Pope Franscis’s Chilean Betrayal

ARIEL DORFMAN

Santiago, Chile.

There were certain words that Chileans were hoping that Pope Francis would say during his three-day visit to our country last week. They were hoping he would denounce the sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic clergy, and particularly the offenses perpetrated by a corrupt and malevolent priest named Fernando Karadima. They were also waiting for Francis to condemn the hierarchs in the Catholic Church who had silenced and humiliated the victims and helped to cover up Karadima’s crimes.

Above all, my compatriots wanted the pope to publicly chide Bishop Juan Barros, who had been Karadima’s protégé and, according to reports (denied by Barros), had witnessed his mentor’s pedophilia. The issue of Barros mattered symbolically because the pope himself, in 2015,had appointed this collaborator of Karadima’s as the bishop of Osorno, a city in southern Chile, in spite of angry complaints from the congregation.

In an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times that appeared just before the papal visit, I argued that, for Chileans, the way in which Francis handled this case would be a critical test of whether he could restore the prestige of the disgraced local Church, so wounded by these scandals, to the noble place it had held in public sympathy for decades because of its brave opposition to the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Pope Francis failed that test.

He did express “shame and pain” at the abuse of minors by members of the clergy, and he did hold a brief meeting with some of the victims—though not with any of those who had been mistreated by Karadima, or with anyone who has blamed Barros for his connivance. But Barros was flagrantly present at three ceremonies over which the pope officiated in Chile during the visit, and on one occasion, the pontiff embraced the bishop and kissed him on the cheek in a display of affection and support.

This was not entirely surprising. The Catholic Church is known for circling the wagons when there is a crisis, defending the institution at all costs, and this pope, after all, pointedly attended the funeral of the notorious Cardinal Law, whose cover-up of the depredations of the Catholic clergy in Boston was the subject of the Oscar-winning film Spotlight. What nobody could have predicted was one word that Francis did indeed utter on the last day of his trip, just as he was leaving the country. Asked about Barros, Francis lost his temper and, with uncharacteristic vehemence, stated that there was not a shred of evidence against the bishop of Osorno and that all the accusations against him were nothing more than “calumnia,” slander.

It is difficult to exaggerate the outrage that greeted this attack upon the integrity of the victims and their testimony. One, Juan Carlos Cruz, who had been abused many times by Karadima, tweeted that perhaps as proof the pope needed him, Cruz, to have taken a selfie while Karadima raped him as Barros looked on. Other Chileans mocked Francis, calling him a hypocrite and worse.

For me, personally, it felt like a betrayal. When I was sixteen years old, Karadima tried unsuccessfully, on several occasions, to convert me to Catholicism. I have no “evidence” that he would not let go of my hand while he promised the fires of Hell if I did not yield to his guidance. Having escaped unscathed from his clutches, I can well imagine how his victims feel when it is demanded that they provide proof of what happened to them. No wonder they are indignant.

But the chief rebuke came from an American clergyman, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads the Vatican Committee for the Protection of Minors. This prelate—from Boston, perhaps notably—wrote that the pope’s words were “a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy,” and added: “Words that convey the message ‘if you cannot prove your claim then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile.” The cardinal did not doubt, however, that the pope felt the pain of those survivors. O’Malley had seen Francis weep and pray with other victims of abuse in multiple occasions.

What nobody has been able to explain is how the pope could have committed such a colossal blunder when, at worst, he could have easily sidestepped the issue. You do not get to be the first Latin American and the first Jesuit to be elected as the successor of Peter if you are not a savvy operator. Why sabotage his own message in Chile, and elsewhere, with that one word, “slander”? Why erase the memory of all the other wonderful words he’d said during his sojourn: words in defense of indigenous rights, refugees, and the environment; his call to young people to set aside despair and commit themselves to a world without greed and exploitation; his challenge to the priests and nuns to dedicate their lives to the sick, the elderly, the homeless; the words with which he comforted incarcerated women, reminding them that they were loved and should not be despised for having spent time in jail?

Why go out of his way to attack those who were demanding he face the uncomfortable truth about Bishop Barros and his complicity in the sins of Karadima? Why, when he half-apologized this week, on the plane back to Rome, did Francis still adamantly insist on the innocence of Barros?

It seems to me that the answer may lie deep in Pope Francis’s own turbulent past. From 1974 to 1983, the military of his native Argentina waged what has become known as the Dirty War, torturing, killing, and disappearing many thousands of citizens. The Catholic bishops of Argentina, in contrast to the courage shown by their Chilean brothers, were vocally supportive of that repression. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as Francis was then known, was at the time the provincial superior (or head) of the Jesuit Order in his country.

Although he was opposed to this regime of terror and personally intervened to save the lives of several endangered men and women (even giving one persecuted man his own ID card so that the man could escape the country), Bergoglio maintained a public silence on the horrors of the dictatorship. Later, there were claims that he had collaborated with the military junta, and failed to protect two priests under his jurisdiction who were arrested and tortured. Though the justice system in Argentina investigated Bergoglio and found no evidence against him, and the allegations of complicity were mostly disproven, those charges resurfaced once Francis was anointed as pope. The Vatican insisted that “there has never been a credible, concrete accusation against him,” and the pope has dismissed the accusations as “slander”—the very word that Francis used to defend Bishop Barros.

It seems probable, then, that the pope saw in Barros a reflection of his own experience: someone who believes he has been falsely indicted, but is unable to clear his name, who feels he has been a target of malicious left-wing and anticlerical activists determined to stain the reputation of an innocent man. It would be tragic, but all too human, if this were the explanation for Francis’s offensive and counter-productive defense of Barros.

The pope has often referred to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells the story of this stranger who tends to an unknown traveler who had been beaten and stripped of his clothing and left half-dead, and takes care of him as if he were a neighbor. And Jesus condemns the priest who passed by that injured man with utter indifference, without offering any aid.

Francis, tormented perhaps by his own dark and secret history, has misunderstood who are the victims and who are the perpetrators in this Chilean story. Instead of following the example of the Good Samaritan and comforting the wounded bodies and souls of those violated by sexual abuse, he has sided with the priest, Barros, and the other prelates who not only did nothing to alleviate that suffering, but were part of the gang that beat the victims and robbed them of their dignity.

Did the pope not understand that this was a chance to redeem himself for not having been a Good Samaritan in Argentina? Did he not realize that this was a unique opportunity to show the courage he lacked years ago? Instead, he has damaged his moral standing and weakened the impact of his vital messages about the threats to humanity of poverty, war, and ecological disaster.

China’s Dementia Challenge

Cesar Chelala

The government of China is facing the challenge of having to care for increasing numbers of dementia patients. This is due, to a large extent, to a steady increase in ageing patients. While life expectancy was 45 in 1960, it was 76.34 in 2015, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. One person in six is over 60 now, and one in four will be by 2025.  Although China has approximately 10 million people with some form of dementia, the government is not yet prepared to deal effectively with this situation.

Dementia covers a broad category of brain diseases that cause a long term and frequently gradual decrease in the ability to think and remember daily life incidents. The disease affects people from all social and economic conditions. The first signs and symptoms of the disease may be subtle. However, later on, language and emotional problems and a decrease in motivation appear as additional symptoms of this troubling condition.

Dementia has been mentioned in medical texts since antiquity. In the 7^th century BC Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, describes the “senium” period of mental and physical decay that occur after the age of 73. Aristotle and Plato also spoke of mental decay in advanced age, and viewed it as an inevitable process that affected old men and women and which couldn’t be prevented.

Old Chinese medical texts also mentioned this deterioration of the intellectual faculties, calling it the age of the “foolish old person”. Byzantine physicians also wrote about dementia, and mentioned at least seven emperors older than 70 who displayed signs of cognitive decline. In Hamlet and King Lear, Shakespeare mentions the loss of mental function in old age.

Before the 20^th century, dementia was relatively rare, because a long lifespan was uncommon in preindustrial times. Following WWII, however, there was an increase in life expectancy, and the number of people over 65 in developed countries started to increase rapidly, and so did dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia, which account for 50 to 70 percent of cases. Other kinds of dementia include vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and frontotemporal dementia. Sometimes more than one type of dementia may exist in the same person. In a small number of cases, dementia may run in families. Today, dementia is one of the most common causes of disability and poor health among older people.

According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, there were approximately 50 million people living with dementia in 2017. The incidence of the disease is three percent among people between the ages of 65-74, nineteen percent on those between 75 and 84 and nearly fifty percent on those over 85 years of age. According to some estimates, the incidence of dementia will increase by 100 percent in the coming 20 years. Before a person with dementia dies, it may experience several years of discapacity.

In the U.S., public awareness of Alzheimer’s disease increased greatly when former US President Ronald Reagan announced in 1994 that he was suffering from the condition. Today, although many more people know about dementia, those in China are lagging behind. Even more seriously, family members frequently do not understand the condition, so that more than 90 percent of dementia cases go undetected.

In China, there are few facilities for diagnosing and treating senile dementia, and they are located at a few top hospitals. To make matters even more complex, there are only a few hundred doctors experienced enough to make an early diagnosis. Most nursing care facilities in China can’t offer appropriate care for patients with dementia. In Shanghai, for example, where an estimated 120,000 residents have some form of dementia, there are only a handful of nursing homes trained to care for these patients.

Dementia exacts a heavy burden on families and society. Because of its effect on families, dementia has been called a “family disease”, particularly because patients need long-term care. Dementia places a heavy economic burden both in families and in society. It is estimated that the total cost of dementia in China will be US$ 110 billion by 2030.

Many countries have national plans or strategies and consider caring for dementia patients a national priority, and invest considerable resources in the different areas of care. The Chinese government should have an improved strategy of mass communication and education about the disease, intensive training of physicians and health care workers on diagnosis and treatment, and develop a national plan of action that addresses the main needs for caring for all kinds of patients with dementia.

The Upsurge of Bitcoin and the Rise of New Civic Power

Nozomi Hayase

Bitcoin’s price explosion made news headlines this last year. Topics of digital assets entered onto dinner tables and friendly chats at work places. Fever of the digital gold rush that has swept mainstream finance became contagious. Institutional funds are now entering into cryptos, seemingly hedging their bets with their “sugar high” bubble economy. Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan CEO who previously slammed Bitcoin as a fraud is said to be regretting his claim. He now praises the blockchain, the underlying technology of Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs recently acknowledged Bitcoin as money, comparable to gold. The firm is already setting up a trading desk for digital currencies.

While Bitcoin is gaining traction in financial circles, Naval Ravikant, the CEO and co-founder of Angel List saw this technology’s profound socio-political impact. He noted, “Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also recognized the revolutionary power of this money based on math. At the end of 2017, from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been confined more than five years, Assange tweeted, “Bitcoin is a real Occupy Wall Street”.

What is this disruptive force of Bitcoin? The Occupy movement that had spread over dozens of US cities and across many countries created a wave of uprising. It inspired a new vision of politics outside of the electoral arena. Now, years after Occupy’s demise, this new innovation of decentralized digital currency could offer a way to reinvent activism, helping all around the world to organize and create radical social change.

The era of creditocracy

First, let’s look back at the rise of OccupyWallStreet protest. The movement kicked off in New York’s financial district in 2011, uniting people from all walks of life under the banner of the 99% against economic inequality and corporate greed. Occupy emerged within a cultural milieu of transparency, spearheaded by WikiLeaks’ disclosure of documents pertaining to government secrecy and corruption.

The insurgency in lower Manhattan marked a peak of disillusionment about the current state of democracy. People began to wake up to an invisible hand of the market – 1% global oligarchy, that was controlling resources through money based on debt. In the article “Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers on the Backs of the Young”, attorney and author Ellen Brown described the advantage of “slavery by debt” over owned slavery, which was an idea argued in a document reportedly circulated during the American Civil War among British and American banking sectors. Brown showed that while slaves need to be housed and fed, “free men could be kept enslaved by debt, by paying wages insufficient to meet their costs of living”.

This debt-based financial system has become what professor and veteran of the Occupy movement Andrew Ross calls a “creditocracy”. In this, ordinary people with student loans, medical and credit card bills have become indentured servants. Ross explains how it is the Western version of a “debt trap”, where debts are piled up with monthly credit card balances or underwater mortgages that cannot be ever paid to ensure continuing revenue for the banks. He notes how this is similar to the developing countries that fell under IMF dependency in the course of the 1970s and 1980s.

In the era of creditocracy, ubiquitous anonymous corporations keep the force of control invisible, making people obey their rules. MasterCard tells their customers who the master is with exuberant chargeback fees and penalties. VISA maintains US hegemony of the world, denying access to finance for refugees and immigrants and assisting US government sanctions on countries like Russia and Iran that challenge dollar supremacy. This is a two-tiered financial patronage network that exempts fees and extends credit lines to the rich and privileged, while it exploits the poor by seizing their funds and engaging in predatory lending.

Creditocracy now expands around the globe and threatens civil liberties. Recently, PayPal came under scrutiny, with their failure to provide services in the West Bank and Gaza, while making its service available in Israel. This payment processing company was accused by pro-Palestinian activists as enacting “online apartheid” against Palestinians.

Vision of new democracy

It is people’s indignation against this systemic economic oppression that sparked revolt at the center of world finance seven years ago. Occupy was unprecedented in its scale and its unique style of no central coordination or formal leadership. It was a move away from electoral politics and top-down decision making to the principle of consensus and direct action, which activist scholar David Graeber described as “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free”.

During the early days of this movement, the mainstream media criticized demonstrators for not having a clear mandate. Yet this lack of demand was a strength and refusal to recognize the legitimacy of power structures that protesters were challenging. What unfolded then was a new form of activism that truly channels uncompromising power of ordinary people. It was an activism that doesn’t acknowledge external power or seek for permission. Instead it encourages people to change society by simply building new alternatives.

This was a seed for a real democracy that is horizontal and participatory. It was manifested through activists’ effort of creating people’s libraries, media hubs and kitchens and forming a new way of governance through mic check and General Assemblies. This vision of organizing society through mutual aid and voluntary association went viral, spreading with internet memes and Twitter hashtags, creating solidarity across borders.

Cypherpunks write code

Occupy’s permissionlessness, without a need to refer to central authority, is embodied at the core of Bitcoin. The idea of Bitcoin was introduced in a whitepaper published in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. It is clear that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was concerned about deep corruption of government and their mishandling of monetary policies. This was shown in the message embedded in the genesis block of the blockchain. It contained a headline of a newspaper that read “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.

Richard Gendal Brown, chief technology officer at software firm R3, provides a summary of the invention of this open source software:

“Bitcoin is the world’s first system of digital cash, which allows peer-to-peer value transfer over the internet with no reliance on third parties. It is built on a new invention, the decentralized global asset register. This global asset register is the world’s first decentralized consensus system.”

What is behind the protocol of a truly peer-to-peer currency is a revolutionary mind that refuses to obey the command from above and declares independence from all that claim authority. This fierce autonomy is the moral value of cypherpunks, a group that emerged in the late 1980s, who saw a potential of cryptography as a tool to shift balance of power between the individual and the state.

Cryptographer and one of the notable cypherpunks Adam Back, who was cited in Bitcoin’s whitepaper for his invention of Hashcash described the ethos of cypherpunks as that of writing code. This is an idea of making changes by creating alternatives. Back noted how pressuring politicians and promoting issues through the press tends to be slow and create an uphill battle. He pointed out how instead of engaging in the political process through campaigns and appealing to authority for changes, people can simply “deploy technology and help people do what they consider to be their legal right”. Then society would later adjust itself to reflect these values.

Network of resistance

While the mainstream media is obsessed with Bitcoin’s price and investors speculating gains in their portfolios, this technology’s defining feature lies in censorship resistance. The integrity of Bitcoin relies on decentralization, which is a method to attain security by flattening the network and removing levers of control, rather than performing checks and balances of power that tends to concentrate through control points inherent within the system, seen in the existing model of governance. This unprecedented security creates a network of resistance resilient to any forces of control.

When governments that are meant to defend civil rights act against their own people, Bitcoin preserves the network value of public right to free association and speech and distributes this to all users. This right was claimed and exercised in real time. In facing the illegal financial blockades imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union, WikiLeaks showed ordinary people how they can circumvent and combat economic censorship with Bitcoin.

As the whistleblowing site continues to publish CIA Vault publications, political persecution intensifies. Now the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization that was founded to tackle attacks on free press, decided to terminate processing of donations for WikiLeaks. In response to this new political pressure, Assange urged supporters to continue making contributions with cryptocurrencies and unleash the power of free speech that belongs to all.

As trusted institutions and governments are failing, people around the world are finding their own path of self-determination. In Argentina, as the Peso has been steadily falling since the country’s 2002 economic collapse, Bitcoin adoption has been accelerating. Bitcoin historian and former tech banker who goes by Tweeter handle @_Kevin_Pham noted, “Bitcoin’s killer app can be found in Venezuela, it’s called: ‘not dying.’” As hyperinflation is rendering their national currency worthless, Venezuelans are flocking to Bitcoin as a safe haven to store their savings.

In Iran, the government came on full force, engaging in internet censorship and cracking down on protesters who revolted in response to the country’s long economic stagnation. It was reported that leading up to the civil unrest, the Bitcoin community has grown with more people entering into cryptocurrencies. In Afghanistan, a company that advocates Afghan women’s computer literacy empowered women with bitcoin, helping them gain financial sovereignty.

Permissionless activism

The Occupy movement ignited aspirations for the rule of the common people, verified and upheld by a network consensus created through people’s trust in one another. Yet the enthusiasm for real democracy that was mobilized through social media could not withstand state coordinated police crackdowns. With the eviction of encampments and squares, people’s power that had arisen then dissipated.

Now, with Bitcoin surging, a new stream of disruption is emerging. These old financial engineers aim to protect their dying fraudulent world of central banks by upending their speculative casino with this hyped crypto market. As incumbent banks geared with regulatory arms try to control the bubbling civic power, perhaps this technology calls people to rise once again to halt financial aristocracy by innovating the ‘activism without permission’ – this time with better security and robustness.

Knowledge of computer science empowered by the ethics of cypherpunks now provides a viable platform for people to occupy society with their heart’s imagining. Sovereign individuals can now defy the rule of creditors and create their own rules, ending financial apartheid and discrimination. They can coalesce to fund independent media they support with their money and defund wars that they oppose. Permissionless activism can bring a jubilee, making rapacious debt obsolete through each individual simply walking away from this erroneous system, uniting with those who share goals to create a new economy.

The imagination of this invention opened the potential for a radically different future. From Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery Alabama to occupiers’ adamant refusal to make demands, Bitcoin’s networked consensus creates an autonomous currency that allows all to move struggles of the past forward.

The rise of Bitcoin is poised to disrupt the world of creditocracy, as we know it. As the price rally continues, many now proclaim the rise and rise of Bitcoin! The question that remains is: Can our imagination rise with the revolutionary force this technology brings? Bitcoin already unleashed a potent power within. The future is now in our hands. It is up to each person to claim this power and show the world what democracy really looks like.

Terror in the Name of God

Michael Welton

I would like to argue in these brief thoughts that the on-going persecution of Baha’is in Iran illustrates what must be faced in our quest for a conversible, multi-religious world. Our globally imbricated world will not achieve a peaceful unity if the world religions declare that their  faith is final, the last revelation to a suffering and embittered humankind. World unity, the fundamental perquisite of world peace, requires a new perception of how, and in what sense, all religions could inhabit common ground without conflict with each other.

Michael Karlberg (2010) has written an insightful article (“Constructive resilience: the Baha’i response to oppression”) that argues that the Baha’i community in Iran has been subjected to recurrent “waves of hostile propaganda and censorship social ostracism and exclusivism, denial of education, denial of employment, denial of due process before the law, property looting and destruction, government seizure of individual and collective assets, arson, incitements to mob violence, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, physical and psychological torture, death threats, execution, and disappearances—all calculated to extinguish the community” (pp. 222-223).

The forerunner to the revelation of Baha’u’llah, the Bab (the gate) was murdered by a firing squad of 750 riflemen in 1850. 20,000 of his early followers were put to death in the most evil and hideous ways (such as cutting the flesh and inserting candles in the incisions). One of the most significant accounts of the persecution of Baha’is in Iran was published by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, A faith denied: the persecution of the Baha’is of Iran [December 2006]). A shocking document, it details Baha’i persecution from the Faith’s early history in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ramada Riots of 1955, the 1977 general unrest and mob attacks to the post-revolutionary, on-going persecution of Baha’is.

For an Islamic fundamentalist such as Ayotollah Khomeini (who had detested Baha’is since the 1940s), Iran was a sacred land, cradling the true interpretation of Islam and discarding the claims and significance of other forms of Islam (such as Sunnism) and world religions. For Khomeini and the Shi’ite clergy, the Baha’is were dangerous heretics, a kind of fifth column acting on behalf of external enemies like Israel. He even called them the “Baha’i Jews.” They were the despicable, evil other that were cordoned off to reinforce the purity of the Islamic state. The Iranian authorities in the post-1979 period used the “full range of state coercive force” against the Baha’is. This full-blown hatred resulted in the execution of over two hundred democratically elected leaders of the Baha’i community, the imprisonment of thousands of others, many thousands lost their jobs, were denied pensions, even forced to repay past pensions and salaries, expelled from schools and universities, denied healthcare and had their personal property ransacked and their grave and holy sites defiled.

The depth of the depravity of the treatment of Baha’is and radical breach of human rights (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression) is revealed in many cases where the family members of executed victims were forced to repay the Iranian government the cost of the bullets used in executions. The Khomeini regime even hanged a young girl of 16, called Mona, for educating children in her home (her story is an integral part of Baha’i legend). The Shi’ite clerics cannot accept the possibility of a post-Islamic religion. The revelation of Mohammed is sealed and final. The world has raised its voice through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at this specific manifestation of terror in the name of God. Still, the persecutions persist to our day.

This bitter reality reveals the depths of resistance of a powerful state religion to permit the minority religion the right to even exist. Since 2005, 860 Baha’is have been arrested, 275 have spent time in prison, 1000s have been denied access to higher education, 950 suffered from economic suppression of their businesses, and 20,000 anti-Baha’i propaganda articles and reports have been published. (Baha’i International Community: Situation of Baha’is in Iran. Current situation: September 19, 2017).  The movement of history towards a justly ordered word cannot occur if some world religions barricade themselves behind a fabricated eternal dogma and engage in holy war against perceived enemies, political and religious.

A great Christian theologian like Hans Kung (Christianity and World Religions, Paths pf Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism(1985) wonders: “If religion is so complicating, so difficult, why deal with it? Why not be content with casual recourse or wilful reversion to non-or anti-religious arguments derived from Enlightenment era understandings of secular reasoning? (p. 443). Our argument is that a “culture of human rights and dialogue” requires transformative action within religious communities, where necessary, so that those with deeply held beliefs can enable all faiths to stand on common ground and, thus, are not excluded from reasonable public discourse.

Baha’i theologian Michael Souris (The station and claims of Baha’u’llah (1997) in a thoughtful chapter on “Religious claims and inter-faith relations” sets out the three major sources of conflict in inter-faith relations: prejudice, misunderstandings of scripture and miscommunications. These factors trigger “conflicts originating with superiority claims” (p. 15). The first, prejudice tends to find reasons to “exalt one’s self over others because of ignorance, fear, ambition, arrogance, and other spiritual inadequacies” (ibid.). Souris perceives religious prejudice (like sexism and racism) as a “spiritual illness that needs to be healed through education, prayer, and the cultivation of spiritual qualities” (ibid.).

Unlike prejudice, misunderstanding of Scriptures are more of an “intellectual problem that can be overcome with the help of study and education” (ibid.). But he also thinks that prejudice can shut down our capacity for compassion, thus blocking reaching out to diverse peoples. However, “purity of thought” can “cause a person to search the Scriptures for an understanding that best reflects God’s love and compassion” (ibid.). The final source of conflict, miscommunications, has two possible sources: poorly expressed beliefs and insensitivity to “other people’s feelings and beliefs” (p. 16).

Payam Akhavan (In search of a better world: a human rights odyssey[2017]) argues that living in a multicultural world requires a sophisticated understanding of the many layers of our identity. Akhavan says that we must be willing to “genuinely listen to the stories of those who are foreign to us.” But we must not be sentimental in our reflections. Some people slide into sloppy comfortability with celebrating diversity by claiming that human rights are “conditioned by cultural context.” But Payam comments pointedly that if we reject universality of judgment, should we then “respect torture, intolerance, and misogyny as expressions of diversity?”

To be sure, there may well be “genuine differences of opinion among and within cultures,” but when “claims of religious exceptionalism are invoked by authoritarian rulers, they must be treated with great suspicion.” In 1983, as “tens of thousands were executed to consolidate Khomeini’s totalitarian theocracy, an Iranian diplomat rebuked those who didn’t seem to understand that the Islamic Republic recognized only “God” as supreme authority and only “Islamic law” as authoritative legal tradition. Payam names this move as a “cynical slight of hand”—now the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, the diplomat alleged, could be rejected because it didn’t “accord with the system of values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”  Almighty God had become the Almighty State.

Creating an Empire of Graveyards?

Tom Engelhardt

Recently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me. He was, in those days, terrified of clowns. Something about their strange, mask-like, painted faces unnerved him utterly, chilled him to the bone. To the rest of us, they were comic, but to him — or so I came to imagine anyway — they were emanations from hell.

Those circus memories of long ago seem relevant to me today because, in November 2016, the American electorate, or a near majority of them anyway, chose to send in the clowns.  They voted willingly, knowingly, for the man with that strange orange thing on his head, the result — we now know, thanks to his daughter — of voluntary “scalp reduction surgery.”  They voted for the man with the eerily red face, an unearthly shade seldom seen since the perfection of Technicolor.  They voted for the overweight man who reputedly ate little but Big Macs (for fear of being poisoned), while swinging one-handed from a political trapeze with fingers of a particularly contestable size.  They voted for the man who never came across a superlative he couldn’t apply to himself.  Of his first presidential moment, he claimed “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”; he declared himself “the greatest jobs president that God ever created”; he swore to reporters that he was “the least racist person you have ever interviewed”; he offered his version of modesty by insisting that, “with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”; and when his mental state was challenged, he responded that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” adding, “I think that [I] would qualify as not smart, but genius… and a very stable genius at that!”

Of course, none of this is news to you, not if you have a screen in your life (or more likely your hand) — the very definition of twenty-first-century modernity.  In fact, by the time this piece comes out, you’ll undoubtedly have a new set of examples to cite.  After all, these days that essentially is the news: him and any outrageous thing he wants to say and not much else, which means that he is indisputably the greatest, possibly in the history of the universe, when it comes to yanking just about anybody’s chain.

And you certainly don’t need me to go on about that strange skill of his, since every time he says or tweets anything over the top or grotesque beyond belief, the media’s all over it 24/7. No one, for instance, could doubt that never in our history has the word “shithole” (or, in some cases, “s–hole”) or even “shithouse” been used more frequently than in the wake of the president’s recent wielding of it (or them or one or the other) for unnamed African countries and Haiti in a White House meeting on immigration. That meeting proved an ambush and a half, only spiraling further out of control when, in its wake, the president denied ever using the word “shithole” and was backed by Republican attendees evidently so desperate to curry favor that they pretended they hadn’t heard the word, which, by now, just about everyone on Earth has heard or seen in English or some translation thereof.

Since he rode down that Trump Tower escalator into our political lives in June 2015, this sort of thing and more or less nothing else has largely been “the news.”  It goes without saying — which won’t stop me from saying it — that not since Nebuchadnezzar’s words were first scratched onto a cuneiform tablet has more focus been put on the passing words, gestures, and expressions of a single human being. And that’s the truest news about the news of this era.  It’s been consumed by a single news hog.  Which means that Donald Trump has already won, no matter what happens, since he continues to be treated as if he were the only three-ring circus in town, as if he were in himself that classic big-top Volkswagen filled to the brim with clowns.

The Imperial Presidency Exposed

Who could deny that much of the attention he’s received has been based on the absurdity, exaggeration, unsettling clownishness of it all, right down to the zany crew of subsidiary clowns who have helped keep him pumped up and cable newsed in the Oval Office?

In early October 2016, I suggested that a certain segment of voters in the white heartland, feeling their backs against the economic wall and the nation in decline — Donald Trump being our first true declinist candidate (hence that “again” in MAGA) — was prepared to send a “suicide bomber” into the White House.  And I suggested as well that they were willing to do so even if the ceiling collapsed on them.  (Had I thought of it at the time, I would have added that much of the mainstream media also had its back to the wall with its status and finances in decline, staffs shrinking, and fears rising that it might be eaten alive by social media.  As a result, some of its key players were similarly inclined to escort that suicide bomber Washington-wards, no matter what fell or whom it hit.)

In retrospect, that has, I think, proven an accurate assessment, but like all authors I reserve the right to change my imagery in midstream, which brings me back to my son’s childhood fear of clowns.  At least for me, that now catches the most essential aspect of the age of Trump: its clownishness.  And despite the fact that The Donald is often treated by his opponents as a laughing matter, an absurdity, a jokester (and a joke) in the Oval Office, I don’t mean those clowns, the ones that leave you rolling in the aisles.  I mean my son’s clowns, the death’s-head ones whose absurd versions of the gestures of everyday life leave you chilled to the bone, genuinely afraid.

Donald Trump fits that image exactly because — though you wouldn’t know it from the usual coverage of him — he isn’t at all unique (except in the details, except in the exaggeration of it all).  What makes him so clownish, in the sense I’m describing, is that he offers a chillingly exaggerated, wildly fiery-and-furious version of the very imperial American presidency we’ve come to know over these last seven decades: the one that has long ridden herd on a nuclear apocalypse; that killed millions on its journey to nowhere in Southeast Asia in the previous century; that hasn’t been able to stop itself from overseeing more than a quarter-century of war-making — two wars, to be exact — in Afghanistan of all places; that, in its pursuit of its never-ending “war” on terror, has made war on so much else as well, turning significant parts of the planet into zones of increasing chaos, failed states, fleeing populations, and wholesale destruction; the one whose “precision” military — the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been termed the “most precise campaign in history” — has helped transform cities from Ramadi and Fallujah to Mosul and Raqqa into landscapes that, in their indiscriminate wreckage, look like Stalingrad after the battle in World War II (and that now is threatening to develop a “precision” version of nuclear war as well); and that has, in this century, overseen the creation of “Saudi America” on a planet in which it was already easy enough to grasp that fossil fuels were doing the kinds of damage to the human environment that nothing short of a giant asteroid or nuclear war might otherwise do.

From his America First policies to his reported desire to see (and make use of) terrorist attacks on this country, the man who has declared climate change a Chinese hoax, threatened to loose “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” described other countries in language once considered unpresidential by presidents who nonetheless treated the very same countries like “shitholes,” and given “his” generals a remarkably free hand to “win” the war on terror is but an eerily clownish version of all that has gone before.  He has, in a sense, ripped away the façade of dignity from the imperial presidency and let us glimpse just what is truly imperial (and imperious) about it.  He continues to show us in new ways quite an old reality: how terrifying a force for destruction, possibly even on a planetary level, U.S. power can be.

And just in case you don’t think that Volkswagen of Trump’s (or maybe I mean that private plane with the golden bathroom fixtures) is filled with other clowns whose acts should similarly chill you to the bone, let’s skip Scott Pruitt as he secretly dismantles the Environmental Protection Agency and so many protections for our health, the Energy Department’s Rick Perry as he embraces the CEOs of Big Energy, that future oil-spill king, the Interior Department’s Ryan Zinke, and the rest of the domestic wrecking crew, and turn instead to “his” generals — the ones from America’s losing wars — that President Trump has made ascendant in Washington.

And even then, let’s skip their urge to create smaller, more “usable” nuclear weapons (a process started in the Obama years), or hike the nuclear budget, or redefine ever more situations, including cyber attacks on the U.S., as potential nuclear ones; and let’s skip as well their eagerness, from Niger to Yemen, Libya to Somalia, to expand and heighten the war on terror in an exaggerated version of exactly what we’ve been living through these past 16 years. Let’s concentrate instead on just one place, the ur-location for that war, the country about which those in the Pentagon are no longer speaking of war at all but of “generational struggle”: Afghanistan.

The Graveyard of Empires

Think of it: 28 years after the Soviet army limped out of that infamous “graveyard of empires” at the end of a decade-long struggle in which the U.S. had backed the most extreme groups of Islamic fundamentalists (including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden), 16 years after the U.S. returned to invade and “liberate” Afghanistan, they’re still at it. In December, with Donald Trump lifting various constraints on U.S. military commanders there, the generals were, for instance, sending in the planes.  That month there were more U.S. air strikes — 455 in a winter period of minimal fighting — than not just the previous December (65) but December 2012 (about 200) when 100,000 U.S. troops were still in-country.  The phrase of this moment among U.S. military officers in Afghanistan, according to Max Bearak of the Washington Post: “We’re at a turning point.”  Another: “The gloves are off.”  (Admittedly, no U.S. commander has as yet reported seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel,” but don’t rule it out.)

In the meantime, drones of both the armed and unarmed surveillance variety are being reassigned to Afghanistan in rising numbers (as well as more helicopters, ground vehicles, and artillery). With the recent announcement that 1,000 more personnel will soon head for that country, U.S. troop strength continues to grow, bringing the numbers of American advisers, trainers, and Special Operations forces there up to perhaps 15,000 or more (as opposed to the 11,000 or so when Donald Trump entered the Oval Office).

In addition, the military has plans to double the size of Afghanistan’s own special ops forces and triple the size of its air force, while the head of U.S. Central Command, General Joseph Votel, is calling for far more aggressive actions by those American-advised Afghan security forces in the upcoming spring fighting season.  (To put this in perspective, a 2008 U.S. military plan to spend billions of dollars ensuring that the Afghan air force was fully staffed, supplied, trained, and “self-sufficient” by 2015 ended seven years later with it in a “woeful state” of disrepair and near ruin.)  Meanwhile, as part of this ramp-up of operations, the Navy is planning to hire drone-maker General Atomics to fly that company’s surveillance drones in Afghanistan in what’s being termed “a ‘surge’ of intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance capabilities.”

If all of this sounds faintly familiar to you, I’m not surprised. In fact, if you’ve already stopped paying attention — as most Americans on the nonexistent “home front” seem to have done when it comes to most of America’s wars of this era — I just want you to know that I completely understand.  Sixteen repetitive years later, with the Taliban again in control of something close to half of Afghanistan, your response couldn’t be more all-American.  Surges, turning points, more aggressive actions, you’ve heard it all before — and when it comes to Afghanistan, the odds are that you’ll hear it all again.

And don’t for a moment think that this doesn’t add up to another version of sending in the clowns.

If you don’t believe that retired General James Mattis, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and retired General James Kelly, aka the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, and the White House chief of staff, respectively, are clowns, if you’re still convinced that they’re the “adults” in the Trumpian playroom, check out Afghanistan and think again.  But don’t blame them either.  What else can a clown do, once those giant floppy shoes are on their feet, their faces are painted, and the bulbous red nose is in place, but act the part?  So many years later, they simply can’t imagine another way to think about the world of American war.  They only know what they know.  Give them a horn and they’ll honk it; give them Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy and they’ll still honk that horn.

For the last decade and a half, through invasions and occupations, surges and counterinsurgency operations, bombing runs and drone strikes, commando raids and training missions, they and their colleagues in the U.S. high command have helped spread terror movements across significant parts of the planet, while playing a major role in creating a series of failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  They’ve helped uproot whole populations and transform major cities into spectacles of ruin.  Think of this as their twenty-first-century destiny.  They’ve proven to be key actors in what has become an American empire of chaos or perhaps simply an empire of graveyards.

They can’t help themselves.  Forgive them, Father, for they are clowns led by the greatest clownster-in-chief in the history of this country.  Yes, he makes even them uncomfortable because no one can pull the curtains back from the reality of the imperial presidency in quite the way he can.  No one can showcase our grim American world, tweet by outrageous tweet, in quite his fashion.

And yes, it can all look ludicrous as hell, but don’t laugh.  Don’t even think about it.  Not now, not when we’re all at the circus watching those emanations from hell perform. Instead, be chilled — chilled to the bone.  Absurd as every pratfall may be, it’s distinctly a vision from hell, an all-American vision for the ages.

Solar Import Tariff: Pain Without Benefit

ROY MORRISON

The new 30% import tariff just imposed on imported solar panels and solar cells is a protective tariff without benefit.

It will not revive the declining U.S. silicon solar cell industry. It will harm U.S. workers in factories manufacturing solar panels using imported solar cells. It will hurt the rapidly expanding U.S.solar industry, slowing down the rapidly growing adoption of solar across the U.S.economy and costing jobs. It will slow the reduction of green house gases and the replacement of coal and natural gas plants with cheaper, zero pollution energy.

In Jacksonville, Florida the city council has just voted for a $23 million dollar subsidy for Chinese company Jinko Solar to build an 800 worker modular production plant which itself will be subject to the tariff on solar cells. Similarly, the tariff will affect the Tesla giga-factory in Buffalo that uses imported cells.

The tariff will slow, but not stop, the expansion of U.S. solar. According to Green Tech Media there will be a 11% net reduction of solar installations over the next five years. This means the installation of 61.3 gigawatts instead of a projected 68.9 gigawatts, a 7.6 gigawatt shortfall. That’s the bad news, if the projection is correct.

7.6 gigawatts of solar if it displaced fossil fuel generation would save, according to the EPA, 1.64 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour, or 7.3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on New England solar production per megawatt. That’s the projected ecological consequence of the solar tax.

The good news is that solar is now big and rapidly growing. 61.3 megawatts of new solar in next five years is equal to the capacity of 61 one thousand megawatt nuclear plants. Total U.S.nuclear capacity is 99 gigawatts and declining as nuke plants shut down, unable to compete while solar rises.

The 30% tariff on cells or modules is scheduled to decline by 5% a year to 15% in 2021, the last year of the tariff. The first 2.5 gigawatts of imports are exempt, as will be a blend of other specialized modules that are applying for exemption from the tariff as are a number of developing nation producers limited to a total of 9% of imports.

What does this all mean on the ground for solar installations ? A 30% module tariff means about a ten cent per watt increase in solar costs. Average residential solar cost, according to NREL (National Resource Energy Laboratory), in 2017 was $2.80 a watt installed, a 3.6 percent increase in 2018 that will decline to 1.8 percent for typical 5-6 kilowatt systems.

For utility scale solar, huge installations above 10 megawatts or 10,000 kilowatts, the price in 2017 was $1.11/watt. Here, a ten cents a watt increase means a 9 percent increase, declining to 4.5% increase.

The negative effects of the tariff are likely to be felt most strongly in emerging PV markets in Southern and other States with limited financial support and market rules for solar

Mitigating Possibilities

Solar in recent years has been characterized by plunging costs, improved efficiency, and technological innovation. Globally,wind and solar is now competitive in more than thirty countries with fossil fuels without subsidies and represents “an outright compelling investment opportunity with long-term, stable, inflation-protected returns,” according to Michael Drexler, Head of Long Term Investing, Infrastructure and Development at the World Economic Forum. The judgement of big capital.

Current responses to utility scale RFPs for solar have been an astounding less than two cents per kilowatt hour. This is stunning for a zero fuel, zero pollution low maintenance cost energy fuel. Fossil fuels and nukes simply won’t be able to compete.

In addition, there is ongoing technical innovation in all areas of renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well new applications of renewables. It is likely, for example, that new types of solar cells will replace silicon as material of choice such as using perovskite crystals, and further advances in thin film technology.

Giant offshore wind machines can now float and be anchored to the sea floor in deeper water expanding the available off-shore wind resource. A legion of new innovative renewable projects are moving forward. I am working on a pilot installation for a new Swiss design for a megawatt scale vertical axis wind turbine that is quiet, minimizes or eliminates bat and bird kills, minimizes rotor shade, has a small footprint.

As a solar developer, I am developing dual-cropping PV systems on working farms that allow PV on poles or tables, at four foot intervals, to be installed in pasture or fields without significantly reducing agricultural productivity. This system was developed by work in test plots by Prof, Stephen Herbert of the Stockbridge Institute with contractor James Marley.  Www.dual-cropping.com

The market consequences of the tariff may also lead to price reductions by Chinese suppliers, and help accelerate the reduction in cost by racking companies, inverter manufacturers, and in PV installation techniques. For example, Spice Solar, now offers solar panels integrated with racking that can be connected to the roof quickly with a few roof anchors, shipped recently at .60 per watt, a significant price reduction. The tariff may also mean foreign companies, as Jinko did in Jacksonville, building American based factories.

Tariff or not, now’s the time for us all to embrace the economic, ecological and social benefits of building a secure and prosperous efficient renewable energy future. Our pursuit of ecological economic growth and our democratic action on all levels will shape the emergence of a renewable energy future and our escape from ecological calamity by making economic growth mean ecological improvement and building step by step a prosperous ecological civilization.