have described. Perhaps one important lesson from both these papers is that the distinction between means and ends must be kept in mind when devising public health interventions. Severe restrictions on freedom of movement and activity have been characterized as “suppression” measures, but “suppression” has also been characterized as the reduction of social contact by a certain percentage (e.g., 75 percent). Yet in some situations, restricting movement outside the home for nonessential purposes may not yield reduction of social contact. Suppression is an end, lockdown a means, and lockdown is only a “suppression strategy” to the extent that it is appropriate to the end. In many parts of the world, lockdown is not a suppression strategy at all, because it does not reduce social contact to the level necessary to bring the reproduction number below 1; indeed, in some overcrowded contexts, it may even increase social contact.

The politicization of lockdowns

Debates about lockdown in the US and UK are becoming more political, not less. But as some of us argued previously, the way that opinions on lockdown have lined up along the interests of the liberal-conservative axis of American politics or the left-right dimensions of Britain politics, is largely irrelevant to the interests of the poorest in the world. This may be part of the WHO’s reasoning in recently stating: “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus.” Regulations that might look the same from a legal or political perspective might have very different epidemiological significance. Their assessment cannot, therefore, be in terms of political allegiance. It has to be empirically based, and localized to a region. Politicization can also cause confusion between quite distinct public health measures. The term “lockdown” may even be confused for any exercise of state power to compel in the name of preventing COVID-19, even where what is compelled could be part of an alternative strategy to lockdown: contact tracing or mask-wearing. It is easy for all public health measures to become equated because they are compatible and imposed by a single authority, even when they are separable and justified by different rationales. Contact tracing formed the basis of some nations’ responses, rather than “lockdown,” and should be seen as a potential alternative strategy on a different dimension altogether from any “intensity scale” of lockdown. Political polarization makes it harder to see such alternatives. We hope to see more assessment of the different strategies countries have used to combat COVID-19 based on the large quantity of data now available. Managing COVID-19 should no longer be a stab in the dark.

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rulystuff · 4 years

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https://servicemeltdown.com/who-amongst-us-will-stand-on-the-tower/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/who-amongst-us-will-stand-on-the-tower/

WHO AMONGST US WILL STAND ON THE TOWER?

In ancient times, watchmen would stand on a tall stone tower always vigilant to the potential of an approaching danger. The role of the watchman, particularly at harvest time, was important to the survival of a community in agrarian societies. The watchman, in effect an early warning system, was called upon to sound an alarm which could prove crucial in thwarting an attack both from ravenous animals and from malefactors who would rather make off with a neighbor farmer’s fruits and vegetables than to labor and toil in their own fields. In times of war, the role of the watchman was critical in spying potential enemy threats to a town: if a threat appeared, the watchman would blow his horn and the townspeople would rally and prepare for battle.

In Scripture, the symbolism of the watchman is profound. No less a figure than the 8th century B.C. prophet Isaiah – who prophesied the birth of Christ in Isaiah 7:14 – conveys God’s message to us, “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest,” Isaiah 62:6. In 21st century America we all have a moral duty to serve as watchmen as the nation is presently besieged by enemy forces both foreign and domestic.

GLOBALIZATION: AN ANTI-DEMOCRATIC NIGHTMARE

The current demagoguery in the hands of globalists takes the ugly form that a citizen who believes in national borders and national priorities cannot be a good citizen – that he is a fascist some claim. We need to be reminded that the American revolution was a nationalist uprising which few would call fascist. The current sophistry in the hands of globalists belies that a citizen who is devoted to his homeland and who places the interests of his nation-state as the top priority can exist, at the same time, with a world view that is tolerant and respectful of those beyond his borders. Furthermore, to be respectful of global interests is not to suggest that those who can afford it should be forced to open their pocketbooks to fix all of the world’s ills. That suggestion is impudent and a sleight-of-hand by globalists whose own personal agendas for control stand to be upended by the rights and privileges of sovereign states. Simply stated, globalism is imperialism in sheep’s clothing. What other conclusion is there to be had when an international organization made up of unelected bureaucrats imposes its will on the citizens of member nations? That supranational organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Health Organization are anti-democratic is a statement of fact and not of ideology. The globalization conceit held by leaders in and out of government around the world and in the United States should sound an alarm to those who believe in the sanctity of democratic processes. Put simply, globalization and democracy are hardly fraternal twins. Globalists believe that globalization’s ugly side, lower wages, lost jobs, shuttered factories or devastated communities is the result of there not being enough global governance to channel all of the good that derives from globalization. And besides, globalists say, any discomfort is strictly temporary. As Mr. Pascal Lamy, former Director of the World Trade Organization said in a recent address, “The future lies with more globalization, not less…”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS A TARGET FOR HOSTILE NATIONS

We have witnessed the onslaught visited upon our shores by the Chinese Communist Virus which at last count had extinguished the lives of two-hundred thousand innocent Americans and for which China takes no responsibility despite having its fingerprints all over the heinous act. Meanwhile, China’s propaganda machine is working full-throttle in our schools and universities. Over one hundred Confucius Institutes – incongruously named as Confucius was a man who preached humaneness – are now operating in our country for the ostensible purpose of disseminating Chinese language, history, and cultural instruction. Colleges have taken in huge sums of money over the years from the Communist regime with the proviso that all discussion and instruction toe the Chinese propaganda line. In the end, that means subjects like the human right abuses of over a million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, or the independence of Taiwan and Tibet are off limits. Only recently did the State Department deem the Institutes propaganda missions which means they will have to adhere to the same restrictions as diplomatic embassies. This action by the United States is welcome news but comes rather belatedly given that Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo, said back in 2009 that the Institutes “are an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” On the commercial front, China purloins roughly $225 billion, at the low end and as much as $600 billion at the high end, annually in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets from the United States. Militarily, America faces a serious threat in the South China Sea where it is being challenged by a territorially aggressive and technologically advanced Chinese Navy. Rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran pose further threats to peace and prosperity led as those regimes are by unbalanced tyrannical dictators.

AMERICA’S DEMOCRATIC VALUES AND BELIEFS ARE UNDER ATTACK FROM WITHIN

The nation has literally been set ablaze by malcontents who would rather settle their philosophical differences not with ballots but with bullets. On the whole, this is the most insidious threat to the democratic ideals of our nation as these forces amount to a fifth-column enemy which has infiltrated our schools, our courts, our churches, all manner of political institutions, and the media. The cultural relativism which now pervades our institutions suggests that no ethical or moral value is superior to any other and so as we see in our contemporary society anything goes:

The teaching of history, language, law, culture and science particularly in the early school grades is now subject to disinformation, myth, and propaganda like never before courtesy of the “knowledge elites” with their own less than charitable axes to grind.

The muzzling both figuratively as well as physically of opposing points of view via the corrosive and regressive practice of “cancel culture” on college campuses renders those institutions little more than very expensive echo chambers.

Looting and rioting is now seen by members of fringe groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa as a legitimate compensatory action to right perceived civil wrongs. Sadly, many local political leaders across the nation are either in league with the rioters or choose to look the other way.

Judicial activism which compels judges who feel it their duty to go beyond the law as written and to interpret it as they see fit countermands the judgment of elected legislators and sets up the courts as super-legislatures.

Sermonizing by certain church fathers on the ills of “white privilege,” wealth, and physical fences while abrogating their responsibility to convey the church’s catechism to their flocks does serious disservice to parishioners seeking spiritual and not political guidance.

Proselytizing by political leaders on the Left that Socialism is in the best interest of the nation. These same demagogues, of course, fail to mention that the socialist experiment has only led to environmental despoliation, starvation, the demise of entrepreneurial initiative, and the spread of a welfare mentality. Rest assured, proponents of Socialism are not able to cite one historical antecedent where the egoism and presumed “wisdom” of central know-it-alls were an able substitute for the actions of countless sovereign consumers and producers operating in a free-market society.

The societal maelstrom, if not gradual dissolution, we are experiencing in our nation is fueled first and foremost by media elites who have the power and the means to filter information and package it so that it satisfies their agenda objectives without regards to the truth or fact. The mainstream media monopolies in Los Angeles, New York and Washington set the table for what most unwary Americans consume as unvarnished factual “information.” Not to be outdone, the oligarchs who control social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google choose what content and what voices they will police so long as they are in keeping with their own preferences and biases.

WE MUST ALL BECOME WATCHMEN ON THE TOWER

The defense of America comes easily to those who are united by the uniquely American principles of liberty, democracy, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, individual choice, and the sanctity of private property. Citizens who fail to grasp these “self-evident” truths owe it to themselves to undertake self-study, if not self-examination, to reaffirm that the American Dream is indeed not a slogan but a unique experiment that can only be realized in our great nation. Now, more than at any other time in our history, Americans need to hone their critical thinking skills so as to question the sources, facts, data, and research thrown at them for the explicit purpose of besmirching the American Dream.

The assaults which threaten the constitutional, cultural, and democratic fabric of America demand that we as citizens stand watch day and night. We must all stand tall on the watch tower and sound the horn so as to rally our fellow citizens as we prepare for battle.

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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The intensifying geopolitical competition between China and the United States has sounded the death knell for liberal hopes of a transparent and unified internet. These aspirations have warped and disintegrated beneath the shadow of the “Splinternet”—a fragmentation of the global internet into autonomous American, Chinese, Russian, and other spheres. Though the West has grown resigned to the prospect of a hegemonic and heavily censored Chinese internet within China’s own national territory, the internet’s global “marketplace of ideas” remains the object of maudlin lamentation as a casualty of the spiraling U.S.-China cold war.

The erection of this Iron Curtain in cyberspace, we are told, has diminished opportunities for transnational collaboration in a variety of productive spheres, ranging from cultural exchange to scientific research, excluding both the American and Chinese sides from the win-win dynamics of a free and open internet. Left unquestioned in this is the premise that the uncensored Western internet has served as a neutral platform for the unmitigated intercourse of ideas and networks.

Influential American geopolitical strategists such as Joseph Nye have frequently observed that the U.S. dominance of the internet constitutes a key pillar of American cultural hegemony abroad. This appears validated by Western Europe, which, above all, has fallen ever more under the sway of American political discourse. Even in countries culturally positioned outside the West such as India, prolonged exposure to the Western internet is increasingly eroding traditional cultural norms. Although this has not yet extended to influencing Indian politics, international familiarity with the distinctly American brand of liberal politics underscores the Internet’s instrumental role in exporting its publicity—putting in question the internet’s intrinsic neutrality.

The active role of the American-dominated internet in radiating this particular form of liberal politics across the world bears profound implications for the global future of governance. It raises fundamental questions as to whether a country should find it desirable to remain open to the Western internet today.

The trade-off involved is best illustrated in a comparative examination of Singapore and China. Both countries are highly technocratic states with formidable capacities for mobilization and, from the perspective of many Westerners, enviably functional governance structures. Singapore’s cyberspace is practically constituted and engulfed by the American internet, while China has retained and consolidated “cybersovereignty” over a distinctive internet culture.

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This combination of openness to the West and retention of illiberal technocratic management is widely seen as a major advantage of Singapore’s governing model. The former allows Singapore to access the West’s scientific and cultural know-how, while the latter ensures policy can be implemented efficiently without partisan obstruction and in a long-term manner. Indeed, in light of America’s catastrophic governmental response to the coronavirus, Singapore is increasingly cited approvingly as an example of a competent state that still tolerates Western institutional norms—thus proof the West need not emulate China in designing a credible alternative governance model.

However, this presupposes a monolithic and static Singapore model, meticulously selecting the best aspects of the West to emulate. It ignores a recent transformational shift which has only accelerated due to deep exposure to the Western internet: the ascent of “identity politics” in Singapore. If sufficiently proliferated, it would pose a new, yet undiscussed challenge to the sustainability of Singapore’s governance model.

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However, this state-imposed vision of racial and religious harmony is largely freedom from racial and religious discrimination, rather than freedom to actively forge a collective identity that transcends race and religion while still accommodating cultural differences. This is manifest in the Singaporean state’s reliance on top-down mechanisms to enforce this policy—notably, in the primary use of legal sanctions against racially sensitive activity, and in the deliberate allocation of public housing to ensure multiethnic compositions in housing estates.

One consequence of this “freedom from” top-down approach is the persistence of racial stereotypes across Singapore’s racial groups. For example, Singapore’s Malay community may be stereotyped by the Chinese as “lazy,” while the Malays may reciprocate with labels of “intimidating” and “bossy.” These sentiments are only compounded by Singapore’s high level of income inequality and status anxiety.

This setup has fomented a growing constituency of primarily younger Singaporeans who believe the discourse of American liberal politics finds a direct parallel in Singapore’s domestic situation. Unashamed borrowing of the terminology is evident. For example, the term “Chinese privilege,” derived from the Anglo-American concept of “white privilege” and used to describe the advantages enjoyed by the politically and economically dominant Chinese community, has proven ubiquitous enough to become the central theme of articles in the student newspaper of the Raffles Institution, one of Singapore’s leading schools.

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This straightforward importation of Western liberal politics into Singapore should be taken seriously as a political trend with disruptive potential for its governance. Whatever one thinks of the positions involved here, the rising challenge is not compatible with Singapore’s governance model.

Some have seen in the Singaporean governance model a simultaneously inclusive and technocratic state apparatus. The technocratic elite derives expertise on “appropriate” policy by leveraging powerful state organs to consult social stakeholders and gauge public sentiment. This forms the “inclusivity” aspect. In tandem with consultation, the technocratic class evaluates public sentiment in relation to their worldview and analysis of the conjuncture. These factors jointly influence eventual policy decisions that are imposed top-down. This forms the “technocratic” aspect. This purportedly ensures astute decisiveness in policy-making while still leaving room for public opinion. More importantly, the ability of the state to set the parameters of discourse in civil society develops a consciousness among individuals and consulted stakeholders of where their interests and roles stand in the broader national interest. This expedites trust and co-operation with the state in policy implementation.

However, the importation of Western liberal politics has introduced two novelties to Singaporean discourse that undermine this approach that renders American cultural influence problematic for the sustainability of Singaporean governance.

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A 2019 article by Zhang Xu and Liu Yangyue—a political scientist at China’s National University of Defense Technology who has specialized in comparing the dynamics of internet control across different countries—instructively outlines the central problems that the policy of cybersovereignty is intended to resolve. Among these they enumerate the intrinsic disorder of the internet and its facilitation of political irresponsibility—items that may appear as so many generic authoritarian complaints in response to a space of free and unfettered discourse. Yet they highlight two other characteristics that are harder to dismiss: first, the unequal distribution of power built into the global infrastructure and governance of the internet; second, the tendency of cyberspace towards cultural homogeneity.

In respect of the broader goals of China’s internet policy, this last observation may be the most relevant point. “Cyberspace,” Zhang and Liu argue, citing Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry, is a favorable “environment for the expansion of cultural imperialism.” The dominant characteristic of online social media, they note, is the use of American social media platforms by non-American users. The ostensible neutrality and freedom of cyberspace has become merely the vector of an all-encompassing American cultural hegemony. To some degree, the Singaporean case might justify this view.

In effect, China’s response to this problem has been the guided and intensive cultivation of a domestic online culture industry unbeholden to Western concerns. Though competitive domestic alternatives to the Western social media giants have emerged in many countries—Naver in South Korea and VK in Russia—from its fortified position behind the Great Firewall, China has attained a degree of influence and variety in its homegrown social media that is unique outside the West. The comprehensive and carefully regulated ecosystem of networks such as Weibo and Weixin, together with forums such as Zhihu, represents a total discursive space that has proven relatively impervious to the currents emanating from the internal convulsions of American culture—unlike the Singaporean internet. Moreover, as the growth of TikTok in Western markets attests, Chinese platforms may now cast shadows that extend far beyond China itself.

As with the selective imposition of tariffs on physical goods, this aspect of cybersovereignty as an industrial policy of the public sphere, a project that combines the cultivation of flagship social media platforms with intentional cultural engineering, would not be possible at such scale without the selective exclusion of dominant foreign alternatives. This exclusion is by no means hermetic. Mainland Chinese users of Western social media, though Westerners typically dislike their opinions, are not simply “bots” sponsored by the CCP: the use of VPNs to access Western websites like Twitter is endemic and shows little sign of disappearance despite its formal illegality and periodic, often localized crackdowns by the Chinese government. It is not difficult to find mainland Chinese users on Western social media. What is far less frequent, however, is for the cultural worldview of such users to be shaped fundamentally by their access to these foreign platforms. In that respect, the policy of hindering access without complete exclusion has done its work.

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The contradictions of China’s own development, above all between reform-and-opening and the self-insistent continuation of the Leninist state, have themselves produced discursive divergences that cannot simply resolve themselves through reasoned argument. Some of the broad and ultimately irreconcilable viewpoints generated by these different moments of development were summarized by the Beijing theorist Jiang Shigong in 2018: the desire for China’s transformation into a liberal democratic state on Western lines, the appeal to Confucian antiquity as a basis for the reconstruction of the CCP, and so on.

In the context of an intensifying competition between fundamentally divergent worldviews, Jiang’s argument suggests, the political development of the public sphere must be subject to an ultimate Schmittian decision that clarifies the goals and limits of acceptable discourse. As the West’s own experience has shown, in cyberspace such points of tension have the potential for limitless amplification. Yet the intrinsic network openness of the internet will not simply disappear. The only option—so it appears to China—is a recognition that this process of discursive collapse will happen, and that it must be kept in check by a continual process of public intervention aiming to maintain its contradictions within the limits, and perhaps for the benefit, of a certain common good.

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These are merely concrete benefits that China derives from cybersovereignty and not moral justifications for China’s policy. Given heightening American strategic competition with China, however, there must be some coherent Western response to the challenge of China’s model of cultural regulation. An important starting step would be the recognition that the status quo of an internet regulated solely by private interests can be a liability for effective governance. In the context of an internet riven in the West by private social media amplifying a spiral of internal conflict, the old nostrums about the intrinsic potentiality of cyberspace to construct a free and rational world are increasingly hollow.

The decisive questions in this struggle for the future of cyberspace are: can an open internet function not simply as a vector for the power plays of American political interests, but as a space of genuine cultural productivity—that is, as something that it is possible to order towards the good? More fundamentally: is there anything now to be gained from openness to the West?

A Western answer to these questions can begin only by admitting the reality of cyberspace as a strategic terrain requiring public oversight—and laying the groundwork for an industrial policy that can effectively govern its own public sphere.

#vincent garton #brandon cheong #palladium magazine #singapore #end the american empire #cybersovereignty #read the whole thing

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tadawulacademy · 5 years

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CISI and EIMF launch Chartered Wealth Manager qualification

Cyprus based finance professionals are being offered the chance to study for what is considered in the market to be the leading global qualification for private client wealth managers. The CISI Chartered Wealth Manager qualification, a post-graduate level specialist qualification, is being launched in Cyprus in partnership with EIMF, with the first five-day training course starting 21 March. The qualification will be taught at the European Institute of Management and Finance (EIMF) headquarters in Nicosia, with highly experienced trainers from EIMF’s partner, the FSTP. The qualification has three units: Financial Markets, Portfolio Construction Theory and Applied Wealth Management, each assessed by passing three-hour, written exams. The EIMF five-day study programme offers practical exam-type questions, additional supporting material and optional mock exams which are marked instantly. Successful candidates are recognised as experienced and qualified financial sector professionals and are permitted to hold the exclusive CISI Chartered Wealth Manager designation and access full membership of the CISI. EIMF and FSTP Chartered Wealth Manager qualification trainer Johanna Kirby has over 20 years’ experience in the global financial services profession and is a Fixed Income and Derivatives specialist. She graduated from Imperial College, London with a First Class Honours degree in Aeronautical Engineering. Her initial financial services career with JP Morgan saw her quickly rise to Director of Fixed Income based at Barclays in South Africa. For the last eight years Johanna has been working as a Consultant to provide technical training for financial institutions. Marios Siathas, General Manager EIMF (right) said: “We are delighted to be able to offer this world class, post-graduate level CISI qualification here in the Cypriot market, which is suitable for wealth managers, IFAs, private client managers, discretionary portfolio managers and private bankers. This highly regarded qualification has been developed in consultation with leading professional practitioners. The Chartered Wealth Manager exams are held just twice a year and therefore it is important that candidates have the best opportunity to pass first time. “The estimated total study time for all the units of this qualification is 609 hours and we are extremely pleased to have Johanna Kirby of FSTP on board as our trainer for this qualification. Exams are scheduled every year in June (registration closes in March) and January (registration closes in September). Those interested in signing up to the study programme commencing 21 March should get in touch as soon as possible as places are limited.” Kevin Moore, Chartered FCSI, CISI Director of Global Business Development said: “To complete our Level 7 Chartered Wealth Manager qualification requires a substantial time investment from the candidate, therefore we are thrilled that EIMF has partnered with FSTP, who will provide exemplary study support and training throughout this programme with Johanna Kirby. We look forward to welcoming successful Cypriot candidates to our elite and growing global community of practitioners in this important private wealth management market.” by Lora Benson | Jan 18, 2019 Read the full article

#CISI

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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The latest attack in London – the third to hit Britain within seventy-five days – is once again provoking a debate about the relationship between Islam and terrorism. On one side we have those who say Islam is inherently violent, and is incompatible with the basic canons of Western civilization. On the other side, we have liberals who say that this is a libel on an entire religion, and that advocates of religious violence are a distinct minority within the Muslim faith.

These two views have distinct policy implications: the former would impose what amounts to a Muslim ban on travel to Western countries, and would furthermore mandate State surveillance of mosques and other religious institutions of that faith. The latter stance would oppose these measures, and proceed as if Muslims posed the same danger to us as, say, Presbyterians, i.e. none at all.

Both views are simplistic nonsense. Furthermore, neither offers an effective policy to deal with the problem as defined.

The origins of Islamic terrorism are not in dispute: the idea that “they hate us because we’re free,” i.e. because of our secular values and Western lifestyle, was not even worth considering, at least initially. After all, Japan, for example, which is not exactly an exemplar of Islamic values, has never been attacked by Islamic extremists. South America has proved similarly immune. The focus of the Islamists’ wrath has been on the United States and Western Europe – not coincidentally, those countries which have a long history of intervention in the Muslim world.

Which brings us to the theory of “blowback,” the idea that the root cause of radical Islamic terrorism is simple retaliation. Here the writings of Chalmers Johnson, whose book, entitled Blowback; The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, was published before 9/11, and also of Robert Pape, who has done yeomen’s work on this issue, are very useful. Johnson put the concept in its historical context, and Pape shows, with extensive detailed evidence, that occupied peoples routinely adopt such tactics as suicide bombings to fight the overwhelming presence of occupiers. And this is not limited to Islamists, by any means: the Tamil Tigers, fighting for the “liberation” of Sri Lanka, for example, employed these same tactics.

And so the “blowback” concept, in its pure form, avers that this isn’t about religion, but about resistance: the resistance of a militarily weak insurgency against an occupying power that exerts overwhelming force. Adherents of this theory point to the statements of the terrorists themselves, principally al-Qaeda, which declared that the presence of US troops on the “sacred” soil of Saudi Arabia motivated – and justified – the 9/11 attacks. Aside from that, they point to other examples of Western imperialism – the invasion and occupation of Iraq, US support to Muslim despots, and the ongoing “war on terrorism” that, from their perspective, is a war on Islam.

So it’s all very cut and dried, simple really – but is it?

It’s been sixteen years since the 9/11 attacks, long enough for a strand of Islam to emerge that views terrorism against Western targets as a religious duty. Furthermore, the radical Islamist critique of Western values and lifestyle as morally corrupt has been integrated into the purely consequentialist idea of “blowback” as retaliation for specific actions. Because it can surely be argued – especially by religious ideologues – that a society capable of killing hundreds of thousands in, say, Iraq, is inherently depraved. Given the theory of “blowback,” this merging of a typically anti-colonialist narrative with a moral critique was inevitable. And to give it a religious angle wasn’t difficult. After all, in the years since September 11, 2001, have the US and its allies attacked any non-Muslim countries?

And it’s not as if there aren’t elements within orthodox Islam that need only elaboration to legitimize this mutant variation. The very concept of jihad, and the storied history of Islamic conquerors who “converted” new adherents by force, feed into this frenzied fundamentalism, which seeks to return to a “purer” form of Mohammed’s creed. Of course, one could point to similarly aggressive tendencies in Christianity, as well as other faiths, and yet the missing element here is a history of military occupation and conflict.

Religious belief, like all human concepts, isn’t static: it undergoes changes in response to events. It adapts, it mutates, it evolves. Christianity changed in response to the advance of science: Galileo is no longer considered a heretic. Judaism was transformed by the Holocaust: Zionism, yesterday embraced by a tiny minority of Jews, is dominant today. Islam is not immune to the tides of history.

Western liberals downplay this uncomfortable truth because they generally disdain religion and fail to appreciate its power. They cannot understand how a person could drive a truck into a crowd of pedestrians, and go on a stabbing spree, while shouting “This is for Allah!” Allah, for them, is a delusion: religion is a primitive throwback, a reactionary atavism that is on its way out. Yet this is hardly true in most areas of the world outside of the Global Metropolis.

The failure of Western liberal elites to acknowledge this reality – the reality of a newly militant strand of Islam that upholds terror as a sacred duty – is linked to their appeasement of the Saudis. For years the Kingdom has exported its austere version of Islam, Wahabism, which serves as the theological foundations of the very terrorist movement we are supposedly pledged to fight.

A few days before the attack on London Bridge, the news broke that an investigation into the sources of terrorist funding commissioned by the government of former Prime Minister David Cameron would probably not be published due to its “sensitive” nature: there’s too much evidence that the Saudis are the principal financiers of terrorist organizations.

Britain recently signed off on a series of multi-billion dollar arms deals with the Saudis: the US has done the same, in a deal brokered by none other than the President’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, Donald Trump travels to the Kingdom where an “anti-terrorist center” is inaugurated – by the very folks who are funding radical Islamic terrorism worldwide.

The West has done everything possible to encourage the growth and development of radical Islamic terrorism, from invading the Muslim world to succoring and supporting the state sponsors of terrorist organizations. We armed and funded Islamic extremists in Syria in a bid to overthrow the secular despotism of Bashar al-Assad – and then wondered how and why returnees from that conflict took their holy war to the streets of Europe’s cities. One wouldn’t have acted any differently if the goal had been to deliberately create a terrorist menace.

And what is the solution offered by our rulers? British Prime Minister Theresa May says we must regulate the Internet, which is now supposedly a “safe space” for terrorists:

"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide. We need to work with allies democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.”

The British government already regulates the Internet and its powers have been used primarily to quash alleged anti-Muslim sentiment: you can be arrested and charged with a “hate crime” for saying the wrong thing about Islam on Twitter or in a blog post. The “Investigatory Powers Act” was passed by Parliament in November: it requires Internet providers to maintain a list of web sites visited by all Internet users for up to a year, and also gives the government broad powers to intercept communications. May wants to internationalize this regulation.

It’s hard to believe that May and her cohorts really think this will have the least effect on terrorist activities. It’s clearly just a pretext to regulate a phenomenon that threatens the powers-that-be. Rather than combat terrorism, the idea is to extend the authority of government as far as they can get away with – and, as the terrorist wave rises, there’s no telling how far they will go.

Not only are Western governments uninterested in actually stopping terrorism, but the terrible truth is that there is no stopping it. Some problems have no solution, and this is one of them. We can wipe out ISIS in Syria, but they will scatter worldwide, returning as “refugees” to the cities of their enemies. We can restrict travel, reject Muslim immigrants: and yet the second and third generations, already embedded in Western societies, will take up their cause. We can spy on our own citizens, regulate the Internet within an inch of its life, restrict “hate speech,” bomb more Muslim countries – and still the monster’s tentacles will wriggle through the interstices and grasp at our throats.

This is what we have unleashed on ourselves: a monster that won’t be killed. The idea that we cannot live with this is akin to the idea that we cannot live with our own history: it is an idea without meaning. The past is prologue: it won’t be repealed or denied. We invaded Iraq. We invaded Afghanistan. We funded and armed al-Qaeda during the cold war, in league with our Saudi allies, while Riyadh spread its ideology of hate on a global scale.

In Greek mythology, the figure of Nemesis dramatizes our current predicament: she is the goddess of retribution, whose name is “derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning ‘dispenser of dues.’” She pursues her quarry relentlessly, visiting on them the consequences of their deeds.

Her pursuit can be ameliorated, albeit not finally and immediately ended, by reversing our course of futile wars – in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. – and ending our alliance with the mandarins of terror in Riyadh and the sheikdoms of the Gulf. Yet still the monster will live: it cannot be slain by conventional means – it will have to die a natural death. The best we can do is to stop prolonging its life.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #the war on terror #the war on islam #islam and terror #blowback

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