West African Research Center (WARC) Travel Grants 2021

Application Deadline: 15th October 2020

Eligible Countries: West African countries

To be taken at (country): Any African country of candidate’s choice.

About the Award: The WARC Travel Grant program promotes intra-African cooperation and exchange among researchers and institutions by providing support to African scholars and graduate students for research visits to other institutions on the continent

Type: Research Grants

Eligibility: This competition is open only to West African nationals, with preference given to those affiliated with West African colleges, universities, or research institutions.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Grants: The WARC Travel Grant provides travel costs up to $1,500 and a stipend of $1,500. Travel grant funds may be used to:

1. attend and present papers at academic conferences relevant to the applicant’s field of research;
2. visit libraries or archives that contain resources necessary to the applicant’s current academic work;
3. engage in collaborative work with colleagues at another institution;
4. travel to a research site.

Duration of Grants:  Between Jan 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021

How to Apply:

• Abstract (50-80 words) of proposed activity with a clear statement of purpose
• Project/Research description (6 double-spaced pages maximum) including why travel is necessary (must be in  language understandable to non-specialist readers)
• Proposed budget
• Curriculum vitae (with research and teaching record)
• Photocopy of the applicant’s passport (must be a West African national)
• All applications must be submitted online in PDF documents
• If attending a conference:
  – an abstract of the paper to be read
  – letter of acceptance to the conference
• If visiting another institution:
  – invitation from host institution
• If travel is to consult archives or other materials:
  – a description of the collections to be consulted and their significance to the applicant’s research
• If you are a graduate student:
  – letter of recommendation from professor overseeing your research

Please address inquiries to
Mariane Yade
West African Research Center/Centre de Recherche Ouest Africaine
warccroa@gmail.com.

Visit Grants Webpage for details

Watching Religion Die

James Haught

Religion is fading more quickly in the United States than in any other nation, according to a forthcoming research book.

Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing It and What Comes Next, by University of Michigan scholar Ronald Inglehart, is to be released in January by Oxford University Press.  Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine – in an advance summary titled “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion” – Dr. Inglehart said:

“The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public.  From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little.  Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data.”

A profound cultural transformation is in progress – mostly happening quietly out of sight, little-noticed in daily life.  Old supernatural beliefs are vanishing among intelligent, educated, science-minded western people, especially the young.  Religion is shriveling into the realm of myth and fantasy. Here are some indicators:

Almost two-thirds of teens who grow up in a church drop out of religion in their twenties, according to both Barna and LifeWay surveys.

The number of Americans who say their religion is “none” began to explode in the 1990s – rising to one-tenth of the population, then climbing relentlessly to one-fourth.  Among those under thirty, “nones” now are 40 percent.

American church membership fell 20 percent in the past two decades, according to Gallup research.  Southern Baptists dropped two million members since 2005.

Tall-steeple Protestant “mainline” denominations have suffered worst.  United Methodists fell from 11 million in 1969 to below 7 million today – while America’s population almost doubled.  Evangelical Lutherans dropped from 5.3 million in 1987 to 3.4 million now.  The Presbyterian Church USA had 3.2 million in 1982 but now is around 1.3 million. The Episcopal Church went from 3.4 million in the 1960s to 1.7 million now.

These highbrow mainline faiths with seminary-educated ministers once drew public respect.  But religion is shifting to lowbrow, emotional worship that is less admirable.  One-fourth of the world’s Christians now “speak in tongues,” researchers say.  Christianity is moving from advanced, prosperous, northern nations to the less-developed tropics. It’s losing its status as moral leadership.

Retreat of churchgoing in America may undercut the Republican Party, which depends on white evangelicals as the heart of its base.  In contrast, godless Americans tend to be compassionate progressives who have become the largest faith segment in the Democratic Party. The loss of religion may shift national political values to the left.

Personally, I hope the Secular Age continues snowballing until supernatural religion becomes only an embarrassing fringe. After all, belief in gods, devils, heavens, hells, miracles, visions, prophecies and the rest of dogma is extremely questionable.  It’s all a fantasy, a bunch of falsehoods, as far as any science-minded person can tell.  It lacks factual evidence.  The more religion declines, the more integrity is gained by society.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s a correlation:  White evangelicals swallow the falsehoods of faith – and they swallow the notorious falsehoods of President Trump.  Psychology researchers should study this gullibility pattern.

The Spoils of War: Sexual Entitlement

Howard Lisnoff

The lack of accountability of criminal behavior is a grotesque stain on human behavior and history. Many who follow history, either as scholars or informed individuals, know that until the second half of the 20th century, history was written by the victors and about the celebrated victorious, those anointed by the few and the very wealthy and often at the expense of truth and justice. History was mostly written at the expense of ordinary women and men.

Fort Hood in Texas has a big problem (“A Year of Heartbreak and Bloodshed at Fort Hood,” New York Times, September 9, 2020). Crime on the army base is rampant and sexual harassment and sex crimes follow upon the heels of that harassment. Two recent deaths at Fort Hood have all the earmarks of sex crimes. Soldiers have also disappeared from Fort Hood.

The Fort Hood deaths reminded some mental health experts of a cluster of violent behavior at Fort Carson in Colorado more than a decade ago. Those events show just how elusive answers can be in trying to identify the root causes of death and violence in the military.

The study (of Fort Carson), released in 2009, found that a number of personal, environmental and military-unit issues may have played a role in the violence, including soldiers’ previous criminal behavior, drug and alcohol abuse and combat exposure and intensity. That combination ‘may have increased the risk for violent behavior’ in some of the soldiers, the study concluded.

First an observation about how men and women in the military are viewed in terms of their targeting for sexual harassment, attacks, and worse. The primary objective of the military is victory in war. Victory in war means killing the enemy. It’s that simple. For the only superpower left standing with over 700 military bases around the world and involvement in endless wars, teaching and learning about war has the consequence of dehumanizing the declared enemy and training to kill that enemy. Teaching and learning about war often dismisses practicing normal moral guidelines about the worth of the individual. Since the US-led Global War on Terrorism began in 2001, the Costs of War Project (Brown University) tags the price of those wars at $6.4 trillion with over 800,000 people killed and 37 million people in eight countries driven from their homes. Isn’t it fitting that during the 1950s, Ronald Reagan, as TV mouthpiece for General Electric, producer of both home appliances and war goods, mouthed the words “Progress is our most important product.”

Killing in war and tormenting people in the military who don’t fit into the military’s definition of soldiering are both acts not so very far apart. Since the attacks of September 2001, the military has enjoyed a kind of status in the US not known since World War II. Although not daily news anymore, the drumbeat of war created a sense in the US that anything the US does militarily is acceptable and the military has been allowed to police its own regarding how men and women in its ranks  behave and are treated. It’s very similar to how police are treated and judged who fire their weapons and report, as a defense, that they felt threatened. The latter, at least until the spate of police murders of unarmed people of color, was generally accepted by the public.

The targeting of women and men for sexual harassment in the military has led to the growth of sexual assaults and worse, and the continued tradition within the system of military “justice” allows for judging its own wrongdoers from within the system with no external oversight. A footnote needs to be considered that most people in the military do not perpetrate violent acts against their fellow soldiers. But it’s also not the case of a few rotten apples because sexual harassment is widespread.

In terms of sex crimes, the cliché that military justice is to justice, as military music is to music, holds true.

I underwent military training at a base in Georgia, Fort Gordon, that had a contingent of the Women’s Army Corps on that base. My recollections of that period, during the Vietnam War era, were that the women on base were generally demeaned in harsh, inappropriate sexual terms.

On one of my basic training company’s first weekend leaves, a group of my fellow soldiers and I rented a van and we were driven across the border to South Carolina to a motel where each soldier in turn went into an adjoining room for sex with a sex worker. Since I thought we were leaving the base and getting away from the weight of military training, I naively went along with my fellows and refrained from taking part in the behavior in the adjoining motel room. As a footnote to our trip across the border, each soldier who entered the adjoining room developed a sexually transmitted disease after returning to the base and its treatment required medical intervention. Sex work has always been a reality around military bases and in war zones. Some have traditionally seen it as part of the rest and relaxation equation in war.

War has always involved the spoils of war that often includes predatory sexual behavior. Much legend about war involves romantic relationships that mirror life outside of war, and that happens, but predatory behavior has always accompanied war and some have condoned that behavior among some soldiers and top military brass. Bases, both inside and outside of theaters of war, have provided soldiers with access to sex, with much of that availability given a nod by military brass. The vulnerable among members of the military have sometimes been viewed as targets of predatory sexual behavior and an extension of military training and the deserved spoils of war in a male-dominated patriarchal universe. The reality of that behavior on the ground is happening in places like Fort Hood.

How Were 46 Million People Trapped by Student Debt? The History of an Unfulfilled Promise

Mary Green Swig, Steven L. Swig, David A. Bergeron & Richard J. Eskow

The democratic principle of tuition-free education in our country pre-dates the founding of the United States. The first public primary education was offered in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and its legislature created Harvard College the following year to make education available to all qualified students. Even before the Constitution was ratified, the Confederation Congress enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required newly established townships in territories ceded by the British to devote a section of land for a public school. It also passed the Northwest Ordinances, which set out the guidelines for how the territories could become states. Among those guidelines was a requirement to establish public universities and a stipulation that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” After the nation declared independence, Thomas Jefferson argued for a formal education system funded through government taxation.

Jefferson’s vision took form over the course of more than a century, as state and local governments began creating primary schools and then high schools. The federal government became involved in higher education in the 19th century with the creation of land grant colleges and other institutions, used primarily to teach agriculture and education after the Civil War. These institutions created opportunities for people who had long been locked out of the learning process, including formerly enslaved African Americans and impoverished people of all races.

State universities and colleges rapidly expanded as well. By the middle of the 20th century, low-cost or tuition-free education was available in many American states. After the Second World War, the federal government once again turned to education to promote opportunities for its citizens and economic growth for all. The G.I. Bill paid educational expenses for 8 million people, without regard to individual wealth, which helped create a robust middle class and contributed to the vibrant growth economy of the 1950s and 1960s. While those opportunities were still denied to many people as the result of racism, efforts were underway to improve educational access for people of color.

The Reagan era ushered in a belief that government programs, including education, stood in the way of people’s dreams and should be severely cut back. Public goods came to be seen as investments, ones that were purely economic in nature. For these reasons, among others, a nation that had expanded publicly funded education for centuries decided to reverse course. Instead of funding higher education on the principle that it benefits us all, the country began shifting the cost to individual students.

In the 1950s, as part of the National Defense Education Act, student loans were created as an experiment in social engineering. Concerned about competition with the Soviet Union, policymakers wanted to increase students’ capabilities in math and sciences. To do that, the country needed more teachers. So, lawmakers offered loans to college students, with the opportunity to have half the loan canceled after 10 years if they became teachers.

The experiment failed. Researchers have not been able to prove that the student loan program led more people to become teachers, despite multiple attempts to do so. The experiment was also cruel. Over the years, the student loan program was expanded, with the claim that a student’s personal investment in their education was an “investment” that would pay off in higher wages. Banks and other private lenders were brought into the process and given considerable incentives and subsidies to issue student loans, without considering the burden being imposed on the student. This financial opportunity was given to banking interests that were already wealthy, with little thought of the resulting damage to an economically sustainable future.

Proponents of financializing the cost of higher education argued that it was cheaper to lend money to students than it was for federal and state governments to provide grants for their education, even after paying subsidies to the private sector for their loans. An entire industry grew up around this process. State and nonprofit guaranty agencies were created to insure the loans. These agencies got paid, no matter what: when loans were issued, when loans became delinquent, when borrowers defaulted, and when they collected on defaulted loans.

In response, most states created guaranty agencies so they could make money from people who needed to borrow to pay for ever-increasing tuitions and fees. Now, states had an extra incentive to cut funding for public higher education. Not only would they save on expenditures, but they could increase the need for students to borrow, which increased their revenue. In many cases, these guaranty agencies don’t handle the loans themselves. They pass the work on to private debt collectors who take collection fees and are aggressive in their handling of cases.

The system took on a life of its own. By the mid-1990s, student loans had surpassed grants in funding students’ higher education. But a system built on debt financing only works if borrowers pay back their loans. That led Congress to make the system even crueler with the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984, which exempted student loans from bankruptcy proceedings and subjected borrowers to draconian collection tools. These tools included wage garnishment without a court order and the seizure of Social Security checks and tax refunds. The Clinton and Obama administrations attempted to lessen the burden slightly by allowing the federal government to lend directly to students while introducing income-based repayment options, but the system’s fundamental cruelty remains unchanged today.

It is time to recognize that the cruel experiment in financing higher education through student loans has failed. It has captured 46 million people and their families in a student loan trap, including people who received vocational training, and has weakened the financial strength of higher education. Inescapable debt is a major driver of social collapse. It has made the racial wealth gap worse and weakened the entire economy, as debt holders are prevented from buying homes or consumer goods, starting families, or opening new businesses. It’s time to restore funds for higher education and cancel student debt for the victims of this failed experiment.

The Anti-Racist Feminist and the Corporate CEO

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

In 2016, the former corporate leader and TV show host Donald Trump became US president. In the night that his victory was announced, previous Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke described the event as one of the most exciting nights of my life. A year later, the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased for a second consecutive year, with attacks targeting Muslim and Jewish people as well as the LGBTQ community.

Corporate leaders and right-wing leaders are legitimized through German sociologist Max Weber’s l’idée fixe of the so-called charismatic leader. The grant certifier of the Kaiser’s Wilhelminian Empire, Max Weber, not only legitimized corporate leaders but also domination. Soon, Weber’s charismatic leaders mutate into Managerialism’s favorite hobby-horse, the transformational leader, even though Weber also thought there are visionary, authentic, spiritual, and wise leaders.

Over the last four decades, business schools and an ever compliant business press have done everything in their ideological and broadcasting powers to cement the l’idée fixe that business organizations need leaders, corporate apparatchiks, and of course, the heroic CEO. Since leadership does not come naturally, it had to be socially constructed. In the case of corporate leaders, the ideology of leadership is largely managerially constructed in business schools. Despite rafts of business professorships, management leadership journals, leadership conferences, MBA degrees, thousands of articles in the business press, and in semi-scholarly outlets like the Harvard Business Review, the fact remains that there is no core universal truth of leadership to be discovered.

Still, the ideology of corporate leaders remains a very good business even when it mostly sells taken for granted ideas – often presented as leadership theories. In the real world of corporate leaders, they are more often than not defined through two key elements. Firstly, almost universally, they are men, and secondly, corporate leaders tend to be white. Rarely is this made part of the business school curriculum apart from an elective run as a Friday night class. This is done so that business schools can claim, “oh, we cover this”. Almost all business school professors just don’t write on white supremacy because writing about supremacy is painful, and might even point the finger at themselves. Business school professors are – more often than not – white, middle-aged men, more or less mirroring the world of management.

Ever since management writer Henri Fayol’s rather militaristic “chain-of-command”, Frederick Taylor’s authoritarian management ideas, and Alfred Chandler’s “field units”, the idea that militaristic leaders mirror corporate leaders have taken hold and has been re-told ever since in management, business school, and its ideological pamphlets called academic journals. In standard business school writing, is not at all surprising to find highly ideological passages like these,

The English would undoubtedly have lost the battle of Agincourt if they had underestimated the importance of the leadership factor. Any astute observer of organizations will notice that CEOs have a considerable impact on their companies.

This is the love-song of a white man for the militaristic, corporate, and above all-male, leader. This is designed to legitimize the white supremacy and masculinity of corporate CEOs of which, in 2018, just 27 of the Fortune 500 were women (barely 5.4%), and just three were black men (0.6%) – not women. From Bezos to Musk to Zuckerberg to Gates, and on it goes, corporate power means the power of the white man. To legitimize their domination, business school professor and the corporate business press sells the need for corporate leaders as common sense, as normal, and even as natural. Ex-CEO Donald Trump just represents a slightly more extreme version of macho-management.

Like Donald Trump, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Branson & Co have all but transmuted into celebrity CEOs reinforcing the domination assuring ideology of patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism – now sold as globalization. To legitimize this even further, token-females like Sheryl Sandberg have been wheeled out, occasionally that is. It is conservative feminism recast in terms of Hayek’s neoliberalism. This is individual advancement – not social progress. Almost self-evidently, the false promises of feminine corporate leadership had to remain unfulfilled.

In the conflict of feminism against Marx and the ever-alluring question: will women feminize and thereby humanize the workplace or will the power of capitalism, companies, and corporations force women to become just like male CEOs, Marx won hands down. In other words, female CEOs operate like just men taking on the ruthless traits of the corporation and corporate capitalism. Just as Maggie Thatcher caused the death of men in an isolated, if not desolated, place called the Falklands Island to get re-elected. It worked – they died, and she got re-elected.

Like business schools, corporations like to present themselves as an inclusive place with lovely pictures on their websites showing a diversity of people and, of course, plenty of smiling women. Often, it is not much more than visual branding. In reality, it deliberately over-represents the diversity found in corporate management and the average business school. Still, the image of a colorful happy face aids the false picture of inclusion and even progressiveness. More often than not, corporate apparatchiks interpret diversity through the logic of capital, focusing on how companies and corporations can use people of color to further their corporate agenda.

The very same corporate agenda is secured when the media reports of – yet another – business scandal. In cementing the “bad apply” ideology, these reports tend to focus on an individual CEO while never questioning the system of corporate apparatchiks, CEOs, and corporate capitalism. Instead, a glorification of heroic leadership takes place. During corporate scandals, the media sacrifice one in order to save the many. Beyond that, scandals are used to show that the system is working and business ethics – a contradiction in terms – is here to do two things: it identifies the bad apples, and it assures the continuation of the “nothing wrong with the system” ideology. This is the raison d’être of business ethics as much as of corporate social responsibility.

Undeterred from business scandals, leadership fantasies continue to be perpetrated by corporations, the media, and business schools. Everyone is it, and everyone is a winner. Corporations and good corporate leadership are shown to be needed and good. Business schools run business ethics classes to show that corporations are good. They receive full-fee paying MBA students and employ business professors. The business press receives advertising from corporations and even from business schools that often function look-a-likes of corporations. Finally, business school professors and deans can fly business class and meet important clients in the business lounge and for business lunches. It is an ingenious set up that severs all those who are part of it – not the precariat and not the women toiling away in outsourced sweatshops in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, business schools sell all this as ethical leadership or even more fashionable: as ethical stewardship.

The key to all this is that the faith is in the heroic leader. Of course, this also includes The White Man’s Burden, as presented by Rudyard Kipling, author of the Jungle Book. This is the image of the white savior bringing civilization to non-whites. Much of this reaches deep into popular culture with Harrison Ford (the white leader) freeing enslaved and non-white children in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett carry the same ideology forward. Two old white men are saving non-white African children from the misery the white man has brought to Africa with highlights like the slave trade, also known as the Triangle of Death. Like Harrison Ford, corporate leaders like Gates and Buffett, as well as Donald Trump, are well aware of the power of impression management. This is not really all that new. Historically, Robber Barons, like John D. Rockefeller, turned to philanthropy to save their reputation – it worked rather well. The Rockefeller Foundation is well known – Rockefeller’s Ludlow Massacre is mostly forgotten. Propaganda works. In the world of corporate propaganda – now called public relations, the center for sustainable leadership is by no means the height of all this.

Corporate PR ideologically underpins the masculine ideal of corporate leadership, cementing a Euro-American dominated culture designed to present domination not only as eternal but also as inherently good. One of the most common ideologies found in business schools, for example, is the l’idée fixe that the world had always had leaders. In her insightful book, Redeeming Leadership, Helena Liu, for example, argues that,

the typical business school degree reinforces imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal ideologies equipping graduates with the hegemonic values they then identify and reproduce in their everyday lives at work and beyond.

The quote shows how Managerialism works. Trained in business schools, corporate apparatchiks and managerial leaders run corporations with the dehumanizing gaze of a dominator. Their entire system enforces the hierarchical “Class Ceiling” legitimized through the worker-leader ideal. It conjures up fantasies of a society in which everyone can rise to the top – just look at Zuckerberg – and the fata morgana of a fair workplace based on meritocracy where ability prevails and where the old boys club no longer runs the show.

In reality, these workplaces are still run by corporate apparatchiks glorifying the ideal of the business conquest in which the male CEO is in control of “his” business organization. On the other side of the coin are those structurally disadvantaged and defined as non-dominant groups, the subordinates, underlings, or simply a human resource – a resource just like cattle, an apparatus, or implement. When non-white underlings highlight white power in management and the self-assign privileges of the corporate apparatchiks, they will be accused of “play the race card”.

What works in management works in management studies just as well where so-called “leadership studies” have mutated into a preferred playground for white, middle-aged business school professors. Being part of the boys club and being friends with the gatekeepers of academic journals – known as editors – they, again, get preferential treatment in so-called ‘prestigious journals‘.

These journals tell anyone to think outside the box but exist inside a tidily controlled box. In many cases, these are nothing but the outlets of the ever same. They publish the same meaningless trivialities in various versions over ten years. This is called “having an established track record”. It adds very little to scientific advancement, which is no longer the point anyway. The point is individual advancement – the next job or the next promotion. Candidates for university promotion often face managerialist committees staffed all those who have never had an original thought in their entire academic existence. Failing scholarly and worse, failing intellectually, they become corporate apparatchiks hooked on Impact Fetishism (output rather than sense) like being addicted to crack cocaine.

Here, another white, middle-aged gatekeeper assesses a candidate’s academic work. It is, most likely, a person put into place because of admin credentials. The appointment to a selection committee comes via other corporate apparatchiks – this time, they are university apparatchiks. In business schools, both are highly similar. The dress code, the managerialist language, the superior behavior, etc. mirror those found in the average business class lounge and almost any corporate office. These are the engineers of structural violence. They smile in your face and tell you how much they support empowerment.

“Despite the celebratory and celebrated language around female empowerment, emerging ideals of female leadership bear a similar imperialist heritage to masculine leadership models”, writes Helena Liu. The irony is that much of this is often implicit or structural violence. It has become naturalized. In business schools, it is assumed to be natural. The same goes for management in universities.

Leadership, structural violence, and domination are normalized and unquestioned just as the denial of the fact that managerial leadership not only means followers, subordinates, and underlings, but it also means the exclusion of democracy. Still, every manager of corporate affairs and even those inside universities and business schools will tell you that we live in a democracy. This marks yet another Spectacular Achievement of Propaganda.

Set against that are four options for resistance against the structural violence that governs university and corporate leadership. It all starts with decolonizing one’s mind or what might also be called “A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense – Find your inner Chomsky“. Secondly, find non-abusive and non-violent ways of relating to other people while trying to escape the pathological nightmare of Managerialism that governs our workplaces. Thirdly, re-imaging social meaning beyond the myths of leadership; and fourthly, read Helena Liu’s exquisite book “Redeeming Leadership” published by Bristol University Press.

Conspiracy Panic

Nicholas Levis

The most consequential false conspiracy theory of the last twenty years in the United States centered on fabricated accusations raised against the Iraqi state in 2002-3. These claimed that Iraq maintained secret stores of “weapons of mass destruction” and intended to use them against the West, perhaps imminently. Most versions also insinuated the Saddam regime was involved in some vague manner in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks together with its sworn enemies, the jihadi movements then doing business as al-Qaeda. That is what the vice-president running the regime, Cheney, repeatedly said. His president, Bush, just repeated the magic words 9/11-Saddam-9/11-Saddam-9/11 for months, until it was taken to be true by enough people to allow a smooth start to the carnage. The claims were actively fabricated by officials and agents at several agencies of the U.S., UK and other national security states, by various client groups and allied journalists, and by freelance assholes looking to get a piece of the action. The fabricators knew they were lying, and they knew that they lied so as to sell a planned, unprovoked war of aggression to the American, UK, and other western publics. The resulting war destroyed a nation, led to more than a million deaths, and accelerated the establishment of an archipelago of torture centers under U.S. control.

In short, the “Saddam-WMD-9/11” conspiracy theory was a top-down psychological operation conducted by state-based agents against the public, and freely trumpeted by nearly all organs of the U.S. corporate media. It has been completely discredited, but rarely will you here it called a conspiracy theory. None of the perpetrators of the campaign have been prosecuted, and most have continued their career trajectories unhindered by their participation in this well-known crime. Today many of them have been embraced by the Democratic establishment as heroic fighters against Trump — the same Democratic establishment that always seeks distance from actual fighters against Trump.

The most consequential American conspiracy theories ever were the Red Scares of 1919-21 and the late 1940s and early 1950s. Both met with a degree of popular enthusiasm and broad fear-based assent, but both were initiated and run by state and corporate-based elements as top-down psychological operations against the public, specifically targeting the left, labor organizers, and journalists, celebrities or teachers who showed insufficient anti-Communist fervor. Both campaigns succeeded in transforming American society and politics in a right-wing direction, and helped in partly dismantling the progressive, leftist and honestly liberal movements of their times.

A recent conspiracy panic campaign, #Russiagate, presented a mythic (and facially laughable) explanation for how the Democrats managed to lose the unloseable 2016 election. It appears to have been intended to weaken or to knock Trump out of office. If so, it backfired completely, presenting a fictional distraction from the far-worse realities of the regime’s violent policies and incipient fascism. Every time that the ludicrous and byzantine accusations fell apart (predictably, in every case), Trump’s position was strengthened, and that of real opposition to Trump’s barbarities was weakened.

Given their failure to actually fight Trump on policy, and given the Democrats’ embrace of Bushian politics and Bush-era war criminals, austerity, and imperialism, and given their propping-up of a right-wing candidate who has his own degree of involvement in Trump-style nepotism and is visibly suffering from cognitive impairment, Trump would be cruising to reelection. Cruising, that is, except for the unpredictable factors of Covid, the Depression, and the open outbreaks of organized fascist street violence that he praises. And because a real opposition to this regime’s particular horrors exists, and has not surrendered. (If they lose, the Democrats will blame the real opposition, and are already doing so preemptively.) Thus, for the moment, Trump is well behind in the polls, despite the four-year favor to him delivered by the #Russiagate operation with its demand for 24/7 coverage and predictable serial failures.

However, the #Russiagate conspiracy panic operation also succeeded, insofar as it has functioned to condition most Democratic-type liberals (and some of the left) to uncritically accept a xenophobic explanation for the rise of an all-American fascism, and insofar as it has gained much support among them for a bellicose, new-Cold War stance and widepread favor for censorship measures (run by private mega-corporations) to combat “propaganda” and “conspiracy theory.”

It cannot be known at this time, but the QAnon narrative appears likely to have also originated with an intel operation, or the action of a Trump-friendly outfit, with the design of casting noise over a story that sounds just like it, but is actually true. Trump, Bill Clinton and various celebrities and intellectual hooligans were all tied to the long-time human trafficking and rape-ring run by likely intelligence asset and “billionaire” Jeffrey Epstein. He was convicted, and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused. The operation’s apparent purpose was to gain material for political blackmail. Trump’s former labor secretary, Acosta, was formerly the Florida prosecutor who made a deal to allow the convicted Epstein to walk free in 2008, and to seal the records of his clients. It’s fine to condemn QAnon, but when you spend your hours talking about how ridiculous and hateful and wrong the story is, you are not talking about Epstein and Trump and Clinton (and the various other Epstein “friends”). You are not talking about or acting on a million other things that matter. From the perspective of the QAnon propagators, you are helping to promote and reinforce the ruse.

America, like many places, is home to fantastically, facially false grand conspiracy narratives positing that the political economy (so evidently managed by a ruling class of owners and corporations and policy-makers reigning over large instituions, who act mostly in the open) is secretly run by a single, smaller, invisible cabal of satanically-inclined mystery men who just want to do evil because they hate America, or maybe because they want to destroy Trump’s beautiful white race. There are many varieties of grand-global conspiracy theories, but they often pander to odious, hateful, and exterminationist politics. The latter are often modeled on the old European anti-Semitic blood libel, or, in fact, repeat the old European anti-Semitic blood libel.

Grand-global conspiracy narratives can appeal to a common socio-psychological make-up that hankers for denial and magic and simplicity, for stories that attribute social ills and human troubles to a corruption that can be theoretically excised, restoring a normality that never really existed as it is now imagined. In this they are akin to other quick-fix narratives, many of them based in religious dogmas (e.g. bad things happen because people reject Jesus and commit acts the Bible supposedly prohibits; or, to take a now-abandoned version, alcohol consumption is the true primary cause of social ills and prohibition can fix it). For most, the reality that their society is systematically rotten to the core, burning the planet, and heading for a predictable fall, and that any change to this reality must be revolutionary or will be nothing, is much harder to process, above all emotionally. It also subjects one to the accusation of radicalism, extremism, or “conspiracy theory.”

I dispute that very many people change their politics or prejudices or world-view as a result of exposure to one of the global-type conspiracy theories. On the contrary, these are devised to aggrandize and manipulate already-existing political tendencies. People tend to believe what they were long-ago conditioned to believe, and they tend to see what they believe. And remember, the most effective and consequential conspiracy theories in the modern milieu are rarely products of autopoeitic convergences of mass psychology. They almost always have original authors who know that they are inventing this shit, like QAnon. They are the products of modern public relations and popular mood management.

Granting that grand-global conspiracy narratives exist, the use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” in American discourse has always been rotten as fuck. Whether true or not, whether or not believable or grounded in evidence, any claims that attribute malfeasance to the American ruling class and policy-making power elite, or to the actual owners and runners of a system in which high-level crime was long ago legalized, is derided as “conspiracy theory” by the very same ruling class, power elite, corporate media, punditry, and liberal-authoritarian establishment. However, claims that mirror the same narratives, but allege them against an officially designated enemy, are never called conspiracy theory. In fact, once the latter tales are circulated within the corporate news media, to question them comes itself to be classified as conspiracy theory. You are a conspiracy theorist if you reject the outlandish #Russiagate conspiracy theories. And, once called a conspiracy theorist, you are supposed to be automatically and forever discredited from participating in public discourse. Increasingly, you are seen as the bearer of a dangerous and contagious disease, associated loosely with all other persons categorized as “conspiracy theorists,” and treated as fair game for censorship.

Conspiracy panic is a propaganda weapon that props up an overall portrayal of the mass of the people (and especially critics of the ideological hegemony, of whatever stripe, good or bad) as ipso-facto stupid, preemptively discredited, crazy, unworthy of participation in discourse, and dangerous. Conspiracy panic nowadays is a go-to for liberals to deny and distract and divert to incremental bullshit, and not have to think about systemic irrationality, falsehood, evils and failures, and how most of the unfolding disasters — including Trump himself — are not aberrations or surprises but predictable and systemic. It’s easier and more comforting to affect being appalled at the stupidity of QAnon (or the supposed millions who were moved to vote for Trump only because they saw a “Russian” post online), and to virtue-signal that you are different from the dumb right-wing patsies who eat that shit up, than to spend too much time being aware that the billionaire and corporate and ensconced policy-making ruling class as a whole — their names are known and plastered in the headlines — is by definition a predator class, professionally incapable of mercy, with overwhelming power over the rest of us, acting in ways that guarantee capitalism and its “ways of life” will continue burning the planet, literally, until the ecosystem’s capacity to sustain the present human civilization and population collapses. Which, speaking in historical lengths, is imminent, and possibly no longer reversible. Fight this anyway.

Repeal Section 230 to Fix Facebook

Dean Baker

Many people are worried that Facebook is playing the same role in the 2020 election that it did in the 2016 election, acting as a conduit for massive amounts of false and misleading information. They hope that Mark Zuckerberg will rise to the task and act to limit the spread of false and hateful stories.

This blind faith in Mark Zuckerberg is bizarre. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are there to make money. Fostering democracy is not really on their agenda, in the same way that helping the Kansas City Royals win the World Series is not on their agenda. If we want to be serious about limiting the sort of abuses that happened in 2016 we need to recognize that Facebook is about making money: full stop. And, we have to make sure that Facebook, or a Facebook like entity, is not making big bucks pushing nonsense stories related to the election.

The quickest way to fix the problem is the repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This provision exempts Facebook from being liable for material that is passed along through its network, either as ads or through individuals’ or groups’ Facebook pages.

This provision means that if someone buys ads on Facebook, or spreads a false story through a Facebook page, say that a prominent person is actually a serial killer, Facebook would face no liability. The person who spread the story could be sued for libel, but the victim of this libel would have no case against Facebook itself because of Section 230.

There would be logic to this exemption if Facebook were a common carrier like a telephone company. A telephone company charges people for use, either by the minute or the month, it doesn’t make a profit from the content of people’s calls. For this reason, it makes sense that AT&T can’t be held liable if people spread false and damaging stories over its lines.

We might feel differently about exempting AT&T if it was monitoring our calls and selling ads based on the things that we said or heard on these calls. However, this is exactly what Facebook does. They know everything we post and everything we look at. This is how Facebook makes its money, they can sell our eyeballs to advertisers since their system allows them to know in very great detail who we are and what we are interested in.

This is why exempting Facebook from facing the same sort of liability as its competitors in traditional media, like the New York Times or Time-Warner, makes zero sense. If these media outlets have to be responsible for the material they carry, why shouldn’t Facebook also be held responsible?

To be clear, the issue is not a direct act of libel by Facebook. If Facebook were to directly post a false and damaging charge against someone, it could be sued for libel in the same way as a traditional media outlet. The issue is with third party posters. If the New York Times runs an ad, a column, or a letter to the editor, it can be sued for libelous content.

In fact, the famous New York Times v. Sullivan case, which established that to win a libel suit public figures had to overcome a greater burden in establishing reckless disregard of the truth than an ordinary citizen, was over an ad placed in the New York Times, not the news or editorial content of the paper. In spite of this fact, there was no legal question that the New York Times would have been forced to pay damages, if it was determined that the ad actually met the standard of being libelous. It doesn’t make sense that Facebook should be subject to a different standard just because its medium is the Internet rather than a print publication.

Removing Section 230 protections would mean both that it could be sued for libelous content in a paid ad and that it could also be sued for libelous content transmitted through its system on individual or group Facebook pages. The first sort of liability is straightforward, just as traditional media outlets know they have to scrutinize ads for libelous material before accepting them, Facebook would have to go through the same process. This would make the process of buying ads on Facebook more time-consuming, and impose more costs on Facebook, but so what? If traditional media outlets have to spend resources to prevent the spread of libelous material through their ads, why shouldn’t Facebook have to incur the same costs?

The issue of individuals’ or groups’ postings is a bit more complicated, but not too much more. It would be unreasonable to expect that Facebook would scrutinize every item someone wants to post on its system for libelous content before it is actually posted. However, it could do this after the fact, when a complaint was brought.

The way this could work is that if a person, group, or corporation believes that they are being libeled by material posted on a Facebook page, they would bring their complaint to the company’s attention. Facebook could be allowed some reasonable period of time to assess the complaint. If it determined that the material is in fact libelous, then it would be obligated to remove it from the page(s) where it appeared.

Since Facebook’s system allows it to know everyone who viewed the libelous material, it would also be required to send out a notice to all these people indicating that the material was libelous and had been removed from the page where it had appeared. If Facebook failed to take these steps in a timely manner or determined that the material was not libelous, then it could be sued just like the New York Times was in Times v. Sullivan.

Mark Zuckerberg would undoubtedly be appalled at the idea that his company could potentially be held liable for all manner of nutty posts that appear on his system. He would have to spend large amounts of money paying people to evaluate the claims. Facebook would end up being a much less profitable, and likely a far smaller company. In that world, there would be little reason to care what Facebook’s policy was on political advertising since it would matter much less.

People obviously like Facebook, since they use it, but changing the law would not mean that this sort of social network type system would go out of existence. While Facebook may be hugely downsized, there could be other competitors that would step up as competitors.

We may also see systems set up that actually are common carriers, that would get the exemption laid out in Section 230. These would be systems that charged a flat fee, say $10 a year, to carry people’s pages, and allow them to interact with others on the network. (I have no idea if $10 would be a reasonable fee to cover costs and allow for a reasonable profit, but since this sort of system should require minimal labor inputs, hopefully $10 a year would be in the ballpark.)

These systems would not sell ads, nor would they acquire personal information on the people that used them. They would be similar to the on-line bulletin boards that many of us used in the early days of the Internet, although advances in technology would allow them to have much more sophisticated graphics and video material.

It is absurd that so many people are in the position of hoping and praying that Mark Zuckerberg will be responsible in how he deals with the 2020 election. We should never be in the position of having to rely on the goodwill of a billionaire to allow democracy to work. Repealing Section 230 will put an end to this problem.

Digital Polarization and the Religion of Profit

Sandeep Pandey & Shivi Saba

What purpose does a religion serve? It serves you the meaning of living a life in the right way. Lately, the sentiment around the religion in our country is undergoing transformation, religion has become a marker of character. Earlier this thinking was limited to a very small section of society but now the politics of majoritarianism has taken over. It has influenced the government, administration, police, judiciary and the media. By conflating majority Hindu religion with nationalism the problem has been further compounded. So much so that every wrong, such as violence done in the name of religion, is sought to be justified. On the other hand Muslim citizens become a suspect in the eye of system. Innocent Muslims as well as those who are critical of the Hindutva ideology are falsely implicated in legal cases because they are viewed as anti-nationals. Laws like sedition, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and National Security Act are invoked so that the accused have to spend years in jail without trial and bail. In Uttar Pradesh, where the police have failed to control the law and order situation, out of 139 cases registered under NSA, 76 are related to cow slaughter. It shows the misplaced priorities of and the abuse of police to achieve its political agenda by the Bharatiya Janata Party government which is being played up by the media of our country. People are using digital platform to incite hate and anger, sadly there is no control over it. This politics of communalism is creating mistrust among the communities as never before and has led to many dreadful events, taking a heavy toll on social fabric of this country.

We live in a society with over 3,000 castes and over 10 major faiths. Yet a kid won’t know when he will call his friends for gully cricket their faith or caste but as they grow society molds our thinking. Our syncretic culture has an inbuilt tolerance. People of different religions and castes have learnt to live together over generations respecting each other’s views and often go out of their way to help each other. For every communal incident we also hear stories of how Hindus saved Muslims and vice versa. But unfortunately politics of communalism is polarizing the society resulting in mental ghettoisation.

Mob lynching incidents, which initially targeted Muslims and Dalits, are now on the rise as people are emboldened to take law into their hands even in other matters. Pure human emotions like love have not been spared. Love jihad is used as a pretext to hound inter-religious couples, just as inter-caste couple are persecuted. The jihad concept was extended to COVID-19 crisis accusing Muslims of spreading the virus. And now one channel has come out with a story that Muslims are infiltrating the civil services. Sachar Committee report tells us that Muslims are under-represented in service sector in proportion to their population essentially because education levels among the community are comparatively lower, but that is how the media is distorting the reality, implications of which are very dangerous for the well being of our society.

Our morality has been numbed by this communal-patriarchal-casteist thinking that our conscience is not pricked by even the cruelest acts. When a barber Ikhlaq from Uttar Pradesh went to Haryana in search of work his right hand which had a ‘786’ tatoo on it was amputated by a saw machine. 786 has religious significance in Islam just as ‘Om’ in Hinduism. It has nothing provocative about it, yet Ikhlaq has been permanently disabled to pursue his vocation for livelihood. Slogans like Jai Shree Ram and Allah-O-Akbar have become war cries defeating the whole purpose of religion. What purpose this hate campaign can serve except to create long lasting fissures in society?

When Wall Street Journal recently carried a story on how Facebook deliberately allowed hate speech content by some BJP leaders including T. Raja Singh to keep the government in good humour, even though it played a role in instigating communal riots, it has sparked a debate on free speech. Ultimately Raja Singh’s content was removed but a number of BJP leaders including the Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad objected to the curb on right to freedom of expression of their colleagues. Does the right to free speech give one a right to endanger somebody’s life? It is interesting that BJP leaders advocate for their freedom of speech but anybody else found to be crtical of their government or leaders or even past Hindutva leaders are likely to be booked by the police. Recently UP police went all the way to Odisha to arrest a Muslim youth who made some adverse comments about Yogi Adityanath and Narendra Modi on social media. And now the UP government is creating a Special Security Force with a power to search and arrest without warrant. We can very well imagine who the likely victims will be.

Media, with some exception, has readily propagated the right wing ideology either to curry favour from government or under duress. The manipulation by the media channels, trying to feed the negativity to serve their rating, has been damaging to our society. The social media platforms have spread fake news sometimes resulting in violent incidents. Hatred and stupidity are on brazen display on these platforms. Innocence of human beings has been replaced by cunningness.

During the time of pandemic when people are mostly at homes the news channels have stooped to a new low in indulging in sensationalism. Journalism is losing its essence, it’s no longer about issues but it has taken the role of judging people’s character. To ensure that no hard questions are asked about its inept handling of the crisis at border created by China, the BJP has invented enemies like Rhea Chakraborty and Shiv Sena so that energies of its supporters are directed internally. Nobody is interested in the real question of how drugs make it to our society with the collusion of authorities. Meanwhile, the BJP is unashamedly using Sushant Singh Rajput’s issue as an election issue in Bihar diverting the attention from the misery of migrant workers who are facing a dual crisis due to floods. The media is simply lapping it all up.

We have to ask some serious questions. How is the national politics and media relevant to a child who sleeps without food at night because there is unemployment? Is poverty no longer an issue in a country with most number and proportion of poor in the world? Where is the conscience of media which is required to play the role of fourth pillar of democracy?  With unemployment going up the information broadcasters are earning enough money to feed gossip but will they be able to feed an empty stomach of a family whose lives have been devastated by the lockdown? What we see or listen we tend to believe, that’s the power we have given to the TV channels and they are abusing the power of information. An uneducated man or a villager is not interested in the Bollywood. The journalism in our country is dying and the people are enjoying the funeral because they are getting their daily soap fun. Journalism means research and showing the truth, posting the current events and not twisting a person’s mind with false fancy information.

It’s no secret how the elections of 2014 and 2019 were influenced with the power of technology. The feed on our Facebook and other platforms are customized menu offered to us, the fashion videos or the food videos are not randomly there on your feed.  Sure, it is easy to just be glued to your phone and watch or get served what you ordered thereafter the rest of the menu follows without you searching for it. The extensive reach of the platforms has posed a danger to our society as whole. Since the feed for each individual is customized the opinion of a person is shaped accordingly but the downside is the race for attention of the masses and the electronic media is the most aggressive player in the game. Electronic media in India is more of drama than actual journalism. As a human mind is more prone to sensationalism, the advantage is being taken by the electronic media. The real issues like the falling GDP, the situation of migrant workers, farmers’ misery all fade vis-a-vis the suicide of a Bollywood actor, Shiv Sena leader equating demolition of Kangana Ranaut’s office to Babri Masjid’s or the politics of Hindu Muslim binary. People get carried away as they are being fed the drama and tend to forget about the actual problems, this has created polarization to a great extent in India. People hate each other for their ideology, even in families there is polarization among the kids and their parents because the kids are critical of the Government.

Is that the world one wants to live in? Where we have differences among our family members? Hate boiling in our blood for our ideology? Use of religion or caste to demean others?The external threat faced by the country can be countered only by fostering equality, liberty, and most of all fraternity, amongst its citizens and not by playing the divisive politics internally.

Maybe it’s time to rethink our actions and conscience! Remember that Idea advertisement? Where people had no religion, no caste just their phone numbers as their identity.

If people were more thoughtful there would be less hatred and violence and more love in our world.