In mid-September, Tunisian voters will head to the polls to decide who will be their next president.

The polarisation of the 2014 elections and the charismatic presence of Beji Caid Essebsi have given way to a splintered landscape with no obvious front-runner who could win the majority of votes in the first round.

Qualifying for the second round might, in fact, depend on a fraction of a percentile.

There is no figure among the 26 final candidates who rises above the fray. There are no historic leaders and no charismatic personalities, although many feel they have the mettle to “save Tunisia.”

Many, including some who served in recent years in senior government positions, are distancing themselves from the political establishment. Anyone associated with the government will have a tough time convincing voters he or she could be part of the solution.

In recent years, confidence in Tunisian institutions has taken a serious beating, except perhaps for security agencies and the military in their fight against terrorism.

There are, hence, doubts about the ability of politicians to pull the country out of its economic predicament. There is even less confidence in their ability to tackle the endemic problem of corruption. Considering the unimpressive results achieved by successive governments since 2011 and the complexity of the problems at hand, such scepticism comes easy.

The anti-establishment streak that is part of the populist narrative of several candidates is too Manichaeistic but it accommodates many voters who have no time for nuances.

As defined in the Guardian by Georgia University Professor Cas Mudde, populism is “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’.”

Kais Said, a candidate with wide appeal, promises a bottom-up political process that would vindicate the “unfinished uprising” of “revolutionary youth.” His supporters look up to him to lead them to victory over “corrupt” elements from the previous regime and foreign powers that deprive Tunisia of its natural resources. Often poaching in the Islamists’ backyard, Said presents himself as a defender of “identity.”

An even more populist candidate, Nabil Karoui, head of the Qalb Tounes (Heart of Tunisia) political party, says it is “from the heart” that he speaks to the poor and is better than all others in his ability to “reach their hearts.” He promises to correct the ills of the system that are at the root of so much poverty and marginalisation.

Opinion polls put him in a good position to be among the front-runners. Even though he is in detention on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, his campaign staff seems confident that his incarceration will only boost his electoral fortunes.

Free Destourian Party President Abir Moussi shares some of the attributes of the populists but also those of more conventional candidates. Moussi doesn’t tire from haranguing crowds and clashing with rivals. Voters who are unhappy with their deteriorating quality of life or are yearning for easier, simpler times have swollen the ranks of her party.

Among many of the candidates, not just Moussi, the legacy of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president, provides a potent symbol of statesman-like vision and leadership. The founding father’s mythology serves as a shelter in current days of uncertainty.

Under the sway of populists and other anti-establishment candidates, voters do not look at programmes, even when they are fully articulated. They are drawn to emotional gratification in their adversarial contests with other contenders. Instead of fixing what doesn’t work, they promise a total overhaul, the Tunisian Constitution and all. Their supporters look for reinforcement and not for discussion of the issues in social media.

Claudia Alvares, associate professor at Lusofona University in Lisbon, said: “The anger that populist politicians manage to channel is fuelled by social media posts because social media are very permeable to the easy spread of emotion. The result is a rise in the polarisation of political and journalistic discourse.”

Populism might have acquired a negative connotation in modern politics even as it has been associated with the election of a US president and the triumph of Brexit. It is the political equivalent of popular culture as contrasted to highbrow culture. Long gone are the days when popular culture was frowned upon. Populist and anti-establishment politics attract a growing audience that cannot be dismissed as driven by emotionalism and ignorance.

In these Tunisian elections, much of the public looks for personal appeal of fresh faces with comforting discourse. Convincing programmes draw only a few.

In the country’s world of supply and demand, populism and anti-establishment discourse fulfil the need for voters to express their unhappiness about politicians and their policies. Nobody knows where the anti-establishment wave will lead, considering the divided ranks and endless sniping between the more conventional candidates, especially in the modernist camp. Furthermore, if candidates with true ability to “save Tunisia” underestimate the appeal of the populists, they could be in for a September surprise.

Oussama Romdhani is the chief editor of the Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 September 2019
Word Count: 824
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I’m choosy about topics. I avoid things that are self-evident in what they teach us about us.

But there are times when I have to set aside that standard to say what’s so obvious to everyone but so in need of being said. For instance, that it’s wrong for the president to cancel a trip to Poland — in order to memorialize World War II dead — so he can play golf; that it’s wrong to say he’s canceling his trip so he can monitor Hurricane Dorian but, actually, so he can play golf; that it’s wrong for the president to play golf on his own properties hundreds of times since taking office; that it’s just so wrong for the president to have played golf on his own properties hundreds of times while having spent his pre-presidential days savaging the previous president for playing golf.

The moral wrongs are myriad: hypocrisy, fraudulence but especially plain-old corruption. Donald Trump told the vice president that instead of staying in Dublin during his overseas trip to Europe that Mike Pence should stay at Trump’s golfing resort on the other side of the country. Why? It’s so obvious I’m a bit embarrassed pointing it out to you: he’s bilking the American people. It has cost the Secret Service alone more than half a million dollars just to rent golf carts at his properties.

It’s also completely obvious that Trump doesn’t care about these myriad moral wrongs, because, to him, morality is for suckers. This president wears his belief in social Darwinism on his sleeve. He glorifies the notion that the strong must eat the weak for the benefit of the human species, and that any counterargument is just another form of fraud. The difference, in the president’s mind, is that at least he’s honest about it.

Survival of the fittest, which is what social Darwinism is, is surely what motivated the administration’s recent decision to deport immigrants, some of them children, with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. (About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief.) It doesn’t matter that they’ll suffer after leaving. What matters is that they don’t belong here. If they die as a result, well, so be it. As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson once said, in a different context: “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country — it means killing people.”

Survival of the fittest is surely what motivated the administration’s decision to deport Jimmy Aldaoud. Aldaoud was born on a refugee camp in Greece where his parents fled to escape religious persecution in Iraq. (They were Chaldean Christians, an oppressed minority in the Middle East.) He arrived in the United States when he was about 1 year old. He was a diabetic and a paranoid schizophrenic. A minor criminal record — e.g., disorderly conduct — was probably attributable to that mental disorder. (The government said Aldaoud’s criminal record was the reason for his removal order.)

Though he lived in Michigan nearly his entire life, spoke no Arabic and did not know Iraq from Mars, the administration deported him. He was a pauper living on the streets of Baghdad when he died. He could not find insulin. Aldaoud was 41. The administration knew all this. Everyone involved did. It deported him anyway. The administration’s actions were the near moral equivalent of premeditated murder.

The administration has allowed Aldaoud’s body to be brought back to Michigan to be buried alongside his mother. It wasn’t OK for Aldaoud to be here while he was alive. It’s OK now because he’s dead. “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country — it means killing people,” Carlson once said. Dying is what the weak do.

The president isn’t strong. That’s obvious. (He certainly isn’t the fittest. That’s obvious, too!) Also obvious is that social Darwinism is how terrible people rationalize doing terrible things. Not so obvious, perhaps, is the social Darwinists are in on the con.

If they really believed the strong must survive for the benefit of the species, they would not back down from deporting sick immigrant children. But that’s precisely what the administration did Monday. It would “reopen the process that helped some seriously ill migrants to defer deportation while receiving life-saving care” per NBC News.

Trump’s belief system isn’t worth defending, not when push comes to shove, and that’s because it’s nothing of the sort. When you don’t believe in anything except power, there’s nothing to stand on when motivated opponents who do believe in something, like protecting the weak and caring for the sick, bring their power down on you.

There’s a lesson here for me, perhaps for you, too. Call out immorality. Every time.

Even when it’s obvious.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 September 2019
Word Count: 792
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In September 2017, US President Donald Trump was vowing the “total destruction” of North Korea. Eight months later, he was shaking hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and discerning great economic “potential” in the dictator’s isolated, impoverished country.

In May 2019, Trump was tweeting about “the official end of Iran.” Then, as the G7 summit in France closed August 26, he spoke of Iran’s “tremendous potential” and the possibility of meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rohani.

With apparent friendliness, more extreme than he initially extended to North Korea, Trump even spoke of a “Make Iran Rich Again” programme. “MIRA” has the ring of #MAGA, the “Make America Great Again” slogan that animated Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign. In a sense, this erratic US president appeared to be elevating Iran to a level he hasn’t North Korea.

It’s stuff and nonsense. This is reality television in the biggest, most consequential “Big Brother” house possible but it’s not certain the Iran-US series of the Trump Show will come to pass.

Any comparisons between Trump’s overtures to North Korea and Iran were always superficial. In the days since Trump’s offer of talks, Tehran has, at least overtly, been less obliging than Pyongyang about providing Trump with a short-lived diplomatic triumph.

It wouldn’t involve much, just, say, a photo op but Rohani has demanded that all sanctions be lifted before any meeting can take place. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the prospect of a meeting as “unimaginable.”

Chances are the Iranians won’t be as wily — and as smart — as North Korea, which has strung Trump along through three meetings and lots of “beautiful” letters from Kim but no change of behaviour. Is this because the Iranians are especially wise or remarkably foolish?

Neither. The political reality is that Iran is no North Korea. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons, which means Trump can be a tad more dismissive, a point the Iranians recognise and probably rue. It has regular elections, even if circumscribed by the ruling clerics. Rohani cannot make do with a photo op; he must be responsive to public opinion, especially with parliamentary elections in February.

This is a complication but it is partly of Trump’s making. His 2018 unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal and “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran emboldened regime hardliners and weakened the pragmatic Rohani, who pushed the accord in his first term.

The fulminations of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Kayhan state-run newspaper, viewed as the hardliners’ mouthpiece, are a good indication of the hostility aroused by Trump’s blithe offer of talks with Rohani. Shariatmadari said any such meeting would be “madness.”

Funnily, Trump’s conciliatory gestures towards Iran illustrate just how different it is from North Korea. Trump previously called Iran a “corrupt dictatorship” but, unlike Kim, Rohani doesn’t have the powers of a dictator. He doesn’t have carte blanche to engage in talks with the country Iran calls the “Great Satan.”

It is Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has the final say. He too, unlike Kim, will eventually give way to a successor, chosen by clerics elected to the Iranian Assembly of Experts. Khamenei has ruled out negotiations with the United States as “double poison,” which dampens Trump’s desire for an easy and eye-catching moment for the history books.

If it happened, it would be an even bigger triumph than the first Trump-North Korea photo op. In June 2018, Trump became the first sitting US president to meet with the leader of North Korea. To meet the Iranian president would top that. After all, the cry of “Death to America!” doesn’t ring out in Pyongyang, as it has in Tehran every Friday since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and former US President Barack Obama, on whose watch the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was negotiated, only ever spoke to the Iranian leader on the phone.

That Trump is eager to be the great dealmaker with Iran is painfully clear. That he will have to tread carefully, so as not to anger Middle Eastern allies as well as sections of his own stridently anti-Iran Republican Party, is also abundantly clear. That Iran is unlikely to play nice, quickly and easily like North Korea, is crystal clear.

At this point, talking about talking about talks may be the safest way forward for everyone concerned.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 September 2019
Word Count: 719
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Today one is inclined to talk of a double impasse for Turkey. The massive Syrian offensive into Idlib province, backed by the Russian military, begins pitting Ankara against Moscow and it may prove the point of those arguing that the Sochi process was stillborn from the onset.

Whatever the case, one point is clear: the last stronghold of jihadist forces has surfaced as the area where Turkish and Syrian-Russian interests will clash.

It can be argued that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not only at odds with the United States. No matter what direction he chooses, he will be only playing for time, nothing more.

He knows the Americans will impose their will in the so-called “safe zone,” mainly to protect their local allies from Turkey. The United States is allied with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a hybrid combat front dominated by the Kurdish fighters in Rojava, north-eastern Syria. These forces will remain a deterrent against the Islamic State and the risk of advances by Iran. It will be also a bargaining chip when the time comes to redesign the Syrian administrative map.

The Russians have not trusted Turkey, especially under Erdogan’s rule. They do not see Erdogan holding to his commitments and still favouring regime change in Syria with hard-line Sunni fighters in mind.

Moscow may have calculated that the standoff between Ankara and Washington over the safe zone has made Turkey more vulnerable. To gain an upper hand over the future of Syria, it initiated a final thrust at the heart of Idlib, disregarding the humanitarian disaster it causes for the civilian population. After all, Russia may have reasoned, after the sale of S-400 missiles to Turkey, it has nothing to lose. Win-win for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Damascus ally.

In Ankara, some pundits close to the Turkish Army say the United States is the real game-setter on the safe zone and some generals are not happy about what they see as the sealing of protection of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units controlling the area. For now, it is only a tension-builder in Ankara. There is not much said about the Syrian offensive and Idlib issue from the same circles.

It has to do with the long-brewing division of views between Erdogan’s camp, which supports the jihadist-dominated Free Syrian Army against Assad’s military, and the camp that includes the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and a tiny Homeland Party, a hardcore, militarist-nationalist group with a strong influence within the Turkish security apparatus and demands, not a retreat from Syria, but to open direct dialogue with the Assad regime.

Divisions in Ankara leave prospects open for a final showdown over who will rule Turkey. Much depends on the pace of developments in the Syrian theatre.

On the surface, there is the Kurdish dimension, which keeps Ankara in convulsions. Stuck in a vicious circle for decades, Turkey’s political class has once more returned to the default position, as the battle against Turkey’s Kurds intensifies.

The unlawful removal of three elected Kurdish mayors by Erdogan has shown that the two alliances that competed against each other in recent local elections — “Public,” bringing together Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party with the ultranationalist National Movement Party and “Nation,” CHP taking side with the offshoot of the ultranationalist Iyi — have not been that far from each other, regarding the Kurdish issue. Opposition parties have given the impression they are closer to supporting the oppressive state than trying to salvage whatever remains of democracy.

If Erdogan knows anything, it is that he can extend his power and control the state apparatus as long as he can keep the secular-nationalist opposition bloc closer to his rule, by continuing to demonise the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). He thrives on this consensus.

With a double impasse in Syria, the appointment of government trustees in three major Kurdish municipalities added more elements to the social turmoil in Turkey. It is apparent that the move was premeditated, aimed at weakening the HDP and alienating some reformist circles within the CHP. A closure case against HDP is also on the agenda.

Another objective could be to provoke street violence or attacks by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at home or against Turkish Army posts in Syria — just to create pretexts for countermeasures.

In any case, the removal of mayors, who were elected with more than 53% of the vote, is a blow to the will of the voters. Not only has it hampered prospects for a renewed peace process between Ankara and the PKK, it has acted as a silencer for optimists arguing that the process was only a matter of when, not if.

Erdogan and his partner in the alliance, Devlet Bahceli, have shown there is no room for wishful thinking or for hope. If anything, the brutal domestic offensive against the HDP should tell the world that, as long as Erdogan is in power and backed by extreme hardliners in key positions, there will never be a peaceful solution of the Kurdish issue.

So, we should not be talking of double impasse but rather of a triple impasse.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 August 2019
Word Count: 856
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I’m going to say something that sounds terrible, really terrible, just awful, but sometimes the whole truth of a moment, the deep immorality of an era, overcomes social mores and taboos. I’d rather not say this, and I apologize in advance. But:

I’m glad David Koch is dead.

I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump and the revival of fascist politics in America. I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to sabotage liberal democracy and self-government. I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to burn the world, leaving our children a devastated planet.

Most of all, I’m glad David Koch is dead because few men have done more to normalize, solemnize, and institutionalize the destructive moral program of greed is good. David Koch and brother Charles Koch have spent billions and billions to shape this country in the belief that life is a zero-sum game in which you win or lose, and any value placed in community, the common good, and in the American public is a sucker’s bet.

Thanks to David Koch, the Republican Party went from “we’re broke” to “build a wall.” It went from adulating freedom and individualism to fetishizing blood and soil. The Republican Party, thanks to billionaires like David Koch, went from public policies cloaked in covert racism that covertly sought to kill human beings it did not like, to policies that are overtly racist and overtly seek to kill human beings it does not like.

I know that I shouldn’t be speaking ill of the dead. It would nicer to keep quiet. But that would mean giving David Koch the benefit of the doubt in the aftermath of his timely death. Evil men don’t deserve memorials. They don’t deserve silence either.

As I’ve noted before, the Tea Party movement, as it was called often, was in retrospect a nascent fascist political movement that exploited the rights, privileges, laws and norms of liberal democracy to sabotage our country from the inside, and that set a course for an administration that’s currently jailing children indefinitely while also inspiring Nazi-style “magahats” to murder people deemed unwelcome in America.

The Tea Party was not in fact motivated by the rule of law, limited government and fiscal responsibility. It was motivated by the election of the country’s first African-American president and the social change his rise to power represented to white so-called “conservatives” who refused to recognize the legitimacy of racial minorities.

As Theda Skocpol and her Harvard colleagues wrote in the months after 2010, opposition to Obamacare wasn’t so much opposition to “government-run health care” as much as it was opposition to “‘handouts’ to ‘undeserving’ groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes,” they wrote.

Race, or rather white supremacy and later white nationalism, motivated the Tea Party. Whatever libertarian gloss that the Koch Brothers’ billions added to the mix in effect made a nascent fascist political movement more palatable to regular Republicans and the press corps. To the extent that they did not fuel the movement, they certainly enabled it, first with money, tons of money, and second by rationalizing its goals.

But the Koch Brothers did fuel the movement, not just with money, but ideologically. As I said, David and Charles Koch advanced over four decades the idea that life is a zero-sum game in which the strong prey on the weak. This is the dark side of libertarianism. Their investments in Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council, two groups that shaped and reshaped politics during the Obama administration, were the institutional expressions of that eat-or-be-eaten worldview. Donald Trump shares the precise same worldview. Morality, to this president, is a con. Morality is what the weak do to prevent being eaten by the strong.

In Donald Trump, and in the nascent fascist political movement before him, the Koch Brothers’ libertarian focus on the individual, which was already hostile to democracy and defense of the common good, melded with a fascist focus on the in-group. Now, instead of individuals eating or being eaten, as Ayn Rand preferred, whole groups of Americans sought other groups to stomp into oblivion before celebrating in triumph.

To be sure, David Koch denied involvement with a nascent fascist political movement. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” he told New York Magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.” But that’s merely plausible deniability. There is an unbroken ideological chain connecting the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and the current resurgence of anti-democratic and anti-republican politics.

David Koch’s death won’t change anything. Whatever gladness I feel has limits. But presuming we have a future, his death gives me reason to hope for a better one.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 August 2019
Word Count: 801
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You may know about the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a major endeavor published last weekend to reframe the citizenry’s understanding of the role of slavery in the founding of America. You may also know about the white conservative reaction to the project. Perhaps the most fascinating take came from the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro:

“A project intended to delegitimize mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance is divisive, yes. I know it’s unwoke of me to say so, but so be it. I’ll take reality, warts and all, over grievance-mongering.”

I’m not going to defend the Times, because I think the scholarship, commentary and reporting speak for themselves. (I will single out for praise, though, Kurt Streeter’s piece about the NBA’s very slow evolution into a black business enterprise.) I’m not going to critique the white conservative reaction either. That, too, speaks for itself.

I do want to point out what these white conservatives (all men, of course) who are expressing anger with the 1619 Project are saying: they love their country. But their love seems provisional to me, like it depended on clear terms and conditions that if unmet will trigger some kind of escape clause. Love, when real, doesn’t work that way.

Moreover, they seem unwilling to recognize the deep abiding patriotism of black Americans. Love, when real, is unconditional. It can endure anything. But these men can’t endure even the truth. Maybe they’re less upset about the 1619 Project than they are about the probability that black Americans love America better than they do.

Take Shapiro’s claim that the Times, in speaking the truth about slavery, and in saying that the African-American experience is central to comprehending America, is an effort to “delegitimize” the US. That’s so interesting. I mean, it’s false. In no way does a country’s history delegitimize it. That’s just silly, and Shapiro should know better.

I also mean that nothing in the 1619 Project says America is not “mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance.” It does say that that was true in the beginning only for property-owning (rich) white Protestant men. It does say that the country was built on the perverse paradox of being founded on human equality as well as human slavery. It does say that slavery, as well as the racism it was justified with, have continued to shape our ways of thinking. Only with time has America come closer to “mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance.”

The fact that America is an ongoing experiment, not a state of being perfected at the beginning, is lost on some conservatives. And because it’s lost, they can’t and won’t tolerate the truth. Because they can’t and won’t tolerate the truth, they search for other motives for truth-telling, malevolent motives that are cynically political, having nothing to do with the altruism of correcting an error in our understanding of our history.

That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so sad.

Again, these white conservative men profess love for America, but when pressed, it’s clear they don’t love their country. Not as it was. Not as it is. Not as it may be in the future. And not when the truth does not satisfy clear terms and conditions. They love something else, something unreal. And that’s what’s really being delegitimized — an infatuation with a myth, a fable, a tall-tale that makes them feel oh-so-good.

And even that wouldn’t be so bad if clinging to the myth of America, rather than the fact of it, did not also deny the deep abiding love felt by the people who fought so hard and died so much to be thought of as real Americans. As Adam Serwer said, in a different context, a peculiar irony of our history is that “the American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.”

I’m not suggesting Shapiro and others are taking the American creed for granted. But I am suggesting their patriotism is built on sand. And perhaps they well know it. Indeed, it would be hard not to when compared to black Americans treated so badly and for so long in this country, and who still love America, and make it better.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 August 2019
Word Count: 720
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Donald Trump is concerned about the economy turning sour before the election. He should be. Very. Ten-year Treasury bonds are now yielding less than two-year bonds. That doesn’t happen in good times when 10-year T-notes are yielding more. This “inverted yield curve,” as it’s called, means what should be right-side up is upside down. When that happens, a recession could be on us within a year or so.

But I think we should be mindful of what Trump is really worried about. He’s not worried about the real impact a recession would have on real people. He’s worried about the effectiveness of his lies. Of course, all incumbents worry about economic factors beyond their control affecting reelection prospects. But more than any other president, Trump cares about appearances in toto. Maintaining appearances is maintaining “unreality,” to use Jason Stanley’s term. If the economy contracts, bye-bye unreality. And bye-bye unreality could mean bye-bye President Donald Trump.

Remember: actual policies don’t matter to this president. If they actually mattered, he wouldn’t prosecute a foolish trade war with China. If policies actually mattered, he’d recognize the suffering he’s causing farmers, and stop. But the trade war was never about outcomes. Its outcomes, therefore, don’t matter. The trade war is and always has been about appearances, specifically the appearance of getting tough on “globalists.”

Even when it’s clear that tariffs are boxing farmers out of the world’s largest food market, Trump can lie and deny. He continues saying that China is paying the US Treasury when in fact US consumers are paying more to Chinese importers for Chinese goods. That US farmers continue to support him politically only launders his lies. And trade wars are messy enough that the president can do what he’s best at. When he doesn’t like the message, he never rethinks, because rethinking would mean acting responsibly. When he doesn’t like the message, Trump kills the messenger.

When he can’t kill the messenger, he looks for a scapegoat. As I said, he can’t and won’t be responsible for his own policies, and he can’t and won’t be responsible for his own policies because actual policies don’t matter to him. He’s already blamed Jerome Powell for slowing economic growth though the Federal Reserve chairman has made money as cheap as it’s ever been. If a recession hits, Powell won’t be able to do much to counteract it, because interest rates are already at or close to zero. That’s fine for the president, though. Policies don’t matter. Powell’s future impotence would give Trump all the more reason to blame him, thus maintaining his “unreality.”

But there are only so many scapegoats. Depending on a recession’s severity, most of the people are going to look to Trump as someone with solutions or someone to blame. It’s debatable whether Republicans vote for their economic interests, but we do know Trump’s approval rating was never as low as it was during the government shutdown earlier this year. The president dug a hole but kept on digging until in the end popular recognition that the shutdown was his fault forced him to quit. It was then that Trump’s “unreality” stopped working for him. It was then that he lost.

We normally think of presidents and the economy in plain political terms. When times are good, people praise the president (whoever it is). When times are bad, people blame him. I think this is good enough but we’re missing something if we stop there.

Trump wouldn’t be in trouble only because of a recession. Republican voters, which are his only supporters right now, may not vote according to their economic interests. (As I said, farmers say they still support him.) Trump would be in big trouble, however, if the recession damaged his credibility among Republicans, a reputation built not on outcomes, which don’t matter, but on “unreality.” A recession would end his lies.

That could be the end of Trump.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 August 2019
Word Count: 653
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I, Winston Smith… I mean, Tom Engelhardt… have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, it seems, living one — and I suspect I’ve been living one all my life.

Yes, I recently reread George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984. In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of Oceania, one of three great imperial superpowers left on planet Earth, goes down for the count at the hands of Big Brother. It was perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this planet.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always had a certain fascination for dystopian fiction. It started, I think, with War of the Worlds, that ur-alien-invasion-from-outer-space novel in which Martians land in southern England and begin tearing London apart. Its author, H.G. Wells, wrote it at the end of the nineteenth century, evidently to give his English readers a sense of what it might have felt like to be living in Tasmania, the island off the coast of Australia, and have the equivalent of Martians — the British, as it happened — appear in your world and begin to destroy it (and your culture with it).

I can remember, at perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep; I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and thrilled) to the bone by Wells’ grim vision of civilizational destruction. To put this in context: in 1957, I would already have known that I was living in a world of potential civilizational destruction and that the Martians were here. They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies, the Reds. I would only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.

The world I inhabited was, of course, a post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never before experienced and killing more than 200,000 people. Thirteen years later, I had already become inured to scenarios of the most dystopian kinds of global destruction — of a sort that would have turned those Martians into pikers — as the U.S. and the Soviet Union (in a distant second place) built up their nuclear arsenals at a staggering pace.

Nuclear obliteration had, by then, become part of our everyday way of life. After all, what American of a certain age who lived in a major city can’t remember, on some otherwise perfectly normal day, air-raid sirens suddenly beginning to howl outside your classroom window as the streets emptied? They instantly called up a vision of a world in ashes. Of course, we children had only a vague idea of what had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As we huddled under our desks, hands over heads, “ducking and covering” like Bert the Turtle while a radio on the teacher’s desk blared Conelrad warnings, we knew enough, however, to realize that those desks and hands were unlikely to save us from the world’s most powerful weaponry. The message being delivered wasn’t one of safety but of ultimate vulnerability to Russian nukes. After such tests, as historian Stephen Weart recalled in his book Nuclear Fear, “The press reported with ghoulish precision how many millions of Americans ‘died’ in each mock attack.”

If those drills didn’t add up to living an everyday vision of the apocalypse as a child, what would? I grew up, in other words, with a new reality: for the first time in history, humanity had in its hands Armageddon-like possibilities of a sort previously left to the gods. Consider, for instance, the U.S. military’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) of 1960 for a massive nuclear strike on the Communist world. It was, we now know, meant to deliver more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets, including at least 130 cities. Official, if then secret, estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and probably underestimated the longer term effects of radiation).

In the early 1960s, a commonplace on the streets of New York where I lived was the symbol for “fallout shelters” (as they were then called), the places you would head for during just such an impending global conflagration. I still remember how visions of nuclear destruction populated my dreams (or rather nightmares) and those of my friends, as some would later admit to me. To this day, I can recall the feeling of sudden heat on one side of my body as a nuclear bomb went off on the distant horizon of one of those dreams. Similarly, I recall sneaking into a Broadway movie theater to see On the Beach with two friends — kids of our age weren’t allowed into such films without parents — and so getting a glimpse, popcorn in hand, of what a devastated, nuclearized San Francisco might look like. That afternoon at that film, I also lived through a post-nuclear-holocaust world’s end in Australia with no less than Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire for company.

An All-American Hate Week So my life — and undoubtedly yours, too — has been lived, at least in part, as if in a dystopian novel. And certainly since November 2016 — since, that is, the election of Donald Trump — the feeling (for me, at least) of being in just such a world, has only grown stronger. Worse yet, there’s nothing under the covers by flashlight about The Donald or his invasive vision of our American future. And this time around, as a non-member of his “base,” it’s been anything but thrilling to the bone.

It was with such a feeling growing in me that, all these years later, I once again picked up Orwell’s classic novel and soon began wondering whether Donald Trump wasn’t our very own idiosyncratic version of Big Brother. If you remember, when Orwell finished the book in 1948 (he seems to have flipped that year for the title), he imagined an England, which was part of Oceania, one of the three superpowers left on the planet. The other two were Eurasia (essentially the old Soviet Union) and Eastasia (think: a much-expanded China). In the book, the three of them are constantly at war with each other on their borderlands (mostly in South Asia and Africa), a war that is never meant to be either decisive or to end.

In Oceania’s Airstrip One (the former England), where Winston Smith is a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of lies, of course), the Party rules eternally in a world in which — a classic Orwellian formulation — “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” It’s a world of “inner” Party members (with great privilege), an outer circle like Smith who get by, and below them a vast population of impoverished “proles.”

It’s also a world in which the present is always both the future and the past, while every document, every newspaper, every bit of history is constantly being rewritten — Smith’s job — to make it so. At the same time, documentation of the actual past is tossed down “the memory hole” and incinerated. It’s a world in which a “telescreen” is in every room, invariably announcing splendid news (that might have been terrible news in another time). That screen can also spy on you at just about any moment of your life. In that, Orwell, who lived at a time when TV was just arriving, caught something essential about the future worlds of surveillance and social media.

In his dystopian world, English itself is being reformulated into something called Newspeak, so that, in a distant future, it will be impossible for anyone to express a non-Party-approved thought. Meanwhile, whichever of those other two superpowers Oceania is at war with at a given moment, as well as a possibly mythical local opposition to the Party, are regularly subjected to a mass daily “two minutes hate” session and periodic “hate weeks.” Above all, it’s a world in which, on those telescreens and posters everywhere, the mustachioed face of Big Brother, the official leader of the Party — “Big Brother is watching you!” — hovers over everything, backed up by a Ministry of Love (of, that is, imprisonment, reeducation, torture, pain, and death).

That was Orwell’s image of a kind of Stalinist Soviet Union perfected for a future of everlasting horror. Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre version of 1984. In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity. In some strange fashion, he and his administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of eternal lies), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the Obama legacy and the president’s own discarded statements, disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that are the essence of any of his rallies (“lock her up!,” “send her back!”), and recently the “hate” slaughter of Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian “Hispanic invasion of Texas” engraved in his brain. And don’t forget Big Brother.

In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald’s version of Orwell’s novel, he isn’t watching us every moment of the day and night, it’s we who are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. In what I’ve called the White Ford Bronco presidency, nothing faintly like the media’s 24/7 focus on him has ever been matched. No human being has ever been attended to, watched, or discussed this way — his every gesture, tweet, passing comment, half-verbalized thought, slogan, plan, angry outburst, you name it. In the past, such coverage only went with, say, a presidential assassination, not everyday life in the White House (or at Bedminster, Mar-a-Lago, his rallies, on Air Force One, wherever).

Room 101 (in 2019) Think of Donald Trump’s America as, in some sense, a satirical version of 1984 in crazed formation. Not surprisingly, however, Orwell, remarkable as he was, fell short, as we all do, in imagining the future. What he didn’t see as he rushed to finish that novel before his own life ended makes the Trumpian present far more potentially dystopian than even he might have imagined. In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an accentuated version of just such a forever, a “huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time,” as a document in the book puts it, to “arrest the course of history” for “thousands of years.”

Yes, in 1948, Orwell obviously knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the weaponry that went with them. (In 1984, he even mentions the use of such weaponry in the then-future 1950s.) What he didn’t imagine in his book was a dystopian world not of the grimmest kind of ongoingness but of endings, of ultimate destruction. He didn’t conjure up a nuclear apocalypse set off by one of his three superpowers and, of course, he had no way of imagining another kind of potential apocalypse that has become increasingly familiar to us all: climate change.

Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all, the president who threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea (before falling in love with its dictator). He only recently claimed he could achieve victory in the almost 18-year-old Afghan War “in a week” by wiping that country “off the face of the Earth” and killing “10 million people.” For the first time, his generals used the “Mother of all Bombs,” the most powerful weapon in the U.S. conventional arsenal (with a mushroom cloud that, in a test at least, could be seen for 20 miles), in that same country, clearly to impress him.

More recently, beginning with its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, his administration has started trashing the Cold War-era nuclear architecture of restraint that kept the great-power arsenals under some control. In the process, it’s clearly helping to launch a wildly expensive new nuclear arms race on Planet Earth. And keep in mind that this is happening at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like India and Pakistan (whose politicians are once again at each other’s throats over Kashmir) could create a global nuclear winter and starve to death up to a billion people.

And keep in mind as well that all of the above may prove to be the lesser of Donald Trump’s dystopian acts when it comes to the ultimate future of humanity. After all, he and his administration are, in just about every way imaginable, doing their damnedest to aid and abet climate change by ensuring that ever more carbon will be released into the atmosphere, warming an already over-heated planet further. That’s the very planet on which humanity has, since 1990, burned half of all the fossil fuels ever used. Despite the Paris climate accord and much talk about the necessity of getting climate change under some kind of control, carbon is still being released into the atmosphere at record levels. (Not surprisingly, U.S. emissions began rising again in 2018.)

This summer, amid fierce heat waves in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, as well as the setting of global heat records, with parts of the Arctic literally burning (while heating twice as fast as the world average), with Greenland melting, and the Antarctic losing sea ice in record amounts, some of the predictions of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the relatively distant future already seem to be in sight. As climate scientist Marco Tedesco put it recently, speaking of the Arctic, “We are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now.”

We are, in other words, already on a dystopian planet. With threats to the world’s food supply and the swamping of coastal cities lying in our future, with the migration of previously unheard of populations in that same future, with heat rising to levels that may, in some places, become unbearable, leaving parts of the planet uninhabitable, it is at least possible now to imagine the future collapse of civilization itself.

And keep in mind as well that our own twisted version of Big Brother, that guy with the orange hair instead of the mustache, could be around to be watched for significantly longer, should he win the election of 2020. (His polling numbers have, on the whole, been slowly rising, not falling in these years.)

In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to 2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let’s return for a moment to 1984. As no one who has read Orwell’s book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he’s brutally tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he’s readjusted his mind to fit the Party’s version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but over.

He still has to visit Room 101. As his interrogator tells him, “You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” And that “worst thing” is always adjusted to the specific terrors of the specific prisoner.

So here’s one way to think of where we are at this moment on Planet Earth: Americans — all of humanity, in fact — may already be in Room 101, whether we know it or not, and the truth is, by this steaming summer, that most of us should know it.

It’s obviously time to act on a global scale. Tell that to Big Brother.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Copyright ©2019 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 August 2019
Word Count: 2,718
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After the thwarted gun attack August 10 on a mosque in Norway, an American cartoon from a few days earlier seems acutely perceptive and seriously unfunny. “Can you step to the side?” asks a man wearing a stars and stripes hat to a gun-toting, heavily muscled giant in a red cap emblazoned with a swastika. “I’m trying to spot Muslim and Mexican terrorists.”

The cartoon appeared in USA Today after the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, where the killer allegedly targeted visually distinct Hispanic people he regarded invaders.

It captured the absurdity of the United States’ continuing focus on jihadist terrorism when it is white nationalism that may be the more lethal emerging threat, not just in the United States but across other parts of the Western world. From New Zealand to Norway to North America, white extremism is on the rise.

The seriousness of the threat can be judged from the way it has been described by several former high-ranking American counterterrorism officials. After the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, they issued a statement saying domestic terrorism should be treated “as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11.”

That would make sense. Data compiled by the New America think-tank indicate that Islamist terrorism claimed approximately 104 lives on US soil since 2002. Far-right extremism was responsible for the death of 109 people in the same period.

In other words, the United States and the wider world are faced with not one but two destructive hatreds, each premised on its own perverted logic of a cosmic war for dominance and survival. Both hatreds are converging in terms of toll, their ability to spread terror and online recruiting.

The convergence says something significant. Those who doubt the white nationalist far right is a mortal threat in and to the West or as great a danger as Islamist jihadists must at least accept they are both equally violent.

Both rely on myth-making and historical reinvention. Jihadists say they are fighting to return to a glorious Islamic past. White supremacists reach back into an imagined idea of the Middle Ages, when Europe was wholly white and Christian, had repulsed Muslim efforts to dominate and was thereby a model for 21st-century North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Historian Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” recently noted that it was best not to divide white extremism “into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or antisemitic attacks. True, they are these things but they are also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.”

The jihadists and white extremists differ mainly in terms of area of operation and standard operating procedures. Jihadists operate in locations all over the world and variously employ suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, trucks, knives and guns.

White extremists generally operate in majority-white countries. They use guns to kill those they consider the enemy — Hispanics in El Paso; Muslims in two Christchurch mosques; a Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh; and African-American worshippers in a Charleston church. The man who ploughed his car into a crowd of protesters after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville two years ago was a bit of an aberration. The white extremist’s tool of choice is the gun.

There is one other crucial way in which white nationalism is distinct from jihadism. It may be the stronger of the two. It is seen to be validated by the rhetoric of powerful politicians, not least the US president, Hungary’s prime minister and Italy’s deputy prime minister.

Furthermore, fewer law enforcement resources are devoted to tracking, disrupting and investigating white extremist cells and conspiracies. Punishment is not always easy either, especially in the United States where federal prosecutors are severely limited in how to deal with white nationalist terrorism. Such acts can, at best, be tried as hate crimes because a US statute defines domestic terrorism but carries no penalties.

The white jihadism is a truly terrible force and it is with us.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 August 2019
Word Count: 666
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It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife.

For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported — that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala.

Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he — like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations — was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month — May — of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president’s wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

U.S. actions have Central American consequences Scholars who study migration speak of two key explanations for why human beings leave their homes and migrate: “pull” and “push” factors. Pull factors would include the attractions of a new place, like economic and educational opportunities, religious and political liberties, and the presence there of family, friends, or community members from back home. Push factors driving people from their homes would include war; the drug trade; political, communal, or sexual violence; famine and drought; environmental degradation and climate change; and ordinary, soul-eating poverty.

International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can confer “refugee” status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum in other countries. This area of humanitarian law dates from the end of World War II, a time when millions of Europeans were displaced, forcing the world to adjust to huge flows of humanity. The 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as anyone who has

“a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”

Almost three-quarters of a century later, that legal definition still theoretically underlies U.S. policy toward refugees, but this country has always welcomed some refugees and not others. In the 1980s, for instance, Salvadorans fleeing U.S.-supported death squads had almost no hope of getting asylum here. On the other hand, people leaving the communist island of Cuba had only to put a foot on U.S. territory to receive almost automatic asylum.

Because of its origins in post-war Europe, asylum law has a blind spot when it comes to a number of forces now pushing people to leave their homes. It’s unfortunate that international law makes a distinction, for instance, between people who become refugees because of physical violence and those who do so because of economic violence. A well-founded fear of being shot, beaten, or raped may get you asylum. Actual starvation won’t.

Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from their homes, especially (once again) in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the power of the drug cartels, and climate change — all factors that, in significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.

According to World Bank figures, in 2016 (the latest year available), El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras took second place with 57 per 100,000, while tenth place went to Guatemala, with 27. Mexico wasn’t far behind with 19. (By comparison, with 5.3 per 100,000, the United States was far down the list.)

By any measure, the three Central American nations of what’s sometimes called “the Northern Triangle” are dangerous places to live. Here’s why.

Political repression and violent corruption: Honduras, for example, has long been one of Central America’s poorest and economically most unequal countries. In the 1980s, the United States supported a military-run government there that routinely “disappeared” and tortured its opponents, while the CIA used the country as a training ground for the Contras it backed,who were then fighting the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua (who had recently deposed their own U.S.-backed dictator).

By the turn of this century, however, things were changing in Honduras. In 2006, José Manuel Zelaya became president. Although he’d run on a conservative platform, he promptly launched a program of economic and political reforms. These included free public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.

In 2009, however, a military coup deposed Zelaya, installing Porfirio Lobo in his place. Four of the six officers who staged the coup were graduates of the U.S.’s notorious School of the Americas, where for decades Latin American military officers and police were trained in the ways of repression and torture.

Washington may not have initiated the coup, but within days Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had given it her seal of approval, supporting that power grab in defiance of the Organization of American States. Since then, murder rates have skyrocketed, while corruption and drug trafficking have flourished as the drug cartels and local governing bodies as well as the national government melded into a single countrywide nightmare. In a recent New York Times report, for instance, Sonia Nazario detailed what this has meant just for public transportation where anyone who operates a taxi or a bus must pay a daily tax (double on special days like Christmas) amounting to 30% to 40% of the driver’s income. But this isn’t a government tax. It goes to MS-13, the 18th Street gang (both of which arose in the United States), or sometimes both. The alternative, as Nazario reports, is death:

“Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hondurans working in transportation have been murdered — shot, strangled, cuffed to the steering wheel and burned alive while their buses are torched. If anyone on a bus route stops paying, gangs kill a driver — any driver — to send a message.”

The police, despite having all the facts, do next to nothing. Violence and corruption have only become more intense under Honduras’s current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who returned to office in what was probably a stolen election in 2017. Although the Organization of American States called for a redo, the Trump administration hastily recognized Hernández and life in Honduras continued on its murderous course.

The drug business: Along with coups and Coca-Cola, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is another U.S. import to Central America. Although Donald Trump likes to cast most refugees as dark and dangerous gang members from south of the border, MS-13 had its roots in Los Angeles, California, among Salvadorans who had fled the U.S.-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. When young people who grew up in Los Angeles returned to El Salvador at the end of that country’s civil war, MS-13 went with them. What had begun as a neighborhood street gang created to protect Salvadoran youth from other gangs in that city has now grown into a vast criminal enterprise of its own — as has the 18th Street gang, or Calle 18, which also came out of Los Angeles, following a similar path.

Without a major market for their product, drug cartels would have vastly less power. And we all know where that market lies: right here in the United States. Fifty years of this country’s “war on drugs” turn out to have provided the perfect breeding ground for violent outlaw drug cartels, while filling our own jails and prisons with more inmates than any other country holds. Yet it has done next to nothing to stanch addiction in this country. These days, if they remain in their own lands, many young people in the Northern Triangle face a stark choice between joining a gang and death. Not surprisingly, some of them opt to risk the trip to the U.S. instead. Many could have stayed home if it weren’t for the drug market in this country.

Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: Even if there were no corrupt regimes, no government repression, and no drug wars, people would still be fleeing Central America because climate change has made their way of life impossible. As what the New York Times calls the biggest carbon polluter in history, the United States bears much of the responsibility for crop failures there. The Northern Triangle has long been subject to periods of drought and flooding as part of a natural alternation of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena in the Pacific Ocean. But climate change has prolonged and deepened those periods of drought, forcing many peasants to abandon their subsistence farms. Some in Guatemala are now facing not just economic hardship but actual starvation thanks to a heating planet.

All along a drought corridor that runs from Nicaragua through Guatemala, the problem is a simple lack of water. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports that, in El Salvador, many people now spend their days in search of enough water to keep their families alive. Even where (unsafe) river water is available, the price — in money or sex — extracted by the gangs for using it is often too high for most women to pay, so they are forced to rely on distant municipal taps (if they even exist). While El Salvadorans live with strict water rationing, the U.S.-based multinational Coca Cola remains immune to such rules. That company continues to take all the water it needs to produce and sell its fizzy concoction locally, while pouring foul-smelling effluvia into nearby rivers.

In Honduras, on the other hand, the problem is often too much water, as rising sea levels eat away at both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts, devouring poor people’s homes and small businesses in the process. Here, too, a human-fueled problem is exacerbated by greed in the form of shrimp farming, which decimates coastal mangrove trees that normally help to keep those lands from eroding. Shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States, comes mostly from Southeast Asia and — you guessed it — Central America. Whether it’s shrimp or drugs, the point is that U.S. desires continue to drive devastation in Central America.

As the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate and deepen the climate crisis, Central Americans are literally dying from it. Under international law, however, if they head for the U.S. in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods, they don’t qualify as refugees because they are fleeing not physical but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.

No asylum for you These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention’s definition of “refugee” may no longer get asylum here. The Trump administration doesn’t even want to offer them a chance to apply for it. The president has, of course, called such groups of migrants, traveling together for safety and solidarity, an “invasion” of “very bad people.” And his administration continues to take a variety of concrete steps to prevent non-white refugees of just about any sort from reaching U.S. territory to make such a claim.

His early efforts to deter asylum seekers involved the infamous family-separation policy, in which children who arrived at the border were taken from their parents in an effort to create the sort of publicity that would keep others from coming. An international outcry — and a federal court order — brought an official end to that policy in June 2018. At the time, the government was ordered to return such children to their parents.

As it happened, the Department of Homeland Security proved largely incapable of doing so, because quite often it hadn’t kept decent records of the parents’ names or locations. In response to an ACLU lawsuit listing 2,700 individual children living without their families in this country, the administration acknowledged that, in addition to named children, thousands more fell into that category, lost in what can only laughingly be called “the system.”

You might think that, if the goal were to keep people from leaving their homes in the first place, the Trump administration would do what it could to improve life in the Northern Triangle. If so, however, you would be wrong. Far from increasing humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the administration promptly slashed those funds, ensuring yet more misery and undoubtedly forcing yet more to flee Central America.

Its most recent ploy: to require refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after leaving their own. Because Guatemala lies between Mexico and the rest of the Northern Triangle, that means Salvadorans and Hondurans will officially have to apply there first. President Trump even used the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such an agreement with that country’s outgoing president Jimmy Morales to secretly designate his nation a “safe third country” where migrants could apply for asylum.

There is something more than a little ironic in this, given that the Guatemalan government can’t even offer its own people anything like safety. Significant numbers of them have, of course, been fleeing to Mexico and heading for the U.S. border. Trump’s solution to that problem has been to use the threat of tariffs to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the process frustrating the new administration of president Andres Manuel López Obrador.

On August 1st, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction against that “safe third country” policy, prohibiting its use for the time being. For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the U.S. The administration will certainly fight the injunction in the courts, while doing everything in its power to stop those immigrants in any way it can.

Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from claiming asylum. Historically, family members of those persecuted in their own countries have been eligible to apply, too. At the end of July, Attorney General William Barr announced that “immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.” This is particularly cruel because, to extort cooperation from their targets, drug gangs routinely make — and carry out — threats of rape and murder against family members.

A real crisis There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way — or in any way at all.

It’s time to recognize that the American way of life — our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government’s actions in our regional “backyard” — has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won’t be) our responsibility to solve it.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Copyright ©2019 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 August 2019
Word Count: 2,850
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