Dealing with a global crisis like Afghanistan allows China to tell the world that it has the political ambition to work with the Taliban and also tame the Taliban to its terms.

Taliban has found a new friend in need. Only time will tell whether it is a friend indeed.

In a recent press conference, Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, said, China is our most important partner. He further stated that the Taliban support Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative that seeks to link China with Africa, Asia and Europe through an enormous network of ports, railways, roads and industrial parks. Mujahid said, China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country.

Interestingly, the Taliban spokesperson also elucidated that it is looking at China to rebuild Afghanistan and exploit its rich copper deposits. There are rich copper mines in the country, thanks to the Chinese, can be put into operation and modernized. In addition, China is our pass to markets all over the world.

Even as early as July, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen noted, We care about the oppression of Muslims, be it in Palestine, in Myanmar, or in China, and we care about the oppression of non-Muslims anywhere in the world. But what we are not going to do is interfere in Chinas internal affairs. During their first-ever press conference on 16 August after seizing power, the Taliban spokesperson said, We want to reassure that Afghanistan will not be used against anybody.

China too has been warming up to the Taliban, stating that China respects Afghanistans sovereignty and will not interfere and follow the friendship with entire Afghan people; Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that facts show that in realising economic development we need an open inclusive political structure, implementation of moderate foreign and domestic policies and clean break from terrorist groups in all forms.

On 16 August, one day after Kabul fell, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesperson Hua Chunying was asked about potential recognition. She said, We hope the Afghan Taliban can form solidarity with all factions and ethnic groups in Afghanistan and build a broad-based and inclusive political structure.

On the same day, Chinese United Nations envoy Geng Shuang echoed the statement but also noted, Afghanistan must never again become a haven for terrorists. We hope that the Taliban in Afghanistan will earnestly deliver on their commitments and make a clean break with the terrorist organizations.

Two days later, on August 18, there came the strongest hint yet at official recognition of the Taliban by China. It is a customary international practice that the recognition of a government comes after its formation, MFA spokesperson Zhao Lijian said. Most recently, on 25 August, an MFA spokesperson, when asked about a reported meeting the previous day between the Taliban representatives and the Chinese ambassador to Afghanistan, said Beijing stands ready to continue to develop good-neighbourliness, friendship, and cooperation with Afghanistan and play a constructive role in Afghanistans peace and reconstruction.

According to Centre of Foreign Relations in the article by CFR expert, Ian Johnson, it stated, The relationship with the Taliban will be twofold. First, it will be mercantilistic. China will seek to revive business ventures inside Afghanistan, which the Taliban is likely to support because investment will provide badly needed revenues. The Afghan economy is fragile and highly dependent on Western donors foreign aid, which will almost certainly be cut off. So any sort of investment, especially if it is not accompanied by lectures on human rights, will be welcome.

Second, the relationship will depend on each side not interfering in the others internal affairs. For Beijing, that means the Taliban cannot export extremism into Chinas troubled Xinjiang region, which shares a tiny border with Afghanistan, or condemn the Chinese governments abuses against Uyghur Muslims in that region. For the Taliban, it means China will not question the groups human rights abuses unless Chinese citizens are involved.

Derek Grossman, a senior defence analyst at the RAND Corporation in his article on China and the Taliban stated: This new transportation infrastructure, including planned thoroughfares through the narrow Wakhan Corridor that links the two countries, would significantly enhance Beijings ability to access Afghanistans natural resources. According to a 2014 report, Afghanistan may possess nearly $1 trillion worth of extractable rare-earth metals locked within its mountains.

Beijing further has its eye on projects that languished under the previous Afghan government due to a combination of obstacles including archaeological discoveries, security issues, and social impact. Under the Taliban, the future of these projects may be brighter. For example, in 2016, the Taliban offered protection for Chinese workers at the Mes Aynak Copper Mine near Kabul. If Afghanistans new masters are so inclined, Beijing may finally get long-sought-after benefits from a major oil project in northern Afghanistans Amu Darya basin.

Developments since the fall of Kabul strongly suggest China and the Taliban have started off on the right foot. This week, the Taliban spokesperson confirmed the two sides are actively discussing their bilateral relationship, including Chinese humanitarian assistance.

China, has positioned itself as a new great power in competition with the United States, and it will want to demonstrate its way of handling world crisis.

Perhaps most importantly, recognizing Taliban-run Afghanistan would contribute to the perception that it is Beijingand no longer Washingtonthat is now setting the agenda and shaping the future regional order according to Derek Grossman in his analysis on China and the Taliban relationship.

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the pathetic manner in which the United States handled the Afghan crisis give China a point to rub into the US government, that when push comes to shove, the United States is unreliable and that it fails to walk the talk when it matters most.

China, recognizing the Taliban makes for strange optics: fighting Islamists at home but embracing them abroad. But it shows that China could be the ultimate politics playing nation.

As, Derek Grossman expressed, its still the early days under Taliban rule, so China is understandably cautious. Beijing is concerned the Taliban may reengage in illegal narcotics trafficking to fund their government and return to supporting terrorist attacks outside Afghanistan. Beijing worries the Talibans spectacular success might embolden alleged members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which Chinese authorities have controversially designated as a separatist and terrorist threat in the northwestern Xinjiang province. To date, China has predominantly relied on its ironclad brother Pakistan to do the heavy lifting to prevent fighters from entering Xinjiang or otherwise supporting the outlawed group.

China and the Taliban make strange bedfellows according to most defence analysts, but I do not see it as strange bedfellows. It is merely a relationship of bare necessities.

China wants to establish itself as a global power centre. Dealing with a global crisis like Afghanistan allows for China to tell the world that it has the political ambition to work with the Taliban and also tame the Taliban to its terms. China will play the friend of the Taliban till such time Taliban and its government benefits China. Having Pakistan on its one-side and Afghanistan on the other, with the Taliban gives it a strong and indisputable leverage not only in the region but the world but most all over India.

With the United States being an eagle with its wings clipped by the Taliban, the dragon will roar in Afghanistan while it will let the hyenas enjoy their prey.

Savio Rodrigues is the founder and editor-in-chief of Goa Chronicle.

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The Taliban get a Chinese friend - The Sunday Guardian Live - The Sunday Guardian

One thousand days.

Thats how much time has passed since Xi Jinpings Ministry of State Security kidnapped Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in a hostage-diplomacy bid to force Canadas release of the jet-setting Vancouver socialite, Huawei billionaire heiress and Chinese Communist Party princess Meng Wanzhou.

Sunday marks that 1,000-days milestone, and no matter who ends up the winner after the votes are counted in the Sept. 20 federal election, the capitulation Beijing is attempting to extract from Canada in their case will overshadow every other foreign-policy tangle the Prime Ministers Office faces.

Thats is because this isnt just about a kidnapping.

Its about untangling a catastrophe of cascading political misjudgments, sordid big-money relationships and an approach to the Chinese corporate state going back years that have ended up combining to isolate Justin Trudeau and an inner circle of old friends and advisers from Canadas allies; from the overwhelming opinion of the majority of Canadians; and even from much of Trudeaus own House of Commons caucus.

Meng was detained on a U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant while checking through Customs in Vancouver to pop into one of her Vancouver mansions during a Dec. 1, 2018 stopover on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Argentina, via Mexico. Meng is facing charges of bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy in what Justice Department lawyers in New York called a strategy of lies and deceit going back a decade, aimed at covering up Huaweis evasions of U.S. sanctions on business dealings in Iran.

Its worth remembering here that Meng is of that Liberal-friendly class of wealth-migration beneficiaries whose investments in Vancouver real estate have so distorted Vancouvers housing markets in a spiral of unaffordability that successive federal governments have ignored. Far from being the mere passing-through traveller the Chinese embassy would have you believe is being victimized on behalf of Canadas American overlords, Meng acquired permanent resident status in Canada 20 years ago, acquired a variety of properties, enrolled her children in Canadian universities, and generally enjoyed the high life here. Although she abandoned her permanent-resident status a decade ago, Meng has remained a fixture in Vancouvers super-rich Chinese expatriate social scene. And since her arrest, shes back full-time, with generous bail conditions allowing her to live in the luxury of a family-owned mansion in Vancouvers posh Shaughnessy district.

Ten days after her detention at Vancouver International Airport, Kovrig, a diplomat-on-leave working as a researcher with the International Crisis Group, was picked up in Beijing. Spavor, an entrepreneur who focused on cultural and business exchanges in North Korea, was detained in Dandong. It took five months before the pair were formally arrested. By the time they were brought up on charges of espionage more than a year after that, in June, 2020, theyd already endured 557 days of interrogation and privation in special prison blocks where the lights were kept on 24 hours a day.

Spavor was convicted on espionage charges last month on evidence that is reported to consist of images of military aircraft that show up in photographs hed taken at airports. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Kovrig was subjected to a similar day-long trial last March. The verdict in his case hasnt been handed down.

For all the governments brave talk about how the case of the Two Mikes has been its first and foremost foreign-policy priority ever since they were first abducted, the facts are unimpeachable: Its been 1,000 days, and nothing Canada has done has slowed the descent of the two Michaels down the throat of Beijings justice system, which boasts a conviction rate approaching 100 percent.

Within months from now, if not weeks, the Meng Wanzhou melodrama will be moving past its B.C. Supreme Court phase. When that happens, the federal cabinet will come to a politically opportune moment, provided by a 1999 amendment to the Extradition Act, to bail from its necessarily non-interventionist the courts must decide standpoint. Trudeaus circle is teeming with Beijing-friendly grandees who have been fiercely lobbying and making the rounds of the opinion-pages circuit to argue for Ottawa taking that opportunity to pay Beijings ransom, on the pretext that it might mean Kovrig and Spavor could get sprung from prison.

As cold as this must seem, Ottawa needs to hold to a standpoint that it adopted only reluctantly at the outset: the courts and the courts alone should decide Mengs fate. Once Justice Heather Holmes has rendered her verdict in Vancouver and Mengs legal options are exhausted, Ottawa should leave it to the courts, regardless of whether Meng is committed for extradition or not. And Canadas political leaders, including the Conservatives Erin OToole, should say this out loud, now.

Its none of Canadas business anyway. Its Beijing and Huawei and Meng that have put Canada in this bind, not the other way around. From the beginning, Meng has been free to leave and face an American judge any time she wants. If the courts end up declining the U.S. extradition request, then fine, let her go home to Shenzhen. But for Ottawa to step in and game the system in Mengs favour, Canada would be playing by Beijings rules. Instead, Canada should make it clear that this country will not sacrifice its sovereignty, or abandon its commitments to the principles established in international extradition law, or offer any ransom whatsoever, no matter how its framed or spun, to secure the Mikes release.

As for OTooles Conservatives, at least they have a policy on how to cope with China. Cleaning up the mess of Canada-China relations is a line of work that dominates the Conservatives foreign policy platform.

Canada would strengthen its ties with Taiwanthe liberal-democratic state Xi keeps threatening to invadeand take up the cause of the Tibetans and the Uyghurs, whose brutal oppression the Trudeau government has been loathe to even notice. Other China measures a Conservative government would adopt include: restraints on the operation of Chinese state-owned enterprises in Canadas economy; a law barring senior Canadian officials from the commonplace practice of kick-starting their careers by jumping over to lucrative Chinese sinecures; collaboration with countries like Australia, South Korea and Japan as mutual defence against Beijings trade bullying; a ban on Huaweis participation in Canadas 5G internet connectivity rollout; a crackdown on the Chinese Communist Partys infiltration of Canadian institutions and its persistent intimidation of Chinese-Canadians; a suspension of the Canada-China Legislative Association.

As for a specific response to the Mikes imprisonment, OToole says a Conservative government would draw up a sanctions list under Canadas Magnitsky law targeting the Xi Jinping himself, along with Chinese premier Li Keqiang, the chair of the Standing Committee of the Chinas National Party Congress and the President of the Supreme Peoples Court.

The Liberal platform is silent on China.

The Trudeau government first promised a new framework with cornerstones and principles governing new rules of engagement with China in December 2019. It never materialized. Theres no sign of it in the 82-page Liberal campaign platform Trudeau released this past Wednesday, either. The names Kovrig and Spavor appear nowhere in it. The word China occurs only once in the Liberal document, where the platform proposes that Canada should work to protect Canadians and work closely with our friends, allies, and partners to respond to illegal and unacceptable behaviour by authoritarian states, including China, Russia and Iran.

But thats something the Trudeau government can claim its already doneto no effect at all. Around the 800th day of the Mikes captivity, Ottawa won the backing of nearly 60 United Nations member states in a declaration that condemns hostage-taking as a tool of diplomacy. It was a kind of petition. The word China doesnt even appear in it.

Beyond paralysis, everything the Trudeau government has done on the China file suggests a policy of appeasement and issues-management. Its been as though Beijings outrage against international norms is just an unpleasantness we need to somehow put behind us so that the Liberals conventional enthusiasm for deeper intimacies with the Chinese regime can resume in the work of enriching the corporations affiliated with the Canada-China Business Council.

Meanwhile, Kovrig and Spavor remain behind bars in China, while Meng Wanzhou shows up cheerily every now and then at the B.C. Supreme Court, which her blue-chip team of lawyers has been bogging down with a slew of legal challenges that have thus far proved as unsuccessful as anything the Trudeau government has done to secure the release of the Two Michaels.

It cant go on like this. Canada needs to show the Xi regime that it can no longer expect to buy off Canadians, bully Canadians, and kidnap Canadians when it doesnt get its way. It is tragic and viciously unjust that this burden is being borne by Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. A thousand days is 999 days too long.

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What the winner of this election must do about China, Meng and the two Michaels - Maclean's

The 360 shows you diverse perspectives on the days top stories and debates.

Whats happening

Since retaking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban have tried to assure the rest of the world that their new government will be different from the brutal, oppressive regime that ruled the country in the years before the American invasion. They have vowed to respect womens rights to some degree, forgive those who had allied with the U.S. military and prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a staging ground for attacks. We want the world to trust us, a Taliban spokesperson said.

Unsurprisingly, the notion of a kinder, gentler Taliban has been met with deep skepticism. The Biden administration has, however, expressed confidence that the Taliban can be compelled to keep their promises not out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of sheer self-interest. The Taliban seeks international legitimacy and support, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday. Our message is, any legitimacy and any support will have to be earned.

After 20 years in exile, the Taliban now control a country devastated by war that finds itself in the midst of a deepening economic crisis. It is also home to extremist groups that oppose their rule. Perhaps sensing this precarious position, the Taliban have sought to create friendly diplomatic ties with the U.S. and other major world powers as they work to establish a new government.

Why theres debate

Story continues

Optimists say the U.S. has enormous leverage to hold the Taliban to their commitments. For years, the Afghan government has relied heavily on foreign aid in order to function. That inflow of funds has now dried up. The U.S. has frozen $9.4 billion in Afghan central bank assets, and European governments have suspended development aid. Unless America is satisfied with the Talibans leadership, some experts argue, the country could soon face a catastrophic economic collapse that may threaten the Talibans ability to retain control.

Beyond economic pressure, the U.S. can also use the threat of military reprisal to force the Taliban to keep their promise to root out terror groups, others say. The Taliban may also seek support in combating its own terror threat from groups like ISIS-K, which some experts believe will create another point of leverage for the U.S.

Others are skeptical about Americas ability to keep the Taliban in line. While the group aided the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, there are already reports of killings and human rights violations in other parts of the country. Many have expressed concern that oppression and violence will once again become the norm once the eyes of the world shift away from Afghanistan.

The Taliban could also seek support from countries like China, Russia and Pakistan, which could limit their reliance on U.S. financial ties and add complexity to American diplomacy with Afghanistan. Others say the Taliban have limited room to moderate even if they want to, since they could risk losing the backing of hard-line factions in the country if theyre seen as being too friendly with perceived enemies like the U.S.

Whats next

The Taliban will reportedly name Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, the groups top religious leader, as Afghanistans supreme ruler in the coming days. More details on the structure of the countrys new government including whether it will be inclusive, as promised by the Taliban are also expected to be announced soon.

Optimists

Afghanistans dire circumstances mean the Taliban will have no choice but to play along

However fierce in battle, the Taliban seem to understand that governing an impoverished, war-ravaged nation is a very different challenge for which it needs economic and diplomatic support, both of which it is already seeking from the United States. Max Fisher, New York Times

The U.S. has enormous power over Afghanistans economic viability

Any Afghan government especially return acts with an unflattering past will come to realize that the U.S. is key to financial and economic security. Daniel Moss, Bloomberg

Two decades in exile has made the Taliban much more pragmatic

The Taliban of 2021 are not those of a generation ago. Consistency marks their ideological position today as in the past. But that consistency goes along with a high degree of pragmatism. Now that they have won the war, they can afford to be realistic about how they govern. David J. Wasserstein, The Hill

The Taliban know that terror groups pose an existential threat to their rule

The most important issue, of course, is protection for international terrorists based in Afghanistan. ... The Taliban can probably be trusted on this for several reasons. ... A new terrorist attack on the United States would not lead to a new U.S. invasion, but it would certainly lead to bombardment by U.S. missiles and strong U.S. support for armed uprisings against Taliban rule. Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy

The U.S. has leverage but must be realistic about its limits

The balance that must be struck now is extremely sensitive. If Afghans compromise too much in believing the Talibans excuses, or the United States and its allies make their expectations of the Taliban too idealistic, an emboldened Taliban would drive the country toward dark days. The price of a failing and isolated Afghanistan will be paid by common Afghans. Obaidullah Baheer, Washington Post

Pessimists

American leaders will ignore Taliban offenses as long as they stay out of the spotlight

The Americans are hoping that the Taliban will relieve them of the burden of the Afghan problem: as long as the Taliban is willing to manage the internal affairs of the country, as the Saudis do, the US is happy to focus on its own domestic affairs. Nelofer Pazira, Irish Times

The Taliban dont have the luxury of being too friendly with the U.S.

If the Taliban embraces a more pluralistic and inclusive political system with fundamental human rights, especially with respect to women, it may face opposition from its more radical factions and rank-and-file members, who have spent years fighting to restore its emirate. Niamatullah Ibrahimi and Safiullah Taye, Conversation

The Taliban are just as brutal as theyve always been

Those who wish to avoid being force-fed their own testicles should probably not read too much into the kinder, gentler Taliban initiatives currently being implemented in Kabul. The Taliban are cruel, but they are not fools, and magnanimity early in their rule does not mean that they will be any less vengeful than they were at the height of their power. Graeme Wood, Atlantic

The Biden administration is naive for thinking it can control the Taliban

U.S. officials have staked the success of their Afghanistan withdrawal strategy on the premise that they can convince the Taliban to live up to commitments they have made in public and private on letting people leave the country, human rights, and other thorny issues. The Biden administrations approach has long sounded credulous to just about anyone without a vested interest in spinning President Bidens chaotic withdrawal effort as a strategic triumph. Jimmy Quinn, National Review

Other world powers could undercut Americas leverage

The administrations repeated threats to turn Afghanistan into a pariah state if the Taliban commits human rights abuses could be undermined if Beijing and Moscow dont cooperate and if a Taliban-led government strengthens ties with Pakistan and Iran. Michael R. Gordon and James Marson, Wall Street Journal

Is there a topic youd like to see covered in The 360? Send your suggestions to the360@yahoonews.com.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

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Does the US have any real leverage over the Taliban? - Yahoo News

Freed slaves, 1863. (Bettmann / Getty images)

Reparations are having a moment. This march, Evanston, Ill., became the first government in the United States to attempt to address racial inequality by providing mortgage assistance and $25,000 homeownership and improvement grants to descendants of residents harmed by discriminatory housing policies in the city. Soon afterward, the US House of Representatives began hearings on HR 40, which would create a commission to study reparations for slavery and other forms of discrimination against Black people in the United States. President Biden expressed support for the study and reiterated that support at the commemoration of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., in May. Meanwhile, California became the first state to initiate an official task force to study and develop a reparations plan for African Americans harmed by slavery and its legacies. Books in Review

Bolstered by the Black Lives Matter movement and last summers protests following the murder of George Floyd, support for reparations has also been aided by a growing awareness of the history of slavery and other forms of racial exploitation in the United States. In the past decade, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other Black journalists have exposed a broad readership to the question of reparations as well as to the scholarship on slaverys importance in the development of capitalism and American democracy, the racial inequalities inherent to New Deal social policies, and the causes and effects of mass incarceration. By doing so, they helped shift the discussion about racial inequality from a question of marginalization and oppression to a focus on the central role that Black people have played in the economic and political history of the United States. Despite the increasing awareness of this history, however, nearly two-thirds of Americans still oppose federal payments to Black people whose ancestors were enslaved. Opposition is strongest among Republicans, who view reparations as overly divisive and unjustified, but barely half of all Democrats, and only a third of white Democrats, support them.

In From Here to Equality, William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen draw on both journalistic and scholarly sources to make a strong case for cash payments to Black descendants of slaves. To those who dismiss reparations as a recent claim for an ancient crime, they point out that African Americans have been demanding compensation since the end of slavery and that the debt has been redoubled by officially sanctioned violence and discrimination since abolition. Likewise, to the alarmingly large numbers of Americans, both white and black, who do not believe that racial inequality and discrimination continue to exist, Darity and Mullen provide a detailed analysis of the deep disparities in wealth, income, education, and other measures of well-being that have persisted since emancipation.

Yet despite their clear evidence of the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow, Darity and Mullen isolate African American reparations from claims for compensation by Native Americans, immigrants, and others. Not only does this risk alienating potential allies, it also narrows the scope of what the Black freedom movement has almost always pursued: A radical program for economic and racial justice for all Americans.

The core of From Here to Equality is a rich historical account of how the economic inequalities between Black and white Americans were created and perpetuated through centuries of slavery and the legally enforced systems of discrimination and political disfranchisement that followed. Drawing on the work of Anne Farrow, Craig Wilder, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, Darity and Mullen explain that slavery was integral to the nationalnot just the Southerneconomy, and that its proceeds therefore helped establish some of the nations most prominent banks, insurance companies, and universities.

Emphasizing several periods when the United States might have taken a different path, they show how slavery became more durable and racialized in the colonial era and then expanded rapidly in the South after a brief period of ambivalence about it during the Revolution. They also explain how Abraham Lincoln and other Northern politicians sought to avoid conflict by appeasing Southern slave owners, and how their hands were forced by the recalcitrance of the Confederate states, rising opposition to the war among Northern whites, and the insistence of African Americans on turning the war into a fight against slavery.

In Darity and Mullens telling, the Civil War was a critical moment not just because it ended slavery but because it also raised the question of how the formerly enslaved would be compensated for centuries of unpaid labor. They cite the testimony of the formerly enslaved minister Garrison Frazier in 1865, who explained to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that the freedom, as I understand itis taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves, and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom. Current Issue

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This testimony was the inspiration for Shermans famous Field Order No. 15, which would have distributed over 5 million acres of plantation land to formerly enslaved families along the Atlantic coast. A version of Shermans order was taken up by Congress, but in yet another missed opportunity to repair the damage done by slavery, Andrew Johnson vetoed it and returned the land to former slave owners.

But the Civil War was not the last missed opportunity, and a key component of Darity and Mullens case is that the plunder of Black America, as Ta-Nehisi Coates dubbed it, continued unabated throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Drawing on the work of Coates and other journalists, sociologists, and historians who have charted this pillage over the past century and a half, Darity and Mullen offer a story of dispossession, exploitation, and disfranchisement whose devastating costs, they argue, also make the case for reparations.

Having explored the centuries of injustice that now demand compensation, Darity and Mullen turn to the most common objections that they have encountered in the 15 years that they have spent researching and developing their case.

Over that period, Darity and Mullen explain, increased awareness of racial inequality has led to a multiplicity of reactions, from challenging the legitimacy of reparations to asking questions about the logistics of a reparations plan. Most of these objections are answered in previous chapters, but they also examine the claims that past injustices were addressed by emancipation, 20th-century social welfare policies, and affirmative action, and they show why all of these are clearly unsatisfactory in the face of the history they have recounted. Indeed, they argue, many of those initiativesin particular welfare and affirmative action programsnot only failed to end racial inequalities but at times deepened them.Related Article

In the final chapters of the book, Darity and Mullen lay out a program for determining who is responsible for paying reparations, who would be eligible, how much would be paid, and how the funds would be distributed.

The detailed history Darity and Mullen present supports the moral and economic claims for reparations. Yet given the persistent opposition, it is puzzling that they describe the potential constituency for reparations in the narrowest possible terms. In written testimony submitted to a congressional hearing on HR 40, Darity suggested that the bill be amended to clarify that it would benefit only people who identify as black, Negro, or African American and have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States. Acknowledging that this excludes post-slavery immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, whose own ancestors are likely to have been subjected to enslavement and colonialism elsewhere, he suggested they could make their claims against the United Kingdom or France, but not the United States.

In addition to alienating potential allies, the exclusion of Black immigrants from reparations obscures not only the consequences of racism and segregation in the aftermath of emancipation but also the inherently international character of slavery and the inequalities it forged. The scholarship that Darity and Mullen draw on emphasizes the centrality of racial exploitation to the development of the United States, but it also demonstrates that the national story was, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, but a local phase of a world problem.

The historian Ana Lucia Araujo, in her transnational and comparative history Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade, shows that the demand for compensation in the United States has always been related to reparations movements in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. That tradition is carried on today by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, which links demands on the US government with a transnational movement seeking reparations for people of African descent.

To limit the scope of what could be an international movement is a missed opportunity, but it also overlooks the influence of the United States and its role in international slavery and racial inequality. As Araujo explains, the US governments refusal to recognize Haiti weakened the Black-led republic at a time when it was attempting to establish economic independence from Europe and was revised only out of hope that African Americans could be resettled in the Caribbean after the Civil War. Since then, US political, military, and economic power has undermined the economic status of former slaves and their descendants in the Caribbean and Central America and led many of them to seek refuge and opportunity through migration to the United States. Certainly, the US government bears some responsibility for those affected by its imperial power.

And that responsibility does not end with people of African descent. Darity and Mullens account of slaverys centrality to the economic development of the United States includes frequent references to Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves, and as Tiya Miles and other historians have shown, African American history has long been deeply intertwined with that of Native Americans. Commenting on the anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Robin D.G. Kelley noted, Any discussion of repair and reparations, of grieving and mourning the events of 1921 and its aftermath, must grapple with the colonial violence that made Tulsa or Oklahoma and its settler regime possible.

Darity and Mullen acknowledge that Native Americans could make a far more costly claim on the American government than black Americans, potentially including the entire territory of the United States. Yet rather than casting Indigenous people as potential allies in the demand for reparations, they insist that such claims are irrelevant to the specific urgency of the black reparations claim.

Black West Indians and Latin Americans are not the only immigrants with a potential interest in reparations. Emphasizing the whiteness, education, and wealth that some immigrants have brought with them to the United States, Darity and Mullen conclude that voluntary immigrants who arrived after the end of slavery have benefited from Americas Jim Crow regime and its established and ongoing racial hierarchy and therefore share responsibility for reparations. But what of the Chinese and other Asian immigrants who were deprived of legal protections, landownership, and citizenship by racist exclusion laws; refugees from US military interventions in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and Central America; and Mexican guest workers and undocumented migrants who powered the internal colonialism that, according to the historian Mae Ngai, was also central to the economic development of the southwestern United States? As Erika Lees recent history of xenophobia shows, anti-immigrant sentiment has often been closely linked to anti-Black racism.

These histories may help explain why Asian and Latino Americans are far more supportive of reparations for slavery than white Americans, and why, rather than dismiss all immigrants as beneficiaries of racial inequality, we should ask which among them might find common cause in a movement to end it.

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In the context of an increasingly racially diverse United States, the need for allies is an issue of strategy as much as of justice. Acknowledging that not enough Americans support reparations, Darity and Mullen caution that their proposals will not be possible without a dramatic change in national leadership and an inspired national movement dedicated to the fulfillment of the goal of racial justice. With African Americans holding steady at roughly 12 percent of the population, it is difficult to see how they could build such a movement on their own. Darity and Mullen suggest that support could also come from whites descended from slave owners who are seeking atonement, but guilt seems a weak foundation for a political alliance. It seems more feasible to build a coalition of those with an interest in repairing the damage done by slavery and other forms of racial exploitation.

But if we are to build such a movement, its demands have to go beyond just one groups claims and one policy program alone. Darity and Mullen describe the goal of reparations as sharp and enduring reductions in racial disparities, particularly economic disparities like racial wealth inequality, and corresponding sharp and enduring improvements in black well-being. These are admirable objectives, but even with reparations and the reduction of these racial disparities in wealth, African Americans would still face other falling standards of well-being endured by Americans as a whole. For example, if Black families were equal to white ones, their median net worth would increase from $23,000 to $184,000, but most of their gains would go to a few wealthy households: 10% of Black families would control 76% of Black household wealth while just 1% would go to the poorest half of Black families. To use another metric, in an economically equal United States, African Americans would likely still be killed by police and be incarcerated at far higher levels than citizens of nearly every other nation in the world. Likewise, they would still likely fall victim to a health care system that prioritizes profit and a labor market that values productivity over humanity. Yet Darity and Mullen assert that once the reparations program is executed and racial inequality eliminated, African Americans would make no further claims for race-specific policies on their behalf from the American governmenton the assumption that no new race-specific injustices are inflicted upon them.

In his opening address at the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph characterized the Black freedom movement as a massive moral revolution aimed not only at securing equal access to voting rights, government services, public accommodations, and jobs, but also at creating a society where the sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. Americans of all races had a stake in that transformation, he explained, but it falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. Darity and Mullen draw a far more modest lesson from the African American struggle against slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of racial exploitation. Their demand for repayment of the wealth and income taken since the nations founding is worthy in its own right and would help address the deep economic disparities between Black and white Americans. Yet as Randolph suggested, the legacy of these freedom struggles is far more ambitious and revolutionary than the simple calculus of compensation.

Any political movement powerful enough to secure policies sufficient to repair the damage inflicted by centuries of slavery and other forms of racial oppression in the United States will also have the power to secure a more radical and enduring transformation of our social and political order, and it should do so for practical and moral reasons. To win reparations will require allies who have a shared interest in addressing the countrys history of racial exploitation, but it will also need more expansive forms of solidarity and systemic change. As Randolph observed over 50 years ago, Black people are in the forefront of todays movement for social and racial justice, because we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations.

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What is Owed - The Nation

Ven. Jibong, the founder of Yeongcheon History Museum, speaks about Minganinswaejobo, the worlds first commercial newspaper, at Yonghwasa temple in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

King Seonjo, the 14th king of the Joseon Kingdom, clearly understood that newspapers write the first draft of history, during what was to be the worlds first case of press oppression in 1577.

The first commercial newspaper printed with movable types was in Korea during the years of King Seonjo, said the Ven. Jibong of the Yeongcheon History Museum.

Following three months of the historic printing of the worlds first commercial newspaper in 1577, 30 entrepreneurs and their families mysteriously vanished from Seoul.

The Joseon Wangjo Sillok, or the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, which is the most detailed historical record of any kingdom in the world, listed on UNESCOs Memory of the World registry, recorded the historic feat by a group of entrepreneurs and their subsequent torture, followed by their disappearance in 1577.

The Nov. 24, 1577, edition of the Minganinswaejobo, the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, shows the use of both metal and wooden types. The wooden types print bolder while metal types print with finer lines.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

Because of that incident, records of King Seonjo are thinner than those of other kings, and are supplemented with contemporaneous notes, called Sukdam diary. It contains interactions with the king by Yi Yeul-gok, one of the two most prominent scholars of all of Joseon period, who taught kings.

The Joseon Kingdom released a daily handwritten government communique, called Jobo, which included vast information about the palace, and governmental personnel appointments for the entire country.

Representatives from regional areas posted in the capital city would hand-copy information relevant to their respective regions, allowing the news from the capital to be delivered to far corners of the land within days. It would be read by a select few educated scholars and officials who needed to stay informed of the kingdoms affairs.

Because the handwritten Jobo was written in extreme cursive, intended only for the esoteric and select few readers, it did not serve the wider public.

Even though Korea had already invented movable metal type printing during the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392), the printing technology was the exclusive domain of the government and of Buddhist temples.

In 1577, a group of entrepreneurs, who had received official permission, started printing a daily newspaper summarizing the vast amount of communique from the government and translating the difficult cursive into a legible format.

The printed newspaper was quite popular among the government officials and noblemen, wrote Yi in the Sukdam diary.

It was about two months after that King Seonjo got wind of the news.

King Seonjo, who was sensitive to his less-than-perfect royal lineage, was enraged to learn that in addition to his governments handwritten daily communique, private newspapers were being printed, featuring news from the palace, including about the health of Queen Inseong, also known as Queen Dowager Gongui, the widow of King Injong, the 12th King of Joseon and King Seonjos uncle.

Even though private citizens were publishing the newspaper using a private printing press, with permission from two of the highest branches of government, a modern-day equivalent of the Chief of Staffs office and the Constitutional Court office, King Seonjo was furious that citizens were publishing their own newspaper.

Is it not the same as setting up another National Archive Bureau when people are selectively printing the news? King Seonjo was quoted as saying in the records.

King Seonjo ordered the metal and wooden types carved by the entrepreneurs for printing the newspaper to be confiscated.

He had all the involved parties imprisoned and suspects tortured to get to the bottom of who organized the so-called crime.

Since the rise of modern newspapers in the 19th century, historians have been searching for physical evidence of the first commercially and privately printed newspaper with movable type, but for centuries it was never located, until the 21st century.

Ven. Jibong, the director of Yeongcheon History Museum, is an art historian who identified the printed newspaper from 1577 when it appeared on an internet auction site trading in rare books.

The November 1577, newspaper, which is the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, shows several variations of the Hanja character horse () in varying sizes and style. Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

The newspaper clipping had references to Queen Inseong, the widow of King Injong.

Ven. Jibong knew about the queen through a painting that was commissioned and installed at the Dogapsa Buddhist temple in South Jeolla Province. The 1550 painting, which was commissioned in King Injongs honor by his widow, has since been stolen, and is now being kept at a temple in Kyoto, Japan.

The Placenta Chamber of King Injong, whose reign lasted only eight months and seven days, the shortest of all Joseon kings, was the other clue that led to the missing newspaper from 1577.

Two Hanja characters sang () are printed with movable wood type (top) and metal type (bottom) in this close-up image of the Nov. 24, 1577, publication of the worlds first daily commercial newspaper.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

The private newspaper that ran an article documenting Queen Inseongs health must have troubled King Seonjo. One day before her death, he asked for everyone to pray for the Queen, granted pardon to King Injongs uncle, and asked his ministers not to make any issue of the granting of the pardon in the future.

King Injongs uncle was killed by a brother of infamous Queen Munjeong, stepmother of King Injong. She was suspected of murdering King Injong and ruled the kingdom as the regent for her son, King Myeongjong, who succeeded King Injong, at age 12, as the 13th King of Joseon.

For many years, Queen Inseong had pleaded with King Seonjo to pardon her husbands uncle who was murdered under infamous Queen Munjeongs rule. But King Seonjo could not restore honor to a man whose family had feuded with Queen Munjeongs family, when Queen Munjeong enabled King Seonjo to become the first King of Joseon from a nonmain bloodline of the royal family.

Joseon-period handwritten government issued communique (right) and the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, the Minganinswaejobo, are on display side by side in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

By Hyungwon Kang (hyungwonkang@gmail.com)

Korean American photojournalist and columnist Hyungwon Kang is currently documenting Korean history and culture with images and words for future generations.

By Korea Herald (koreaherald@heraldcorp.com)

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[Visual History of Korea] Worlds first case of press oppression - The Korea Herald

M. Reza Behnam| Guest View

The most powerful military in the world has been defeated by men in sandals in a desperately impoverished country about the size of Texas with a population of more than 37 million. The Taliban victory has also dealt a blow to Americas pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East and to its power globally.

The chaos at the airport in Kabul, caused by Americas sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, has not shifted attention away from the fact that the Taliban have won a decisive military and political victory over the foreign invaders. In addressing the nation, President Joe Biden stated that he had factored in chaos in his withdrawal plans a remark that runs counter to his promise to adhere to a humane foreign policy.

Americas 20-year occupation of Afghanistan has ended. President George W. Bushs war on terror, which began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, was built on lies. At home, the absence of truth has given rise to distrust of government and has further weakened the political and social fabric of the country.

Reflection has not been Americas, especially Washingtons, mtier. It is important to weigh the reasons behind Americas colonial adventure in Afghanistan and why it was destined to fail.

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The military mission in Afghanistan has been about defending U.S. geopolitical and economic interests in the region. It has not been, as we have been told, about democracy, freedom and defending human rights.

To understand Washingtons interest in Afghanistan, it is important to recognize the countrys strategic geographical location. Afghanistan at the crossroads of Asia connects the Middle East with Central Asia and India. It is near the Caspian Sea region, reported to contain the second largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.

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Afghanistan is well-situated for oil and gas pipelines pipelines that can bypass Iran and Russia. Since the 1980s, Washington has fashioned numerous pipeline plans that have been delayed or canceled due to political, military or financialproblems.

In 1979, the United States established a military presence in Afghanistan in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In that year, the United States armed and financed the mujaheddin which included young Pashtun Taliban to overthrow and fight the Kremlin-supported Communist government in Kabul. In so doing, the United States successfully lured the Russians into a 10-year military quagmire in Afghanistan.

The collapse of the Communist government in 1989 paved the way for Taliban control of Afghanistan in 1996. And in a twist of fate, Washington found itself fighting the Taliban forces it had helped create.

During the 1990s, the United States was willing to overlook the repressive practices of the Taliban government in order to maintain a presence in Central Asia and to move ahead with pipeline access through Afghanistan.

The United States has established military bases throughout the Arab Middle East, Israel, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Forced to exit Afghanistan, the United States has been deprived of its Afghan base in Central Asia. A lingering question is whether Washington negotiated some future pipeline security with the Taliban before withdrawing.

The Taliban have derailed Washingtons hegemonic plans for the Middle East and Central Asia. China and Russia are now positioned to solidify their presence in the region and to acquire the pipeline access, which has been so coveted by the United States.

It is contrary to reason for Washington to claim that it has been in Afghanistan to benefit the people when tens of thousands of Afghans, who had nothing to do with 9/11, have suffered profoundly because President Bush decided to invade and build a nation transform the government and society in Americas image.

The oppression of women under former Taliban rule is often cited to defend Americas occupation of Afghanistan. U.S. bombs, however, have not discriminated they have been gender-neutral.

That 34 Afghan provinces fell to the Taliban without a fight is evidence that no guerrilla insurgency can win victories without popular support. As the only organized force fighting the American occupation, Afghans turned to the Taliban to provide peace, order and security. They chose the Taliban over foreign occupation. Ultimately, the United States was defeated by the injustice, corruption, inequality and violence brought by the war and their occupation of Afghanistan.

M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D., is a political scientist whose specialties include American foreign policy and the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.

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Guest View: Rise of the Taliban and defeat of the U.S. - The Register-Guard

A friend and colleague jokingly asked if the Bangsamoro people are celebrating the August 15 victory of the Taliban over the US-trained Afghan National Defence Security Forces and the US-installed and backed Afghan puppet government.

Based on the social media posts and messages and the talks in the streets, I would say that fellow Bangsamoro are very careful of their opinions, lest they be accused of harboring terroristic ideas again.

Harboring terroristic ideals was an accusation hurled by President Rodrigo Duterte at the Meranaw people to justify the Philippine governments military airstrikes in Marawi City and his declaration of Martial Law in Mindanao in May 2017.

Not to mention that the Muslim communities here in the Philippines have been perenially accused of harboring terrorists, and during the Operation Enduring Freedom was dubbed as the second front of the war on terror which led to the deployment of US soldiers in Mindanao for military exercises on a rotational basis.

But how can we celebrate, when weve seen what we have been warning the world about during our protests against the US-led global war on terror, the consequent US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the continuing military occupation of Afghanistan? That this would only lead to un-peace and destruction of Afghanistan.

The International League of Peoples Struggle (ILPS), the network our group belongs to, has said that the fall of the US-installed and US-backed Ashraf Ghani regime not only exposed the defeat of US imperialism but also how unjust the US war and occupation was.

The US military invasion, occupation and intervention was unjust because the Afghan people bore the brunt of the military operations and encounters with the Taliban. There were 2.7 million Afghans who were forced to seek refuge in other countries while 4 million were internally displaced due to incessant military airstrikes in areas they believe were hideouts of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network.

The US government created a condition for the Taliban to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Decades of political and economic intervention by the US government in Afghanistan has pushed the Afghan people to see the Taliban as their liberators. ILPS chair emeritus Jose Maria Sison even said that in the absence of a capable revolutionary party, the Taliban group played a progressive role in fighting imperialism and the brutal puppet regime.

There were numerous reports of civilian casualties and human rights violations during the whole decade of US military intervention. According to the Cost of War Project by Brown University, 157,000 people died throughout the US occupation of Afghanistan and civilian casualties reached 47,245.

The project also reported that the number of civilians killed due to military airstrikes by US forces and its allies has increased to 330% since 2017.

The Human Rights Watch had a report about civilians bearing the brunt of night raids by CIA-backed Afghan Strike Forces from the years 2017 to mid-2019 due to mistaken identity, poor intelligence or political rivalry.

In her book Drones and Targeted Killing, law professor and former deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Marjorie Cohn wrote that the US government has killed more civilians with the use of targeted killings drone strikes, manned bombers and military raids.

A United Nations data cited by the International NGO, Save the Children, showed that at least 26,025 children were killed or maimed in the years 2005-2019 and that this was due to the attacks on schools by military airstrike of the US and Afghan forces and suicide attacks by the Taliban insurgents.

It is important that we be reminded of these reports because until now, no one from the proponents or architects of the US-led invasion and military occupation in Afghanistan were held accountable. No tribunals were held for war crimes against the people of Afghanistan.

Ive been hearing from CNN the word democracy and the death of it due to the takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Was the US-controlled Afghan government democratic? Was the US invasion and decades of intervention in Afghanistan democratic?

Years of occupation and installing puppet regimes also failed to bring the much-touted democracy, development and genuine peace in the country.

According to the Asian Development Bank, people who live below the national poverty line in Afghanistan reached 47.3% out of 39 million last year while the unemployment rate was at 11.7%.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2020 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs Overview, posted at the USAID website, 8.2 million people in Afghanistan are in need of emergency food and agricultural livelihoods assistance while 11 million Afghans are acutely and severely food insecure or lacked access to affordable and healthy food.

The continuing struggle against oppression

The news footage played over and over again in the US mainstream media of Afghans attempting to hold on to a US military plane as it took off from the Kabul airport does not only show the desperation of the Afghan people who figured in the US occupation and the puppet government to get out of Afghanistan and escape the Talibans reprisal.

To many, it only shows the true colors of the US government, that in times of crisis they are the first to get out of the country and leave all the mess behind. An opinion in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the US government had no treaty obligation to protect the Afghan government from its enemies.

Imperialist powers should be reminded that the Afghan people have long fought wars of aggression from the British and Russian empires to the Soviet Union and the US-led invasion and occupation. The persistence of the Afghan people will once again be tested under the Taliban government.

The Talibans history of imposing an ultra-conservative and often puritanical interpretation of Islamic laws, especially with women and minorities, is forever embedded in the minds of the Afghan people and the world as abusive and oppressive.

However, we should be reminded that not all Muslims adhere to these strict views, as there are several Islamic thoughts and schools of interpretations of Islamic laws. But we are united in the idea that Islam encourages Muslims to fight all forms of oppression and emphasizes justice for the people.

But we also cannot forgive the US government and its allies for using the propaganda of emancipating women, or for some was reduced to lifting the burqa, as the reason behind their invasion in 2001.

We are hopeful and, at the same time, wary of the Talibans assurance that there will be changes in their attitude towards women. Afghanistan has already experienced the liberation of women in the past and the strength of Afghan women in the struggle against colonialism and occupation.

In some conferences and speaking tours that I have participated in, which were protests against the US-led global war on terror, I have met Afghan refugees and activists who were critical of the Taliban regime but were also against the US-led invasion. They said that there were Afghan activists who had participated in the jihad (struggle) against the Soviet Union, but were critical of the Taliban and were threatened when they took over.

In Afghanistans history, it is the US government and other imperialist countries who benefited from the Taliban.They backed the Taliban in their fight against the Soviet Union, supported its previous regime in the 90s, and wooed the Taliban government into entering business contracts for the construction of oil pipelines, despite reports of abusive leadership and human rights violations.

That is why the Afghan people also need to watch out for negotiations made by the US government and the Taliban forces outside of what was laid down during their peace negotiations last year. The US and other imperialist countries have already benefited during the two decades of war in Afghanistan, securing contracts for reconstruction, defense and security, and mining.

I cannot help but suspect that US interests in the region are still protected. If the Afghan puppet government cannot deliver, the assumption is that the Taliban can.

Afghanistan is rich in minerals like coal, copper, natural gas, petroleum, gold, lithium, uranium, gold and rare earth elements. Add to this the Afghan people who are a potential productive force for agriculture and industry.

We should not be fooled by the for democracy mantra of the US government and its allies. We should open our eyes to the real terrorists and their wars of aggression in the name of profit and securing their political and economic interests.

The fight for democratic rights of the Afghan peoples should not be viewed in the lens of the occupying forces and imperialist countries but the Afghan people themselves. It is in the hands of Afghan people to truly fight for their genuine liberation.

More here:

The unjust war in Afghanistan and the continuing people's struggle against oppression - Davao Today

Sep 4th 2021

SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

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Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.

Nowhere is the fight fiercer than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to strike down a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat in liberalisms spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as faades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America liberal has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling unsafe and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressedwith echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about. For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom upand it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control. By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

This difference in method has profound implications. Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competitionby, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing equitythe outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents. Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish. Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group. Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. He was right. Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individualsand, in that, it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means. And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

If classical liberalism is so much better than the alternatives, why is it struggling around the world? One reason is that populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supportersto the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribes excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen. Just look at Britain, where politics in the past few years was consumed by the rows between uncompromising Tory Brexiteers and the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

In short, it is hard work to be a genuine liberal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their last ideological challenger seemed to crumble, arrogant elites lost touch with liberalisms humility and self-doubt. They fell into the habit of believing they were always right. They engineered Americas meritocracy to favour people like them. After the financial crisis, they oversaw an economy that grew too slowly for people to feel prosperous. Far from treating white working-class critics with dignity, they sneered at their supposed lack of sophistication.

This complacency has let opponents blame lasting imperfections on liberalismand, because of the treatment of race in America, to insist the whole country was rotten from the start. In the face of persistent inequality and racism, classical liberals can remind people that change takes time. But Washington is broken, China is storming ahead and people are restless.

The ultimate complacency would be for classical liberals to underestimate the threat. Too many right-leaning liberals are inclined to choose a shameless marriage of convenience with populists. Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Dont worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve societys many problems without anyone resorting to coercion. Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release peoples creative energies. Classical liberals must rediscover their fighting spirit. They should take on the bullies and cancellers. Liberalism is still the best engine for equitable progress. Liberals must have the courage to say so.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The threat from the illiberal left"

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Political thought The threat from the illiberal left - The Economist

Afghan women are not just victims of conflict but also of rhetoric.Ruhi Khan, ESRC Researcher at LSEs Media & Communication department, argues that we need to break away from binary viewpoints on Afghanistan, probe deeper into coloniality and the history of feminism in the global south and include it into the larger geo-political feminist epistemology.

A young woman just 27 years old was beaten to death in the centre of Kabul by a mob. Her crime? She called out a religious vendor (mullah) selling holy verses on paper which he promised were powerful spells promising the hearts desires. The mullah was agitated that a woman had challenged him and falsely accused her of desecrating the Holy Quran. Soon a mob joined the chorus and started pelting her with stones and sticks, kicking her and hitting her. They tied the badly beaten woman to a car and drove it around until she succumbed to her injuries. Her broken body was thrown along the riverbank and torched.

This was not a witch hunt in the remote hamlets of Afghanistan. Nor did this happen under the Taliban rule. This crime happened in March 2015 in the liberalised Afghanistan under the watch of the allied forces and close to the palace of a progressive President.

Farkhunda Malikzadas story is important to understand the perils of the binary viewpoint that the world has of Afghanistan. When America sold the justification for the war in 2001, women became the central focus. How the Afghan women were subjugated and oppressed by the Taliban made global headlines. Their only savour, we were told, were the Western forces that would set them free by establishing a government that looked out for the women and a rule of law that protected them. We were given only two choices oppression by the Taliban or freedom by the Western invasion. There was no room for an alternative.

Farkhunda was a student of Islamic law and wore the veil, but she was also brave enough to stand up to a man against what she believed were un-Islamic practices. The barbaric actions of the mob captured on video, the incompetence of the Afghan police who stood by and watched the attack, the indifference of the hundreds who cheered or mutely witnessed the atrocities unfold, the sheer brutality of this gendered violence shows that little had changed in Afghanistan when it is not looked at through the rose-tinted glasses of the Western aid agencies.

When America sold the justification for the war in 2001, women became the central focus.

Farkhundas killers were not the Taliban, but city folks from the custodian of a religious shrine to street vendors, from the Afghan police to a 16-year-old boy who was part of the bloodthirsty mob. Many did not don religious attire or sport turbans and long beards, but were clean shaven and wore jeans and tee shirts, some were educated and some grew up in a US-occupied Afghanistan with its liberal dose of womens rights. Yet they were culpable of committing a murder over a rumour. The new Afghan legal system failed to give Farkhunda justice.

However, in an unprecedented display of feminist solidarity, Farkhundas burial saw women carrying her coffin chanting We are all Farkhunda and over 1000 people both men and women attended the funeral. But the spectacle of her murder, the re-enactment of the crime, the twist and turns of the narratives around it, the global outrage (however meagre) propelled this story to be exploited by many for their own socio-political gains, with little focus on structural changes that could prevent another Farkhunda.

If Farkhundas murder teaches us one thing, it is that there are no binaries in Afghanistan: The West is not the saviour of Afghan women. And the Taliban is not the only monster.

If Farkhundas murder teaches us one thing, it is that there are no binaries in Afghanistan: The West is not the saviour of Afghan women. And the Taliban is not the only monster.

The binary thinking of the saviour and the monster can be traced to colonial discourses dominated by what is often termed the white saviour complex. This sentiment was clearly evident in the American First Lady Laura Bushs radio address to her country in November 2001: Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.

By terming the American military attack as heroic and a much-needed intervention to protect the women of Afghanistan from the men within their fold, the First Lady affirmed the subjectivity of the White western male saviour by exploiting the psychological subjugation of the Brown Afghans. Indeed, here the subjects of the Global South the Afghan women and girls are simply used as objects to confirm the White subjectivity through a sense of gratefulness to the White Saviour.

This also exemplifies a clash of civilisations discourse, which is aided by creating a visual palette in the form of photographs and videos that juxtapose the self with the Other. Womens oppression served as an excellent marker to constitute this visual binary. Images began floating in newsprint and television of Afghan women in short skirts alongside those now in full burqa, or of Western women enjoying a music concert with veiled young girls huddled together outside a closed school.

The struggles of the white, heterosexual, elite, western woman have gained currency as the only history of feminism setting itself up as a role model for the rest of the world. Any woman who does not fit this image is deemed oppressed and in need of saving, making her a white mans burden and the white feminists cause clbre. Hence it is important to deconstruct the normative western feminist notions of gender and bring into focus indigenous understandings of gender from the global south and include it into the larger geo-political feminist epistemology.

The struggles of the white, heterosexual, elite, western woman have gained currency as the only history of feminism setting itself up as a role model for the rest of the world

The image of the Afghan woman draped in the head-to-foot burqa became the justification of a military action. The idea that Afghan (read Muslim) women needed saving became the central focus. The identity of global south women is constructed through the western lens and their agency disavowed within a global discourse. This is highly problematic if not understood in a historical and contextual framework. It also reinforces a sense of Western arrogance that their way of life is superior and unchallenged. This binary of the West and global south is simplistic in its construction as it fails to consider that the West is also shrouded in intersectional structural inequalities and gendered violence.

Few understand the country of Afghanistan its demography, politics or culture. The US and the Taliban were not always pitched on opposite sides. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 got American presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supporting and arming the resistance fighters (mujahideen) who have now become the Taliban. In fact one of the USs closest ally was mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, infamous for throwing acid on the faces of women who did not wear the burqa, while the US turned a blind eye.

Many of the Afghan population live in villages and hamlets where the tribal leaders hold a huge sway. Occupation by one foreign force after another British, Russians, US and its allies has only fuelled a revival of extreme religious bigotry as a mode of what they term self-preservation. The foreign occupying army has been equated with liberal thought and the resistance against both has been building. The global discourse (or lack of) on Afghanistans economy and politics coupled with corruption and disregard for the rural poor has left a gaping hole that the militant Taliban filled.

To many women living in the remote mountainous hamlets of the ravaged country, food and healthcare are priorities over education and employment. Mini-skirts and music concerts are not the aspirational goals for many Afghan women. And not all women who wear the veil are subjugated. Making it the central focus of liberation of the Afghan women alienates those who find comfort behind the layers of the garment. Issues around womens education and employment opportunities were largely focussed on select cities while corruption and unfair practices in the government were widespread.

It is impossible to isolate gender from the many cultural and political intersections through which it is constituted and maintained, and it is therefore important to understand and include the complexities of compoundness to explore the diverse experiences of differently positioned women and to make visible the collaboration that exists between systemic gender violence and the power equations that exist between individuals and groups for or against feminist causes and their intersectional differences.

The binary of the white men saving brown women from brown men (as scholar Gayatri Spivak eloquently puts it) is a narrative that needs to be challenged as it erases the history of feminisms within the global south.

Independence belongs to all of us that that is why we celebrate it. Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset needs only men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation and Islam. From their examples we must learn that we must all contribute toward the development of our nation and that this cannot be done without being equipped with knowledge. So, we should all attempt to acquire as much knowledge as possible, in order that we may render our services to society in the manner of the women of early IslamAfghan Queen Soraya Tarzi, 1926

These words of Soraya Tarzi (1899-1968), Queen consort to King Amanullah Khan but better known as the Human Rights Queen of Afghanistan, paved the way for a new Afghanistan in the 1920s. She was born in the Ottoman-controlled Syria to exiled parents Asma and Mahmud Beg Tarzi, who in the early 20th century returned to Afghanistan at the behest of King Habibullah and started the first modern newspaper- Seraj-ul-Akbhar. It gave voice to women under the banner Celebrating Women of the World, edited by Asma. Ideas of womens education and liberty were often discussed. King Habibullahs son Amanullah fell in love and married Soraya in 1913.

After Habibullahs assassination in 1918, Amanullah took to the throne and successfully defeated the British in the third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919. The newly liberated Afghanistan saw a new constitution one that also saw women being liberated from the regressive traditional cultural norms. Amanullah treated Soraya as a partner in his endeavours to modernise the country.

In a dramatic public event, the royal couple introduced the idea of popular feminism. King Amanullah made a powerful speech stressing that Islam did not ask women to wear the veil, at the end of which Queen Soraya publicly tore her veil. Many other women then followed suit. New reforms made wearing the veil optional in Afghanistan.

Reforms by Amanullahs government included abolishment of slavery and the banning of child marriage, polygamy, revenge killing and bride prices. Soraya was the first woman minister for education, started a school for girls and sent her two daughters to it. She also began the first womens magazine in Afghanistan called Ershad-I-Niswan (Guidance for Women). She founded a grievance centre for women suffering from domestic violence and created a special task force a kind of an all-women secret service- to monitor men who abused women. One of Amanullahs sisters founded a hospital and another started an organisation that supported women suffering from oppression. In the 1920s, none other than the Royal family of Afghanistan sowed ideas of feminism by leading from the front.

It is little wonder that women in Afghanistan earned the right to vote after the country won independence from Britain in 1919,one year before women in the United States were allowed at the polls and almost a decade before women in the UK gained the same voting rights as men. Amanullah also introduced a social insurance to provide pensions linked to old age and disability, sickness and maternity benefits and workers compensation (a decade before the US).

To encourage womens education, the royal couple helped facilitate 15 women to go to Turkey to study in 1928. In fact, the King and Queen received honorary degrees from University of Oxford during their tour of Europe in 1927-1928. However, this tour also backfired. It was widely suspected that the British leaked photographs of the tour to the traditionalists in Afghan villages, who used them to instigate the rural masses against the royal couple.

More reforms on the return and in particular a separation of the state and church (mosque in this case) and a Western judiciary (instead of the Shariah law) led to more angst against the monarchy by the traditionalists. Amanullah soon faced a coup by the tribal leaders and the royal family had to flee to Europe in 1929. Soon all their reforms were reversed and the new patriarchal ruler stripped women of their hard-earned rights.

Soraya and Amanullahs story and those of others like them are often lost in grand Western narrative of feminism that has always only visualised global south women as subjugated and oppressed, and men as tyrants and barbaric.

In 2020, Time magazine posthumously put Soraya Tarzi on the cover of the 1927 edition calling her a progressive royal acknowledging her contributions to the womens cause in Afghanistan. But Soraya and Amanullahs story and those of others like them are often lost in grand Western narrative of feminism that has always only visualised global south women as subjugated and oppressed, and men as tyrants and barbaric. The two Afghan Royals were forging a path of progress for women in Afghanistan, yet it was a journey cut short, not just by the religious bigots but also by the British whose political interests superseded women reforms.

It is heart-breaking to know that the generation of girls that grew up believing that they were free to pursue their dreams and realise their potential will now have to hide their degrees and give up their professions as their futures remain uncertain.

By occupying Afghanistan for two decades, the US, UK and allies are duty bound to save the Afghans. A deal has been struck between the Taliban and the US that benefits their political and economic interests, but does this include safeguarding the rights of women and the vulnerable not just on paper but in practice? What would be the consequences should the Taliban renege on its promises? Who will be held accountable?

The Western leaders who once rallied support for the invasion of Afghanistan on the womens liberation card, now seem to have abandoned those very women who were promised safety and security as they enrolled in education institutions, joined the workforce and took up political positions. Today as the expats flee, many natives are left behind, waiting to be killed.

As Taliban establishes its rule in Afghanistan, the future of the country is unpredictable and the situation for women is frightening. Many are expecting to be at the end of a barrel of a patriarchal gun both figuratively and literally. Remember Malala Yousufzai? The next one may not be a survivor.

We, as global citizens, need to rally our support, pressure our governments and the international agencies to protect the Afghan women and other vulnerable citizens. We need to open our borders and our minds to break through the binaries of rhetoric thrusted on us and demand a better outcome an outcome that enables an orderly transition, safeguards the vulnerable and does not turn back the clock on gender reforms.

Women in Afghanistan are counting on our support. We cannot abandon them now.

This article givesthe views of the author and does not represent the position of theMedia@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit

Image 1: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona via Unsplash

Image 2: Andre Klimke via Unsplash

Image 3: Isaak Alexandre Karslian via Unsplash

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Afghanistan and the colonial project of feminism: dismantling the binary lens - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

This year, American history might look different in Iowa classrooms.

In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as divisive, including the idea that one race or sex is superior to another, that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.

The law, which is already in effect, has sparked confusion and distress among educators, some of whom say it is so broad and the language so ambiguous, they fear they might face consequences for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism in the context of US history.

Teachers need to know what the legislation means for us, and they have been asking, Is the district going to support us and have our back? Monique Cottman, whos taught elementary school and middle school for 15 years in the state, told Vox.

Cottman is a teacher leader with the Iowa City Community School District, a role that requires her to regularly coach about 50 teachers on classroom instruction strategies, curriculums, and lesson plans. This year, it involves the added work of creating a comprehensive list of FAQs for teachers about the new Iowa law because there are a lot of questions.

Since at least 2014, when students went to the school board to demand an ethnic studies course, Cottman and other teachers in the district have worked to make anti-racism part of the curriculum, but with the new law, a lot of the momentum they have built has been undercut. Teachers who would have thought about me last year arent listening to teachers like me at all because of fear, she said.

Cottman isnt alone in her predicament. Educators across the country are figuring out how to navigate laws like Iowas that have turned anti-racist education often lumped together under the catchall term critical race theory, an academic framework scholars use to analyze how racism is endemic to US institutions into a boogeyman. While critical race theory opponents fear that the framework places blame for inequality on all white people, proponents argue that their goal is to use the lens to identify systemic oppression and eradicate it. Educators who want to teach with an eye toward anti-racism say that their lessons simply reflect an honest history of the countrys founding and development including the contributions of and the discrimination against marginalized people which has traditionally been glossed over in textbooks and curriculums.

But in the past six months, seven other states Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina have already passed legislation similar to Iowas, and 20 others have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Meanwhile, in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, state boards of education and local school boards have denounced, if not totally banned, teaching critical race theory and/or the 1619 Project, a collection of essays that examines the foundational contributions of enslaved Black people to the US.

Teachers are already facing consequences, too. While debates over critical race theory were going on in the Tennessee state legislature, a high school teacher was fired after teaching Ta-Nehisi Coatess essay The First White President and playing the video of the spoken-word poem White Privilege. A Black principal in Texas was recently suspended without explanation after a former school board candidate complained that he was implementing critical race theory, promoting extreme views on race and the conspiracy theory of systemic racism.

In higher education, entire courses that grapple with inequity were dropped from course rosters or made optional. And even in states where anti-critical race theory legislation hasnt been passed, education leaders are facing pressure.

The first Black superintendent in a Connecticut district resigned after parents and community members complained to the school board that he was trying to indoctrinate students with critical race theory. (According to reports, he had been championing diversity and inclusion training and spoke out against conspiracy theories surrounding the US Capitol insurrection.)

The country is only just beginning to see this culture war play out, educators and curriculum specialists told Vox. On one hand, there will be many teachers, particularly in states where the bills havent passed, who will continue to do justice work in their classrooms, said Justin Coles, a professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But others are going to resort to glossing over key issues in our history that are deeply intertwined with race and racism, overlooking nuance.

While teachers like Cottman will continue to teach with an anti-racist lens despite these laws, more teachers are expected to be silenced. Because of the current social climate, Coles said, it will be more acceptable to manipulate the truth and denounce folks who make deep conversations about oppression part of their classrooms.

Ultimately, the laws, and the discussions around them, have created chaos for teachers who dont know what they should and shouldnt be teaching. A lot of the anti-racist discussions that educators had brought into the classroom following the uprisings of 2020, and even prior, could be in danger of being removed. And the people who will feel the greatest impact are students.

With these bans, learning will be incomplete since [children are] only being taught half-truths, Coles said. The classroom will become unsafe spaces for marginalized students since they cant discuss their lived experiences. These bans make it harder for our country to change.

The pushback to anti-racist teachings began shortly after last summers social justice protests that swept the country, when many Americans started to grapple with the racism embedded in institutions like policing. In August 2020, conservative activist Christopher Rufo declared a one-man war against critical race theory, appearing on Fox News and claiming that federal diversity trainings (which he wrongly identified as critical race theory) were dividing workers and indoctrinating government employees.

It didnt take long for then-President Donald Trump to seize on Rufos narrative, going as far as issuing an executive order that banned racial sensitivity training in the federal government. When Trump lost the presidential election a few months later, Republicans in state legislatures picked up the cause, drafting and introducing bills that placed limits on government agencies, public higher education institutions, and K-12 schools teaching harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.

At the core of these state bills is the desire to prevent discourse about Americas racist past and present. Last year, amid a deadly pandemic and social justice protests, students had questions about the police shootings of Black and brown civilians and why the coronavirus was disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, and teachers couldnt ignore talk about a president who threatened when the looting starts, the shooting starts. As Texas high school teacher Jania Hoover wrote for Vox this July, The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our countrys ugly past anyway from media coverage to last summers protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more.

The past year, and the social justice movements leading up to it, left a lot of teachers rethinking how they taught history, challenging the colonialist narratives long embedded in elementary and high school curriculums. For example, a third-grade textbook Cottman was required to use only tells a partial story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana. Bridges was 6 years old when federal marshals escorted her and her mother into the school building as mobs of white people surrounded them, rioted, and yelled threats and racial slurs.

The textbook states that the marshals protected her from angry people who lined the streets and stood outside the school. It makes no mention of why those people were angry or who they were, leaving out the key context that white people fought for decades to keep Black children from schools because of the belief that Black people were inferior, a detail that Cottman needed to bring forward during classroom discussions.

Another story in a similar textbook tells about a girl who was kidnapped from Greece and sold into slavery in ancient Rome; according to the text, she chose to remain enslaved because her owners treated her well and they all felt like family. Students kept taking away that as long as slave owners are nice to their slaves, theres nothing wrong with slavery, Cottman said.

If teachers continue to do what theyve been doing, no one wins, Cottman added. They need to be interrogating why some of their lessons are problematic.

As bills opposing critical race theory made their way to state legislatures this spring, confusion over what the theory was and what the bills meant overshadowed Americans desire to have nuanced classroom discussions about race. A July Reuters/Ipsos poll found that fewer than half of Americans (43 percent) said they knew about critical race theory and the surrounding debates, with three in 10 saying they hadnt heard of it at all. Respondents were even less familiar with the New York Timess 1619 Project (24 percent). Yet a majority of Americans said they support teaching students about the impact of slavery (78 percent) and racism (73 percent) in the US. State laws banning critical race theory in public schools received less support (35 percent). On all fronts, there was a partisan divide, with Republicans more interested in banning talk about slavery, racism, and the teaching of critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

In Iowa, Cottman, also a co-founder of Black Lives Matter at School Iowa, says a handful of parents in support of the ban have already reached out to teachers about the 2021-22 curriculum, but they are not the majority. Parents in support of anti-racist education have also voiced their support at school board and community meetings.

But the vocal minority, coupled with the new law, weighs on teachers and administrators. Though Iowa City is known as the bluest part of the red state, Cottman says she has talked to a number of teachers who are fine with the curriculum as is; she has also spoken to those who are concerned about losing their jobs if they talk about race.

One group of high school teachers decided to stop teaching Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walkers short story The Flowers (a story about a young Black girl who comes across a dead body, presumably a Black man who had been lynched, while picking flowers in the woods) after parents were up in arms about it on social media, for fear of further controversy.

Last fall, Cottman says her school ordered 1,000 copies of Ibram X. Kendis book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in an effort to improve their American history coursework. But once some parents got wind of the effort, the book became optional, most teachers chose to not use it, Cottman said.

Teachers in other states are also dialing it back. Joseph Frilot, a middle school humanities teacher, learned from his curriculum manager that all of the content he developed about Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement wont be part of his lessons this year in light of the Texas law that limits discourse on racism and sexism. A huge chunk of the curriculum that I created was about oppression and resistance, so all of that will be excluded from our curriculum, Frilot told EdWeek. Am I allowed to be the transparent and honest educator that Ive been over the years?

In Tennessee, where one of the first anti-critical race theory bills was passed, teachers have requested guidance on how they should reframe their lessons and leading class discussions. The guidance from the education department, released in August, clarifies that teachers can introduce topics like racism and sexism as part of discussion if they are described in textbooks or instructional material, but teachers remain concerned that the law limits them from teaching the true history of the state and country. The states guidance also lays out major consequences for schools and educators found in violation: Schools could stand to lose millions in annual state funds, and teachers could have their licenses denied, suspended, or revoked.

Some teachers, though, plan to keep anti-racist lessons alive despite these new laws. Cottman tells teachers that even under the new law they arent required to say anything to parents, nor are they obligated to solicit parents feedback before lessons, but she reminds them that it is vital to make sure that parents feel welcome and that two-way communication is established early in the school year. When teachers have expressed worry about their classroom libraries, Cottman said she tells them they do not need to remove any books from their classrooms. If theres an anti-racism book on the shelf, a student has the choice to read it.

Lakeisha Patterson, a teacher in Houston, said she plans to continue to talk about how African Americans were considered less than human, and the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers union is encouraging lessons that foster inclusion and nonwhite perspectives on history.

For many Black teachers, we arent even expressing financial concerns, Cottman said about the possibility of getting fired for incorporating race discussions in classrooms. Were just pissed off that were constantly being silenced.

States and districts without anti-critical race theory legislation have greater latitude to experiment with anti-racist teaching. For Jesse Hagopian, a high school history and ethnic studies teacher in Seattle, the moment is ripe and long overdue. Beginning in September, Hagopian will be co-teaching the schools two-year-old Black studies course, the result of organizing in the wake of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016.

If anyone is asking, the answer is yes, we are teaching critical race theory, Hagopian said. Most educators didnt know what critical race theory was until Republicans made it their main reelection vehicle. But many of them are now looking it up and realizing how it is aligned with their principles, which I think is wonderful.

On Hagopians syllabus is a wide array of texts to help students center the contributions that Black people have made throughout history, including Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, A Different Mirror, excerpts from A Peoples History of the United States, Jazz and Justice, and the YA version of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. Each text will help bring nuance to the Black experience. Were going to learn about Black intersectional identity all Black people dont have the same experiences so its important to understand sexism, ableism, and all forms of oppression, Hagopian said.

He has also made clear what his class is not about. Im not teaching white kids to hate themselves. Im teaching them to understand how racism is systemic and that they can be part of a multiracial struggle to bring about change, Hagopian said. Thats empowering to white students, not shaming them.

Hagopian is not alone in his efforts. While some states are trying to repress anti-racist education, others are mandating that teachers expand on it: The California Board of Education approved a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for high school students this March, and Indian Education for All standards will go into effect in Wyoming schools next school year. Meanwhile, in July, Illinois became the first state to mandate Asian American history for elementary and high school students, and Connecticut required all high schools to offer African American studies and Latino studies by 2022, with Native American studies being required in all schools beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

While anti-racism education advocates see these initiatives as promising steps forward anti-critical race theory laws are also facing legal challenges teachers in less progressive districts still face an uphill battle if they want to include nuanced discussions of race in their classrooms. For many of these teachers caught in the culture war, what they want most is to give children an education that reflects Americas true, complicated history.

As a Black woman in Iowa public schools, this is my calling as a teacher and as an advocate, Cottman said. I believe fundamentally that students, and teachers, need to know the truth.

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Critical race theory bans in schools are making teaching harder - Vox.com

The Network for Women's Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) has charged Government to take appropriate and urgent actions to protect women and children in the country.

"Women in Ghana deserve to live, and to live safe and dignified lives in environments that nurture and protect them. The home is no longer a safe haven," it said.

A statement issued by NETRIGHT on Wednesday and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra said, it was alarming that family life had increasingly become unsafe for many women since the cruel murder of women by partners, close relations and other perpetrators recently had reached an alarming proportion.

According to the statement, since January 2021, over 25 women had been killed in their homes, on farms, in hotels and other private and public places, and the staggering statistics, rate and trend showed that it was a scourge, and a reminder of the spate of murders of women in the country in 1999 or 2000.

The unacceptably high rate of femicides, it said, had highlighted the extreme forms of sexual and gender-based violence in the country which had been linked to entrenched inequality, discrimination and economic disempowerment in the society.

Adding that, the murders also had been a reminder of the increasing normalisation of toxic masculinity in the Ghanaian society that used women's bodies as battlefields and the insecurities that women faced in their homes and communities.

"Unfortunately, while society is quick to ask women why they remain in abusive relationships, reports have rather shown that women who choose to divorce husbands are killed, those who threaten to divorce are killed. Likewise, women who choose not to continue with intimate relationships are also murdered. Whether women choose to stay or leave, they are still unsafe," it said.

The statement expressed worry over the culture of silence by political and public attention to the murders that it would embolden abusers and perpetuates a 'sense of entitlement' by the abusers.

"It should be clear to everyone that the institution of marriage or relationships and their gender stereotypical norms should not trump human life," it said.

The statement urged Ghana Police Service and relevant law enforcement agencies to perform their duties creditably and as expected, for the perpetrators of the heinous crimes to face the full rigours of the law.

It called on stakeholders including state and non-state actors to as a matter of urgency, create spaces and mobilise their constituencies to discuss systemic violence against women within a broader framework of all kinds of oppression and address the issue of femicide.

It called for an end to femicide, and all forms of sexual and gender-based violence against women because it was a crime against women and girls, as well as humanity.

The statement extended NETRIGHT's condolences to the families of women who had been murdered in Ghana between January and August 2021.

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Government should urgently take appropriate actions to protect women and children - BusinessGhana

Alphabet Inc, which owns Google, partially confirmed Reuters information about the account ban. The company said in a statement that it is monitoring the situation in Afghanistan and taking steps to secure vital accounts.

A former government employee told Reuters that the Taliban tried to extract messages from their accounts. The informant said he did not agree to the transfer of access and is currently in hiding.

Access to accounts is synonymous with obtaining information about former administration employees, ministers, contractors, domestic supporters and foreign partners.

Publicly available data shows that there are more than 20 Google email accounts linked to the ousted government, includingin a. With Ministries of Financeindustry and higher education. The presidents office and local authorities also used Google accounts.

Watch the video Mourning about refugees at the border: We cannot show Lukashenkas weakness

As an information security expert evaluated in an interview with Reuters, even getting the list of employees into a Google Sheets file could mean serious problems regarding the oppression that former administration employees faced.

Government organizations have also used Microsoft accounts, incl. in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, it is not known if the company has taken any steps to secure Taliban access, and if so, what. Microsoft declined to comment.

Coffee enthusiast. Troublemaker. Incurable introvert. Subtly charming twitter scholar. Award-winning social mediaholic. Internet buff.

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Afghanistan. Google blocked the accounts of the ousted government employees. The Taliban sought to reach them - MoviesOnline

Geopolitical interventions imposed on domestic ethnic rivalries in Afghanistan have created the tragedy unfolding in this region. It is critical to see Afghanistan holistically and not just as a geostrategic game for world powers. If a people-centred and holistic approach is not now taken by the international community, the blowback and spillover of conflicts will have deeper and far reaching consequences.

The human and material consequences of this intervention are still being calculated. But figures from sources indicate: that the US spent a trillion dollars on this war, with less than 2% going to the Afghan people while 98% was for the military. The casualties exceed 72,000 civilians. There is an army of the wounded, 2.7 million refugees, 4 million internally displaced.

Add to this the indignity, impoverishment, disemployment, rape, trauma, corruption. Besides, the $88 billion spent on training the 300,000 Afghan soldiers who melted away, and the huge amount of military equipment left behind. Poppy cultivation and the illegal production of opium is calculated at 90,000 tonnes. This list can go on.

The international focus is primarily on geostrategic consequences, as states recalibrate their responses to the Taliban as state power. To understand this geopolitics and its impacts it is important to see that there is a constant and repeated pattern.

This pattern comes from a combination of (1) imperial projects and militarist interventions. (2) These interventions are backed by imperial and militarist knowledge constructions, and (3) both material and ideology are superimposed upon local power and ethnic conflicts, and combine to oppress the Afghan people, promote xenophobic nationalisms and global Islamophobia, and heighten human insecurity within and outside Afghanistan.

Imperialism and interventions

British colonialism used Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian southward advance and British colonial possession of India in the 19th century as documented in the three Anglo-Afghan Wars and the British-Russian Boundary Commission of 1885.

Second, the Russians used intervention in Afghanistan to fortify their security positions during the Cold War, and to uphold a failing and faction-ridden pro-Soviet Afghan regime.

The perceived oppression of Islam by the government of Daud and their Communist backers led to the rise of political Islamic nationalism, the creation of the Taliban and Mujahideen backed by the US and Pakistan, the massive inflow of arms and mercenaries, and a rise in poppy cultivation and illegal opium trade controlled largely by the Taliban.

The Russian withdrawal in 1989 was seen as a geostrategic victory for the United States, its allies and Pakistan.

Third, the US quest for revenge for the September 11 terror attacks and thereby its direct intervention into Afghan civil strife to annihilate Al Qaeda did hit some of the bases of this terror group. But it was also advantageous to the USs geostrategic desire to reconstruct west Asia as shown by the simultaneous US war in Iraq.

Afghanistan provided the US with military bases for the various interventions in west Asia and to project US power to threaten Iran. The US withdrawal is now seen as a victory by Russia, China, Pakistan and forces of religious fundamentalisms.

Fourth, regional powers and their conflicts and militarisms have come into constant play in Afghanistan. If Pakistan was key to the nurturing of the Taliban, India supported the Northern Alliance. As for the US versus Iran and Iraq, here Irans long border with Afghanistan was a region for tensions. Saudi Arabia and Turkeys search for regional influence led to their links with both the US and the various Taliban groups, and the central Asian states all played a role.

For example, Kyrgyzstan provided a military air base to both Russia and the US in the early 2000. Uzbekistan has been wary of the Taliban providing support to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the main underground opposition to this autocratic regime.

Russia mans the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan with its 201st Motorised Division. China has an interest in advancing its investments in Afghanistan and linking it with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. India needs to safeguard its security and investments. So all have had a role in militarising the internal divisions in the Afghan civil war for their own ends.

It is evident that there is a repeat pattern where big powers from the US to Russia down to middle and regional powers have constantly used Afghanistan for their own interests. The countries may change, but the nature of intervention remains constant.

Knowledge constructions to support violent interventions

Knowledge construction is important for building hegemony and legitimacy for intervention. This too has had a repeat pattern for Afghanistan.

1) Imperial knowledge construction has constantly presented Afghan society and state as tribalist, violent, backward, without capacity for a modern state and therefore open for intervention.

Joe Biden used the old British analogy that Afghanistan is known in history as the graveyard of empires. This is ahistorical the British won one of the three Anglo-Afghan wars, it presents the past as present and unchanging, and it is racialised, showing Afghans as the keepers of graveyards. Wars produce graveyards everywhere and Afghanistan is no exception.

2) The securitised narrative of victory vs defeat. When the Russians left it was victory for the US and Pakistan. When the US withdraws it is seen as a victory for Russia, Iran, Pakistan and others. This narrative of victory versus defeat prepares for more wars.

When there has been no occupier, Afghanistan has been presented as a power vacuum.

All regional countries selectively protect only their own borders often at the cost of others. Each of these countries sees manoeuvres in the colonial paradigm of the Great Game, or now as the New Great Game. Economic assistance to Afghanistan has been framed as the revival of the Silk Routes, especially as precedent for the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

The current post-withdrawal already sees new types of interventions.

The US has carried out several bombings claimed against the Islamic State in Khorasan. Others from the Pakistan Army present themselves as advisors and well-wishers of the Taliban. Pakistan, Russia, China, Iran see an opportunity from the US defeat. Turkey, Iran, Israel, the Saudis want to use it to project their own power in the troubled west Asian region.

3) A threat perception approach from India and the EU sees Afghanistan as a threat and source of fear: of terror attacks, new refugee influx, and trafficking.

These tropes promote Islamophobia and approach Afghanistan through domestic agendas that have little to do with either the Afghan people and their problems. They ignore the severe issues of political economy, impoverishment, displacement, reversal for women, issues of education and health. These are real issues and ignoring them can turn Afghanistan into a failed state with terrible consequences for the entire region of Asia, Europe and beyond.

Local politics

In this geopolitics, the local Afghan regimes and power holders cannot be cast as progressive national liberation movements or anti-imperialists. The Taliban use religious extremist nationalism, violence, fear and threat to gain control. They supported external interventions when it suited them and turned against them too. More importantly:

1) Politics and governance is ethnic and majoritarian, with the political exclusion of different ethnic groups from political participation, power and government.

2) Afghan rulers have not developed agency for political expression and communications, like institutions, political parties etc. True, this is difficult in conditions of civil war, but even during comparative stability institutions remained weak.

3) Narrow elite economic control and benefits led to poppy cultivation and drug and other trafficking. A well run shadow economy prevails.

4) The Taliban will remain a ruthless, misogynist, anti-democratic, fundamentalist and cruel force that will use their own interpretation of Sharia law to oppress women and public culture.

These are the current continuities and specificities in the geopolitical patterns after the US withdrawal and Taliban takeover:

1) The US is looking for new military bases and quads: if Pakistan does not oblige they can look at India. Settling new waves of displaced, squeezing the Taliban economically, continuing policies of intervention in west Asia and the Indo-Pacific the US policies of curbing Russian and Chinese influence continue as its main aim in the region.

2) Russia is concerned with security and the influx of political Islam in central Asia. All these countries, from Russia and China to India will recognise and give foreign aid to the Taliban to transact security for their own countries.

3) Pakistan sees this as the victory of strategic depth and a victory against India, as new leverage with the USA and it will coordinate with the Saudis and the OIC on this.

4) India sees this as a victory of terrorism, and worries about Kashmir.

5) China wants to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor for trade routes into Afghanistan and Central Asia.

For civil society and a humane approach

It is important to have collective security in this region and to:

1) Oppose a geostrategic approach where the Afghan people are barely mentioned. Afghanistan cannot be made a pawn into any more geostrategic adventures. No more interventions.

2) Ask all nations to support and give dignity to Afghan refugees.

3) Support humanitarian aid to Afghan people and the internally displaced.

4) Oppose unilateral sanctions as these impact people and not ruling regimes.

5) Support the gains made by Afghan women and look for ways to maintain freedoms for women in education, health, workplace, public spaces and for choice.

6) Oppose Islamophobia.

7) NGOs have been part of peace building, keeping and maintaining exercises in Afghanistan since the 1980s. These efforts have come from around the world, regardless of political differences. They need to be activated once more with security guarantees from the Afghan government.

8) Development assistance has been poured into Afghanistan. This should be conditional on the rights of people.

9) Institutional and operational analysis of various NGOs involved in peace building (including Norwegian Church Aid) shows that their strength lay in institutional commitment, developing local capacities, using local languages, and consideration of political, cultural sensitivities. This approach should be used in development assistance.

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The Repeat Patterns in the Afghanistan Conflicts - The Citizen

By Shari Narine

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

To vote or not to vote? That is the question Indigenous people face every federal and provincial election.

On Aug. 31, when the Assembly of First Nations released its five-priority platform for the federal election, National Chief RoseAnne Archibald weighed in. Like her predecessor Perry Bellegarde, Archibald encouraged people to vote.

RoseAnne Archibald Assembly of First Nations new National Chief

First Nations voters can and will make a large impact on the results on election night, said Archibald.

The Native Womens Association of Canada launched an aggressive campaign entitled Were done asking, were voting, which aims to activate Indigenous women from coast to coast to coast to get to the polls and have their voices heard, said the news release.

Both the Manitoba Metis Federation and the Metis Nation of Ontario are encouraging all of our citizens to vote.

Despite these pushes by Indigenous organizations to get people to mark their ballots, Courtney Skye, research fellow with the Indigenous think-tank the Yellowhead Institute, says voting is a contentious issue.

Courtney Skye, a former candidate for Six Nations elected chief in her home community says she wont vote in federal election.

Some Indigenous people believe that Canada has long had policies of assimilation and voting is another step along that way of assimilation and indoctrination, said Skye.

The issue is, do you vote for your own oppression? Because Canada is a state that is invested and continues to be invested in the oppression of Indigenous peoples, the suppression of Indigenous rights and the denial of those rights in every aspect of the country, said Niigaan Sinclair, an assistant professor in Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Niigaan Sinclair, an assistant professor in Native Studies at the University of Manitoba

We continue to have a country in which Indigenous peoples are seen as second tier, are seen as lesser than, are deemed as not as important or an option for political parties to decide to deal with at some point. In that environment the fact is that it is very difficult to justify voting because if all the parties suck, why would you participate in any of it? he said.

Skye also brings attention to the existence of pre-Confederation treaties with the British Crown, including those held by her Haudenosaunee people.

If we expect the Crown to respect our nationhood and our autonomy over our affairs then we have to extend that back out of mutual respect, and so, for a lot of Indigenous people who consider themselves treaty people and expect the Crown to honour these treaties, then they follow through with that in their own conduct and they dont vote in elections, she said.

For those who do choose to vote, Sinclair says its a matter of making a choice between lessen(ing) the damage of voting in the party that will do the least amount of damage or you choose the party that will be complicit in your own oppression.

Skye isnt as cynical as Sinclair. She says those who choose to vote are often driven by frustration of the status quo and not necessarily (by) being indoctrinated into another system and want to have Indigenous voices in the House of Commons.

Indigenous people make that choice for themselves, informed by their own history, their own treaty agreements, their own view, what riding theyre in, whether or not theres a (good) candidate in their riding, whether they view their riding as close or not.

Theres a lot of different things I think that go into Indigenous people making the choice of whether or not theyre going to vote in the upcoming election, said Skye.

She also points to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which entrenches the human rights of Indigenous peoples and collective groups to participate in elections of the state without losing any of their rights and entitlements of Indigenous peoples.

Skye says it makes sense that the AFN would encourage its members to vote as the AFN itself is a colonial construct ? Its a representative body of Indian Act band councils. They dont represent nations; they represent First Nations as creations of the federal government. They are people who are trying to affect change within the system. I get where theyre coming from.

Getting out the vote is a standard practise of all national chiefs, said Sinclair, adding he believes that push goes back as far as Phil Fontaine who served as national chief from 1997 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2009.

The AFN has to deal with the federal government and so if theres a brown face in that government, naturally, they think that will evoke change, he said.

Skye observes that Inuit have a much different relationship with Canada than do the Haudenosaunee people. That difference became clear with the positive reaction from Inuit organizations when Inuk woman Mary Simon was appointed the new Governor General, the first Indigenous person to hold that position.

Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc

In an earlier interview with Windspeaker.com, Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., said that having an Indigenous person representing the Queen was not a conflict, especially an Inuk, as the experiences that we have had are quite different from First Nations and Metis.

As for the Metis, Sinclair says they are pleased with Trudeaus Liberal government. While the Metis do have longstanding issues ?

the fact is the Metis have been able to justify many of the policies that the Liberals addressed and theyve found a very willing dance partner.

While we believe that Justin Trudeaus government has developed the strongest relationship with the Indigenous community in Canadian history, we are willing to work with any party that wins the election, said Manitoba Metis Federation President David Chartrand in a news release. He also said the Red River Metis would be actively participating in the election.

Skye believes the number of Indigenous voters has slowly increased over the years, but she is not counted among those numbers. Skye has never voted nor will she be this time around.

For me I make the personal choice to invest in our own communities, participate in our own governance structures and revitalize our traditional systems over leveraging power from the state to affect change, said Skye.

Sinclair, who is Anishinaabe, has voted in the past although not often. Hes more inclined to vote in provincial elections, he says, because that can influence policies that pertain to his career as a teacher. He is uncertain whether hell be voting federally this month.

Often for me its a determination of will my vote matter?Frankly, my vote never matters in the area Ive lived, said Sinclair.

Shari Narine is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Windspeaker.Com . The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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Many eligible Indigenous voters struggle with whether or not they will go to the polls - Turtle Island News

Mayawatis BSP is likely to make oppression of Dalits and Brahmins its main election weapon. (File Photo)

With the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election 2022 approaching, political parties have started drawing up their battle plans.

Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is likely to make the oppression of Dalits and Brahmins its main election weapon, sources have said.

The party is working on its social engineering formula of 2007 which helped it win the state election, said a BSP leader.

READ: BJP to launch massive OBC outreach campaign ahead of UP polls

This agenda will be sharpened after the Prabuddha Sammelans, underway in the state under BSP national general secretary Satish Chandra Mishras leadership, sources said.

As part of the strategy, sources said, local BSP leaders will go to places where cases of oppression of Dalits and Brahmins have been reported and meet the families of victims to protest, show solidarity and seek justice.

In election meetings, the BSP will also talk about Dalits, Brahmins and Muslims being oppressed in the last five years and question the BJP government in the state on core issues.

Mayawati is busy preparing for the UP Assembly election from Lucknow. On her instructions, Satish Chandra Mishra is holding conventions or Prabuddha Sammelans to integrate Brahmins with the party.

As per party sources, Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims have suffered the most under the BJP rule and they are not being heard.

Mayawati will start the assembly election campaign by addressing a Brahmin Sammelan at the party office in Lucknow on September 7.

Satish Chandra Mishras conventions will end on September 4. Preparations are being made to start it from CM Yogi Adityanaths turf Gorakhpur.

ALSO READ: AAP to hold Tiranga Yatra in Ayodhya on September 14 with possible Ram temple stop

ALSO READ: Samajwadi Party: Looking forward, counting backwards

Click here for IndiaToday.ins complete coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

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UP election 2022: Oppression of Dalits, Brahmins to be BSPs key poll plank - India Today

Critical race theory (CRT) is the latest target in the cultural clash of values, ethics and morality that characterizes the poisonous polarity between right and left-leaning Americans.

Conservatives have been pushing back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses. Their shorthand for this unwanted review is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory

Elizabeth Harris, in the Aug. 15 Sundays New York Times, wrote that Fox News and other right-wing media have aggressively taken aim at critical race theory, a scholarly framework that examines the role of law and other institutions in perpetuating racial inequality, rather than focusing on individual prejudice. Critics say it is a divisive system of beliefs that portrays whiteness as inherently bad and unfairly paints the country as irredeemably racist, but academics who embrace critical race theory say it has been intentionally misrepresented and widely misused. CRT is often compared by critics to actual racism.

The My Turn essay by two members of the Hawlemont Regional School Committee last Thursday echoes this view. Critical Race Theory is a poisonous, disruptive ideology meant to divide, not unite us they wrote.

In Adam Serwers book The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trumps America, he defends a backlash thesis in which Trumpism must be seen as the white supremacist reaction to societys cultural and political decline. Serwer therefore sees Trumpism as a cruel backlash to the election of Barack Obama and the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor. Serwer writes, Trumps supporters look to him to use the power of the state to wage war against the people who threaten their white supremacist vision of America.

Then there is the 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Its purpose is to reframe the countrys history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Twelve Civil War historians and political scientists who research the Civil War wrote to The New York Times Magazine concerning the 1619 Project. They were troubled that the Project was to become the basis of school curriculums with the imprimatur of the New York Times while lacking additional historical facts. That said, the letter began with It is not our purpose to question the significance of slavery in the American past. None of us have any disagreement with the need for Americans, as they consider their history, to understand that the past is populated by sinners as well as saints, by horrors as well as honors, and that is particularly true of the scarred legacy of slavery.

In another new book Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner offer a learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America through the lens of the Supreme Court.

In his review of the book in The Nation, Randall Kennedy writes that Burton and Derfner state The Supreme Court has often been the most anti-progressive branch of the federal government. It has been and continues to be deeply implicated in the countrys history of racial oppression. It permitted the creation of a pigmentocracy that reached its fullest elaboration in the South, where states formally segregated people of color and excluded them from government. Recently, Kennedy notes, the court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act the high point of the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 60s ruling that Congresss continued imposition of special regulations on covered jurisdictions (mainly Southern states with histories of stubborn racial disenfranchisement) was unacceptable in light of positive changes in the demographics of voting. That decision, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), written by Chief Justice John Roberts for a 5-4 conservative majority, was an outrageous act of judicial delinquency. It minimized evidence of an ongoing effort to discriminate against Black voters individually and collectively. It failed to give appropriate deference to congressional policy-making.

Bottom line is that it has again eased the way for an increase in voter suppression and a roadblock to achieving true equality.

Trumps failed attempts to strip immigrants from the 2020 Census count was designed to benefit older, white voters. Racism remains embedded in our legal, political, financial, medical and real estate systems.

Connecting the Dots appears every other Saturday in the Recorder. John Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times and the editor of a new childrens book After the Race available on Amazon.

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Connecting the Dots with columnist John Bos: Is racism systemic? - The Recorder

Until the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was showered in U.S. and international assistance that amounted to nearly half of its GDP. Now, delivering a stern message to the triumphant militants, U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are shutting down most of it. The United States is freezing Afghan reserves, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have announced they will also suspend aid, as have major Western powers like Germany.

But Biden has a problem he doesnt face in other rogue countries squeezed by U.S. sanctions: The United States has spent an estimated $2 trillion over nearly 20 years trying to build up Afghanistan and help its desperately poor people. Moreover, given the swift U.S. withdrawal that left behind tens of thousands of Afghans who once supported the U.S.-led effort there, can Biden morally justify cutting them off? This is an especially pressing question as potentially new strains of COVID-19 proliferate among a poorly vaccinated population and Afghanistan heads into the colder months.

The Biden administration is trying to thread that needle by saying it will continue to deliver humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but the Taliban government wont get any of it.

Until the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was showered in U.S. and international assistance that amounted to nearly half of its GDP. Now, delivering a stern message to the triumphant militants, U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are shutting down most of it. The United States is freezing Afghan reserves, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have announced they will also suspend aid, as have major Western powers like Germany.

But Biden has a problem he doesnt face in other rogue countries squeezed by U.S. sanctions: The United States has spent an estimated $2 trillion over nearly 20 years trying to build up Afghanistan and help its desperately poor people. Moreover, given the swift U.S. withdrawal that left behind tens of thousands of Afghans who once supported the U.S.-led effort there, can Biden morally justify cutting them off? This is an especially pressing question as potentially new strains of COVID-19 proliferate among a poorly vaccinated population and Afghanistan heads into the colder months.

The Biden administration is trying to thread that needle by saying it will continue to deliver humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but the Taliban government wont get any of it.

Consistent with our sanctions on the Taliban, the aid will not flow through the government but rather through independent organizations, such as U.N. agencies and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Monday as U.S. forces completed their withdrawal. And we expect that those efforts will not be impeded by the Taliban or anyone else.

But bypassing the Taliban could be especially difficultif not impossiblesince the group can now officially oversee the operations of any agencies and NGOs in the country. In any case, its hard to make a distinction between the peoples welfare and the overall health of the Afghan economyparticularly if, as expected, it collapses in the coming months.

The leverage of the West is quite limited, said Adnan Mazarei, a former deputy director at the International Monetary Fund who oversaw Afghan programs from 2009 to 2015. In the end, leverage is a function of how much the United States and other countries care about the suffering of the Afghan people. The U.S. may decide it cares.

Nor are major institutions like the United Nations necessarily on board with Bidens pressure campaign. On the contrary, U.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres said Tuesday that extra food, shelter, and health supplies must be urgently fast-tracked into the country because Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe amid a severe drought and with winter approaching. Guterres said he had grave concern about the threat of basic services collapsing completely, adding 1 in 3 Afghans do not know where their next meal will come from.

The Biden administration has not yet specified how its limited-aid approach will work. Speaking on condition of anonymity, several governmentofficials indicated the U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, the key agencies overseeing financial support, have barely begun discussing the details.

On Tuesday, a Treasury official indicated the Biden administration would maintain sanctions against Taliban leaders, including significant restrictions on their access to the international financial system, but could not be more specific. Other major donors, such as the World Bank, which had been overseeing nearly $800 million in programs in 2021 for Afghanistan, are also still figuring out how to navigate the new reality. We continue to follow events in Afghanistan, and once the situation becomes clearer, we will be able to make an assessment of next steps, a World Bank spokesperson said Tuesday.

The European Union, which mainly fears a giant influx of refugees, is now focused on giving aid to neighboring countries where Afghans might flee rather than to Afghanistan itself. In a statement Tuesday, the EU said its member states stand determined to act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled large-scale illegal migration movements faced in the past.

The United States and major Western nations also have, over the last two decades, sponsored critical aid programs that many are loath to eliminate nowin particular, hundreds of millions of dollars in investments toward female education, with some 3 million girls and young women affected, said Daniel Runde, a development expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I would argue we would want to support those programs, and theres a lot of money in those pipelines, he said.

They need to distinguish between humanitarian needs and the broader development programs. Its going to be fuzzy, said Earl Anthony Wayne, a former U.S. deputy ambassador in Afghanistan. Theyre going to have to have a set of governance conditions and rights conditions. That will also get fuzzy.

The central issue going forward is whether the Taliban will uphold such conditions of fair governance and observance of human rightsat least adequately enough to keep some of the aid flowing. The Biden team credited the Taliban leadership with helping U.S. forces airlift more than 120,000 people, including thousands of Americans, out of the country. The Taliban have also said they want international recognition, and they appear to be forming a motley governing body that could include technocrats like Omar Zakhilwal, a former finance minister who has returned to Kabul, along with U.S.-designated terrorists such as Sirajuddin Haqqani.

But it is not yet entirely unclear what sort of government will emerge or whether the Taliban will ever moderate their past behaviorespecially their harsh treatment of women and girls.

What is problematic for the West is how to respond to what may soon be urgent humanitarian needs generated by an extensive drought and a large internal displaced population, the possibility of significant refugee flows, and the collapse of the money economyall of which will create pressures to find ways to help the Afghan people, said Peter Michael McKinley, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. That may require dealing with the Taliban more directly.

If Biden comes down too hard on the new Afghan government, he could also face political problems at home as stories of desperation and Taliban oppression continue to make headlines. On Tuesday, facing harsh bipartisan criticism, the president again defended his decision to withdraw by Aug. 31, even though some Americans were left behind along with thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. effort. Biden suggested the only mistake he might have made was to think the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown. And he insisted we have leverage to hold the Taliban to their promise of safe passage for Americans and Afghans holding special immigrant visa applications.

We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid, Biden said. Well continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls.

On Monday, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution sponsored by the United States, Britain, and France that called on the Taliban to facilitate safe passage for people wanting to leave Afghanistan, allow humanitarian organizations to access the country, and uphold human rights, including for women and children. The resolution also called on the Taliban to let humanitarian aid flow and combat terrorism. In his speech, Biden said we are joined by over 100 countries that are determined to make sure the Taliban upholds those commitments. Notably, China and Russia abstained.

A key question in the months ahead will be whetherfaced with the threat of an international embargo on at least some financial aidthe Taliban will decide to preemptively moderate their worst past practices, which only in recent weeks have reportedly involved revenge killings and forcing girls and young women into marriage or sex slavery.

A half-dozen foreign aid experts interviewed for this article, all of them well versed in international programs that help Afghanistan, agreed the Taliban-led government will be unable to replace billions of dollars in Western aid with meager revenue from the opium trade or aid from China and neighboring Pakistan, which has supported the Taliban in the past. Given the cutoff in aid, they believe it is inevitable the country will sink further into poverty, opening the way for terrorist groups to exploit the peoples misery with illicit funds.

Its hard to envisage alternative streams of revenues that would provide the same sustenance for running a government and an economy, McKinley said. He said the Talibans narcotics revenues are not at a level that would compensate for the loss of international donor assistance and, in any case, would be grounds for holding off. Pakistan is not a country in a position to provide significant assistance. China is the real issue, but how much assistance does China actually deliver in many situations like this?

Aid specialists say China is probably not interested in large-scale development or humanitarian aid. Its not their forte, Runde said. What the Chinese offer is to say, hey, Ill lend you money to build a port or a road.

The withdrawal of international aid wont necessarily be felt immediately by ordinary Afghans, especially since the previous Afghan governments led by former Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were steeped in corruption and most U.S. assistance went to the military buildup of the now-collapsed Afghan National Security Forces.

But there is little doubt that millions of Afghans will suffer in the coming months and years. Mazarei, who is now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, suggests if the Afghan economy collapses completely, U.S. leverage over the Taliban could increase somewhat. There is going to be pressure on the exchange rate and balance of payments and a rise in inflation and poverty levels, he said. The trick is going to be whether the Taliban decide that, at least for now, they will form a more inclusive government so as to get some of this foreign aid.

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Biden Can't Pressure Taliban Without Hurting Thousands of Afghans Left Behind - Foreign Policy

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an unforgettable name in the socio-economic, cultural and political history of India whose influence was quite apparent in the fields of social and religious reformation, public administration, free journalism and educational development in British-ruled 19th century India. He was born in a prosperous family of the Brahman class but developed an unorthodox religious ideology at an early age.Ram Mohan (1772-1833) was a polyglot ~ he was proficient in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Bengali and Hindi. He also knew Latin and Greek. He was totally against idolatry. He was exiled from home and went to Murshidabad in 1803. In 1805, Ram Mohan joined the East India Company and worked for John Digby in the Rangpur collectorate; it was Digby who introduced him to western culture and literature.The immobile structure of Indian society, beset with blind beliefs like the Sati system, caste excesses, untouchability and the oppression of women divided society. Ram Mohan began to protest against the Sati system and other social evils inside and outside his home. Not only that, being a strong advocate of equal rights for men and women he worked tirelessly for an end to practices like child marriage and Purdah system, dowry system and polygamy.Ram Mohan Roys ground-breaking reforms in various spheres of life laid the foundation upon which future Indias values and principles were laid. An erudite scholar, a champion of the press and freedom of expression, a great reformer and above all, a pioneer of the national movement in India, Ram Mohan Roy is known as the Father of Indian Renaissance. He dedicated himself to the task of modernising India.Sati was a historical Hindu practice in which a widow sacrificed herself by sitting atop her deceased husbands funeral pyre. In 1811 Roy witnessed his brothers widow being burned alive on her husbands funeral pyre. Ram Mohan was severely hurt by the cruelty of the custom. In fact, he was the first Indian to protest against this custom. In spite of vehement protests from orthodox Hindus, he carried out his propaganda against this custom. Finally, Raja Ram Mohans effort became successful when in 1829 Lord William Bentinck banned Sati by law.According to this law, the custom of sati became illegal and punishable as culpable homicide. Abolition of Sati was one of the significant turning points in the social development of modern India. While Ram Mohan is remembered by common people for the role he played in abolishing the evil of Sati, he was also a prominent name in educational reforms.He supported English as a medium of teaching in India for he believed it was superior to the traditional Indian education system. He regarded education as an effective vehicle to achieve social reform and was a strong advocate of introducing western learning in India. Keeping this great purpose in his mind he set up the Hindu College at Calcutta jointly with David Hare in 1817; it later went on to become one of the best educational institutions in the country producing some of the best minds in India.Before that, in 1816, he established Indias first English medium school. In 1822, he gave a big grant to start an English high school of the Unitarian Association that was led by the noted educationist David Hare and Reverend Adam. He established Vedanta college, City College and English schools where courses in both Indian learning and western social and physical sciences were offered.In 1830, he assisted Alexander Duff in establishing the General Assemblys Institution. Roy promoted and urged teaching of scientific subjects like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Botany. He promoted technology, western medicine and English to be taught at Indian schools. He was also a great scholar who translated many books, religious and philosophical works and scriptures into Bengali and also translated Vedic scriptures into English. Not only that, he was the first Indian to make a passionate plea for womens education and rights.To educate the common people, Raja published magazines in different languages including English, Hindi, Persian and Bengali. Notable magazines published by him were the Brahmanical Magazine, the Sambad Koumudi and Mirat-ul-Akbar. He started the first Bengali language weekly newspaper and the first newspaper in an Indian language, called Sambad Koumudi in 1821 and in 1822 he published the journal Mirat-ul-Akbar.Sambad Koumudi helped people to form an opinion about the issues affecting their daily life in British India and represented their grievances before the Government. He vehemently fought for the freedom of press. In 1823, when the British imposed censorship upon the then Calcutta press, Roy, as the founder and editor of two of Indias earliest weekly newspapers, organised a protest, arguing in favour of freedom of speech and religion as natural rights.Ram Mohans spiritual devotion was not confined to the sphere of spirituality alone as social and religious reforms were inseparable to him. True religion was to him an antidote of political tyranny and social oppression. Ram Mohans ideology of Brahmoism derived from the Upanishads condemned polytheistic practises, idolatry and encouraged practise of the unity of God ~ formless, universal and omnipresent.In 1815, he founded the short-lived Atmiya Sabha to propagate his doctrine of monotheistic Hinduism. From 1828, the Brahmo Sabha which was renamed as Brahmo Samaj in 1830, was formed for worship of the Single Divinity irrespective of caste, creed or sect and became one of the most important agents of religious and social change in 19th century India.Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in his book The Indian Struggle called him the apostle of a religious revival in India. Except it, his visions for a democratic, secular and rational society were carried forward by Brahmo Samaj. He also advocated larger association of Indians in the administration, the separation of the Judiciary from the Executive, disbandment of the Standing Army and the formation of militia composed of peasants.He believed in social equality of all human beings, and thus was a strong opposer of the caste system. It was Roy who condemned oppressive practices of Bengali zaminders and demanded fixation of minimum rents. He also demanded the abolition of taxes on tax-free lands. He called for a reduction of export duties on Indian goods abroad and the abolition of taxes on tax-free lands.He was perhaps the first feminist who wanted women to be educated and given the right to inherit property. Roy was the moving spirit behind empowering women and getting them a respectable position in society.Ram Mohan was also the first to give importance to the development of the mother tongue. His Gaudiya Byakaran in Bengali is the best of his prose works. He stood for cooperation of thought and activity and brotherhood among nations. His understanding of the international character of the principles of liberty, equality and justice indicate that he well understood the significance of the modern age. He was perhaps the first philosopher in the world to strengthen internationalism.In his address entitled Inaugurator of the Modern Age in India, Tagore referred to Ram Mohan as a luminous star in the firmament of Indian history. Ram Mohan is an outstanding personality who was not only the pioneer of modernity but also a visionary of liberal democracy not just of Bengal but of the whole world. He proved himself to be a religious, social, educational and cultural reformer who challenged traditional Hindu culture and indicated lines of progress for Indian society under British rule.There is no denying the fact that without Ram Mohans intellectual stimulation and indefatigable campaigns against social evils, it is not possible to conceive of contemporary India. He was the symbol of freedom, equality, fraternity, tolerance, kindness and rationality. He was given the title of Father of Modern India by Gopal Krishna Gokhale.At present we are suffering from religious intolerance. Our everyday life is beset with many severe social and moral problems. In this situation we are in dire need of following the ideologies of Raja Ram Mohan, the relentless crusader against all kinds of injustices as well as exploitative practices for making a modern India in the true sense of the term.

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Ahead of his times - The Statesman

George W. Bush addresses the nation aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, 2003. (Stephen Jaffe / AFP via Getty Images)

A republic that wages unending war beyond its frontiers sets itself up for decline and fall. Its intractable military skirmishing is like the drip-drip-drip of water slowly eroding the sturdy foundations of an edifice before it collapses. Buffoons soon take their turns as mob rulers, coarsening and dividing a once-free society, before a barbarian horde tries to topple it.1 Books in Review

Or so goes the Roman narrative, an old story of imperial decline that has instructed generations of politicians and political theorists seeking to stave off a similar fate. If you spend too much time fighting savagery, you become savage as well. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual2

warfare, warned James Madison in 1795. Added Barack Obama in 2013, in a statement that, in retrospect, seems prophetic: A perpetual warthrough drones or special forces or troop deploymentwill prove self-defeating and alter our country in troubling ways.3

But there has long been both a minor and a major problem with the Roman narrative. The minor one is that no one ever seems to agree on when the free society went wayward. For millennia, observers have emphasized different causes and dateswhich was easy to do since, as the 18th-century French political philosopher Montesquieu pointed out, from the beginning Rome was in an eternal and always violent war somewhere. Edward Gibbon, the most famous modern chronicler, opens his history with an admiring description of the Roman Empire as it embarked on its wars, with scenes from Augustus to the Antonines that read like a fanboys paean to military achievement. The pivot in his account comes only with the murder in 192 ce of Emperor Commodus, the narcissist who lacked every sentiment of virtue and humanity and was goaded into unspeakable acts of cruelty by a servile crowd that worshiped him. (He did not have red hair.)4

But the larger problem with the Roman narrative is its complacent nostalgia for a time before the decline itself. Historical bickering about what went wrong and when presupposes that a lotor enoughwent right. Taking the virtues of the free society for granted, its way of life glorious until the intrusion of wartime vice, the Roman narrative, whether credulously or ideologically, implies that the problem was adventitious and occurred late. It becomes a matter of saving the last best hope from its unwinding, to quote the titles of two of George Packers recent books. But what if the sources of the cruelty and violence and putrefaction were of long standing? What if the crimes and pathologies of empire abroad and subjugation at home, belatedly fingered as the causes of collapse, had always prevented a republic from actually coming into being? What if the supposedly free society was unconscionably violent to its own people, and its military adventures far away were extensions or reflections of its unfreedoms nearby? The problem wasnt a decline and fall, but a failure to rise in the first place.5

In Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman opens with Madisons warning and refuses to narrate the main events of the War on Terror in the years after 9/11 separately from their domestic ramifications. In Subtle Tools, Karen J. Greenberg studies how policies enacted to allow the pursuit of foreign terrorists 20 years ago, with their unexpected and unholy uses at home in recent years, ended up degrading our laws and liberty. For both, the whirlwind of the forever war of the past 20 years allowed Donald Trump to reap the opportunity for American devastation.6

Both books raise the question of whether the Roman tale of liberty spurned is the right one, while also suggesting the more disconcerting possibility that the pathologies were there all along. Ackerman at one point cites the observation of Aim Csaire that unfreedom oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack of an empire, including those found within its metropole: What happens abroad is only a manifestation of unfreedom at home. If this is true, then Ackermans and Greenbergs focus on how the War on Terror led to Trumps rise and reignthe Roman narrative applied to recent American historyis not necessarily wrong. But starting with the War on Terror and ending with Trump also isolates both from their genuine sources. It also distracts from how Joe Bidenwho called in illegal air strikes in February and promised amid the fiasco of the pullout from Afghanistan to sustain counterterrorist operationsis continuing our war, not ending it.7

Spencer Ackerman has been among the most important journalists to chronicle the War on Terror almost from its inception. Writing for, among other publications, The Guardian and, until recently, The Daily Beast, he has shown himself to be a gifted reporter, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his role in bringing Edward Snowdens revelations about NSA surveillance to the public. In Reign of Terror, Ackerman synthesizes two decades of his and others work to explore how the War on Terror was not simply something that happened on the battlefields. Rather, it happened in the United States and helped to create Trump and allow his profane works.8 Current Issue

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Karen Greenberg, a national security expert at Fordham Law School, has also been a precious resource, especially on the War on Terrors legal machinations. The author of an indispensable study on Americas Guantnamo Bay prison, she has become one of the countrys leading experts on the perverse legal changes brought about by counterterrorism policy and the surveillance state. Like Reign of Terror, her new book draws from this experience to show how the subtle tools forged out of the wreckage of 9/11the governments use of euphemism, flexibility, and secrecyworked for two decades to smother the good out of a democracy in turmoil and pave the way for some of the most infamous episodes of Trumps presidency.9

Ackerman and Greenberg hardly deny the excesses and ravages of our wars abroad. But their interest heresomething the last presidents term and the current anniversary marking two decades (so far) of counterterrorism make pressingis in what these excesses and ravages have done to America itself. And Trump, far from representing a deviation from the War on Terror, epitomized it. He brought aspects of the war home, Ackerman contends, even if fundamentally the war was always home. As Greenberg adds, Trump exploited existing tools, already destructive, and sharpened them into weapons. The boomerang of counterterrorism policy, invented to attack foreign enemies, ended up permanently disfiguring American life once it struck home.10

Both authors sweep across the past two decades before reaching the age of Trump, and in doing so they help periodize the entire experience of the War on Terror. For Ackerman and Greenberg, the two pivotal moments in the evolution of Americas counterterrorism age were the early months of George W. Bushs presidency and the early months of Barack Obamas.11 Related Article

As both authors tell it, the initial days and months after Al Qaeda struck Manhattan and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, were formative for everything that followedespecially Bushs proclamation of a war on terror and the supersession of limits that he and his neoconservative stewards demanded in consequence. Having abandoned the concept of a war against a specific terrorist organization, Ackerman observes, Americans would never be able to agree on when it could be won. From the start, therefore, the whole notion of a War on Terror was conceptually doomed, and yet it would remake the country in its wake. Chillingly, Greenberg cites Trump the celebrity businessman predicting this very thing himself: On September 13, two days after the attack, he noted that a whole different city and world would arise from the smoking ruins of ground zero.12

It wasnt just that Bush chose unending war; he also supercharged border and homeland policing, racializing it on the grounds thatas his attorney general, John Ashcroft, remarkedthe enemys platoons infiltrate our borders. Even as foundational decisions were made about how to movenotwithstanding the constraints of international lawagainst Afghanistan and Iraq, starting with Congresss near-unanimous 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the government began to round up terrorism suspects at home, initiate domestic surveillance, and lift controls on detention and interrogation. Greenberg calls the AUMF the Ur document of the War on Terror, because its vagueness meant that it would authorize force against anyone. And as she shows in a separate chapter, Bush also moved immediately to set up the agency with the sinister name Department of Homeland Security, placing border control in a counterterrorism framework. Meanwhile, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in October 2001, which ended up imposing few limits on such surveillance practices.13

Ackerman stresses how near-universal the support for the War on Terror was across Americas partisan divide in this first pivotal period. The neoconservatives in the cockpit of Bushs foreign policy, however showily many of them would later become never-Trumpers, continued or even extended their dangerous game of indulging the nativist part of the Republican base, which has proved to be anything but an atavistic remnant of the distant past. At the same time, the neocons were not above lecturing paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and others about their insufficient patriotism when they advised caution. As for liberals, they were compliant and supinewhen they were not even more enthusiastic about the opportunity to slay monsters abroad than their neoconservative frenemies. Part of the reason was electoral fear. Anti-communist liberalism built the structures that confronted the Soviet Union, Ackerman comments, but that did not spare it the demagoguery of conservatives for whom liberalism was a stalking horse for communism. Yet the most important reason was that mainstream liberals, too, were grateful for a new enemy to replace the one that had long defined their aggressive posture.14

Minor pushback came only with the faltering of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib torture revelations in the spring of 2004. The legacy of this period was that the War on Terror was touched up, its torture and related prisoner abuses removed (with an assist from the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and other cases). In the process, however, the earliest assumptions of the war framing and the licensing of force abroad were continued, even entrenched. Perversely, as I argue in my own new book on the period, the humanization of perpetual war adopted in the later Bush years ratified and even fortified his foundational choices to move the country to a war footing, even as the presidents own popularity tanked. Just as, in 2001, mainstream opinion across the political spectrum had given the government carte blanche to create a new national security state, between 2004 and 2006 a renewed public legitimacy for the War on Terror turned on making it moral.15

That evolution in the war is why its second pivotal moment came during Obamas first months in office. The new president had campaigned on a selective opposition to the Iraq War, presenting himself as a broader peace candidate, while implying to those in the know his acceptance of an infinity war under the new and unconstrained authorities that Bush had asserted and Congress had granted. Obamas anti-war speech as an Illinois state senator in 2002providentially rediscovered as he battled Hillary Clinton, who had even fewer scruples about Americas mightwas taken to be more significant than his votes to fund the Iraq War as a US senator or to expand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which increased government spying, the month after he clinched the Democratic Partys nomination for president.16

Although his rhetoric about the war on terror suggested both legal and operational restraint, Greenberg writes, Obama proved reluctant to surrender the flexibility that vague language provided for the presidential exercise of elastic powers. Neither expansive war powers nor limitless surveillance authority were reformed; their abuse continued, and in some instances they were even broadened. Nonetheless, liberals and the mainstream media lionized Obama for ending the War on Terror, while others nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which he won later that year). Never mind that he killed members of Faheem Qureshis family by armed drone on his third full day in office or that he used Congresss original AUMF against new enemies and in many more places.17

Although the haze of gratitude that Obama enjoyed for not being Bush took a long time to dissipateand then returned once the identity of his successor became knownboth Ackerman and Greenberg show that Obama chose forthrightly to make the War on Terror permanent. Indeed, he not only extended it in time and expanded it in space but, with his lawyerly bent, formalized its legal basis to provide extra legitimation.18

The expanded range and startling rise in the number of drone strikes, so associated with this second period of the War on Terror, should not obscure its other forms, such as the ramped-up use of Americas special forces. Drone strikes were more than just the centerpiece of Obamas counterterrorism strategy, Ackerman notes. They represented how he saw the War on Terror: not as something to end, but something to reorient. Obama understood that the War on Terror could not continue in its cruel earlier form, either in bloody ground campaigns or unspeakable prisoner abuse (which was easier to avoid if suspected terrorists were not captured but killed outright). Even when his other compromises were eventually challenged by a rising left indicting the rampant austerity and anti-Black violence of his era, Ackerman writes, the opposition to Obama was not fueled by antiwar activism. As a result of this transformative period during Obamas first few months as president, what Ackerman dubs the Sustainable War on Terror was launchedand continues to this day.19

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But how persuasive is it to insist, as Ackerman and Greenberg do, that the War on Terror, aside from its grievous effects abroad, transformed America beyond recognition as well? And how illuminating is it to search for proof of a decline and fall in the coming of Donald Trump and his presidencyespecially if Bushs and Obamas early months in office proved so decisive?20

To the extent that both writers focus on the War on Terror proper, they face serious difficulties. Trumps ascent marked what Ackerman calls the decadent or exhaustion phase of the War on Terror. In an excellent chapter, he shows that the American people and even some leading policy-makers had grown weary of endless war even before Trump was elected. Indeed, this fatigue helped give Trump an extraordinary opening, among the others he exploited in his astonishing 2016 breakthrough. Was his condemnation of the wars, then, genuine? Ackerman is contemptuous of any notion of Donald the Dove, and fair enough. Yet Trump pressed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, even if it is also true, as Greenberg documents, that his aggressive and lawless attack on the Iranian general Qassim Soleimani embraced the War on Terrors legerdemain and the erosion of any limits on war powers.21

If there was no Donald the Dove, it is mainly because the Sustainable War on Terrorwith fewer deployed troops and more high-tech death from a distancewas something that Trump inherited more than invented. In reducing troops ever further in most theaters, even as he ramped up the use of drones and special forces against the Islamic State and others, Trump was simply following the policies of his predecessors to their logical conclusion (as would his eventual successor). Still, it is only fair to note that by running in 2016 on his own critique of US military policyand of Bush himself, for the Iraq WarTrump helped make possible the Afghan withdrawal that Joe Biden is putting center stage to mark the 20th anniversary of September 11 and to take credit for ending the forever war. Moreover, the anti-war cause saw no greater successes than during the Trump years, not just on the left but on the rightnotably among the US veterans who massively supported him.22

In other ways, though, Ackerman and Greenberg argue, Trumps tenure did not augur the end of the War of Terror so much as its return home. Ackerman notes how, from its start, the War on Terror helped reactivate a nativist current in American politics and thus shaped the constituency that supported Trump. Greenberg meticulously documents how Trumps Muslim travel ban was debated in the Supreme Court within a War on Terror frameworkand how the considerable deference the court showed to the president in its ultimate decision also presupposed the executive authority that had been granted over the past 20 years. The legal and policy tensions of 9/11 persisted into the Trump era, she writes, and were brought into the open by the Muslim ban. The same was true of border interdiction, with the Department of Homeland Security on the front lines of the administrations outrageous policies. But the most vivid example for their thesis is in the nationwide protests after George Floyds murder. In response to the uprisings, Trump openly referred to the protesters as terrorists, explicitly calling for a counterinsurgency on American soil by the military, if possible, and by militarized police if not. A wartime attitude took hold, Ackerman writes.23

That the former intelligence and military stewards of the War on Terror now professed themselves shocked to find their tools perverted in a domestic struggle against their fellow citizens was ironic, as both Greenberg and Ackerman note. Meanwhile, some Trump supporters moved to protect his nativist racism from the very national security state they once demanded, as the neoconservatives and national security functionaries bolted from Trump and were seen to be using their deep state powers to hem in and undermine the president. This development was the War on Terror through a fun-house mirror, as Ackerman notes, with paranoid fantasies of Islamists in collaboration with the Security State. Now American hatred and racism required turning on the American government itselfin defense of its leader.24

Greenberg concludes her study with the prescription to control or eradicate the subtle tools, now that we can confirm their domestication and misuse. More darkly, Ackerman suggests that by the time Joe Biden providentially ousted Trump, a perpetual-motion machine of death powered by the worst of American history had made it increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.25

But for all the power of a general argument that invalidates the War on Terror through Trump and his works, there are also limits to memorializing its first 20 years this way. As Ackerman sometimes implies, all of American history culminated in Trump. If so, then reducing Trump to the culmination of just one particular episode in that history risks making it too easy for us to pretend otherwise. The #Resistance, Ackerman notes, tended after 2016 to surgically separate their hatred of Trump from any examination of the America that produced him. But by the very same token, one cannot surgically separate ones hatred of the War on Terror from any examination of the country that produced it. American exclusion and nativism are hardly new, and the governmental euphemism, flexibility, and secrecy that Greenberg illuminates have been endemic features of Americas war-making for decades, if not centuries. Also, for all the appeal of the framework of counterterrorisms blowback and boomeranging, racialized oppressionespecially in the furious responses to bids for freedom and justice by the enslaved and their descendantshas been at home in the United States throughout its history.26

Finally, by locating the costs of the War on Terror in the climax of the Trump presidency, we allow the argument to be made that, now that the sane conservatives and liberals are back in charge, all we need is some modest reform of the War on Terrors blatant or subtle tools. That lesson is, indeed, precisely the dominant one among liberals today. Greenberg ends on an expectant note about Biden, even as she worries that the January 6 uprising has been widely analogized with 9/11 as a national trauma requiring the most emphatic kind of patriotic response. She knows, however, that Biden and his foreign policy stewards are old hands at the counterterrorism policy of the past two decades and have so far done littlethe withdrawal from Afghanistan asideto challenge its ways.27

The Roman narrative of civilized freedom undone through foreign wars is alluring. But it is also misleading. For a while, scholars have rejected the whole notion that Rome fella paradigm, as Glen Bowersock wrote some years ago, that mostly represented the fears of observers centuries later as they confronted the instability of the civilization to which they belonged. It still serves such a function today. And as scholars like Dirk Moses and Richard Waswo have argued, the Roman narrative is a founding legend that permits a measure of self-criticism in the name of honoring an otherwise supposedly great civilizationignoring what Mohandas Gandhi and other anti-colonialists have long noted: that civilization has mostly been a euphemism for its opposite all along.28

This is why we should not separate the War on Terror from what came before, nor so innocently fasten its conclusion to Trump, especially as a symbol and symptom of civilizations degradation, without a deeper reflection on what it means to be civilized in the first place. On the 20th anniversary of the War on Terror, it is easy to slip into the Roman narrative, mourning a distinctive or even decisive period of freedoms collapse. The darkerand truerstory to tell is one in which the War on Terror extended and ratified the cruelty and oppression that define our history more than many might care to admit.29

On the other hand, the Roman example could well instruct us that there are uplifting possibilities in disorder and decline. Much as the historian Peter Brown did so breathtakingly in junking all the accounts of Romes decline in the first centuries after Christ, people might someday see the current period as the birth of something creative and interesting. Not only may there be limited value in a narrative of imperial excess coming home, but the harsh transitions we are experiencing now might be the birth pangs of something better and new. Of course, it is up to us to make it so.30

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In the Shadow of 9/11 - The Nation