Join us for a public talk on Putin's illegal & unethical invasion of Ukraine
It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, March 12, 2022
AN INTERVIEW WITH VOLODYMYR ARTIUKH
Vladimir Putin uses the language of “demilitarization” to pursue an aggressive imperial policy against Ukraine. In an interview for Jacobin, a Ukrainian socialist explains the falseness of the Kremlin’s pretexts — and why the war could drag on for years.
A woman crosses a destroyed bridge as civilians continue to flee from Irpin due to ongoing Russian attacks. (Diego Herrera Carcedo / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
LONG READ
Jacobin
03.09.2022
INTERVIEW BY Jana Tsoneva
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a crime and a human tragedy. There are already some 2 million refugees, as bombs and missiles rain down on cities around Ukraine. Early setbacks for the invading forces have often fed the idea that Vladimir Putin’s actions have backfired. Yet Ukrainians face the prospect of a long and drawn-out war, with no end in sight even despite their stiff military resistance.
Volodymyr Artiukh is a Ukrainian anthropologist specializing in labor and migration in the post-Soviet space. Jana Tsoneva asked him about Putin’s imperial agenda, the last eight years of war, and what hopes exist of a viable peace process.
JT
How is the war related to the post-2014 outbreak of civil war?
VA
Briefly, the Maidan protests of 2013–14, Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, and support of the uprising in Donbas led to a change in the geo-economic and geopolitical orientation of Ukraine. Ukraine signed an association agreement with the European Union, changed its cultural and political orientation in favor of Euro-Atlantic structures, and abandoned the idea of integration with the Russian project of an economic and political union. Russia reacted to this by consolidating an anti-Western narrative.
The Crimea annexation, which was largely bloodless, led to a boost in Putin’s domestic popularity. Then, he hoped to capitalize on the uprising in Donbas, which was an uprising against the change of government in Kiev. This uprising was construed as self-defense of the “Russian world” against Western-supported Ukrainian nationalists. Ukraine was increasingly represented as a failed state with an illegitimate Western-controlled government that terrorizes Russian speakers. All these ideological elements are present now as Putin’s justification of the invasion: denazification, demilitarization, decommunization.
JT
Did the new government in Kiev do something to them to trigger this uprising in the East?
VA
This was a revolt that started essentially in a similar way to the Maidan — as a grassroots mobilization, with barricades and takeover of local governments in several eastern cities. Initially it was a purely negative phenomenon — against something rather than for something. But soon, guys with a particular mix of the Russian-imperialist ideology and Soviet nostalgia — hoping for a union with Russia and inspired by the annexation of Crimea — took over this local uprising.
Their idea was to spread the uprising to the rest of south-eastern Ukraine, which they called Novorossiya, referring to the time of the Russian Empire. Russia eventually integrated these semi-independent warlords into the Russian security apparatus. This led to an attempt of the Kiev government to take back Donbas in summer 2014 with the so-called anti-terrorist operation.
It was a war waged against the rebels, who were already quite pro-Russian and fought for an independence from Ukraine and for integration with Russia. Eventually Russian troops entered there on several occasions in 2014 and 2015. These incursions led to very significant defeats of the Ukrainian army with significant loss of life and equipment, which forced the Ukrainian government to sign the Minsk agreements.
Eventually, the spread of the uprising to Ukraine more widely faltered — but it was still mobilized by Russia to redirect the Ukrainian government as a whole, to use the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” as a leverage against Kiev’s pro-Western orientation. The Minsk agreements were essentially a diplomatic expression of the Russian military superiority; Russian military victory was translated into this diplomatic document. These agreements basically complemented the fighting rather than stopping it.
JT
Did the Ukrainian government honor these agreements?
VA
Neither side honored them — the divergence of interpretations emerged almost instantly. The agreements were not meant, in hindsight, to stop the war but to contain the military action, to dampen the contradictory interests of Ukrainian and Russian elites, to contain the military action so that the parties could regroup and prepare for the next round of fighting.
So, the ceasefire, which was only one part of the agreements, ebbed and flowed. At times, there was almost a full-fledged war; at times almost a real ceasefire, for example for almost half a year since summer 2020. The rhythm of the military action accompanied political negotiations. Ultimately these agreements were just a diplomatic break on the war, not its negation.
JT
Volodymyr Ishchenko writes that only 20 percent of Ukrainians approved of joining NATO in 2007, doubling to 40 percent after the Crimea annexation, but still not the majority. So, what precipitated the geopolitical shift around 2013 and Maidan?
VA
It’s true that prior to the Maidan of 2013, Ukrainian society was quite polarized; there was no majority in favor of either Russian or EU integration, much less in favor of NATO. The cause of the Maidan uprising was internal rather than geopolitical; it started as a popular uprising against an extremely corrupt and authoritarian regime, but eventually these contradictions of Ukrainian society were capitalized on by the oligarchs, also for electoral ends.The Maidan uprising was quickly hijacked to streamline the popular discontent into this pro-EU pro-NATO straitjacket.
So, the Maidan uprising was quickly hijacked by one of these fractions to streamline the popular discontent into this pro-EU pro-NATO straitjacket. A whole stratum of self-organized volunteers, paramilitary groups, NGOs, political adventurers, and intellectuals emerged after Maidan, who combined nationalism, neofascism, economic liberalism, and “Occidentalism” — a loose idea of the Western civilization. This was amplified by Western soft power and a network of NGOs — the familiar story.
So, the more the conflict progressed along these lines — with Russia also playing its role in amplifying this conflict with its own imperialist ideology — people’s perception was increasingly put in these very narrow confines: either the West or Russia.
Nevertheless, there was still a silent majority in whose common sense these questions were rather superficial. For them, these were not the major concerns, but they didn’t have another way of speaking of their problems publicly. This majority elected Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019. He promised to end the war, to not press the issues of identity and language. He appealed to the good sense of the majority while glossing over these divisive issues.
JT
But he also constitutionalized the new geopolitical orientation of Ukraine.
VA
Yes, a year into his tenure as a president, he changed direction. Initially he was accused of being pro-Russian, accused of preparing to capitulate to Russia. But as essentially every president of Ukraine does, he tried to concentrate as much power as he could. He had to defeat his nationalist enemies, attract their constituency, and became this Napoleonic figure that balanced the Right and Left, pro-Russians and pro-Europeans, and at one of the turns he got stuck in the pro-Western nationalist corner. And at this point, everything collapsed.
JT
And now the war has only radicalized this position?
VA
Yes, the war changed everything.
JT
We discussed the Russian involvement in the run-up to the war — so what was NATO’s role?
VA
Look, there are Russia-NATO relations that stretch back to 1991 and back to the Soviet-NATO confrontation. This is one level. But I would insist on separating this from a second layer which is Ukraine-Russia-NATO. You can’t reduce the one thing to the other.
JT
Ukrainian NATO membership wasn’t really on the table, right?
VA
Yes. And in the recent diplomatic talks, before the war, Joe Biden was willing to entertain the possibility for a moratorium on Ukrainian NATO membership. He stressed that NATO would not be involved in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Among other powerful Western powers, such as France and Germany, nobody seriously considered Ukraine joining.
JT
Did Russia use NATO’s expansion as a fig leaf then?
VA
Definitely. Take, for example, the ultimatum which Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued back in December about rolling back NATO’s border to the pre-1997 period. The call to decide literally the next day meant that no one could see this as a good faith negotiation. I think the idea of going to war in Ukraine, one way or another, was already there and they needed the war itself as a negotiating mechanism. They wanted to use war as a way of getting information from the West, like, what is the highest level of escalation that the West can afford? How far can we — Russia — go? What can we do in our backyard, and how far can they go in response?
JT
Why would they want to know that?
VA
Because that’s not the end of the matter. Because they think ahead. If you listen to Russia’s officials and read their ideological manifestos, if you read people who interpret Russian foreign policy decision makers in the Kremlin — they see these apocalyptic events coming. They see the world changing to the core. They see that we live in the new world and Russia needs to find its place otherwise it will be eaten by these predators, by China or the US. They’re reasoning along the lines of “we need to act now, it’s now or never, there is time and it will either be glorious or we perish.” They also hope that they will join China in a sort of alliance. And they already need to mark their territory. The logic is: “There’s seven bad years ahead, but then we’ll have our hundred years of empire.” This is the frame of mind, if you read closely what the Russians are saying.
JT
Left-leaning media emphasize NATO’s role — but your reading makes me think that the talk about NATO was some kind of fake excuse for Russia.
VA
It was not. Let’s put it this way, in the long-term perspective of the last three decades. For Putin and for his very tight-knit elite group, it was real: NATO pushing right up to the border was a defeat for them. Most of NATO’s expansion happened on Putin’s watch, except for the first round. The rest of it happened on his watch. Of course, he talks about Russia’s interest in geopolitical terms. But he also sees it as his personal defeat, a matter of his legitimacy, not only in the eyes of average Russians, but in the eyes of the elite.
JT
But didn’t Russia want at some point to join?
VA
Putin said something like this, but it wasn’t serious. The broader problem, if we leave aside his perception of threats, was that the West did not manage to inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements. So, for Putin, partly it was this defeat that needs to be corrected now.
JT
Like when he speaks of 1991 as a “catastrophe.”
VA
Yes, and this long-term perspective had a caricatural representation in Lavrov’s ultimatum, seeking to solve the whole problem in a matter of two months. What he said was that NATO was going to Ukraine and was about to station weapons there: a hysterical spectacle, a performance of all these grievances. But this diplomatic spectacle was not meant to resolve this thirty-year-old problem.
So, the war in Ukraine is not a direct consequence of NATO expansion. It’s Russia’s proactive step to change, to break this structure of power relations in which Russia existed. It was not reactive in the sense of an immediate threat, it was a predator’s attack at the moment when, according to the Kremlin, the enemy was at its weakest. The diplomatic spectacle was a distraction.
JT
Let’s talk about the liberal take on the situation that Putin wants to recreate the old “Soviet empire” in its former borderlands.
VA
Let’s just abandon this ridiculous idea that Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union. Listen to Putin himself — he spent half his speech castigating Lenin.
JT
And promised the “decommunization” of Ukraine.
VA
Yes, exactly. For him, decommunization means destroying this “affirmative action empire” that was the USSR. Putin wants to destroy the economic and national units that the USSR created throughout its history. He wants to essentially rebuild the Russian empire with one imperial center. Not necessarily within the boundaries of the old, but with a similar power structure of one imperial center resting on an oppressive apparatus without any hegemonic ideology that mobilizes people from below.
Hegemonic leadership implies concession to the partners in the hegemonic power bloc, as the Soviet Union did, making some concessions to the nationalities. Putin is not interested in hegemony. He’s interested in building this “vertical power” that begins and ends with the Kremlin. This is a very different thing to the Soviet Union. You need only look at how Putin talks to his Security Council, like to schoolchildren who failed their homework assignment. Compared to that, the Communist Party was a shining example of direct democracy.
JT
When the invasion happened on February 24, you wrote that you had seen it coming. How did you do so?
VA
The process that led to the war was already visible in the first war scare of April 2021, when the first Putin-Biden meeting happened after Russia piled up troops on the border with Ukraine. Back then, everyone expected a war to happen at that point.
But instead, Putin and Biden started talks on strategic stability and Putin made some claims regarding Ukraine, especially about the Minsk agreements. Nominally the troops were withdrawn from the borders after this meeting, but everyone knew that a substantial number remained. However, immediately after that Putin talked about the red lines, the asymmetric response if the lines are crossed; then he wrote his Ukraine article, which was essentially an ultimatum directed at Zelensky. This article was the draft of his war declaration speech that we saw in two parts over February 22 and February 24. It was probably recorded in one go.Only wishful thinkers assumed that Putin would still want to go ahead with the Minsk process.
So, after the Putin-Biden meeting in 2021, the military infrastructure and substantial numbers of weapons remained at the border. There was a surge in September and October with a large-scale military exercise, the Zapad (“West”) exercise, when the number of troops exceeded those that are now active in Ukraine, and these exercises were explicitly about taking over Ukraine. They did it as an exercise. Simultaneously, the breakaway regions of Donbas were all but integrated into Russia. More than half a million inhabitants gained Russian citizenship. The leaders of these republics got membership of the Russian ruling party.
Only wishful thinkers assumed that Putin would still want to go ahead with the Minsk process. By that time it was clear that even if Putin went along with Minsk, it would mean a war by other means, because the process implies that Ukraine reintegrates these territories, but they were de facto already integrated into Russia. They had their own military and so on, but being constitutionally integrated into Ukraine, they would have a free hand in the rest of the territory where they would clash with Ukrainian nationalists. In Ukraine, an internal revolt would have happened against such an implementation of the Minsk agreements, anyway. So, the Minsk process was another name for dismembering Ukraine and war in slow motion.
JT
Ukraine has been treating them like foreign lands: it doesn’t pay pensions, social payments, all these financial and fiscal ties have been cut. I mean, can they ever go, or do they even want to go back? There’s also the issue of the language.
VA
I don’t think it was feasible, even before the war. Ukraine’s elites were already resigned to the fact that these were not their territories and the elite in these breakaway republics never thought that they would join Ukraine. When Putin recognized their independence, there was briefly a sigh of relief among Ukraine’s elites. They didn’t know the war was coming. Until the last moment, they didn’t believe that there would be war. But they were relieved that they had finally gotten rid of these troubled regions.
JT
The West reacted to the war with sanctions which the media called unprecedented. Do you think the sanctions are going to stop Putin or will there be a world war?
VA
The sanctions will not stop the war. Only tanks and guns can stop tanks and guns.
JT
Well, these tanks and guns need fuel and ammo and only money can buy them. How are they going to finance the war if it drags on?
VA
I’m talking about a long-term perspective. If the sanctions remain for years, probably we will see this effect. And even that is not given because we don’t know how China will react, but in the short term, there is no way the sanctions will impact the course of the war.
JT
How about the antiwar movement in Russia? Is there any hope that Russians themselves will take down the regime and put an end to the war?
VA
No. The majority of the population in one way or another support the war. That’s clear now.
JT
Really? The Levada Center registered only 40 percent support for the war.
VA
The latest polls show a much higher percentage.There is no good news. It’s just death and death and death.
JT
Aren’t they government-controlled?
VA
Yes, there are issues with polls in Russia because the rate of nonresponses is very high. So, we probably aren’t accounting for a huge share of the population who for one reason or another refuse to respond. But let’s say that there is an indication that opponents of the war are a minority. Moreover, there is no political structure behind them, because the structure was destroyed in recent years. Add to that the immense increase in the repressive apparatus in Russia and the institutionalization of censorship. The antiwar movement is necessary, of course, it is a good thing, we need to support and increase cooperation with those Russian scholars and activists and we need to fight xenophobia against them. But this is for the future.
JT
What needs to be done in the short term, now that people are under fire and running away?
VA
Try to help the refugees and relieve the evolving humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. Western governments should not only think about supplying weapons and so on, but of canceling Ukraine’s foreign debt, providing economic assistance, and how to help to achieve ceasefires to get people out from under the bombs. They need to think about what’s going to happen with Ukraine’s economy very soon and how it’s going to impact the world food market.
These are the things that we can do and Western governments can do. They can, of course, influence the military action there. They are doing this, but now it ultimately depends on Ukrainians’ willingness to fight, which is now quite considerable. Even the Russian-speaking Ukrainians are rallying around the flag.
JT
Do you see the West sending armies at some point?
VA
This will not happen. They are sending guns and anti-tank weapons, and there is talk of sending warplanes — I don’t know whether that will materialize or not. This won’t change the strategic picture. It helps to drag on and postpone Russia’s victory. It’s better to fight with an anti-tank missile than with your bare hands.
JT
But if it drags on, what are the Ukrainians to do?
VA
There will be a slow takeover of Ukraine by Russia, city by city, with immense destruction and with immense suffering.There is no way Putin can sustain a stable pro-Russian regime in Ukraine.
JT
Like Chechnya.
VA
Yes, but it can’t be ruled out that, at some point, Russia will sink all its resources in Ukraine. Actually, Russia already seems to be running out of resources and will need to mobilize its economy and then more recruits, reservists and so on, and that will likely significantly change the picture inside Russia. Probably it will have a negative impact, much more negative than the sanctions, but it remains to be seen. I remain pessimistic in regards to the outcome of this war. I still don’t think that Ukraine’s army can prevail. As to whether Putin can achieve his goals of regime change: definitely not. There is no way he can sustain a stable pro-Russian regime.
JT
Because there would be another Maidan followed by another invasion?
VA
Yes, and you see this already — in Russian-speaking cities, mind you — with peaceful protests in the cities captured by the Russians. There is an army. There are attacks on the streets, yet people take to the protests unarmed. If this is happening now, it’s definitely going to happen to any regime Putin may install.
JT
Is there a way out for Putin?
VA
I don’t think he knows himself. It’s this situation when you jump into the fight and then you see — that’s what they did. They miscalculated gravely. They thought that the Ukrainian army would fold and that the people would come with flowers to cheer, but this didn’t happen.
The West also risks losing face. I didn’t see any appetite for war in the West last year, neither from the US — which explicitly said we don’t need trouble in Europe, we need to focus on China — nor from the EU. That’s also part of the reason why Putin did it because he saw that the West was not ready to deal with a war. You remember Emmanuel Macron making a fool of himself proclaiming that, oh, I brought peace and the week after Putin invaded. So, the West can’t do anything, to be honest. The war, unfortunately, has to be fought out between the Ukrainian and Russian army. The balance of power on the battlefield will decide pretty much everything else. And there is no good news. It’s just death and death and death.
JT
One final question concerning knowledge production in war. You have criticized US-centric paradigms trying to explain the conflict. I agree with you that when they talk about the war, Americans have a tendency to talk mostly about themselves. What kind of frameworks do we need to begin to understand this war?
VA
I think we need to take a break analyzing the US hegemony, because we know pretty much everything about it already, and very little about how Russia came to be like this beyond this cliché caricature that American scholars paint of Putin and Russia.
Some parts of the Left also needs to abandon the idea that Russia is somehow a continuation of the Soviet Union, or that it is the underdog in the imperialist fight that needs to be supported. We need to pay closer attention to what Russian scholars have done. We need to think more deeply about how the Kremlin guys picture themselves, what they imagine is happening around them and what may motivate them beyond what the West imagines is rational. Clearly their goals and the way they work is different than we imagine. We need to pay attention to the internal dynamics in the Ukraine-Russia relations. This is not something we know a lot about beyond the simplistic Western portrayal of the good democratic Ukraine versus the terrible authoritarian Russia or the evil Nazi Ukraine versus the eternally mistreated Russia.
We need much closer cooperation with the Left in Ukraine, Russia, and the West, which has not been happening beyond occasional meetings. Because the Left is a bearer of some knowledge, limited knowledge, but some unusual and probably insightful knowledge about the situation. A lot of people on the Left in Russia and Ukraine will need concrete material help, and they need understanding, because the fog of war destroys rational and critical thinking, and you need to be patient with people who make mistakes and will make mistakes. It’s impossible not to make a mistake when bombs are falling and your friends are dying.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Volodymyr Artiukh, PhD, is a Ukrainian anthropologist specializing in labor and migration in the post-Soviet space.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jana Tsoneva is an assistant professor of sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She works in the fields of political sociology and the sociology of labor and is a member of the Collective for Social Interventions, Sofia.
Peter Marcuse, Presente!
Peter Marcuse (1928-2022) was an emeritus professor of urban planning and a German-American lawyer. Peter Marcuse, the professor, was born in Berlin, Germany, on November 13, 1928. He was the son of Herbert Marcuse. In 1933, with the start of the Third Reich, he immigrated to the United States. He graduated from Yale Law School with a JD in 1952 and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley in 1972. He decided to pursue a profession as a lawyer and began practicing in New Haven and Waterbury, Connecticut. He was a member of the Board of Aldermen and took part in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. After obtaining his Ph.D. at Columbia University, he became a professor of urban planning at UCLA from 1972 to 1972 after obtaining his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Peter Marcuse wrote "The Right to the City and the Occupy Movement." His wife, Frances, and three children make up a lovely family. Irene Marcuse is a novelist who died last year, Harold Marcuse, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara, and Andrew Marcuse, the third kid. Throughout his career, the professor had written a number of other popular works, including Of State and Cities, Cities for People, Not for Profit, and many others. His colleague in social theory, David Madden, wrote: “RIP to our wonderful comrade Peter Marcuse, an immensely inspiring scholar, mentor, teacher, writer, researcher, urban planner, activist, and friend. His brilliance and humanity was evident in all of his work. I cannot overstate how much he will be missed!” Peter was also a member of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism CCDS |
Friday, March 11, 2022
In West Virginia, a ‘critical race theory’ bill leads to a statehouse debate over Jews and race.
Andrew Lapin, JTA
11.03.22
State Capitol in West Virginia
When West Virginia lawmakers opened a discussion about proposed “critical race theory” legislation on Monday, it didn’t take long before the topic of conversation turned to Jews.
West Virginia’s House of Delegates was debating legislation along the lines of laws considered or passed in a slew of other states, to prohibit classroom instruction that could make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of the individual’s race, ethnicity or biological sex.”
A retired public school teacher took the floor to argue against the bill and described a hypothetical objection to a hypothetical lesson to show how the law could backfire.
“What if I am teaching about the Holocaust and a parent takes issue because [the parent believes] only 6,000 Jews were killed, not 6 million?” Jenny Santilli, an adjunct professor at Fairmont State University and retired public school Spanish teacher in the state, asked the House Education Committee.
“But that’s not race,” replied the committee’s chair, Republican Joe Ellington, in audio of the session. “That has nothing to do with race. That’s not race.”
Santilli pushed back. “Jews are considered — they are classified as a race, though,” she said.
Ellington replied, “I believe you’re incorrect there.”
“Well, see, here’s a perfect example,” Santilli said, before Ellington cut her off to move the conversation on.
Ellington’s voice was identified on the audio by West Virginia journalist Kyle Vass, who was present at the session. Ellington, who did not author the legislation, did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
The exchange centered on the Republican-backed “Creating Anti-Racism Act of 2022,” which would bar teachers in the state from teaching that “one race, ethnic group, or biological sex is inherently, morally, or intellectually superior to another race, ethnic group, or biological sex.” It creates a reporting system to discipline teachers who are found to have done so.
The West Virginia bill is nearly identical in wording and scope to more than a dozen other so-called anti-”Critical Race Theory” bills that have been debated and sometimes passed in statehouses over the last few months. Their proponents have chiefly focused their attention on race and gender theory. In a speech promoting an earlier version of the bill, West Virginia state Senator Mike Azinger, a Republican who attended a rally outside the U.S. Capitol shortly before the Jan. 6, 2021, violent insurrection, said its main goal was to defeat “Marxism” and “Communism,” which he contended were the true backers of “critical theory.”
These debates have also directly involved Jews and Holocaust education. A Jewish lawmaker in Wyoming recently spoke out against a similar bill by saying he “cannot accept a neutral, judgement-free approach” on the Holocaust, and the subject of how to teach the Holocaust in the presence of such laws has also emerged as a debate point in Indiana, New Hampshire and other states.
“I don’t think this particular piece of legislation directly impacts us as Jews (though it may be argued as I would that such legislation being proposed could have a chilling effect on teaching the Holocaust),” Rabbi Victor Urecki, one of just six rabbis in West Virginia, told JTA via email. He said legislation like S.B. 498 “is more a sad reflection of the kind of politics our state is witnessing. And for people like myself, it is not good.”
Urecki, who leads B’nai Jacob Synagogue in Charleston, had tweeted about the statehouse debate, calling the question of Jews and race “complicated” — and saying that complexity offered a strong argument against the bill.
“The fact that there is confusion means we probably need to expand education, not limit it like our legislators in West Virginia are trying to do,” he wrote.
The conversation about Jews represented only a small portion of lawmakers’ debate over the bill, which advanced after the education committee passed an amended version nearly along party lines (one Republican voted with Democrats against it). On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee amended the bill yet again — to remove the provision prohibiting instruction that causes “discomfort” as well as to remove the bill’s definition of “race.”
The West Virginia Commission on Holocaust Education, first established in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and awareness in the state, has spoken out about similarly worded bills on social media before. In a 2021 Facebook post, referencing a story about a Texas school administrator who had advised his staff that their state’s new CRT law meant they would have to teach “opposing” views on the Holocaust, the commission said, “This incident proves the importance of our work and exemplifies the ongoing need for education in our schools and community.”
The commission has not issued any statements on S.B. 498 or on Ellington’s contention that Jews are not a race. A JTA request for comment to chair Marc Slotnick returned an out-of-office email.
The broader question of whether Jews should be considered a race is a weighty topic, both inside and outside of such legislation. Last month Whoopi Goldberg ignited a firestorm of controversy, and was briefly suspended from “The View,” after asserting on-air that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Hitler frequently wrote and spoke of the Jewish people as a race, and characterized his genocide of the Jewish people as a race extermination project.
Ukraine: the world’s defense giants are quietly making billions from the war
By Peter Bloom, Professor of Management, University of Essex – The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been widely condemned for its unjustified aggression. There are legitimate fears of a revived Russian empire and even a new world war. Less discussed is the almost half-trillion dollars (£381 billion) defense industry supplying the weapons to both sides, and the substantial profits it will make as a result.
The conflict has already seen massive growth in defense spending. The EU announced it would buy and deliver 450 million Euros of arms to the Ukraine, while the US has pledged US$ 350 million in military aid in addition to the over 90 tons of military supplies and US$650 million in the past year alone.
Put together, this has seen the US and NATO sending 17,000 anti-tank weapons and 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, for instance. An international coalition of nations is also willingly arming the Ukrainian resistance, including the UK, Australia, Turkey and Canada.
This is a major boon for the world’s largest defense contractors. To give just a couple of examples, Raytheon makes the Stinger missiles, and jointly with Lockheed Martin makes the Javelin anti-tank missiles being supplied by the likes of the US and Estonia. Both US groups, Lockheed and Raytheon shares are up by around 16% and 3% respectively since the invasion, against a 1% drop in the S&P 500, as you can see in the chart below.
BAE Systems, the largest player in the UK and Europe, is up 26%. Of the world’s top five contractors by revenue, only Boeing has dropped, due to its exposure to airlines among other reasons.
Opportunity knocks
Ahead of the conflict, top western arms companies were briefing investors about a likely boost to their profits. Gregory J. Hayes, the chief executive of US defense giant Raytheon, stated on a January 25 earnings call:
“We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE … And of course, the tensions in eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”
Even at that time, the global defense industry had been forecast to rise 7% in 2022. The biggest risk to investors, as explained by Richard Aboulafia, managing director of US defense consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, is that “the whole thing is revealed to be a Russian house of cards and the threat dissipates”.
With no signs of that happening, defense companies are benefiting in several ways. As well as directly selling arms to the warring sides and supplying other countries that are donating arms to Ukraine, they are going to see extra demand from nations such as Germany and Denmark who have said they will raise their defense spending.
The overall industry is global scope. The US is easily the world leader, with 37% of all arms sales from 2016-20. Next comes Russia with 20%, followed by France (8%), Germany (6%) and China (5%).
Beyond the top five exporters are also many other potential beneficiaries in this war. Turkey defied Russian warnings and insisted on supplying Ukraine with weapons including hi-tech drones - a major boon to its own defense industry, which supplies nearly 1% of the world market.
And with Israel enjoying around 3% of global sales, one of its newspapers recently ran an article that proclaimed: “An Early Winner of Russia’s Invasion: Israel’s Defense Industry.”
As for Russia, it has been building up its own industry as a response to western sanctions dating back to 2014. The government instituted a massive import substitution program to reduce its reliance on foreign weaponry and expertise, as well as to increase foreign sales. There have been some instances of continued licensing of arms, such as from the UK to Russia worth an estimated 3,7 million sterling, but this ended in 2021.
As the second biggest arms exporter, Russia has targeted a range of international clients. Its arms exports did fall 22% between 2016-2020, but this was mainly due to a 53% reduction in sales to India. At the same time, it dramatically enhanced its sales to countries such as China, Algeria and Egypt.
According to a US a US congressional budget report: “Russian weaponry may be less expensive and easier to operate and maintain relative to western systems.” The largest Russian defense firms are the missile manufacturer Almaz-Antey (sales volume US$6.6 billion), United Aircraft Corp (US$4.6 billion) and United Shipbuilding Corp (US$4.5 billion).
What should be done
In the face of Putin’s imperialism, there are limits to what can be achieved. There appears little credible possibility for Ukraine to demilitarize in the face of Russia’s continued threat.
There have nevertheless been some efforts to de-escalate the situation, with Nato, for example, very publicly rejecting the request of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to establish a no fly zone. But these efforts are undermined by the huge financial incentives on both sides for increasing the level of weaponry.
What the west and Russia share is a profound military industrial complex. They both rely on, enable and are influenced by their massive weapons industries. This has been reinforced by newer hi-tech offensive capabilities from drones to sophisticated AI-guided autonomous weapons system.
If the ultimate goal is de-escalation and sustainable peace, there is a need for a serious process of attacking the economic root causes of this military aggression. I welcomed the recent announcement by President Joe Biden that the US will directly sanction the Russian defense industry, making it harder for them to obtain raw materials and sell their wares internationally to reinvest in more military equipment.
Having said that, this may create a commercial opportunity for western contractors. It could leave a temporary vacuum for US and European companies to gain a further competitive advantage, resulting in an expansion of the global arms race and creating an even greater business incentive for new conflicts.
In the aftermath of this war, we should explore ways of limiting the power and influence of this industry. This could include international agreements to limit the sale of specific weapons, multilateral support for countries that commit to reducing their defense industry, and sanctioning arms companies that appear to be lobbying for increased military spending. More fundamentally, it would involve supporting movements that challenge the further development of military capabilities.
Clearly there is no easy answer and it will not happen overnight, but it is imperative for us to recognize as an international community that long-lasting peace is impossible without eliminating as much as possible the making and selling of weapons as a lucrative economic industry.
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One Year After an External Review into Sexual Harassment at Harvard, Three Recommendations Remain Unfulfilled
Three months after an external review found that a “permissive culture regarding sexual harassment” at Harvard allowed a former Government professor to rise through the school’s ranks despite repeatedly sexually harassing students and colleagues, University President Lawrence S. Bacow said he was confident in procedural changes made in the wake of the report.
The report, released in February 2021, detailed how former Government Professor Jorge I. DomÃnguez sexually harassed women over three decades — all while being promoted to several high-profile University positions. DomÃnguez was barred from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences campus and stripped of his emeritus status in 2019, following his retirement.
“The same issue, were it to arise now, might be a little bit cumbersome, but we would still avoid the unfortunate outcome that occurred previously,” Bacow said in May 2021.
The report said Harvard’s processes had improved in the years since allegations were first made against DomÃnguez in the 1980s, finding that “if the University confronted the same situation today, it has the processes and structures in place to handle it differently.” But the three-person external panel also offered nine specific recommendations for Harvard to improve sexual harassment reporting processes, as well as a broader call for the University to “accelerate progress toward a culture intolerant of sexual and gender-based harassment.”
Just over a year after the report was released, as Harvard grapples with another high-profile sexual harassment scandal, the school has not fulfilled three of the external review’s recommendations.
Despite reforming its sexual misconduct training curriculum and revamping online resources, Harvard has not established a standardized procedure to vet faculty and staff for misconduct during hiring and appointment processes — a key recommendation of the external review. And more than a year after Bacow pledged the school would create a centralized personnel database to better track misconduct reports, school officials could not point to completed reforms in the management of personnel data.
The external review also called on the University to hold units — such as academic departments — accountable for instances of misconduct by having deans and the University provost conduct internal reviews at least once every three years. But the school has not announced any such review cycle.
School officials say further updates are coming this semester — including regarding efforts to establish processes for vetting candidates and a centralized personnel repository. University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in a statement this week that Harvard is working on all 10 recommendations.
“When he accepted the recommendations from the external review committee, President Bacow made clear that the University must continue to build on our progress and accelerate our work in assuring Harvard is free from harassment, discrimination, and bullying,” Garber wrote. “In the year since these recommendations were made, University leaders have prioritized efforts to move them forward including addressing our policies and structures.”
DomÃnguez was first accused of harassment in 1983 by Terry L. Karl, then an assistant professor in the Government Department. In a statement when the external report was released last year, Bacow apologized to Karl, writing that “Harvard failed her.”
Today, Karl says she would not recommend any Harvard affiliate seek recourse through Harvard’s Title IX processes.
Though she acknowledged recent strides, Karl said more reforms are needed in the school’s processes for handling gender-based harassment, citing a federal lawsuit filed last month by three Harvard graduate students that accused the school of ignoring a decade of complaints against professor John L. Comaroff.
“I wish [Harvard] would design their procedures not to meet the minimal Title IX, but to bring in some of us who have experienced these issues and can design better policies so they won’t make victims feel that it takes too long, that they’re not being listened to, that their rights are being violated — all of which led to a lawsuit, and a very understandable one,” Karl said.
The report recommended that Harvard increase transparency around investigations and sanctions. In recent years, the FAS has publicized sanctions it levied against professors — including Comaroff.
Harvard has also revamped its gender-based and sexual misconduct trainings and its online resources, per three of the external review’s recommendations to improve climate and increase the accessibility and transparency of reporting processes. Many reforms have come from the University’s newly-formed Office of Gender Equity, which was established last March after Harvard combined its Title IX Office with the Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.
The OGE, which runs mandatory trainings for all Harvard employees, updated its required e-learning courses to focus on improving the school’s culture, according to University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain. The OGE’s website, which launched last summer, also includes a new electronic complaint filing process and a data hub with current statistics about complaints and disclosures.
Harvard also says OGE is expanding. The office has hired three new staff members for its Sexual Harassment/Assault Resources & Education team and hopes to bring on two more staffers later this year, according to Swain.
Starting in 2017, before the external review recommended that Harvard monitor employees with past infractions, the school instituted policies intended to track patterns of misconduct disclosures. OGE is notified when someone is accused of misconduct multiple times, according to Swain.
The report also recommended that the Government Department improve the gender balance of its faculty. A 2019 department review found that only two women went up for tenure in the last quarter-century — and only one was promoted. In contrast, 14 men went up for tenure and 12 were promoted over the same period. The review noted the department has disproportionately failed to retain female junior faculty members compared to their male colleagues.
In the faculty overall, the total number of tenured female professors at Harvard has increased from 226 to 305 since 2012 — but women still make up fewer than 30 percent of tenured faculty.
Nicole M. Merhill, Harvard’s Title IX coordinator, who heads the OGE, wrote that the school’s work is an “evolving process.”
“It would really be a mistake if we looked at these recommendations as a checklist or bulleted list of actions,” Merhill wrote in a statement. “Culture change, as you know, is an ongoing and evolving process and it requires three pieces to work in tandem – individual actions, structural actions, and cultural change.”
Still, Karl said the lawsuit against Harvard over its handling of the Comaroff complaints is evidence that the University must continue to improve its processes.
“I’ve never known anybody who chose the legal route unless they felt that that was all that was left for them,” she said. “It’s a failure of a procedural system when people choose the law — that’s how it must be understood.”
—Staff writer Cara J. Chang can be reached at cara.chang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @CaraChang20.
—Staff writer Isabella B. Cho can be reached at isabella.cho@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @izbcho.
Ocado Wins U.S. Trade Case Brought by AutoStore Over Robots
Susan Decker and Matthew Bultman, Bloomberg News
At Ocado’s warehouse near London, each robot travels up to 35 miles per day. , Source: Ocado
(Bloomberg) -- Ocado Group Plc won a trade case lodged by AutoStore Holdings Ltd. that threatened its plans to expand its robotic warehouses into the U.S.
AutoStore said it plans to appeal the International Trade Commission’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Ocado shares rose as much as 11% in London Friday, while AutoStore dropped as much as 8.6% in Oslo.
The ITC affirmed with modifications a judge’s findings that three AutoStore patents are invalid and that Ocado doesn’t infringe a fourth. AutoStore asked the full commission to review the findings “to correct multiple legal mistakes.”
The two companies are seen as having the best chances for growth in the fast-developing market for automated warehouse robots. It’s led to a global battle over who has the rights to the underlying technology, with cases in Germany, the U.K. and the European Patent Office.
While the trade case isn’t the only dispute between the two in the U.S., it’s the one that has the greatest potential to disrupt Ocado’s plans in the world’s largest market. A London court is expected to rule on another legal dispute between the companies in coming weeks, Ocado said.
Ocado said it welcomed the ITC’s decision and that it expects to be awarded damages from AutoStore for allegedly infringing its patents.
“All 33 of the patent claims asserted against Ocado have now been confirmed for a second time to be either invalid or not infringed, demonstrating again how misguided AutoStore’s complaint has been,” Ocado said.
AutoStore in a statement said it “believes strongly in its litigation positions and will continue to pursue them.”
Ocado said in its annual results that it’s spent 29 million pounds ($39 million) on legal fees so far relating to its dispute with AutoStore.
Kroger Co., the biggest U.S. grocery chain, said in a Jan. 14 filing with the agency that it has customer fulfillment centers with Ocado machinery in three states with plans for seven more in the next six months.
An order banning Ocado’s robots “would prevent Kroger from delivering groceries from these facilities, result in the loss of thousands of current and future employees, and negatively impact many American citizens and communities,” Kroger said in the filing.
The three AutoStore patents found to be invalid relate to the robot body with an internal cavity to transport a storage bin. ITC Judge Charles Bullock found that, while Ocado used the technology, those claims failed to fulfill requirements of clearly describing the invention in a way that others can understand.
AutoStore argued that Bullock’s findings rested on him “disregarding clear evidence” and ignoring findings of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s review board.
The Oslo-based AutoStore says its technology forms the basis of Ocado’s Smart Platform. Ocado contends that AutoStore’s Red Line system wasn’t good enough for the fast turnover of groceries, so it developed its own machines.
Autostore’s arguments to the trade agency “contort the facts and law in an attempt to manufacture ‘clear errors,’ for review, but they fail to identify any issue that warrants review,” Ocado said in a filing with the agency. It asked, however, that if the commission takes a second look at validity it also review the judge’s findings that Ocado infringed the patents.
The case is In the Matter of Certain Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, Robots, and Components Thereof, USITC, No. 337-1228, 3/10/22.
--With assistance from Deirdre Hipwell and Katie Linsell.
To contact the reporters on this story: Susan Decker in Washington at sudecker1@bloomberg.net; Matthew Bultman in New York at mbultman@correspondent.bloomberglaw.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net ; Renee Schoof at rschoof@bloombergindustry.com
(Updates with Ocado shares in second paragraph)
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