Carrie Lam blames Hong Kong education system for fuelling protests

Pro-Beijing leader pledges to overhaul school system, after weekend of heavy-handed police action

Helen Davidson and agencies
Mon 11 May 2020 THE GUARDIAN

Riot police during a demonstration in a shopping mall in Hong Kong on Sunday. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leader, Carrie Lam, has vowed to overhaul the city’s education system, saying its liberal studies curriculum helped to fuel last year’s violent pro-democracy protests.

Her intervention follows a weekend of heavy-handed police responses to scattered protests across the city, with journalists pepper-sprayed and searched, at least 18 people injured, a 12-year-old student journalist detained, and an estimated 200 people arrested.

Lam described the current secondary school programme as a “chicken coop without a roof” and said her government would soon unveil its plans. She reportedly said students needed protection from being “poisoned” and fed “false and biased information”.

“In terms of handling the subject of liberal studies in the future, we will definitely make things clear to the public within this year,” she told the pro-government Ta Kung Pao newspaper in an interview published on Monday.

Lam has record low approval ratings as leader and is under increasing pressure from Beijing authorities frustrated with the pro-democracy protests which have besieged the city since June.

Recent weeks have seen extraordinary interventions by Beijing into Hong Kong affairs and warnings that it will not “stand idly by” while the “political virus” of protesters continue.


Flash mob protests were called for the weekend after a house committee meeting in Hong Kong’s legislative council turned violent on Friday afternoon, drawing groups mainly to shopping malls to chant slogans and sing, where they were met by large contingents of riot police.
Aaron Mc Nicholas(@aaronMCN)

This boy was asked by the police how old he was; he told them he was 13. He’s since been identified as being part of Student Depth Media.

The issue of secondary schoolers acting as reporters is a tough one, but he did nothing provocative and kept his cool while being singled out pic.twitter.com/W5vabppywlMay 10, 2020

On Sunday police chased protesters through the upmarket complexes and streets of Kowloon.


Live streams of the demonstrations showed police appearing to shoot pepper balls inside a mall where people were shopping and dining with families, pinning a child to the ground, and detaining two student journalists aged 12 and 16. Pandemic prevention laws were also used to issue fines against people for gathering.

Hong Kong police denied they arrested the two children, saying the minors were taken to the police station for their own safety, where their guardians were called to collect them. The mother of the younger boy told media police had threatened to fine her if he was seen again.

The police force said they entered the shopping malls to “stop protesters breaching to peace”, and responded in Mong Kok to protesters setting fires and “seriously disturbing the public order and posing a threat to public safety”.

Hospital officials told RTHK News 18 people presented to emergency rooms with injuries sustained during protests on Sunday, including the legislator Roy Kwong who was shown on live streams being forcefully held to the ground by police in Mong Kok, and a journalist who alleged a police officer had strangled her neck from behind for several seconds.
LO Kin-hei 羅健熙(@lokinhei)

this is the moment lawmaker Roy Kwong is subdued.

He was pushed forcefully to the ground, and riot police rushed to press his head onto the floor with their knees. pic.twitter.com/sTJ1KaYxoPMay 10, 2020

In Mong Kok a large group of reporters were kettled by police, told to kneel and stop filming, and prevented from leaving despite some appearing to have been affected by pepper spray.

Since the protests began last June there are growing concerns about police brutality and rule breaches occurring without consequence, including the targeting of journalists.
Damon Pang(@damon_pang)

#HongKongPolice has asked a large amount of #HongKong journalists to fall on their knees, asking mainstream media to group together & other web-based or student press to stay elsewhere in #MongKok. The reporters are asked to stop rolling their live streams #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/alKFoVujzzMay 10, 2020

HK leader blames protests on education, vows system overhaul

AFP May 11, 2020

HK riot police enter a shopping mall to disperse protesters during demonstrations on Labour Day. (AP pic)

HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leader on Monday vowed to overhaul the city’s education system, arguing its liberal studies curriculum helped fuel last year’s violent pro-democracy protests.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam described the current secondary school programme as a “chicken coop without a roof” and said her government would soon unveil their plans.

“In terms of handling the subject of liberal studies in the future, we will definitely make things clear to the public within this year,” she told the pro-government Ta Kung Pao newspaper in an interview published Monday.

Her comments are likely to inflame those Hong Kongers who fear Beijing is chipping away at the freedoms that make the city a major international draw as political tensions rise once more.

With the backing of Beijing, Hong Kong’s government is pushing ahead with a bill that outlaws insulting China’s national anthem and leading pro-establishment figures are lobbying for an anti-sedition law.

The government says new legislation is needed to curb snowballing support – especially among younger Hong Kongers – for democracy and greater autonomy from China.

Opponents say the laws will cut back on free speech and do little to heal the city’s festering divides.

Hong Kong has some of Asia’s best schools and universities with academic freedoms unseen in mainland China.

Liberal studies was introduced in 2009 as a way to foster critical thinking with schools allowed to choose how they teach it.

But it has become a bete noire for Chinese state media and pro-Beijing politicians who have called for more patriotic education.

In Monday’s interview, Lam said she felt the classes allowed teachers to push their political biases and that greater oversight by the government was now needed.

Hong Kong was convulsed by seven straight months of often-violent youth-led pro-democracy protests last year, with millions hitting the streets.

More than 8,000 people have been arrested – around 17% of them secondary school students.

The mass arrests and the coronavirus pandemic ushered in a period of enforced calm.

But with the finance hub successfully tackling its Covid-19 outbreak – and social distancing measures easing – small protests have bubbled up.

On Sunday, riot police chased flash-mob protesters through multiple shopping malls.

They later used pepper spray and batons against protesters, bystanders and journalists in the district of Mong Kok.

Multiple arrests were made, many of them youngsters.

Lam has resisted calls for universal suffrage or an independent inquiry into the police’s handling of the protests.

In the New Year, she vowed to heal the divisions coursing through Hong Kong, but her administration has offered little in the way of reconciliation or a political solution.

Arrests and prosecutions have continued apace, while Beijing’s offices in the city sparked a constitutional row last month by announcing a greater say in how Hong Kong is run.


Hong Kong: Hundreds arrested as protest movement returns

Police say they have arrested 230 people, some as young as 12, after a weekend of pro-democracy demonstrations. Activists are concerned that pandemic lockdown measures will be used by China to roll back more rights.


Some 230 people were arrested in protests over the weekend in Hong Kong, local authorities said on Monday. Pro-democracy demonstrations have picked back up in the city after weeks of under a coronavirus-related lockdown.

Police said the detainees were between the ages of 12 and 65, and the charges ranged from assaulting an officer to failure to provide proof of identity. Democratic lawmaker Roy Kwong was amongst those arrested, officers said he was being charged with disorderly conduct. Video showed him being surrounded by police and pushed to the ground.

Read more: China: First foreign national prosecuted over Hong Kong protests

On Sunday, protestors had gathered for a sing-along event at a shopping mall when hundreds of riot police were called in to disperse the crowd. According to police, they also blocked roads in the city's Mongkok district and started fires.

Onlookers and journalists also got caught up in the ensuing clashes, with police firing tear gas at reporters and activists alike.


"Some journalists who were sprayed by pepper spray were not allowed to receive immediate treatment, and they were requested to stop filming," said Chris Yeung, chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists' Association.

Several people hospitalized

Footage of the scuffles, which included some people lying on the ground bleeding, were reminiscent of when Hong Kong was brought to a standstill by months of protests last year. At least 18 people had to be brought to local hospitals, the city's Hospital Authority said, including Kwong.

Read more: Lam Wing-Kee: Hong Kong bookseller fights back against China with Taiwan shop

There have been widespread worries amongst democracy advocates in Hong Kong that restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the pandemic will be used by China to further clamp down on rights. For example, a contact-tracing app meant to control who comes into contact with infected people may be used to target anti-Beijing protestors, activists have warned.

Current restrictions only allow public gatherings of a maximum of eight people.

Despite fears across Asia about a possible second wave of the virus, organizers are still planning to hold an annual mass pro-democracy rally on July 1. They say they are expecting two million people to join the even that marks the anniversary of Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese rule.

es/mm (AP, Reuters)

DW RECOMMENDS

EU condemns attacks on press freedom during COVID-19 crisis

Ahead of World Press Freedom Day, Germany's foreign minister said independent journalism is being weakened during the coronavirus pandemic. The EU also warned that media freedom is under threat in several countries. (02.05.2020) 

Does US-China coronavirus blame game threaten scientific investigation?

China's need for official secrecy and the Trump administration's need for a coronavirus scapegoat, are combining to lend credibility to conspiracy theories. Could science become a victim of the politics of the pandemic? (08.05.2020) 

Coronavirus: Travel boss urges EU to relax curbs on tourism

China has lifted its coronavirus ban on selling holiday packages, meaning the Hannover-based TUI Group can resume business. The group wishes the EU would consider doing the same. (04.05.2020) 

China's export spike masks darker prospects

China's exports jumped 3.5% in April, with the country exporting millions of tons of medical products. But with demand in the EU and US likely to crash this year, the figures may mask a more complicated picture. (07.05.2020) 

EU defends censorship of letter in Chinese newspaper

EU officials have backed a decision to accept China's censorship of a letter that ran in a Chinese newspaper. A sentence referencing China as the origin of the coronavirus outbreak was removed before publication. (07.05.2020)  

AUDIOS AND VIDEOS ON THE TOPIC

Martin Lee: 'From now on, China's going to rule Hong Kong with an iron fist' 

Date 11.05.2020

Cargo ship sailors press-ganged into keeping the world's trade afloat

‘Ticking time bomb’ as contracts aren’t honoured and ports stop crews going ashore even for urgent medical care

Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by

Karen McVeighMon 11 May 2020
 

Cargo ships wait to onload on the Marmara Sea outside Istanbul. Photograph: Erdem Şahin/EPA


Thomas Stapley-Bunten was due to finish his contract aboard the Al Shamal, a huge cargo ship carrying liquid natural gas, early last month. The ship docked at the LNG terminal in Fos Cavaou, southern France, as planned, but by then the world was in coronavirus lockdown. He couldn’t disembark, and international flights were grounded, preventing him from getting home to Newcastle, UK.

So the 27-year-old former Royal Navy warfare officer has been stuck onboard as the Al Shamal criss-crosses the ocean from Qatar to Turkey and France and back. The 34-man crew, from the Philippines, India, Russia and Ireland, have had their pay increased by 50%, but they just want to go home.

Thomas Stapley-Bunten: ‘People are essentially prisoners. There is no way to get off the ship.’

“We are still loading, sailing and discharging our cargo. But in the back of our minds, we are starting to realise: we are trapped. People are essentially prisoners,” he said. “There is no way to get off the ship.”

Stapley-Bunten is one of 150,000 seafarers stranded at sea on their vessels, forced to work beyond their contracts indefinitely, often seven days a week. Many have families and don’t know when they will see them again. They have been given no choice but to keep going, from port to port, unloading at docks that are open for cargo but closed to the seafarers who deliver it.

Cargo ships are responsible for delivering as much as 90% per cent of the global trade in goods, and the world’s 1.2 million seafarers are a resilient workforce, operating in often dangerous conditions, seven days a week. Britain, Spain and the Netherlands have designated them key workers during the health crisis. But they are being stretched to the limit: working beyond their contracts, exhausted, under stress, and invisible to the governments that rely on the goods they carry.


Cruise companies accused of refusing to let stranded crew disembark due to cost

The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) has received multiple reports of crew members with life-threatening conditions who have been refused emergency treatment at ports, despite the illnesses being unrelated to Covid-19. Unions and shipping and maritime organisations warn of a health and safety crisis. They are lobbying governments to lift restrictions to allow crew members home, but so far with little success.

Many governments are making huge efforts to ensure cargo continues to be delivered safely. But there is no similar effort to help seafarers. The European commission has issued guidelines to facilitate the safe movement of seafarers and shipping companies, suggesting key ports – including Singapore, Rotterdam, Gibraltar and Hong Kong – where crew changes could take place safely. But unions have said port states and governments are not responding.

“Governments are managing to get their citizens home from abroad, passengers from cruise liners, yet there are 150,000 seafarers still out there, working to keep global supply chains open, who can’t get home,” Mark Dickinson, general secretary for Nautilus International, the maritime union, said.


“The EU, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the International Labour Organization, are saying please get these seafarers home, but individual governments are not pulling their weight. It is becoming a health and safety crisis and it’s getting worse by the day.”

Kees Wiersum, captain of a Dutch-flagged specialised cargo ship currently sailing off the coast of Madagascar, said he is concerned about “fatigue and depression” among his 21-man, mainly Filipino, crew.

“They are in contact with their families, but if something happens, they can’t do anything,” said Wiersum. “We are trying to keep their spirits up, but they will tell you their families need them home. Some of them are expecting babies and they can’t get home for the births.”

Even if they were repatriated to the Philippines, one of the largest suppliers of seafarers in the world, they would face the additional obstacle of overcrowded quarantine facilities in Manila. 

Filipino seafarers stranded amid the coronavirus pandemic rest inside a dormitory in Manila. Photograph: Francis R Malasig/EPA

“Our minister of transport calls us heroes. He said we are vital for the economy,” said Wiersum, 61, a Dutchman who has spent 43 years at sea. “But we are treated like pariahs, like criminals. We can’t go ashore for a walk or a beer, or even for medical help. In Holland, they have repatriated holidaymakers all over the world. But they forgot about us.”

One of the most pressing problems is that seafarers are not being afforded the usual rights to get medical treatment at ports. Fabrizio Barcellona, from the seafarer section of the ITF, said he was receiving 10–15 reports of medical emergencies a day, and those are “just the ones we know about”.

The strain of being forced to work long beyond the end of your contract also increases the risk of accidents, seafarers say. Andrewi Kogankov, 47, from St Petersburg, Russia, has been captain aboard the Spetses Lady oil tanker since November. His contract ran out in March, but the planned crew change in Qatar was cancelled due to the lockdown, forcing him to continue sailing. His contract has now been extended for two months.

Scottish fishermen turn to food banks as Covid-19 devastates industry

“We are feeling exhausted,” Kogankov said. “We are working 24/7, we have a tough schedule, handling dangerous cargo. You have to be careful, you have to concentrate. When you are six, seven months on board, thinking about your family, you can lose your concentration.”

This week the International Maritime Organization warned its 174 member states that trade and global supply chains would “come to a halt” unless crews on ships can be replaced. If the 150,000 seafarers estimated to be working beyond their contracts are not relieved of their duties in two weeks, they will be in breach of maritime regulations.
 Crew wear face masks on a Pacific International Lines ship in Singapore. Photograph: Pacific International Lines/Reuters

Several groups – including the ITF, International Chamber of Shipping and the International Air Transport Association – have proposed a 12-step protocol to allow seafarers to join or leave ships at a series of “repatriation hubs”, from where they could fly home.

Stephen Cotton, general secretary of the ITF, said: “Our message for governments is clear: you cannot continue with a mentality of out of sight, out of mind, and we strongly urge governments to act now before we suffer more serious human or environmental consequences.”

Guy Platten, general secretary of the International Chamber of Shipping, described the plight of seafarers as a “ticking timebomb”.

“We could start to see disruption to trade, and more importantly we risk accidents and mental health issues. Putting this off is no longer an option.”

Indian chemical factory behind deadly gas leak was operating illegally

Company that owns factory admitted in 2019 it did not have valid environmental clearance

Hannah Ellis-Petersen , Aruna Chandrasekhar and Michael Safi
Mon 11 May 2020

Friends and relatives gather outside a Visakhapatnam hospital mortuary to mourn the 12 people who died after a gas leak at the city’s LG Polymers plant. Photograph: AFP/Getty

The chemical factory that leaked gas into a coastal Indian city on Thursday morning, killing at least 12 people and putting hundreds in hospital, was operating illegally until at least the middle of 2019, documents show.

In an affidavit [pdf] filed by LG Polymers in May 2019, as part of its application to expand the plastic plant’s operations, the South Korean multinational admitted it was operating its polystyrene plant without the mandatory environmental clearance from the Indian government.

“As on this date our industry does not have a valid environmental clearance substantiating the produced quantity, issued by the competent authority, for continuing operations,” the company said.

In the early hours of Thursday, toxic styrene fumes began leaking from the LG plant in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh state, as preparations were underway to restart production after a nationwide lockdown. The gas enveloped residents as they slept, causing people to collapse in the streets as they fled their homes. About 1,000 people were exposed to the gas, which causes neurological symptoms including headaches and nausea, as well as burning eyes. Twelve residents, including two children, died.

India's chemical plant disaster: another case of history repeating itself

Read more

The documents show that in December 2017, LG Polymers applied to the central government for the mandatory environmental clearance, in regard to a proposed expansion. The factory had been operating since 2001, but it is unclear whether the company had ever applied for the legally required permit before this.

In its affidavit filed May 2019, LG Polymers informed central and state government it had not fulfilled its legally binding environmental requirement. Prior to this, the factory had operated based only on consent given by the Andhra Pradesh pollution control board. The same pollution control board had also given approval on six separate occasions for LG Polymers to expand its operations.

The company then inexplicably withdrew its application in November 2019, even though the clearance had not yet been granted. The Guardian could not confirm whether it had since received the necessary permits.

Environment clearance involves carrying out scoping and pollution studies, consulting with affected communities and mapping out any potential contaminating impact of the plant, under the scrutiny of an expert panel.

Play Video
1:11 Several killed and hundreds in hospital after gas leak from chemical plant in India – video report

“Running without an environment clearance is a crime: consent from the pollution board is not a ground on which they can operate,” a Delhi-based environmental lawyer, Ritwick Dutta, said. “They should have ceased production at least then. Culpability is with the pollution control board, state and central environment authorities. They knew, they should have taken action proactively.”


LG Polymers did not respond to a request for comment.

EAS Sarma, a former government finance and power secretary, who lives in Visakhapatnam, has filed a legal petition against the ministry of environment, the Andhra Pradesh state government and LG Polymers, calling for them to be held accountable for failing to comply with environmental law and to pay damages for contaminating the area. The petition was heard on Friday by the National Green Tribunal, India’s top environmental court. Its ruling is awaited.

The erosion of environmental safeguards and legislation has been evident since the prime minister, Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014. Green laws have been eased in favour of reduced industrial scrutiny and factories are now allowed to apply for retrospective environmental clearance. In March, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change amended the law so that smaller industrial, mining and energy projects will no longer be required to undergo environmental impact assessment.

Environmentalists said this lack of enforcement and accountability on environmental laws meant it was not uncommon for major industries, such as construction or coal mines, to operate without clearance. Federal and local pollution and industrial safety watchdogs are often thinly staffed and poorly trained and equipped.

The cost of poor environmental regulation is high. On Thursday, as well as the LG Polymers leak, there were industrial accidents at two other factories, one in Chhattisgarh and another in Tamil Nadu, that hospitalised several workers. In April, six people, including two toddlers, died when the waste pond burst at a factory in Madhya Pradesh’s Singrauli region, which was allegedly operating in violation of environmental laws, releasing an ash flurry.

VS Krishna of the Andhra Pradesh Human Rights Forum said there was already an attempt by state government to remove LG Polymers from any potential criminal liability for the gas leak.

“No one is talking about criminal liability, there’s not been any deterrent,” he said. “There’s been a spate of accidents in this city and it all ends at compensation. The attempt to whitewash the South Koreans and the government has already started.”

Coronawashing: for big, bad businesses, it's the new greenwashing

A Who’s Who of polluters, tax dodgers and outsourcing vultures are urging us to #StaySafe and clap for the NHS

Mon 11 May 2020 Oscar Rickett

‘HSBC is now showing its caring side ... Yet at the same time it has decided, at Ramadan, to block donations to a Palestinian aid charity.’ Photograph: Maureen McLean/REX/Shutterstock

Last week, the Lancashire Post carried a feelgood yarn about a great British success story. “It’s plane sailing for BAE Systems – with a little help from Carol Vorderman”, ran the headline, accompanied by a picture of the smiling former Countdown maths whizz sitting in the cockpit of a plane.

Lancashire’s biggest private sector employer had “designed and built a ventilator” to aid treatment in the coronavirus pandemic, and they’d done it with a bit of help from the beloved TV personality, who said that her small private plane had delivered some of the vital components.

You had to read to the end of the article to find out that, in fact, the world’s sixth largest arms-producing company had simply manufactured 2,700 ventilator parts, and that “ventilator design did not eventually go forward to full-scale production due to the drop in the need for ventilator technology”.

All of which represents another great day at the office for the communications team of a company that made $21bn in sales in 2018 – 95% of them to military customers – and whose Typhoon and Tornado aircraft have been key to devastating Saudi-led attacks on Yemen, which have killed thousands of civilians and contributed to what the UN calls a “humanitarian catastrophe”.

A key element of coronawashing is, of course, the performance – being seen to be supportive in the face of a national and global tragedy

The word coronavirus has entered our vernacular in the space of a few months – now it’s also swiftly become a shortcut to brand self-awareness and vague corporate caring, with many companies quick to jump on board. A Who’s Who of polluters, tax dodgers and outsource vultures are urging us to #StaySafe, pumping out soft-focus branded content that makes Forrest Gump look like an episode of Chernobyl.

In a neoliberal society in which private companies need to project an image of public-spirited compassion, a global pandemic means back-to-back strategy Zoom calls for corporate communications teams. The mission objective is: how do we look like legends without impacting our profits?

More than that, these are often businesses that helped create and profit from the weakened public services and diminished standards of living that the outbreak of Covid-19 has served to expose, and which have hampered the UK’s response. These feelgood pieces of PR, then, are exercises not just in making it look like corporations are fighting the crisis, but that they also are definitely not culpable in having helped worsen it.


We have become used to sportswashing, greenwashing, pinkwashing and even wokewashing. We are now in the first wave of coronawashing, in which corporations trip over themselves to clap for key workers, before packaging the footage up into moving nuggets of shareable content and promoting them on several social media platforms. In the background, these same companies are asking for government bailouts and taking advantage of a crisis to push for favourable legislation and the slashing of regulations that are more necessary than ever.

And so we have Holly Branson, doing her best Ivanka Trump, tweeting about Virgin ventilator design while her father, Richard, lord of the boomers, moves on from taking legal action against the NHS to pleading for government money.

Then we have HSBC, which, among much else, has been heavily fined in the US for facilitating tax evasion and money laundering and was found to have “helped clients dodge millions in tax”. The banking giant is now showing its caring side by filling newspaper advertising pages with messages of support in this time of crisis. Yet at the same time it has decided, at Ramadan, to block donations to a Palestinian aid charity.

Meanwhile, on YouTube, in a video entitled Thank You For Not Riding, plaintive piano lines soundtrack footage of ordinary people in their homes during pandemic. It’s not until you get to the end of this moving tribute to the common man that you realise it was made by Uber, a company with a litany of questionable work practices, which is now using coronavirus sick-leave measures to argue against giving its drivers employee status.

Examples of coronawashing are everywhere. Amazon, the selfless buddy who does a favour for you behind the scenes and then tells you and all your mutual friends about it, was recently “revealed” as a “mystery £250,000 donor to UK bookshops”. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos makesmore than $8m every single day. His company has been deemed “worst” for aggressive tax avoidance and has long been widely blamed for the destruction of the very independent bookshops it is now so generously and mysteriously donating to.

A key element of coronawashing is, of course, the performance – being seen to be supportive in the face of a national and global tragedy. Primark donated “care packs” to staff at London’s new Nightingale hospital, established to treat coronavirus, but in Bangladesh it was cancelling production of $273m-worth of goods, leaving already immiserated workers destitute. (In the face of adverse publicity, Primark reversed its position.)

All of which recalls a line from, of all people, Peter Buffett, son of investor billionaire Warren. In an essay entitled The Charitable-Industrial Complex, Buffett described taking over some of his father’s philanthropic work and finding himself sitting around the table with power players “searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left”.

This is a neat description of the coronawashers: these corporations obviously weren’t responsible for the global pandemic, but they spent decades eviscerating the public sphere, which, in turn, has reduced the state’s ability to respond to large-scale problems. Now they hope to be patted on the back for throwing out some loose change and clapping the NHS (in an inspiring social media clip that you can like and share).

• Oscar Rickett is a journalist and writer

Trump’s grand alliance: MAGA hat-wearing cosplay fascism meets neoliberal capitalism — and the results could hardly be worse

 May 11, 2020 By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon- Commentary


One thing that unites the MAGA-hat cosplay fascists of the anti-lockdown “movement” and the Karens and Chads of the hashtag-resistance is the shared conviction that the United States of America is special and that nothing that happens here has much relationship to anything that happens anywhere else. OK, we might hear some comparisons to Germany in the 1930s — on both sides, honestly! — but even that is kind of a special declaration of specialness, as if fascism hasn’t experienced something of a spring awakening all around the world.

Normally this blindness to history and context, and this theological belief in the greatness of whichever aspect of Americanness is being foregrounded at the moment — whether that’s constitutional checks and balances or sepia-toned, sentimentalized white supremacy — is totally wrong-headed. I mean, it pretty much always is. But right now, in the deeply improbable timeline where we find ourselves, I think we have to admit that America’s situation is distinctive and unique

Our nation is leading the world — right down the historical crapper. Donald Trump is not solely responsible for this, and I’ll stick to my guns on the argument that he’s not all that important, in world-historical terms, and not nearly as anomalous as he seems. But, sweet Jesus, has he found his moment and made the most of it!

After three-plus years of criminality, corruption and general incompetence — much of it so clownish that a mid-level Cleveland mafia boss of the 1950s would have found it insulting — our bleach-injecting, hurricane-nuking, Greenland-purchasing stable genius has finally stumbled into the major crisis that will define his presidency for posterity. (Assuming there is any.) Yeah, whatever about Ukraine and his impeachment trial — which was this year, unbelievably enough, and it’s only May. That’s now totally forgotten. Robert Mueller, pulling long faces on Capitol Hill and delivering indecipherable double negatives perhaps meant to denote grave constitutional concerns? I don’t even remember who that is, do you?

The hell with that stuff. Along came the coronavirus pandemic, which was in general terms a predictable event but one that nonetheless caught the Western world at a vulnerable moment. The major democracies of Western Europe, all of which are going through significant trauma, handled it well in some cases and alarmingly poorly in others. Then the virus came to the United States, and I have to say: When it comes to fucking this up, we’re No. 1.

The Trump administration’s flamboyant display of overconfidence, lies, mixed messaging, buck-passing, goalpost-shifting, petulant blame games, incoherent policy reversals, conspiracy theories and anti-scientific balderdash has, in a certain sense, been wondrous to behold. It has certainly been revelatory, in that our nation has shown its ass to the world, and from now until the end of time will not plausibly be viewed as a leading power in science or medicine or public health.

This isn’t funny, obviously, and I will stop trying to be entertaining long enough to observe that we can now say with confidence that at least 100,000 Americans will die in this pandemic, and probably many more than that. The fact that Trumpian virus-truthers are out there convincing each other that those numbers have been faked somehow, and that the libtards have some vested interest in running up the score, is simultaneously completely unsurprising at this point and deliriously far beyond anything we could have imagined back in the innocent days of the Benghazi investigation and “but her emails.”

How many of those human lives could have been saved with a coherent and rational response from the federal government? We will likely never know, but whatever the number is, it’s much too large.

Will the Trump administration — and, to speak truthfully, its behind-the-scenes puppetmasters in the corporate suites with sweeping views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty — succeed in framing those deaths as vaguely regrettable but necessary sacrifices to “the economy” or “the American way of life,” understood as grand, inhuman abstractions not unlike the deities of bygone civilizations? We don’t know that either. It’s cold comfort to conclude that their scheme to pretend that the economy has been “reopened” and everything’s going great and this was the plan all along is stupid and won’t work. But that’s where we are.

I remarked on Twitter recently that it would clarify matters if we replaced all such generic references to “the economy” and “the market” and “America” with “Yog-Sothoth,” an all-devouring Elder God from H.P. Lovecraft’s paranoid mythos. Americans are warriors, who have never hesitated to face death to save Yog-Sothoth! Human lives are sacred, of course — even, hypothetically, those of older and less productive people — but not as sacred as Yog-Sothoth!

Please don’t start mumbling at me about how everything will be different after Joe Biden takes office and the Democrats win the Senate. Just take all that old flea-ridden furniture to the dump and drop it off. Because even if all that happens, we’ll get the usual half-baked, apologetic Democratic policy mélange, in which everybody gets an orange slice and the Wall Street banks and Silicon Valley tycoons get monopoly control of all the orange trees, all the water and all the sunlight. If Republicans are all-in on the Yog-Sothoth cult, Democrats have got some really good focus-group pie charts from 2004 that tell them the smart play is to occupy the middle ground between appeasing it and embracing it.

And we will still be, now and forever, the country that elected a third-rate con man who had no actual interest in being president, and whose only policy agenda was to pursue psychic revenge against the elite liberals who mocked him by encouraging racist backlash, pouring gasoline on the culture wars and demolishing the federal government from the top down. And we’re stuck with him, by the way. Please disabuse yourself of the liberal magical thinking that Trump will go to prison after he leaves office (he won’t), that he won’t somehow be rehabilitated as a “controversial yet charismatic” ex-president (he will) or that he won’t get a presidential library in his dotage and a state funeral when he finally kicks the bucket.

Of course it’s true that any other president, even the dim or reactionary ones, would have done a vastly better job during this emergency. Barack Obama would have been great, probably superior at handling a pandemic than he was at the political and economic crises he actually faced — but Bill Clinton and, for that matter, George H.W. Bush would have managed the situation like competent adults as well. (Even George W. Bush would probably have grasped that it was a time to defer to expert advice.) If there’s a silver lining here — and there really isn’t — there’s no longer any question that Trump will be remembered as a massively useless and destructive president. He had some work to do to get past James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson into “worst episode ever” position, but I think he’s done it now.

But to act like it’s just bad luck that we wound up with a hateful, soulless idiot in the White House at this perilous moment is missing the point on a grand scale. We got here because this is where we are. Donald Trump could only have happened now, and he represents the confluence of various toxic currents that have been thrown into stark relief by the coronavirus pandemic. We can summarize those in familiar terms: the two-party political system is paralyzed, our civic culture is bitterly divided and dysfunctional, economic inequality has reached epic proportions, and the global economic system, undergirded by the philosophy known as “neoliberalism,” is in profound and worsening crisis.

One consequence of all that bad stuff is the global resurgence of fascism, which I mentioned up top. In the American context that has provoked an increasing number of violent hate crimes along with a whole lot of theatrical play-acting, such as the armed goons seen protesting in Lansing, Michigan, and other state capitals. I’m not suggesting those people are not dangerous — read this cautionary essay by Aleksandar Hemon, who lived through the violent collapse of Yugoslavia — but for the moment they’re disorganized and their numbers are small. Most American fascism is just petty, lard-ass older people emitting gas on the internet.

Bands of gun-toting morons staging photo-ops on the statehouse steps, as I read things, is more a symptom of cultural collapse than a cause. It’s also unclear whether Donald Trump has any actual thoughts about the fascist renewal, beyond an instinctive sympathy with malice, racism and stupid caricatures of masculinity. He’s had Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller whispering dark wisdom in his ear at various times, but he possesses no vision of the world beyond his own self-glorification.

When it comes to the free-trade and fiscal austerity policies identified with neoliberalism, the equation is different: Trump doesn’t understand those things and instinctively dislikes them, which might be the only borderline-redeeming quality of his presidency. Bannon tried to push him toward full-throated “national socialism,” which would never have worked but at least had the virtue of logical consistency. Which, come to think of it, is no longer a virtue!

After following a trail of billion-dollar crumbs into the forest to the cabin in the woods haunted by Mitch McConnell and the CEO class, Trump has now thoroughly imbibed the brainworms of the Yog-Sothoth paradox, served in a delicious cocktail of Lysol and hydroxychloroquine. That would be the paradox through which a system that oppresses almost everyone in endless cycles of overwork, bottomless debt and pointless consumption, while massively enriching a few, is identified with “freedom.” This is how neoliberal capitalism and the rising tide of fascism, which from the beginning were supposed to be incompatible, have become aligned.

If this vision of freedom is completely incoherent or psychotic, in America it gets invested with all kinds of symbolic meaning. The “freedom” to go into Publix without wearing a mask or to buy a toaster oven without standing in line — like the freedom to reject scientific thought as “cultural Marxism” or the freedom to hold fantastic and irrational opinions because coastal liberals find them obnoxious — becomes a totem of heroic individual resistance to tyranny, a marker of identification with the founding fathers and the noble “lost cause” of the Confederacy and John Wayne at the end of “Stagecoach.”

It’s perfectly true that most Americans do not hold blatantly insane beliefs about freedom and science and history and the nature of our economy, and that large majorities appear to favor what could broadly be called social-democratic solutions to our nation’s worsening problems. That may yet create legitimate reasons for optimism in the decades ahead, but in the short and medium term it’s nowhere near as encouraging as it ought to be. W.B. Yeats’ lines from “The Second Coming” get quoted too often, because they’re irresistible:


The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Given our political duopoly, “the best” must be read as “the best available option,” that being the not-blatantly-insane party, which — even faced with the cult of Yog-Sothoth — remains consumed by existential doubt and internal conflict, not to mention pathologically averse to anything that resembles a large or ambitious plan not cloaked in immense draperies of bewildering bureaucratic language.

It’s not just that the NBI Party has selected a hilariously terrible candidate to run against Trump, or that it keeps flirtatiously trying to strain the biggest chunks of fascism out of the neoliberal Clorox cocktail and chug the remainder. Those things are only true in the first place because everyone in mainstream American politics remains trapped in the toxic myth of American exceptionalism — the narrative frame that insists we are a special nation anointed by God and invested with divine purpose, if only we can figure out what that is.

That’s a blatantly insane belief that has distorted our entire history, and has now brought us Donald Trump and the national tragedy and humiliation of this pandemic. Those things are not anomalies, and we cannot wish them away. We will never get past them unless we free ourselves from the collective delusion of our national greatness. Time is running out.

Fascism, capitalism, Donald Trump and the pandemic: How did we get here?
May 10, 2020 By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon- Commentary



One thing that unites the MAGA-hat cosplay fascists of the anti-lockdown “movement” and the Karens and Chads of the hashtag-resistance is the shared conviction that the United States of America is special and that nothing that happens here has much relationship to anything that happens anywhere else. OK, we might hear some comparisons to Germany in the 1930s — on both sides, honestly! — but even that is kind of a special declaration of specialness, as if fascism hasn’t experienced something of a spring awakening all around the world.





This article first appeared in Salon.
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.



Normally this blindness to history and context, and this theological belief in the greatness of whichever aspect of Americanness is being foregrounded at the moment — whether that’s constitutional checks and balances or sepia-toned, sentimentalized white supremacy — is totally wrong-headed. I mean, it pretty much always is. But right now, in the deeply improbable timeline where we find ourselves, I think we have to admit that America’s situation is distinctive and unique.


00:0002:58




Our nation is leading the world — right down the historical crapper. Donald Trump is not solely responsible for this, and I’ll stick to my guns on the argument that he’s not all that important, in world-historical terms, and not nearly as anomalous as he seems. But, sweet Jesus, has he found his moment and made the most of it!

After three-plus years of criminality, corruption and general incompetence — much of it so clownish that a mid-level Cleveland mafia boss of the 1950s would have found it insulting — our bleach-injecting, hurricane-nuking, Greenland-purchasing stable genius has finally stumbled into the major crisis that will define his presidency for posterity. (Assuming there is any.) Yeah, whatever about Ukraine and his impeachment trial — which was this year, unbelievably enough, and it’s only May. That’s now totally forgotten. Robert Mueller, pulling long faces on Capitol Hill and delivering indecipherable double negatives perhaps meant to denote grave constitutional concerns? I don’t even remember who that is, do you?

The hell with that stuff. Along came the coronavirus pandemic, which was in general terms a predictable event but one that nonetheless caught the Western world at a vulnerable moment. The major democracies of Western Europe, all of which are going through significant trauma, handled it well in some cases and alarmingly poorly in others. Then the virus came to the United States, and I have to say: When it comes to fucking this up, we’re No. 1.




The Trump administration’s flamboyant display of overconfidence, lies, mixed messaging, buck-passing, goalpost-shifting, petulant blame games, incoherent policy reversals, conspiracy theories and anti-scientific balderdash has, in a certain sense, been wondrous to behold. It has certainly been revelatory, in that our nation has shown its ass to the world, and from now until the end of time will not plausibly be viewed as a leading power in science or medicine or public health.

This isn’t funny, obviously, and I will stop trying to be entertaining long enough to observe that we can now say with confidence that at least 100,000 Americans will die in this pandemic, and probably many more than that. The fact that Trumpian virus-truthers are out there convincing each other that those numbers have been faked somehow, and that the libtards have some vested interest in running up the score, is simultaneously completely unsurprising at this point and deliriously far beyond anything we could have imagined back in the innocent days of the Benghazi investigation and “but her emails.”

How many of those human lives could have been saved with a coherent and rational response from the federal government? We will likely never know, but whatever the number is, it’s much too large.




Will the Trump administration — and, to speak truthfully, its behind-the-scenes puppetmasters in the corporate suites with sweeping views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty — succeed in framing those deaths as vaguely regrettable but necessary sacrifices to “the economy” or “the American way of life,” understood as grand, inhuman abstractions not unlike the deities of bygone civilizations? We don’t know that either. It’s cold comfort to conclude that their scheme to pretend that the economy has been “reopened” and everything’s going great and this was the plan all along is stupid and won’t work. But that’s where we are.

I remarked on Twitter recently that it would clarify matters if we replaced all such generic references to “the economy” and “the market” and “America” with “Yog-Sothoth,” an all-devouring Elder God from H.P. Lovecraft’s paranoid mythos. Americans are warriors, who have never hesitated to face death to save Yog-Sothoth! Human lives are sacred, of course — even, hypothetically, those of older and less productive people — but not as sacred as Yog-Sothoth!




Please don’t start mumbling at me about how everything will be different after Joe Biden takes office and the Democrats win the Senate. Just take all that old flea-ridden furniture to the dump and drop it off. Because even if all that happens, we’ll get the usual half-baked, apologetic Democratic policy mélange, in which everybody gets an orange slice and the Wall Street banks and Silicon Valley tycoons get monopoly control of all the orange trees, all the water and all the sunlight. If Republicans are all-in on the Yog-Sothoth cult, Democrats have got some really good focus-group pie charts from 2004 that tell them the smart play is to occupy the middle ground between appeasing it and embracing it.

And we will still be, now and forever, the country that elected a third-rate con man who had no actual interest in being president, and whose only policy agenda was to pursue psychic revenge against the elite liberals who mocked him by encouraging racist backlash, pouring gasoline on the culture wars and demolishing the federal government from the top down. And we’re stuck with him, by the way. Please disabuse yourself of the liberal magical thinking that Trump will go to prison after he leaves office (he won’t), that he won’t somehow be rehabilitated as a “controversial yet charismatic” ex-president (he will) or that he won’t get a presidential library in his dotage and a state funeral when he finally kicks the bucket.

Of course it’s true that any other president, even the dim or reactionary ones, would have done a vastly better job during this emergency. Barack Obama would have been great, probably superior at handling a pandemic than he was at the political and economic crises he actually faced — but Bill Clinton and, for that matter, George H.W. Bush would have managed the situation like competent adults as well. (Even George W. Bush would probably have grasped that it was a time to defer to expert advice.) If there’s a silver lining here — and there really isn’t — there’s no longer any question that Trump will be remembered as a massively useless and destructive president. He had some work to do to get past James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson into “worst episode ever” position, but I think he’s done it now.




But to act like it’s just bad luck that we wound up with a hateful, soulless idiot in the White House at this perilous moment is missing the point on a grand scale. We got here because this is where we are. Donald Trump could only have happened now, and he represents the confluence of various toxic currents that have been thrown into stark relief by the coronavirus pandemic. We can summarize those in familiar terms: the two-party political system is paralyzed, our civic culture is bitterly divided and dysfunctional, economic inequality has reached epic proportions, and the global economic system, undergirded by the philosophy known as “neoliberalism,” is in profound and worsening crisis.

One consequence of all that bad stuff is the global resurgence of fascism, which I mentioned up top. In the American context that has provoked an increasing number of violent hate crimes along with a whole lot of theatrical play-acting, such as the armed goons seen protesting in Lansing, Michigan, and other state capitals. I’m not suggesting those people are not dangerous — read this cautionary essay by Aleksandar Hemon, who lived through the violent collapse of Yugoslavia — but for the moment they’re disorganized and their numbers are small. Most American fascism is just petty, lard-ass older people emitting gas on the internet.

Bands of gun-toting morons staging photo-ops on the statehouse steps, as I read things, is more a symptom of cultural collapse than a cause. It’s also unclear whether Donald Trump has any actual thoughts about the fascist renewal, beyond an instinctive sympathy with malice, racism and stupid caricatures of masculinity. He’s had Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller whispering dark wisdom in his ear at various times, but he possesses no vision of the world beyond his own self-glorification.

When it comes to the free-trade and fiscal austerity policies identified with neoliberalism, the equation is different: Trump doesn’t understand those things and instinctively dislikes them, which might be the only borderline-redeeming quality of his presidency. Bannon tried to push him toward full-throated “national socialism,” which would never have worked but at least had the virtue of logical consistency. Which, come to think of it, is no longer a virtue!




After following a trail of billion-dollar crumbs into the forest to the cabin in the woods haunted by Mitch McConnell and the CEO class, Trump has now thoroughly imbibed the brainworms of the Yog-Sothoth paradox, served in a delicious cocktail of Lysol and hydroxychloroquine. That would be the paradox through which a system that oppresses almost everyone in endless cycles of overwork, bottomless debt and pointless consumption, while massively enriching a few, is identified with “freedom.” This is how neoliberal capitalism and the rising tide of fascism, which from the beginning were supposed to be incompatible, have become aligned.

If this vision of freedom is completely incoherent or psychotic, in America it gets invested with all kinds of symbolic meaning. The “freedom” to go into Publix without wearing a mask or to buy a toaster oven without standing in line — like the freedom to reject scientific thought as “cultural Marxism” or the freedom to hold fantastic and irrational opinions because coastal liberals find them obnoxious — becomes a totem of heroic individual resistance to tyranny, a marker of identification with the founding fathers and the noble “lost cause” of the Confederacy and John Wayne at the end of “Stagecoach.”

It’s perfectly true that most Americans do not hold blatantly insane beliefs about freedom and science and history and the nature of our economy, and that large majorities appear to favor what could broadly be called social-democratic solutions to our nation’s worsening problems. That may yet create legitimate reasons for optimism in the decades ahead, but in the short and medium term it’s nowhere near as encouraging as it ought to be. W.B. Yeats’ lines from “The Second Coming” get quoted too often, because they’re irresistible:


The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.






Given our political duopoly, “the best” must be read as “the best available option,” that being the not-blatantly-insane party, which — even faced with the cult of Yog-Sothoth — remains consumed by existential doubt and internal conflict, not to mention pathologically averse to anything that resembles a large or ambitious plan not cloaked in immense draperies of bewildering bureaucratic language.

It’s not just that the NBI Party has selected a hilariously terrible candidate to run against Trump, or that it keeps flirtatiously trying to strain the biggest chunks of fascism out of the neoliberal Clorox cocktail and chug the remainder. Those things are only true in the first place because everyone in mainstream American politics remains trapped in the toxic myth of American exceptionalism — the narrative frame that insists we are a special nation anointed by God and invested with divine purpose, if only we can figure out what that is.

That’s a blatantly insane belief that has distorted our entire history, and has now brought us Donald Trump and the national tragedy and humiliation of this pandemic. Those things are not anomalies, and we cannot wish them away. We will never get past them unless we free ourselves from the collective delusion of our national greatness. Time is running out.

Yale Fascism expert: Pandemic offers Trump a dangerous opportunity to ‘rule by decree’ — and consolidate his power

May 11, 2020 By Chauncey Devega, Salon- Commentary

A moment of reckoning is here. America must have committed great wrongs to be afflicted with the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump at the same time.

Authoritarians like Trump love disasters. Because they can only destroy and not create, authoritarians use such moments of misery and fear to expand their power.

Donald Trump is announcing that fact when he proclaims himself to be a “war president.” Such language is not just the superficial trappings of Trump wrapping himself in the flag and using empty words about “sacrifice” and “bravery” and “heroism.” It is something far worse and more sinister. As a “war president,” Trump is putting himself above the law and proclaiming the country is in a state of emergency.

I recently spoke with Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of the books “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works.” He warns in this conversation that the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for the Trump regime to further advance its campaign against the Constitution, democracy, human rights, human dignity and freedom across all areas of American society.
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

Stanley also explains how the fake coronavirus “protests” staged by Trump supporters in Michigan and other parts of the country exemplify the kinds of forces that have brought fascist and authoritarian movements to power, including Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Stanley explains that he sees America’s colleges and universities as key sites for teaching critical thinking and engaged citizenship — which is why gangster capitalists, neo-fascists and other right-wing forces are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to further undermine the country’s system of higher education.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jason Stanley on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

At this moment there are rent strikes and other forms of protest taking place all across the United States in response to the economic calamity and destruction brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s response. Discontent is most certainly in the air.

If discontent isn’t in the air now, when is it going to be? Consider what has happened with the stimulus. Trillions of dollars have been given to the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations. Did they think that people would not notice?

A vast fortune has been transferred to the richest Americans under so-called trickle-down economics — a theory which has been disproved, by the way. The idea is that giving money to the richest Americans is supposed to help average people. Let us see what happens when the average people determine if that is in fact the case. Hopefully, that moment will be one when people mobilize.

The 2020 election is quickly approaching. Nearly four years into Donald Trump’s rule, how is American democracy doing? Where are we in the story of Trump and American authoritarianism?

Propaganda is the denial of reality. For example, when Donald Trump says, “I’ve done the best job ever.” His surreal press conferences are another example. Trump has been able to use the coronavirus pandemic to transfer the country’s news media environment into one big authoritarian spectacle. He was able to be on television for two and a half hours a day for a month. Such a thing happens in authoritarian societies. Trump’s authoritarian rule is really a sign of the problem with the Republican Party. The United States is now in a situation where the minority party, in terms of representing the people’s will, has a lockdown on many of the nation’s institutions.

The problem with the United States is that it is already a flawed democracy. When there is such extreme partisan capture of our country’s institutions, does there really need to be a fascist or authoritarian takeover? With gerrymandering, voter suppression, control of the courts and making voting difficult in other ways, one does not need an explicit takeover and overthrow of democracy by an authoritarian movement to exercise almost the same level of power and control.

How do you make sense of this nightmare confluence of events, with the combination of an authoritarian regime and the coronavirus pandemic?

The concept of “emergency” is essential to fascism. Trump is able to use the pandemic to rule by decree. Another example of authoritarian takeover through “emergencies” is a Reichstag fire moment, such as how Hitler and the Nazis took control in Germany, where one manufactures the “emergency” and then claim a need to seize full power.

By comparison, the coronavirus is a real emergency. Authoritarian governments all over the world are using the pandemic as an excuse to seize more power. In the United States this has taken place with Trump and the Republicans using the pandemic as protective cover for massive corruption. With Trump’s purge of inspector generals there is really no independent oversight of his administration.

The public does not know, for example, where the money from the coronavirus relief bill is really going. As with other authoritarians, the coronavirus emergency is a way for Trump to enact his goals and policies much faster and with less oversight and possibilities for resistance.

Trump and his news media and representatives are consistently using the language of “war,” and describing Trump as a “war president” during this pandemic. Most mainstream commentators and analysts have failed to understand the true meaning and origins of that language. “War president” is another example of a logic where democracy no longer applies. Carl Schmitt — a political theorist and jurist whose thinking was foundational for the Nazi regime — described this condition as one of “exception,” where the leader can ignore the rule of law and other norms. How can we better explain what Donald Trump and his agents really mean when they talk about him as a “war president”?

You are absolutely correct. When an authoritarian or like-minded leaders and regimes want to suspend democracy, they use the language of “war.” Trump calling himself a “war president” enables him to do drastic things such as rushing bills through Congress without proper debate, hearings and public scrutiny. An emergency is a very dangerous time, and the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is a real emergency makes matters much more perilous and complicated.

Trump, the Republicans and many of their supporters have argued that older people and others who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus should be willing to face death as an act of “loyalty” and “patriotism” to save “the economy.” How does this relate to authoritarianism and fascism?

This coalition of the business elite, right-wing Christian evangelicals, and white nationalists and other white supremacists is very dangerous. Fascism is ultimately a death cult.

Social Darwinism is the heart of fascism as well as the heart of capitalism. With the pandemic, and the way capitalism is a type of religion in America, the Darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest” is made even more central. The notion that “Life is always a struggle, the weak will die” is central to fascism. That idea is also common to certain ways of thinking about capitalism. Remember, Adolf Hitler’s book was called, “My Struggle” — that “struggle” was survival of the fittest. That is exactly what we are seeing in this moment with Trump, the Republican Party and the coronavirus pandemic.

Crisis is an opportunity for Donald Trump. Several weeks ago, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that the United States was ending all legal immigration because of the coronavirus emergency. Of course, that is part of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda.

Notice Trump’s verbiage when he describes the coronavirus: He calls it the “invisible enemy”. That language is an allusion to Jewish people. For centuries anti-Semites and other hate mongers for centuries have used such eliminationist, conspiratorial language. Trump’s announcement “banning” legal immigration — which was likely written by Stephen Miller — was also made on Hitler’s birthday. Miller has repeatedly signaled through his policies, language, emails and use of codes such as “14” and “88” in government documents and announcements a deep affinity with Nazis and other neo-fascists.

It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.

Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?

This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology. By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.

The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?

Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well. Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.

Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.

Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.

The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”

What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?

One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.

In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”

In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?

If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.

What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?

Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.

The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”

Noam Chomsky: Trump’s love of ‘wealth and corporate power’ played a key role in country’s staggering coronavirus death toll


President Donald Trump has been widely criticized on the left — as well as by centrist Democrats and Never Trump conservatives — for failing to take the threat of coronavirus seriously back in January and February. But left-wing author Noam Chomsky, in an interview with The Guardian, asserts that Trump’s culpability goes way beyond downplaying COVID-19’s severity: as Chomsky sees it, Trump’s love of corporate power is a fundamental reason why he has handled the crisis so badly.

The 91-year-old Chomsky told The Guardian that Trump’s cutting federal government funding for research on infectious diseases is “something that Trump has been doing every year of his term, cutting it back more. So, (his plan is): let’s continue to cut it back, let’s continue to make sure that the population is as vulnerable as we can make it — that it can suffer as much as possible, but will, of course, increase profits for his primary constituents in wealth and corporate power.

Chomsky told The Guardian that for Trump, not doing enough to help governors who are tirelessly battling the pandemic in their states is “a great strategy for killing a lot of people and improving his electoral politics.”

When The Guardian asked Chomsky if he blamed Trump for the staggering number of coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S., he responded, “Yes, but it’s much worse than that, because the same is true internationally. To try and cover up his criminal attacks against the American people — which have been going on all of this time — he’s flailing about to try and find scapegoats.”

According to Chomsky, one is seeing two very different responses to the pandemic — one very positive and one very negative.

“One is: let’s take the savage Reagan/Thatcher approach and make it worse,” Chomsky told The Guardian. “That’s one way. The other way is to try to dismantle the structures, the institutional structures that have been created — that have led to very ugly consequences for much of the population of much of the world (and) are the source of this pandemic. To dismantle them and move on to a better world.”

As part of the “better world” approach,” The Guardian’s Richard Partington notes, Chomsky is part of the launch of the Progressive International — whose other participants include Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Yanis Varoufakis (former finance minister in Greece). Partington describes the Progressive International as a “global initiative to unite, organize and mobilize progressive forces around the world.”

But Chomsky, who compares the rise of far-right nationalist movements in a variety of countries to the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the late 1920s, warns that building and advancing a new progressive movement will take a lot of hard work.

“It’s not easy,” Chomsky told The Guardian. “There are forces fighting back. The International is going to be facing similar attacks. To overcome them, it depends on the peasants with the pitchforks.”


Trump is culpable in deaths of Americans, says Noam Chomsky


Professor argues US president is stabbing citizens in back while pretending to be saviour

Richard Partington Economics correspondent Mon 11 May 2020 

THE GUARDIAN

Donald Trump is culpable in the deaths of thousands of Americans by using the coronavirus pandemic to boost his electoral prospects and line the pockets of big business, Prof Noam Chomsky has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, the radical intellectual argued the US president was stabbing average Americans in the back while pretending to be the country’s saviour during the worst health crisis in at least a century.

He said Trump, who will seek re-election later this year, had cut government funding for healthcare and research into infectious disease for the benefit of wealthy corporations.

Chomsky said: “That’s something that Trump has been doing every year of his term, cutting it back more. So [his plan is] let’s continue to cut it back, let’s continue to make sure that the population is as vulnerable as we can make it, that it can suffer as much as possible, but will of course increase profits for his primary constituents in wealth and corporate power.”


Chomsky also said the president had abandoned his duties by forcing individual state governors to take responsibility for combating the virus: “It’s a great strategy for killing a lot of people and improving his electoral politics.”

Asked to clarify if he viewed Trump as culpable in the deaths of Americans, he said: “Yes but it’s much worse than that, because the same is true internationally. To try and cover up his criminal attacks against the American people, which have been going on all of this time, he’s flailing about to try and find scapegoats.”

The professor said Trump’s decision to freeze payments to the World Health Organization, would lead to deaths in Yemen and across the African continent.

Chomsky was speaking in an interview to mark the launch of the Progressive International, a global initiative to unite, organise and mobilise progressive forces around the world.

First convened by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, it aims to mount a fightback against the increasing rise of rightwing populist movements around the globe.

Other members include Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Icelandic prime minister, former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the authors Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador. In September, pandemic permitting, the council will convene for an inaugural summit in Reykjavik.

Also speaking in an interview to mark the launch, Varoufakis said articles he and Sanders wrote in the Guardian two years ago were among catalysts for launching the Progressive International.

He said: “It’s been urgent for quite a while now. If anything I’m worried that we’re coming to the party too late. I hope not..”

Expressing anger at the EU response to the pandemic as a “very sad dereliction of duty”, he said the crisis could tear apart the euro single currency bloc. “I don’t think the eurozone can survive it. But it can survive long enough to deplete huge amounts of wealth and social capital. Europe is rich enough, it can pretend and extend.”

If you have been affected or have any information, we'd like to hear from you. You can get in touch by filling in the form below, anonymously if you wish or contact us via WhatsApp by clicking here or adding the contact +44(0)7867825056. Only the Guardian can see your contributions and one of our journalists may contact you to discuss further.
Tell us

EU leaders have agreed to draw up a €540bn (£480bn) package of emergency measures. However, there is a deep split between countries demanding grants for stricken economies, such as Italy and Spain, and northern members such as Germany who favour loans.

The launch of Progressive International comes amid growing calls to drastically alter the global economic and political status quo as Covid-19 continues to expose and exacerbate entrenched levels of inequality and poverty.

Pressure had also been mounting since the 2008 financial crisis to reverse more than four decades of government retreat from intervening in the economy, amid widespread dissatisfaction with modern capitalism from supporters and detractors.

Faced with rightwing nationalist responses and the growing urgency to combat global heating, McDonnell said the new organisation would help develop and promote a more progressive vision of the future.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said: “This initiative comes at just the right time. It’s about the nature of society we want. It’s also about how we tackle the real threat upon us from climate change.

Comparing the threats from rightwing populism to the rise of Nazism in 1928 when he was born, Chomsky said two approaches were being promoted in the response to Covid-19.

He said: “One is let’s take the savage, Reagan, Thatcher approach and make it worse. That’s one way. The other way is to try to dismantle the structures, the institutional structures that have been created; that have led to very ugly consequences for much of the population of much of the world, [and] are the source of this pandemic. To dismantle them and move on to a better world.”

“It’s not easy. There are forces fighting back. The International is going to be facing similar attacks. To overcome them, it depends on the peasants with the pitchforks.”