Gang violence leaves at least 150 dead in Haiti's capital this week, UN says

The death toll from gang violence in Haiti this year rose to over 4,500 after 150 people were killed in the capital of Port-au-Prince over the past week, United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said on Wednesday. Amid rampant violence and persistent political instability, Turk said the latest "upsurge" in violence is a "harbinger of worse to come"

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Issued on: 20/11/2024 - 
By:  NEWS WIRES
Video by:  Matthew-Mary Caruchet

Soaring violence in Port-au-Prince since last week has left at least 150 people dead, bringing the number of deaths in Haiti this year to over 4,500, the United Nations said Wednesday.

"The latest upsurge in violence in Haiti's capital is a harbinger of worse to come," UN rights chief Volker Turk warned in a statement.

"The gang violence must be promptly halted. Haiti must not be allowed to descend further into chaos."

Violence has intensified dramatically in Port-au-Prince since November 11, as a coalition of gangs pushes for full control of the Haitian capital.


Well-armed gangs control some 80 percent of the city, routinely targeting civilians despite a Kenyan-led international force that has been deployed to help the outgunned police restore some government order.

"At least 150 people have been killed, 92 injured and about 20,000 forced to flee their homes over the past week," Turk's statement said.

In addition, "Port-au-Prince's estimated four million people are practically being held hostage as gangs now control all the main roads in and out of the capital".

Monica Juma, Kenya's presidential national security advisor, said on Wednesday that her nation backs calls from Haiti for the United Nations to consider turning the current international security mission into a formal UN peacekeeping mission.

Juma told a UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday that Kenya, believed a formal peacekeeping mission could bring more resources to confront an escalating gang conflict.

The current mission has deployed just a fraction of troops pledged by a handful of countries and less than $100 million in its dedicated fund.

The Haitian capital has seen renewed fighting in the last week from Viv Ansanm, an alliance of gangs that in February helped oust former prime minister Ariel Henry.

03:16© AFP

Turk said that at least 55 percent of the deaths from simultaneous and apparently coordinated attacks in the capital resulted from exchanges of fire between gang members and police.

He also highlighted reports of a rise in mob lynchings.

Authorities said Tuesday that police and civilian self-defence groups had killed 28 gang members in Port-au-Prince after an overnight operation as the government seeks to regain some control.

Last year, in a gruesome chapter of the vigilante reprisals, a dozen alleged gang members were stoned and burned alive by residents in Port-au-Prince.

The UN rights office said the latest violence brought "the verified casualty toll of the gang violence so far this year to a shocking 4,544 dead and 2,060 injured".

The real toll, it stressed, "is likely higher still".

In addition, an estimated 700,000 people are now internally displaced across the country, half of them children, it said.

Turk warned that "the endless gang violence and widespread insecurity are deepening the dire humanitarian crisis in the country, including the impacts of severe food and water shortages and the spread of infectious diseases".

This was happening "at a time when the health system is already on the brink of collapse", he said, adding that "threats and attacks on humanitarian workers are also deeply worrying".

"Gang violence must not prevail over the institutions of the State," he said, demanding "concrete steps ... to protect the population and to restore effective rule of law".

(AFP)

Doctors Without Borders halts operations in Haiti's capital amid threats from police

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Doctors Without Borders halts operations in Haiti's capital amid threats from police

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday that it is stopping operations "until further notice" in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince due to an increase in violence and threats to its staff from members of the Haitian police. The suspension would begin on Wednesday, MSF said.

Issued on: 19/11/2024 - 
By: NEWS WIRES

A woman looks at a damaged business in the Solino district of Port-au-Prince on November 16, 2024. © Clarens Siffroy, AFP


Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday that it is stopping operations across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince and its wider metropolitan area due to an escalation in violence and threats to its staff from members of the Haitian police.

The suspension would last from Wednesday “until further notice”, said MSF.

MSF said in a statement that since a deadly attack on one of its ambulances last week, police had repeatedly stopped its vehicles and directly threatened their staff, some with death and rape threats.

“We are used to working in conditions of extreme insecurity in Haiti and elsewhere, but when even law enforcement becomes a direct threat, we have no choice but to suspend our projects,” MSF’s Haiti mission chief Christophe Garnier said.

A Kenyan police armoured vehicle patrols the Solino district in Port-au-Prince on November 16, 2024. © Clarens Siffroy, AFP

A spokesperson for Haiti’s national police declined to comment.

MSF, whose presence grew in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, is one of the main providers of quality free healthcare in the Caribbean nation and operates key services such as a trauma center and a burn clinic.

The U.N. estimated last month that just 24% of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area’s health facilities remain open, while those outside the capital face an influx of displaced people jeopardizing their ability to provide essential care.

MSF cited four separate incidents of police threats and aggressions, including from an armed plain clothed officer it said threatened to start executing and burning staff, patients and ambulances as of next week.

The medical aid group treats on average 1,100 outpatients, 54 children in emergency situations and more than 80 sexual and gender-based violence survivors each week, MSF said, as well as many burn victims.

Garnier added that while MSF remained committed to the population it could only resume services if it receives guarantees of security and respect by armed groups, members of self-defense groups and law enforcement.

Earlier on Tuesday, police reported that over two dozen suspected gang members were killed after residents joined police to fight off attempted overnight attacks in a resurgence of “bwa kale” - a civilian vigilante movement that seeks to fight off armed gangs that control most of the capital and are fuelling a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Watch more  FRANCE 24 exclusive report in Haiti:

The Iron Grip of the Gangs

(Reuters)

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Evangelicals see Trump as God’s warrior in their battle to win America from satanic forces

The Conversation
November 9, 2024 7

Chris Straub, prays with the congregation during an ‘Election Eve Service of Prayer,’ in support of Republican Presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at Suncoast Liberty Fellowship in Largo, Florida, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

A growing movement believes President-elect Donald Trump is fighting a spiritual war against demonic forces within the United States. Trump himself stated in his acceptance speech on Nov. 6, 2024, that the reason that “God spared my life” was to “restore America to greatness.”


I have studied various religious movements that seek to shape and control American society. One of these is the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, whose followers believe that they are waging a spiritual battle for control of the United States. NAR is an offshoot of Protestant Christian evangelicalism.

NAR advocates claim they receive divine guidance in reconstructing modern society based on Christian spiritual beliefs. In 2015, an estimated 3 million adult Americans attended churches that were openly part of NAR. Some scholars estimate that the number of active NAR adherents may be larger, as the movement may include members of Protestant Christian churches that are not directly aligned with the NAR movement.
The beginning of the movement

NAR emerged in the late 1990s when theologian C. Peter Wagner popularized the term “New Apostolic Reformation.” Wagner argued that God was creating modern-day apostles and prophets who would lead Christianity in remaking American society.

The roots of the New Apostolic Reformation can be traced to the broader charismatic movement that sees spiritual forces as an active part of everyday life.

This view does not separate sacred experience from regular everyday life. For the much larger network of charismatic Christians and Pentecostal movements that emphasize a personal relationship with God, the world is full of the active presence of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts and direct divine experiences.
Core beliefs

Central to NAR is the belief that Christian religious leaders should be the main source of cultural and political authority in America.

NAR proponents argue that select leaders receive direct revelation from God, guiding the direction of churches and fighting spiritual warfare against demonic influences, which they believe corrupt the behavior of individuals and nations.

NAR advocates for a hierarchical structure in which religious leaders and their political allies hold authority in society.

They believe in “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” a way to represent Christian control of society through a strategy that Christians should infiltrate, influence and eventually control seven key areas in society – business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion – to bring about cultural transformation.

By doing so, NAR proponents believe they can establish a pure and true form of what they believe is a society ruled by divine guidance and strict adherence to biblical ideas.

Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian author, speaker, social media influencer and consultant associated with NAR, has promoted the idea that such engagement where NAR Christian leaders hold authority through a government tied to divine will is essential for advancing societal transformation.

Wallnau has been a vocal supporter of Trump, viewing him as a significant figure in NAR’s vision.
Spiritual warfare

Followers of the NAR believe that they must engage in spiritual warfare, which includes prayers and actions aimed at combating perceived demonic influences in society. 

Evangelist Lance Wallnau speaks during a September 2022 rally for Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Chambersburg, Pa. Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

This practice often involves identifying “strongholds” of evil, around cultural issues, such as gay marriage, transgender rights and LGBTQ+ activism, and working to dismantle them. An example of this is a recent series of religious-based political rallies led by NAR leaders known as “The Courage Tour” that advocated directly for Trump’s second election.

The NAR emphasizes that Christians should expect to see miraculous signs, where extraordinary events, such as Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt, are interpreted to be explained only by divine or spiritual intervention.

The movement’s adherents also believe in faith-based healing and supernatural experiences, such as prophetic utterances and speech.
Trump as divinely ordained

Many NAR leaders and followers support Trump, viewing him as a divinely appointed figure who would facilitate NAR’s goals for societal reconstruction, believing he was chosen by God to fulfill a prophetic destiny.

They position Trump as a warrior against a so-called demonically controlled – and therefore corrupted – “deep state,” aligning with NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and cultural dominion as outlined in the “Seven Mountains” mandate. NAR leaders followed Trump’s understanding of a corrupt government.

The NAR led a “Million Women” worship rally on Oct. 12, 2024, to Washington, D.C., in which the organizers sought to encourage 1 million women NAR adherents to come to pray, protest and support Trump’s campaign. The event was promoted as a “last stand moment” to save the nation by helping Trump win the election as a champion against dark, satanic forces.

Several prominent politicians, legislators and members of the judiciary, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, have flown the NAR-based “Appeal to Heaven” flag.

For NAR evangelicals, the presidential election is interpreted through a Christian apocalyptic rhetoric. In this rhetoric one candidate is a force for good, a warrior for God – Trump – and the other is led by demonic forces such as Harris. Trump’s 2024 win is seen as a critical moment of spiritual warfare where the forces of God defeat the forces of evil.
Criticism from many Christian denominations

Despite its growing popularity, NAR faces substantial criticism. Many mainstream Christian churches argue that the movement’s teachings deviate from traditional Christian orthodoxy.

Critics highlight abuse of authority by people who claim God is directing their actions and the potential for abuse of authority by those claiming apostolic roles. The embrace of Trump raises concerns about blending evangelical faith and political ambition.

Critics argue that the NAR’s support for Trump compromised the integrity of the gospel, prioritizing political power over spiritual integrity. The events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol further complicated this relationship, exposing the potential dangers of conflating religious beliefs with partisan politics.

Moreover, the NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and the idea of taking control over society has raised other Christian groups’ concerns about its potential to foster an “us versus them” mentality, leading to increased polarization within society.

The New Apostolic Reformation represents a significant development, blending charismatic practices with a strong emphasis on politics and cultural transformation.

However, a large majority of Americans disagree that society should be remade based on religious theology. Thus, for now, the NAR movement’s fundamental views about religion and government are starkly at odds with most Americans.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2024/11/time-to-read-mikhail-bakunin-god-and.html

Russian Community Organization and Its Allies Behind Vladimir Oblast Ban on Hijabs

Russian Community Organization and Its Allies Behind Vladimir Oblast Ban on Hijabs

Paul Goble

 

Thursdaey, Novmber 7, 2024

   In another sign of the growing power of right-wing Russian nationalist groups like “the Russian Community,” “Northern Man,” and “Rokot-Center” in the wake of the Crocus City Hall terrorist action, officials in Vladimir Oblast have acceded to demands from these groups and banned the hijab.

    They have done so, local journalists say, even though Muslims number only 50,000 out of a total population of 1.3 million and even though there have been no significant clashes involving them and the ethnic Russian majority 

me/dovod3/15577 and kavkazr.com/a/hayp-na-hidzhabe-kak-chechnya-i-dagestan-uchat-islamu-tsentraljnuyu-rossiyu/33186434.html

    That the regional authorities felt they had to defer to the Russian nationalist groups shows how powerful they have become and how likely it is that many officials in the federal subjects view they as enjoying the favor of the Kremlin. And that in turn means that regional governments may take the same view and the same step despite the absence of problems.

    On the growing power of the Russian Community and other groups like it, see 

windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/extremist-russian-community-now-active.html,

 windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/another-black-hundreds-group-revived-in.html,

 windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/closed-diasporas-are-seizing-power.html and jamestown.org/program/russian-community-extremists-becoming-the-black-hundreds-of-today/.

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Liberal Interventionism From Past to Present

The kind of progressivism that people expect from the Democratic Party has been subsumed by another

By Brandan P. Buck

October 23, 2024

Source: Responsible Statecraft


Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

One could find similar consternation with American liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.

The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.

This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.

Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.

While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.

Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.

While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.

Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.

The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.

After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.

Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.

This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.

While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill.

Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration’s arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia.

During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.

Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration.

Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a “responsibility to protect.”

Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy.

Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America’s role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be.

Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans.

This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.


Brandan P. Buck

Dr. Brandan P. Buck is a foreign policy research fellow at the Cato Institute and holds a Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. Brandan is a former intelligence professional who served in the United States Army and Virginia Army National Guard, completing multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
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The US Isn’t Moving Right — the Democrats Are

As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.

By Branko Marcetic

October 23, 2024

Source: Jacobin



Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.

“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”

Don’t be so sure.

It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.

But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)

Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.

Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.

This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.

Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.

These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.

In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.

At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).

Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.

Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.

That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.

In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.

Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.

Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.

Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no effect.

So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.



Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Extreme Right ‘Russian Community’ Becoming Active in Circassian Areas

Russians were Shocked by Ukrainian Advance into Kursk Oblast but Now Mostly have Taken It in Stride, Levada Center Head Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 7 – When Ukrainian forces began their intervention in Kursk Oblast in early August, Russians overwhelmingly were in a state of shock having convinced themselves that such an event was impossible given the pressure the Russian forces have put on Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine, Denis Volkov says.

            But in the weeks since, most Russians have come to terms with this Ukrainian military action and view it within the context of the broader fighting inside Ukraine rather than as a separate problem, the head of the independent Levada Center polling agency says (forbes.ru/mneniya/520270-privycnaa-trevoga-cto-dumaut-rossiane-o-nastuplenii-vsu-v-kurskoj-oblasti).

            That does not mean that Russians have accepted this Ukrainian action as a fait accompli. Rather, it is the product of Moscow propaganda and its insistence that Russia has everything in hand  and will soon expel the Ukrainian forces from Russian territory, Volkov says polling data show.

            There have been, however, two consequences of the Russian reaction to Kursk that have been less widely noted but may prove more important. On the one hand, there is no ever less talk about the possibility of any peace negotiations with Kyiv to end the war. And on the other, Russians have become more angry about social and economic problems.

            If the reasons for the first of these are obvious, those behind the second are less so, Volkov suggests. They involve increasing cynicism in the population about Russian government declarations and a sense that the war is likely to drag on for some time if Ukraine is able to mount such operations.   

Extreme Right ‘Russian Community’ Becoming Active in Circassian Areas

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 5 – The extreme right Russian nationalist organization, the Russian Community, already the largest Russian nationalist group in the country, involved in suppressing non-Russian groups across the country, and the source many fear for complecting the regional militias Moscow is allowing is now becoming active in Circassian areas.

            (For background on this group and the fears it is provoking among non-Russians, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/09/russian-community-now-largest-extreme.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/08/clashes-between-ethnic-diasporas-and.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/09/moscow-gives-heads-of-all-federal.html.)

            The Circassian National Front reports that “the first branches of this nationalist group have opened in Kabardino-Balkaria (Nalchik) and Karachayevo-Cherkessia (Cherkessk). In Krasnodarsk Kray and Adygeya (Maikop), the Russian Community has already been functioning for several years” (t.me/cirnatfront/50).

            Some members of the Russian Community in these regions are flying the notorious Bakalanov flag which was used by Russian irregulars at the end of the Circassian war, and the Circassian National Front fears that the appearance of this group with such flags means that Russian nationalists hope to “extinguish” the Circassian nation on its homeland.

            However that may be, the appearance of the Russian Community in Circassian areas almost certainly is going to spark more conflicts in the binational republics of the central North Caucasus, republics that in recent months have seen a significant rise in ethnic tensions (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/09/islamist-radicalism-continues-to-spread.html).          

 

Russian Duma Deputy Calls For Special Terrorist Prisons In Norway’s Svalbard Or In Russia’s Novaya Zemlya – OpEd

 September 5, 2024 

By Paul Goble

Ivan Sukharyov, an LDPR Duma deputy, is calling for the construction of special prisons for those convicted of terrorism either in Svalbard or Novaya Zemlya because the isolation of these Arctic islands would not only prevent escapes but ensure that the terrorists did not influence other prisoners.

His proposals which echo those of others who have called for Guantanamo-like penal institutions to hold terrorists raise serious questions, however, first and foremost because of the Putin’s regime’s expansive definition of terrorism, one Moscow uses to convict many who are not in fact terrorists (ria.ru/20240903/tyurma-1970113222.html and  thebarentsobserver.com/ru/2024/09/v-rossii-poyavilas-ideya-sozdat-tyurmu-dlya-terroristov-na-svaldbarde).

But a bigger problem has to do with sovereignty. While Russia has complete sovereignty over Novaya Zemlya and could build such a prison there without any problems internationally, Svalbard belongs to Norway, although under the existing treaty regime other states, including Russia, have the right to act there as long as they respect the archipelago’s special status.

That status is of a demilitarized region despite Norway’s membership in NATO, and some analysts last spring suggested Moscow might use this confusion to launch an attack on NATO (jamestown.org/program/moscows-first-move-against-nato-could-take-place-in-norways-svalbard-archipelago/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/05/norwegian-security-expert-alarmed-by.html).

Such concerns prompted Norway to boost its military presence around the Svalbard archipelago (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/norway-to-boost-its-and-natos-strategic.html), and so fears about a Russian attack there appear to have faded. But the proposal for a prison for terrorists there could reopen them.

That is because the construction of such a facility would bring many Russians to the islands who might then be used to subvert Norwegian rule and because the prisoners might be identified as terrorists but could be released by Moscow if they agreed to fight for it, just as Russia has done with prisoners inside the Russian Federation who volunteer to fight in Ukraine. 

For these reasons, many in the West are likely to be skeptical about the idea. But at least for the moment, Russian commentators are too. Svobodnaya Pressa presents a sampling of their opinion and most are negative because of the costs involved in building and maintaining such a facility in the far north (svpressa.ru/society/article/428167/).

Nonetheless, what the Duma deputy has proposed bears watching because it has so many characteristics of other Putin moves, moves that many dismiss early one only to be caught out when they become the basis for broader aggression. 

 

Putinism And Russian Ideological Shifts – Analysis

 September 5, 2024  

By Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

By Olena Snigyr

(FPRI) — Apparently, the collapse of the USSR did not mean the end of the Cold War. It took less than ten years for people trained within the KGB to take over the state management of Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies showed their skills and views on state management by conducting the second Chechen war, beginning in 1999. Around the same time, Putin asked former US president Bill Clinton his opinion on the possibility of Russia’s membership in NATO.

Against the background of Russia’s military actions in Chechnya, this idea sounded bizarre, but today Russian propagandists with imperturbable faces tell the story that Russian leadership had quite serious intentions regarding the rapprochement between Russia and NATO. Putin’s rhetoric about the democratization and liberalization of Russia sounded equally bizarre against the background of crimes in Chechnya, murders, and persecution of journalists. The rhetoric of the Russian authorities about rapprochement with the West was most likely a ploy to buy time and obscure the fact that the Cold War never ended in the minds of those who rule Russia. Russian leadership puts confrontation with the West, above all with the United States, at the core of its foreign policy.

Seeking to secure its superpower status and unable to compete with the West militarily and economically, Moscow competes for discourse power, offering international actors a set of opinions and beliefs that are assembled into a system of strategic narratives. Russia seeks to secure a wide range of supporters among the Multi-aligned Community[1] and to undermine the cognitive, value, and political resilience among Western countries and their allies. Russian Information Influence Operations are carried out mainly within the context of Russian strategic narratives and are guided by Russian ideological principles, which are hostile to the idea of liberal democracy.

Ideology is back as an instrument of creating international alliances in global rivalry, and Russia’s role in this process is pivotal. War, propaganda, and pushing the new ideology are tools for Russia to achieve foreign policy goals and create an anti-Western alliance. It can be suggested that today Russia’s renewed ideology combines the ideological heritage of the Russian Empire and the USSR and is adjusted to the needs and goals of the Russian leadership. In his recent book, Putinism—Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology (2024), Mikhail Suslov mentions three main components of Russian ideology:

• Anti-liberal, communitarian, or identitarian conservatism, which presumes that Russian identity was created at the moment of Christianization of Kyivan Rus more than a thousand years ago and has never changed since that time;
• Right-wing communitarianism, which means denial of individual freedom to choose identity—to be born Russian means to be Russian forever.
• Organic, geopolitical, identitarian populism, can be found such constructs as the theory of the “deep people,” the concept of “Russian world,” pan-Slavism, etc.

New Arguments, Old Foes

Contemporary Russian ideology complements Russian foreign policy, “explains” its goals and actions, and is revealed to internal and external audiences through strategic narratives. Thus, Russia’s foreign policy goal of preserving the status of a world power is interpreted ideologically through the idea of ​​the existence of Russia as a civilization that has a mission to save humanity, and therefore any Russian actions become legitimate and whitewashed in the eyes of supporters of this idea. The role of the global evil that Russia opposes is assigned today to liberal democratic values ​​and, accordingly, to the West, especially the United States, as the bearer of these values.

This grand narrative’s umbrella covers the stories that the system of international law and international institutions, especially financial ones, has been significantly influenced by the West and is unbalanced. Russian leadership declares that the West replaces international law with so-called rules and thus calls into question the binding nature of international legal norms, especially norms of international humanitarian law. According to Putin “the only rules that must be followed are public international law.” Russia promotes the concept of “democratization of international relations … primarily on the basis of the principles of the UN Charter … based on respect for the sovereign equality of states,” which in the Russian interpretation means promoting the inviolability of authoritarian regimes and impunity for their leaders.

The Concept of Foreign Policy of Russian Federation defines the “elimination of the vestiges of the United States and other unfriendly states’ dominance in world affairs” as a foreign policy goal and thus advocates establishment of the new multipolar world order. According to Russian strategic narratives, this assumes the division of the world into geographical zones of interest of major world powers. The geographical ambitions of the Russian sphere of influence include the entire European continent, which, according to the architects of Russian foreign policy, should be freed from US influence and presence and become part of the Greater Eurasia integration project. This narrative corresponds to the Kremlin’s very specific foreign policy demand voiced by Putin—“to return NATO’s military potential and infrastructure in Europe to the state it was in 1997, when the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed.”

“Traditionalists of All Countries, Unite!” (A. Dugin)

Russian ambitions to oust the United States from Europe and establish influence find an ideological explanation in Russia’s self-declared mission and duty to save the Europe of traditional values ​​from the harmful influence of liberalism. The modern Russian ideology is based on the concept that liberal values ​​are the main evil for humanity, and therefore Russia has a mission to protect traditional values.

Russian antiliberal rhetoric specifically focuses on two topics:

• The danger of LGBT+ rights.
• The destructive nature of the concept of individual freedom for human communities, due to its opposition to the idea of birth given collective identity and loyalty to the authorities.

Russian (and not only Russian) propaganda insists that it is the idea of ​​individual freedom that leads to chaos, uprisings, revolutions, and the destruction of stable societies.

The list of traditional values which Russia seeks to protect, and which is given in Russian regulatory documents is made quite vague and casts a wide net in order to be appropriate for multiple audiences. The main focus of Russian propaganda is on “family values,” opposing them with individual freedom, gender equality, and the right to self-expression. An example of ​​ instrumentalization of the idea of ​​protecting “family values” ​​as opposed to human rights is the proposal of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, regarding international development and the adoption of a convention on the rights and protection of the family.

 While the idea of protection of Russian society from “malign liberal influence” became the reasoning for internal repressions and persecutions, in Russia’s foreign policy the idea of protection of traditional values became an integral element of all anti-Western rhetoric. Russia tries to popularize this idea globally and make it universal.

De-Libéralisation–Décolonisation–De-Westernisation

The idea of liberal values ​​as evil is present in all Russian narratives explaining the conflict between Russia and the West and is mixed, sometimes in a bizarre fashion, with historical and political myths. There are two examples of such a combination in Russian official rhetoric: In the first case, the Russian duty to liberate Europe from liberal ideas is presented as a continuation of the liberation of Europe from Nazism as the result of WWII. It should be remembered that the myth of Russian Victory in the Great Patriotic War is one of the cornerstones of all Russian propaganda. It organically fits into the narrative of the historical mission of the Russian people to protect the world from global evil and is an important element of Russian modern ideology. Despite the seeming impossibility of combining liberalism and Nazism into one concept, Russian propagandists and ideologues explain the proximity between the two by the fact that the liberal West allegedly limits traditional values ​​of illiberal societies, by demanding the observance and protection of human rights and denying the rights of authoritarian regimes to implement repressive domestic policies.

In the second case, liberalism is described as an instrument of Western neocolonialism towards their former colonial possessions, which are assumed to be only allegedly decolonized and independent, but de facto continue to be exploited by the West. Within the framework of this myth, the economic success of Western countries is explained not by the competitive advantages of liberal democratic systems, but by Western neocolonialism—the fact that the West, with the help of the policy of spreading Western governance models, created such a world order that allows it to continue exploiting its former colonies and other countries. This idea is a big part of intellectual discussions from the times of Jean-Paul Sartre and Kwame Nkrumah to contemporary statements of Walter Mignolo that Russia is just a “de-Westernizing” force and a “disobedient” state that is “not attacking, but defending itself from the harassment of Western designs.” Russia utilizes this argument of decolonial discourse with a great advantage, especially in the countries of the Multi-aligned Community.

 One may assume that Russian leaders don’t believe in their ideas themselves and use ideological arguments in Informational Influence Operations to enforce their policy and achieve their goals. However, the revamping of this ideology to use it in competition with foreign rivalries reveals genuine intentions and can indicate long-term tendencies in Russian politics.

• About the author: Olena Snigyr is a 2024 Templeton Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. She is also a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.
• Source: This article was published by FPRI

[1] The term Multi-aligned Community was proposed by Jonathan Morley-Davies, Jem Thomas, Grahem Baines and is defined as “States existing outside of the Western environment who have exhibited a preference for aligning or partnering with chosen states depending on specific spheres or issues.”

Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

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