Fractured Australian government under intense US and economic pressure

Mike Head

Having barely survived Australia’s July 2 election, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s conservative government has still not been sworn in as the governor-general, the head-of-state, is out of the country. But even before Turnbull names his ministry, the government is wracked by recriminations and rifts, both within his Liberal Party and with its coalition partners, the rural-based National Party.

Turnbull’s bid to break through a protracted political impasse over the imposition of austerity measures by calling a double dissolution election for all members of both houses of parliament severely backfired. Under conditions of rising job losses, widening inequality and mounting hardships facing working-class households, millions of people voted against the three main parties of the political establishment—the Coalition, Labor and the Greens—and for groups that campaigned as anti-elite candidates.

With some close results still to be decided, the Coalition, which previously had 90 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives, has been left with a razor-thin majority of one or possibly two seats. In the Senate, the upper house, the government’s position is even worse. It is far short of a majority, and 10 or 11 “crossbenchers,” mostly right-wing populists, have been elected, compared to eight in the previous Senate.

Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison nevertheless asserted this week that they now have an election “mandate” to push through all the stalled austerity spending cuts—primarily to health, education and welfare—that were contained in the Coalition government’s 2014, 2015 and 2016 budgets. They have immediately faced several political storms.

There is ferocious opposition from within the Liberal Party’s wealthy base to proposed alterations to superannuation rules that would lessen the tax concessions being exploited by the richest layers of society. Turnbull and Morrison unveiled the superannuation changes before the election to give a veneer of “fairness” and “sharing the sacrifice” to measures to slash the budget deficit. This led to such a backlash in the corporate world that the Liberal Party’s funding sources dried up, forcing Turnbull, a multi-millionaire ex-merchant banker, to donate $1 million of his own fortune to the campaign.

Prominent right-wing media commentators and leading conservatives in the government have urged Turnbull to bring into his cabinet Tony Abbott, the former Liberal leader and prime minister whom Turnbull ousted in a party room coup last September. They have warned that unless Abbott is brought into the fold, the government may prove incapable of enforcing the austerity measures being demanded by the financial markets.

Yesterday, the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan wrote: “Now Turnbull leads an underdone government with poor prospects. It has no mandate, no direction, a largely unknown cabinet, a wafer-thin majority, a deeply disgruntled party—both parliamentary and organisational—and an overall lack of political skills.” With “Abbott at his side,” Turnbull would be in a stronger position to withstand the pressures of “having to make big spending concessions to the crossbenches” and “having his base vote eaten by the populist Right.”

As well as being a figurehead for the most socially conservative and right-wing elements in the Liberal Party, Abbott is regarded as more unequivocally committed than Turnbull to joining US-led military interventions, notably directed against China.

At the same time, long-standing tensions between the Liberals and Nationals have been intensified because, while the Liberals lost 13 or 14 seats, the Nationals gained one seat—at the expense of the Liberals. On Wednesday, Turnbull was forced to concede that the Nationals were now entitled to two extra places, as yet unspecified, in the ministry.

Turnbull declared that this would not result in any policy changes, and refused to disclose the details of the new coalition agreement that must be reached between the two parties. Under the previous pact, however, struck last September after Turnbull ousted Abbott, the more protectionist Nationals insisted on numerous concessions, including on family tax benefits and water policy. This time, the Nationals have indicated they will push for a new “rural development bank” to make concessional loans to farmers and for the repudiation of a proposal to tax young foreign backpackers, on whose cheap labour agribusinesses rely to harvest crops.

In this fractured state, the government is under escalating pressure on two main fronts. One is Washington’s call for Australia to join the US in sending warships and planes into the 12-nautical-mile zones around Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea, following this week’s international court ruling rejecting China’s territorial claims.

US Vice President Joe Biden will arrive in Australia on the weekend to place this demand squarely on Turnbull. Thus far, Turnbull’s government has endorsed US provocations, held under the fraudulent banner of “freedom of navigation,” but not matched calls by the opposition Labor Party for similar Australian operations. Tom Switzer, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, stated bluntly in yesterday’s Australian: “Expect Vice-President Joe Biden to lobby hard in Sydney next week when he meets Malcolm Turnbull and senior government officials,”

The other main front is the deteriorating global and Australian economic situation, which has ended the country’s mining boom, and decimated corporate and tax revenues. A debt-fuelled property bubble, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, has made the big banks more vulnerable to a worldwide crash than they were in 2008.

Over the past week, three major credit ratings agencies—Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Fitch and Moody’s—have intervened into the post-election political turmoil, threatening to end Australia’s AAA rating unless the government can enforce deep cuts to social spending. Like S&P last week, Moody’s yesterday drew attention to the failure of consecutive Labor and Coalition governments to deliver on their pledges to eliminate the budget deficit, which has now grown to about $40 billion annually.

“Despite broad political consensus around the desirability of returning the budget balance to surplus, authorities have had difficulty implementing specific measures to achieve this,” Moody’s senior vice-president Marie Diron said.

KPMG, a corporate financial services firm, this week issued a report insisting that the deficit had to be eliminated by reducing spending, not raising taxes. KPMG asserted this required cutting expenditure by up to $13 billion annually, on top of the measures already promised by Turnbull and Morrison, “as difficult politically as this may be.” It advocated further severe cuts to health, education and welfare.

Since the election, Murdoch’s Australian editorials have repeatedly called for Labor to deliver “bipartisan co-operation” so that the austerity offensive can be carried through. On July 12, the newspaper again invoked the bipartisanship that helped the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, backed by the trade unions, to enforce the restructuring of the economy to meet the needs of finance capital during the 1980s and 1990s.

The editorial insisted that the two major parties must “find some consensus on reform to remove political rancour, smooth a way through parliament, repair the budget and render the minor parties and independents impotent on the sidelines.” Labor leader Bill Shorten has already declared his party’s readiness to “be constructive” in the new parliament and to seek “common ground” with the government and other parties.

As the Socialist Equality Party warned throughout the election campaign, once the voting was over, whichever government was formed, the real agenda of austerity and militarism would be brought forward. Those warnings have been quickly vindicated, underscoring the need for workers and youth to turn to the socialist and internationalist perspective fought for by the SEP.

Global trade stagnates amid wave of protectionism

Nick Beams

Recent months have seen a series of warnings from the World Trade Organisation and other international bodies on the slowdown in world trade and the rise of protectionism. But according to Global Trade Alert (GTA), an organisation that monitors protectionism, the situation is much worse than previously estimated.

A report issued by the GTA on Wednesday said the term “slowdown” created the impression that, while it is losing momentum, world trade is still growing and one country’s exports do not come at the expense of others. These “rosy impressions” should be set aside because its analysis revealed that world export volume reached a plateau at the beginning of 2015. World trade was not only slowing down, but not growing at all.

The GTA says it constructed a detailed dataset in preparation for the report that showed that world export volumes came in at markedly lower rates than those of other organisations, including the International Monetary Fund, the WTO and the World Bank.

According to its calculations, falling commodity prices could not account for the fall in the value of world trade in 2015 because they had recovered partially in the last quarter of 2015. The total value of capital goods also fell in the first half of last year and then plateaued, as did consumer goods. It noted that, except for periods of recession, the “plateau” of 15 months stagnation, which affects both advanced economies and emerging markets alike, is “practically unheard of since the Berlin Wall fell.”

There were falls in world trade following the collapse of the dot-com boom in the early 2000s and the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008. But the fact that the current stagnation has lasted for 15 months “highlights how unusual it is when compared to the global trade dynamics we have witnessed over the past quarter of a century.”

“With every additional month of data confirming a global trade plateau, the odds lengthen that the current global trade dynamics are a temporary pause, a soon-to-be reversed cyclical phenomenon, or a statistical freak.”

The general trend is widening. In its report last year, the GTA noted that 28 product groups had each accounted for 0.5 percent or more of the fall in the value of world trade. This has now increased to 38.

The stagnation in global trade is being accompanied by a rise in protectionist measures. Tracking the total number of trade liberalising and protectionist measures since 2009, the report said the results were “striking,” with the number of discriminatory measures imposed in 2015 some 50 percent higher than in 2014. By this measure, the resort to protectionism last year was “far higher” than in 2009 “when world leaders openly fretted about threats to the global trading system.”

The steel industry is the most prominent expression of this trend. According to the report, the number of discriminatory measures implemented in 2015 was 118, exceeding the two worst years since the financial crisis, 2009 and 2013. Since November 2008 a total of 740 measures had been documented in the steel industry discriminating against foreign interests with the number of such measures outnumbering liberalising measures by a ratio of 4.5 to 1.

The shift towards protectionism goes across the board. The use of protectionist measures overall in 2015 was up by 50 percent over that of 2014 and the number of initiatives harming foreign commercial interests outnumbered trade liberalisation measures in 2015 by three to one. Since 2010, in the first four months of each year, between 50 and 100 protectionist measures were implemented. In the first two months of 2016 the figure was 150.

Significantly, in the light of its repeated declarations eschewing protectionism and warnings about the descent into the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour policies that characterized the 1930s, the report pointed out that members of the G20 were responsible for 81 percent of protectionist measures in 2015, with the United States and Russia topping the list of countries most responsible.

The report warned that a “negative feedback loop” could develop where zero trade growth fuelled the resort to ever-more protectionist measures, leading to a further decline in trade. While the report did not draw out the implications of its warning, they are clear. It was such a feedback loop that developed in the 1930s, intensifying the Great Depression and ultimately leading to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

The ever-more aggressive trade policies of the major powers, especially the US, were underscored within a day of the GTA’s report release with the decision by president Obama that he was initiating a formal complaint against China over nine key industrial commodities which the US says are being unfairly priced for American manufacturers.

The Financial Times noted that the formal complaint to be lodged with the WTO took place as both his potential successors, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton “push the domestic political debate in an increasingly protectionist direction on the campaign trail.” It said the action had been undertaken to counter claims that the administration had been “weak on China” and was part of a push to step up trade actions against Beijing.

The rising tide of economic nationalism in the US was evident in a speech delivered by vice-president Joseph Biden in San Diego on Thursday on the latest initiative. He said the Obama administration had issued more than 300 antidumping actions, launched 62 trade investigations last year and would continue to be aggressive in trade enforcement.

In a definite pitch towards the strident economic nationalism at the centre of the Trump campaign, he said “not all the effects of globalisation” were good but Americans had always “bent reality to the benefit of Americans.”

Saudi Arabia and the Challenges Ahead

Fariborz Saremi

Since the 2003 Iraq war and especially the wake of the Arab spring ,Saudi Arabia is going through an identity crisis. There is growing unrest among many youth who no longer tolerate living in servitude and oppression. They want and need more freedom, and civil rights.

With the eruption of the Arab spring the government spent $ 130 billion dollars to silence the opposition. Any political opposition is quelled by force, and punishments for crimes such as blasphemy, sorcery and apostasy are gruesome and carried out publicly. In 2015 alone, 157 people were beheaded, and more than 90 have been executed thus far in 2016.

With estimated oil reserves of 270 billion barrels, the fall of oil prices has had an unprecedented effect on the Saudi economy. The oil crisis has inflicted major economic disruption, forced the government to cut subsidies and curtail many development projects and reduced its international stature and ability to exert influence over the Arab states.

There is massive inequality between the various classes. Nearly one fifth of the population lives in poverty, especially in the predominantly Shiite South where ironically much of the oil reserves are located. While the poor are getting poorer, thousands of princes and princess live lavishly mostly in Europe spending hundreds of millions of dollars and occupying villas which further drains economic resources.

The relationship between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran has always been characterized by tension and mistrust. The quiet enmity came to the fore in the wake of the 2003 Iraq war and the growing influence of Tehran over the Shiite Iraqi government.

This was further aggravated with the eruption of the civil war in Syria, where Iran supported the Assad Regime with money, military equipment, training and subsequently foot soldiers while the Saudis provided similar aid to the rebels opposed to Assad and radical Sunni forces fighting Assad.

The enmity between the two countries took another turn for the worse when it was suspected that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, which Riyadh viewed as a direct threat to its national security.

The execution of Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al Nimr an icon who called for addressing human rights violations in Saudi Arabia was charged with incitement and treason and sentenced to death with 46 others further deepened the animosity between the countries. Although Saudi Arabia and the United States have enjoyed decades of close bilateral relations, the relationship has soured over the geostrategic and geopolitical interests of the US in the Middle East,its deal with Iran .

Saudi Arabia must face these challenges head on and avoid what might become an albatross that would choke off its potential to be a significant player in and outside the region.

Dire Predictions

Gene Glickman

This is being drafted on the eve of the 2016 Republican Convention. It is an attempt at a cold-blooded look at the balance of forces in the United States and the conclusions it comes to are not pretty. The author of these predictions hopes he is wrong but fears he is correct. I’m avoiding “dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s” in this essay. I’m keeping it short to insure that the reader will to read it to its end.

Let’s start off with the quadrennial hysteria called “U.S. Democracy in Action” – the presidential elections. What will be the outcome of these elections? The likelihood is that Trump will be the candidate of the Republican Party and Clinton will be the Democratic standard-bearer. There are other scenarios that will be considered, but, in the long run, they all add up to pretty much the same fraught conclusion.

But let’s first consider the most likely scenario – a Trump vs. Clinton contest. The odds are that, with the Republican Party divided, Trump will lose badly, this, despite the fact that Clinton is not liked and considered untrustworthy by huge swaths of the electorate. We already see the first signs of this in Trump’s inability to raise necessary campaign funds. Jill Stein, the beneficiary of the disaffected Bernie supporters may attract perhaps ten percent of the vote. This would be a huge improvement for the Green Party, but will not, by any stretch of the imagination, alter the outcome – a Clinton victory.

What will be the response of the Republican base – predominantly white, disaffected, working- and middle-class men – to Trump’s defeat? Here is likely to be their immediate reaction: They’re already pissed off because of their belief that “they are losing America” to the Establishment, the well-educated, people of color, immigrants, the big corporations who are moving the good jobs overseas, etc., etc. Thus, their initial reaction is likely to be fury – rage against the “RINOs” (Republicans in name only) who sold them out by refusing to do their all to support Trump’s bid for the presidency.

And their long-term reaction? They will perceive that, despite Trump’s popularity, he did not have enough support throughout the country to win an election. Their inclination will probably be to dispense with an electoral approach in favor of one that will remind us of the German brown shirts – a coming-together of all the already-existing disparate right-wing forces into a full-blown-fascist movement. The gun clubs, militias, Klan offshoots, Tea Partiers, NRA supporters will say to themselves that they’ll have to dispense with their undependable “moderate” allies, organize themselves more tightly and prepare to take over the country by extra-legal means, if necessary.

And what will a Clinton presidency be like? She’ll undoubtedly retreat forthwith from her Sanders-like pseudo-populism and return to her true colors, those of a neo-liberal. She’ll support TPP, give a few salves to some strata of the working class, conduct a hawk-like foreign policy, increasing tensions with Russia and China, and keep us embroiled in old and new wars in the Middle East. Interventions in Latin America are possible, as well.

In the mean time, many of the former Sanders supporters will be attempting to build a movement. It will grow, maybe even becoming a mass movement, but it is unlikely to reach the strength of the well-organized former Trump supporters, now preparing to take power in a quasi-military coup. The Left will be fatally compromised by racial divisions, its torn loyalties to the two-party tradition, the left of the Democratic Party, the first woman president and the power of the Democratic machine, with Bernie, now reduced to impotence as merely one of a hundred senators and compromised by his lukewarm support of Hillary Clinton.

This is the most likely scenario. What are the alternatives? Now that Hillary will not be indicted (the rigged Democratic campaign continues apace) there are only two: A) Trump will not get the Republican nomination, after all. B) Trump will be nominated and win the election. Let’s consider each of them.

If the Republican establishment pulls off a coup by changing the Convention rules at the last minute, it is doubtful that a different Republican candidate could eke out a win in the general election. Firstly, the Trump supporters will continue to be pissed off, only now their initial focus will be the RINOs. They’ll be likely to sit out the election, making a Clinton victory all the more likely. The Democrats will be energized by the Republican split, making them more formidable. But the long-term effects are not likely to be different from those already outlined. The right-wing will still mobilize, divorce itself from the Republican Party and form extra-legal mechanisms designed to take power.

Let’s look at the other possibility – a Trump victory at the polls. What would a Trump presidency look like? First of all, it’s likely that his narcissism and shoot-from-the-hip mentality will produce an incoherent start to his presidency. Eventually the Republican establishment, and maybe even Trump himself, will realize this and they will coalesce around an extremely right-wing populist, but non-fascist agenda. What will be the outcome of this scenario? It is unpredictable, but very likely to be the prelude to a fascist takeover, probably because the fascist base of the Republican Party will grow stronger and come to dominate it.

In the mean time, with any of these three scenarios, what will the Left be doing? It will be growing stronger. The coming together of the youth will be accompanied by its self-education. It will come to the conclusion that capitalism, either under Clinton or under Trump, is not working and needs to be replaced. Their older and more experienced brothers and sisters will be heartened by this influx into the ranks and become more militant themselves.

Now, I’ll take a moment to lay out my view of fascism. To me, fascism comes about when the façade of democracy is found to be unable to maintain the power and control of the ruling capitalist elite and the rule of capital itself needs to be maintained by naked force. Thus, it is simultaneously a sign of the weakness of capitalism and yet its still-enduring strength.

What will be the balance of forces then? I’m afraid it will lie with the forces of reaction. The Left will not yet have come into its own; it will be searching for what sort of post-capitalist polity it is seeking; it will still be trying to decide what organizational structures will reflect its new-found political/economic goals, even assuming these goals have been determined. The Right will have a simpler problem: what to do about the rising Left? Luckily for them the solution is more realizable: repress the Left through legal and extra-legal means, whichever is more convenient. Similar treatment will be meted out to the supporters of the undocumented, but it’s likely that the undocumented themselves not be deported, since they’ll be needed to do the work.

This, then, is the grim future I see. I’m writing this now in the hopes that, if my insights are correct, we on the left can be forewarned and thus forearmed. If we can prepare well enough, we might be able to forestall an attempted right-wing coup or even defeat it.

Cyberspace: The New Field for War in the XXI Century

Cesar Chelala

The use of cyberspace as a tool of war has changed the nature of conventional warfare. This not only poses problems in terms of how to respond to those threats but also how to develop agreements among countries to curtail its use.
Richard A. Clarke, former counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council defined “cyberwarfare” in his book Cyber War as “actions by a nation state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption.”

The Lipman Report, which offers insights from private sources on national security risks, warns that several sectors of the U.S. economy are seriously endangered, including cyber threats to public and private facilities, banking and finance, education and government, and other sectors which depend on computers for daily operations.

“The United States is ill-prepared to defend itself from cyber espionage when its adversary is determined, centrally coordinated, and technically sophisticated, as is China’s government,” stated a U.S. Congressional advisory body in November 2015.

Cyber attacks can wreck havoc in a country’s defense system and on its economy. One of the best known incidents was perhaps the one caused on Iran’s centrifuges by the Stuxnet worm in its Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, which probably delayed its nuclear development activities by several months. Many consider this worm the most advanced piece of its kind, one that significantly increases the profile of cyberwarfare.

“We have entered into a new face of conflict in which we use a cyberweapon to create physical destruction, and in this case, physical destruction in someone else’s critical infrastructure,” declared Ret. Gen. Michael Hayden to the CBS’s 60 minutes. Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, acknowledges that he knows more about the attack on Iran than he is willing to discuss publicly.

There are also potential problems with this kind of warfare, however. Malware modeled after Stuxnet could also be used to target critical infrastructure in the U.S. such as electrical power grids and water-treatment plants, in addition to Department of Defense facilities and banks. All these actions could adversely affect security installations and cause enormous economic damages.

According to Defense officials, Pentagon computers are targeted about 5,000 times per day. Although so far the extent of the damage has been controlled, there are no assurances that in the future this kind of activity may not cause significant and long-lasting effects. In a public notice, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has alerted that the U.S. electrical grid is exposed to cyberattacks, which could cause enormous damage.

In this regard, Richard A. Clarke stated to National Public Radio (NPR), “We’re probably doing things on lot of networks around the world to get ready for cyberwar, and yet we don’t have a military strategy that has been shared with the Congress or the public. And I suspect we don’t really have a military strategy at all.” And he added, “We have extremely good cyber-offensive capabilities – and almost nothing in the way of cyberdefense.”

Because the U.S. has proved unable to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks, a U.S. Congressional group has suggested that U.S.-based companies “hack back” to recover stolen data, making these attacks more costly to carry out. U.S. laws don’t allow corporations or private citizens to carry out retaliatory cyberattacks.

China, along with Russia, Iran and North Korea have reportedly developed plans to disrupt the critical infrastructure of electrical grids, water purification plants, air traffic control units, subways systems and telecommunications.
The real dilemma is how to reach international agreements to limit military attacks in cyberspace. A Ukrainian professor of international law, Alexander Merezhko, has developed a project, the International Convention on Prohibition of Cyberwar in Internet, and an American General, Keith B. Alexander believes that talks should be carried out between the U.S. and Russia on ways to avoid military attacks in cyberspace.

In September 2015, President Barak Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping, agreed that neither country would carry out cybertheft of intellectual property for commercial gains. They also agreed to work together with other countries to establish international rules for conduct in cyberspace. Unless agreements among the leading world powers are reached soon, the consequences on international commerce and world peace will be devastating.

The Infinite Sadness of Syria

Robert Fisk

Syria is a place of wounds. Flesh wounds, mental wounds, wounds of the memory. The scars settle like a tissue over every conversation. Perhaps that’s why the market in western Aleppo is still packed each evening and the road outside the old Baron hotel jammed with traffic – because pretence of normality is the best cure for a front line that runs straight through the brain. Like the man who told me that the war had so framed his daily life – ensuring the washing machine would end its cycle before the scheduled power cuts, listening to the news each hour with the passion of an addict, calling friends after air raids – that his greatest fear was that peace would break out.

Many people feel like this. In Aleppo, some in the government-held west of the city watch the two Syrian opposition TV channels, one broadcasting from Turkey and the other from Dubai, to learn about the barrel bombs and the new “snake” bombs – explosives in tubes, a weapon originally designed to destroy mine-fields in earth revetments – which are dropped by the regime on both rebel and civilian targets in Nusrah or Isis-controlled areas. Perhaps this makes sense of the Nusrah mortars that fall across military and civilian targets in western Aleppo.

There are moments of unexpected, infinite sadness. In a military prison in Damascus, a 34-year old Muslim who wanted to be an Islamist fighter breaks down in tears as he tells us how he lied to his wife, informing her that he was going to Moscow to earn money for their family in Kyrgyzstan. Instead of going to Russia, he headed for Syria to make “jihad” but rather than sending him to the front, Sukrat Baba Jan’s colleagues from Chechnya forced him to be a cook. His was a familiar story, lured on by internet calls for a “holy war” in Syria and a well-organised system of villas for newly arrived “jihadis” already set up on the other side of the Turkish border.

But when Baba Jan called his wife from rebel-held Syria, she begged him for money. When was he coming home from Moscow? Now he is in the hands of the Syrian army and she is still waiting for Baba Jan to send her money from Russia. He has a six-year old child called Abdul-Rahman, he says. I ask his wife’s name.

“Hafiza,” he replies, and breaks down in tears. “I cannot remember her last name.” This cannot be true. He does not want us to contact her. She thinks he is still in Moscow. And he sobs away in misery. A lost soul.

And then there is the young Syrian soldier on the front line north of Aleppo who tells me that his parents are in the besieged Isis-held town of Manbij. Remember Manbij, which the American-supported Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” were just about to capture in May, but which mysteriously remained uncaptured – and thus unreported ever afterwards? It’s Kurdish rather than Syrian, definitely not “democratic” and has no “force” unless US planes bomb its enemies. The Syrian soldier has managed to call his mother and father on the phone just once in three years. He fears that Isis will destroy the town. “We spoke very vaguely, I said I was well and unhurt. I could say no more. They couldn’t say anything either. But they heard my voice. Yes, they know I am a soldier.”

The teenager’s commander, Major Hassan, is not unhurt. He has been wounded four times – first by a bullet in Hama, then by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade in Homs, third by a bullet in Sheikh Sayeed, and then by a mine explosion under his car. He shows me a photograph of his almost severed leg poking from beneath the wreckage – and now he has a prosthetic left leg. But he begged to stay in the army and now he is a Syrian special forces officer liaising with the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Iranians on the front lines.

He talks of the 300 religious television channels in the Arab world, of which only three are educational, the rest dedicated to “wash the minds” of the young. “These [religious] people use technology for the wrong purpose. The internet and social media serve their purpose. This is sufficient to throw up the suicide bombers.”

Then Major Hassan changes the subject. He talks of his wife’s love, how she nursed him and believed in his future even when he started a course of 42 operations – and even after his brother was shot in the back defending the besieged Koyeress airbase; his brother will never walk again. But Major Hassan drives himself round the front in the ruins of the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City, jumping down from parapets on his peg-leg. “I so love my wife because I got my strength back through her power,” he says.

But the Syrian war provokes far earlier memories. Take the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblat who has always blamed President Bashar al-Assad’s late father Hafez al-Assad for his own father Kamal’s assassination in Lebanon in 1977. Walid Jumblat now constantly demands the overthrow of Bashar, and in a recent speech recalled how he travelled to Damascus less than two months after Kamal’s murder to meet Hafez al-Assad, the man he was convinced ordered his father’s own death.

“Geopolitics dictates unavoidable choices so, after the 40th day [of death, when families again receive condolences], I took the road to Damascus,” Jumblat said. “I climbed the steps of the presidential palace – in those days a modest building below Mount Qassioun – and arrived on the first floor where a door opened onto a sparsely furnished room which contained the descendant of the Old Man of the Mountain – Hafez el-Assad himself. In walking to greet me, he fixed me with his small, intense black eyes in which I thought I could see the shadows of a terrible past. And he exclaimed, with apparent surprise: ‘How you resemble Kamal Jumblat!’”

Thirty nine years after Jumblat’s visit to Damascus, however, the city remains safely in his son’s hands and Bashar al-Assad’s army has not collapsed as the regime’s enemies predicted.

By chance, I met again a few days ago a Syrian general whose soldier son was killed in Homs and who was wounded by shrapnel in the battle with Isis to retake Palmyra this year. He sat under the shade of a wrecked house, close to the spot where almost 2,000 years earlier, another military man, the Emperor Diocletian, had built a camp for the 1st Legion after Palmyra had rebelled against Roman rule.

In present day Palmyra, the general – Fouad is his real name – was already thinking about the future.

“Yes,” he said, “after the war, the rebuilding will start, even political rebuilding, even military reconstruction.” It all sounded a bit Roman. And then, he suddenly admitted after much questioning: “I will write a book!” Essential reading, I imagine.

How This Became the Era of the Gunman

John Feffer

Every era has its representative figure. The Neolithic era had the Farmer. The avatar of the Middle Ages was the Monk, bent over an illuminated manuscript. For the period before and after 1492, the Explorer captured the global imagination. During the Industrial Revolution, the Worker embodied the age of manufacturing.

And now we have the Gunman.

The Gunman is everywhere. He is a soldier. He is a policeman. He might be a right-wing extremist or a caliphate-inspired jihadi. He might be a survivalist atop a well-stocked bunker or a settler in occupied territory. He might be a maniac with no motivation other than mayhem. Or he might just be the middle-class dad next door who wants to protect his family. But he’s usually a guy. Reports of a surge in U.S. women owning guns are largely anecdotal: Gunmen still outnumber gunwomen three to one.

Shortly after the Orlando shootings, I was driving to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant with my wife’s high school friend when I made a passing comment about the need to ban assault rifles. To my surprise, this otherwise liberal fellow begged to differ. Then he pointed out that he had three guns in the back of his MINI Cooper. Everyone is coming out of the closet these days, so why not gunmen?

Guys with guns dominate the headlines. Young armed men are dispensing death in public places in service of any number of philosophies (racism, homophobia, the Islamic State, misanthropy). Meanwhile, the American police force has been conducting a veritable war against African-American men: 248 black men died last year at the hands of the police, 36 of them unarmed. Also last year, 42 police officers died by gunfire, a 14 percent decline over the previous year. This year, however, the numbers are rising. Including last week’s shooting in Dallas, 26 police have been shot and killed in 2016. Overall, there were 372 mass shootings in the United States in 2015, and an astonishing 13,286 people died by gunshot.

In this war on the American streets, it can be difficult to know who is on what side. In Dallas last week, when Micah Johnson killed five cops, he wasn’t the only civilian with a gun in the vicinity. According to the Dallas mayor, more than 20 men in camouflage gear with rifles started to scatter when Johnson opened fire. Texas, after all, is an open-carry state.

Instead of implementing gun control measures in the wake of Dallas and Orlando and all the other recent outbreaks of firearm violence, Congress has deadlocked on the mildest of reforms. Gun sales, meanwhile, are up.

The number of households possessing guns has actually declined to around one in three, but not the overall number of guns in circulation. The average gun owner now possesses eight guns, twice as many as 20 years ago. The United States ranks number one in the world in per capita gun ownership: an astounding 112 guns per 100 residents. The next closest is Serbia at 75 (engulfed by war in the 1990s), followed by Yemen at 54 (engulfed by war today).

Guns have become the new smartphone: an indispensable accessory for the modern age. I fear that one day a pop-up window will appear in my browser advertising the new iFirearm (iGun is already taken).

Apple’s latest creation will come loaded with apps, like one that tells you all the establishments that welcome customers who are packing heat. Siri will inform you from a little speaker in the handle about the nearest location of an active shooting — and you can decide whether to run in the opposite direction or head toward the bloodshed waving your firearm.

I can even envision a deadly new reality series based on that app: Who Wants to be a Hero? (Of course, despite the exhortations of Donald Trump, the NRA, and others to add rather than subtract guns from a mass shooting, the police recommend that if you have a firearm and you’re at the scene of a shooting, you should keep it holstered — or else the police will take you for the gunman.)

I used to think that the United States was backwards when it came to gun control, that we still lived by an archaic frontier ethos of Lawman versus Outlaw. Some day we would grow up, put away our childish things, and join the civilized world of the Europeans and Japanese.

But perhaps they are the anachronisms. Perhaps it will soon become as futile to resist the spread of guns as it was to ignore Facebook and Twitter. Even Europe is not immune from the trend. The Gunman has turned up in Norway (Anders Breivik) and England (Thomas Mair). Gunmen have terrorized France and Belgium. So far in 2016,according to Vice, mass shootings have taken place in Serbia, Cyprus, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and multiple times in Russia.

Of course it’s worse elsewhere. Some countries have completely succumbed to the lawlessness of the frontier — Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia — where everyone “guns up” in order to survive. Africa and Latin America are home to numerous “murder capitals” such as Caracas, San Salvador, and Cape Town. Just like at the OK Corral, the Lawman battles the Outlaw in these violent lands.

Having intervened militarily in the crescent of crisis stretching from Central Asia to North Africa, the United States has fancied itself the Lawman upholding the principles of international law. But in reality, Washington has more frequently acted as the Outlaw, squeezing the trigger in extrajudicial executions (through drone strikes), causing the collateral damage of civilian deaths, and invading countries on dubious pretexts.

During previous wars — in Korea, in Vietnam — the Gunman at home and the Gunman abroad were involved in two separate enterprises. Today, however, the two worlds are beginning to collide.

The War at Home

Micah Johnson, a product of the JROTC program, enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2009. His engineer brigade deployed to Afghanistan in 2013. He received an honorable discharge as a result of a deal involving a sexual harassment charge. He apparently didn’t see any combat in Afghanistan, but he continued to conduct his own military training stateside, becoming an expert marksman.

Angered by the recent spate of police killings of African Americans, he set up in a location overlooking a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas and killed five police officers.

Two of the five officers had also served overseas in the military, while a third had worked for a private military contractor. This is not exactly a coincidence. Police forces in the United States are the logical employment for ex-soldiers. It’s hard to find precise statistics, since police departments don’t release this information. But The Dallas Morning News reported in 2015 that hundreds of Dallas police officers are military veterans and 119 are active reserve members (out of approximately 3,600 officers), which tracks with the 15-20 percent of each academy class who are former soldiers.

Over the last few years, large numbers of combat troops have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq and are looking to return to civilian life. The federal government decided to address high unemployment among veterans and the staffing needs of police forces by directing resources to the preferential hiring of former military in law enforcement.

The convergence of the war abroad and the war at home is not simply one of overlapping personnel. Police departments increasingly resemble the U.S. military. SWAT teams look like invading forces. Surplus military equipment, like grenade launchers and armored personnel carriers, has transformed police officers into battlefield warriors. Even robot-controlled bombs, like the one that killed Micah Johnson, threaten to turn the terrain of American cities into something more closely resembling Baghdad.

It’s not the military veterans, however, who are necessarily behind the more gung-ho attitude among police. Writes one officer:

I worked with a lot of guys who were combat veterans from the Vietnam era, and they certainly didn’t have anything to prove to anybody. They were probably less likely to get involved in violent confrontations than the types of cops I see nowadays, most of whom do not have a military background, and some who are acting out, at least to some degree, video game fantasies about being a bad ass.

If you throw together a large number of combat-hardened veterans with cocky video-game-trained recruits, add a new array of firepower, and round it out with training programs designed by former military contractors, it’s no surprise that our police forces have begun to operate as if they’re in a war zone. SWAT teams conduct raids like they’re breaking down doors in Afghanistan — tens of thousands of them every year. The police approach young black men as if they are potential terrorists with concealed weapons and intent to kill.

From a statistical standpoint, it’s a mystery why police departments believe that bulking up is necessary. Violent crime in America has not simply declined, but declined dramatically (by half between 1991 and 2013). Of course, the federal government has made it practically free for municipalities to get all this war gear, which they would need, if at all, only in worst-case scenarios.

But the real reason for this arms race is fear.

The Fear

The war abroad and the war at home are both fueled by the same fear of encroaching chaos. In an invaluable New Yorker article by Evan Osnos, here’s how David Grossman, the author of On Combat, describes his post-apocalyptic vision:

He predicted that terrorists will detonate a nuclear weapon on a boat off the coast of the United States, and that they will send people infected with diseases — “suicide bio bombers” — across the border from Mexico. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what’s next, folks: school-bus and day-care massacres.” Eventually, he wound his way to the solution: concealed carry. “There is a time, in the first five to ten minutes in every one of these events, when one or two well-trained people with a concealed weapon can rise from the entire pack.” Americans, Grossman told us, must accommodate to a future of “armed people everywhere.”

Armed people everywhere: Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. The NRA is selling guns to people worried about “armed people everywhere” and thereby creates its own worst nightmare (or perhaps its own largest potential membership).

But note how closely Grossman links terrorists attacking the U.S. homeland with the worst fear of American families: They will go after our children. Grossman knows that parents will do practically anything to defend their children, who have nothing but stuffed animals and schoolbooks to defend against men with assault rifles. But parents can’t be there all the time.

With that in mind, gun manufacturers have been marketing firearms to youth in an effort to arm the next generation. Well, it took a while for smart phones to reach the pre-teen set. If assault weapons indeed form an indispensible part of making America great again, then why wait for kids to vote or drink before they start training to take out potential enemies?

These fears of attack have always contained an undercurrent of racism, a suspicion that those with brown or black skin (from the Middle East, from over the border, from the ghetto) want “what’s ours.” The initial spike in gun sales in the United States for something other than hunting dates back to 1992 and the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, according to former gun salesman and economic historian Mike Weisser:

“It was the first time that you could see a live riot on video while it was going on,” Weisser said. “They had a helicopter floating around when a white guy pulled up to the intersection. These black guys pull him out of the truck and are beating the shit out of him right below that helicopter.” The new market for self-defense guns was born, Weisser said, and it was infused with racial anxiety.

The marriage of racism and guns has necessarily generated its own armed response. During the civil rights movement, as a number of recent books have documented, anti-racism activists often resorted to carrying and using firearms to protect themselves and fight back against a determined and armed adversary.

Akinyele Omowale Umoja took the title of his book We Will Shoot Back from Charles Evers, who replaced his murdered brother Medgar as the state field secretary of the NAACP: “We made up our minds…that if a white man shoots at a Negro in Mississippi, we will shoot back.” Charles Cobb traces a much longer tradition of bearing arms in This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible: “Armed self-defense (or, to use a term preferred by some, ‘armed resistance’) as part of black struggle began not in the 1960s with angry ‘militant’ and ‘radical’ young Afro-Americans, but in the earliest years of the United States as one of African people’s responses to oppression.”

As long as the police continue to kill young black men, the People’s New Black Panther Party’s message — “We want every black man and woman throughout the country to legally arm themselves,” according to the Dallas chapter head — will resonate with anyone familiar with this historical tradition. Without radical reform, the police will lose the trust of the community. Loss of faith in governance over all will surely follow.

Gun Versus Computer

The avatars of earlier eras — the Farmer, the Monk, the Explorer, the Worker — represented the cutting edge of society. They heralded a powerful social transformation. They each sparked a revolution.

The comparable figure for our era should be the software engineer. Computers have indeed transformed the way we live.

But the gun, a much older technology, threatens to turn back the clock. The NRA and criminal cartels and the Islamic State are all pushing for their own revolution that will put guns in the hands of everyone. If they succeed, governance will end, and states will fail. In a war of all against all, the Gunman will take law into his own hands.

And we human beings, who started out as hunters and gatherers so many millennia ago, will end up in this benighted age as hunters and hunted.

A Prayer for Peace in Ukraine

Halyna Mokrushyna

An all-Ukrainian cross procession for peace, initiated by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate -MP), is taking place in Ukraine. Many thousands of people have joined the procession in the polarized regions of eastern and western Ukraine in an expression of peace, civil reconciliation and an end to the civil war that has wracked eastern Ukraine. The procession started from two opposite parts of Ukraine. In the East, processioners departed from the Holy Assumption Sviatohirsk Lavra in Donetsk region (approximately 150 km to the north of Donetsk city) on July 3. On July 9, another procession started in Western Ukraine, from the Holy Assumption Pochaiv Lavra in Ternopil region. The two processions will meet in Kyiv on July 26, 2016. They will join on Vladimir Hill and will walk together to Holy Assumption Kyiv-Pecherska Lavra, where solemn masses will be held.

A lavra is a monastery of the highest rank in the Eastern Orthodox Church. There are three lavras in Ukraine, belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (MP). That is why this cross procession is highly symbolic and will unite Ukraine – pilgrims from the east and from the west will walk through all Ukraine, congregating in Kyiv, the heart of Ukraine.

Cross processions of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (MP) have been held in Ukraine every year, to commemorate the baptism of Kievan Rus by Grand Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr in Ukrainian) in the year 988. To avoid frictions between believers belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and Kyiv Patriarchate, Kyiv city authorities decided to split celebrations in Kyiv into two days – on July 27 Orthodox parishioners of Moscow Patriarchate walk in procession through Kyiv, and the next day, on July 28, the parishioners of Kyiv Patriarchate do it.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate emerged in 1992 as the result of a schism within Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This was an effort to create an independent, truly ‘Ukrainian’ Orthodox church. Prior to 1992, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church existed within the Moscow Patriarchate as a self-governing church with the rights of wide autonomy, which it preserves today. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate is headed by Patriarch Filaret, a former Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In 1995, he proclaimed himself “Patriarch of Kyiv and of all Rus-Ukraine”. In 1997 he was excommunicated from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate for his schismatic actions.

According to the 2011 data of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) remains the largest in Ukraine. It has 12,340 parishes, 191 monasteries and employs 9,922 clerics. By contrast, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate has 4,482 parishes, 49 monasteries and 3,088 clerics. It is not recognized as a canonic church.

Since the beginning of civil war in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate took a neutral position, not taking sides and serving the needs of parishioners on both sides of the conflict. Many experts believe that the church of the Moscow Patriarchate is one of few institutions which could preserve Ukraine as a country. Because of its pacifist position, the church has been harshly criticized by ‘patriotic’ Ukrainian politicians and public figures for being an ‘agent’ of Kremlin, an outpost of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The primate of the Church His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy, has addressed the faithful by saying that the most that the Orthodox Church can do is to call for peace and to intensify prayers for peace to be granted to the Ukrainian land, something that the Church has being doing since the beginning of the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The primate noted that in spite of the peace-making mission of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there are forces within Ukraine that try to portray the Church as inimical to Ukrainian society. An inter-confessional war is being ignited in the peaceful part of Ukraine, provocateurs direct their actions against clergy and parishioners and provocations have being made against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a whole. A unifying force of prayer of believers can work miracles, so every Christian should make a conscious effort to participate in the procession. Contemplation alone is not enough, said the primate. Who can walk – walks, who can walk only it their locality, join the procession, who can feed pilgrims – it is also your participation in the great common cause. The all-Ukrainian cross procession is a procession of peace, love and prayer for Ukraine, stated Metropolitan Onufriy.

The Union of Orthodox Journalists reports that over 10,000 people started the procession on July 9, 2016 from Pochaiv Lavra in Western Ukraine. Video can be seen here. Around 1,000 people started the procession from Sviatohirsk Lavra on July 3. Video can be seen here.

On July 10, the cross procession from the east reached Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Over 10,000 people walked through the streets of the city wearing icons. Old, men, women with little kids and babies walk for peace in Ukraine.

Some Euromaidan ‘activists’ have stated that this cross procession is a “huge provocation” by the Russian FSB (security police) and that authorities should check all who participate in this procession. Euromaidan activists have also been discussing the need to disperse this “biological mass”.

The head of the Information Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate, archbishop Evstratiy on his page on Facebook on July 11, after reading many posts on Facebook, noted that Ukrainians are afraid of the cross procession because they perceive it as a procession of the “Russian world” to Kyiv and may end up as a large anti-Maidan protest. The Archbishop came to a decision that the cross procession should be allowed to continue, but some precautionary measures should be taken so as to not play into the Kremlin’s hands. For instance, any “Russian, monarchic, or separatist’ symbols, such as Saint-George ribbon (symbol of Soviet victory in WWII) or a portrait of tsar Nicolai II, should be videotaped or photographed and reported to the police; participants in the procession should be verified whether they are Russian citizens or have connections with ‘separatists’.

The current speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a co-founder in the 1990s of the neo-Nazi party Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, stated that he knows for sure about a “scenario” that the Kremlin has prepared for July 27 in Kyiv, when the cross procession will reach the city. An expert on Ukrainian religious matters, speaking in a TV program, stated that by organizing the cross procession, the ‘Moscow church” wants to demonstrate its force and influence in Ukraine.

The head of the Ministry of Interior, Arsen Avakov, commented that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate has a right to do this cross procession as long as it does not threaten others. He added that Ukrainian security forces will ensure peace and security during the procession and warned radical nationalist forces to avoid any attempts to violently disrupt the procession.

The Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform has published opinions of several Ukrainian experts summarized in the telling title: “Cross procession of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate – a mass Russian provocation. What our answer will be?”.

A leading Ukrainian newspaper, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, reports on the procession making frequent use of the term “Moscow Patriarchate” to stress the fact that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is ruled from Moscow. The newspaper also places the word “procession” in quotation marks. Ukrainska Pravda, the main media outlet of Euromaidan, also resorts to quotation marks when republishing reports from the cross procession in Kharkiv. Anton Herashchenko, the deputy of Verkhovna Rada, an advisor to the head of the Ministry of Interior, called upon Ukrainian media to ignore the whole event because, in his opinion, media coverage will draw unnecessary attention to the procession and will transform it from a simple action into a big event.

Herashchenko, like other so-called Ukrainian experts, believes that the cross procession was planned in Moscow. He called it a “pop-parade”, the Russian word “pop” being a pejorative word for an Orthodox priest. In Herashchenko’s opinion, Moscow curators and organizers of the cross procession hope that Ukrainian patriotic forces will react to the procession violently, and as a result Russian media will be able to show to the whole world how the rights of Orthodox believers are violated in Ukraine.

In Herashchenko’s posts on Facebook, there is not a single word about the genuine intentions of the leadership of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (MP) in organizing this cross procession, which is to make a collective prayer for peace and love. By calling it a “Kremlin provocation”, Herashchenko and others like him are fomenting interfaith hatred in Ukraine, which needs words of reconciliation, not war.

The extraordinary cross procession is a prayer for peace by thousands of common Ukrainians who want to put an end to a fratricidal war. In Ukraine, where the Euromaidan political elite embraced right-wing nationalism as its official ideology, it is up to ordinary Ukrainians to reunite a country, torn by civil war. Thousands of Ukrainians are walking for peace. Let us hope their prayers will be heard.