No room for 'Taiwan independence' separatist activities: mainland spokesperson

CGTN


A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Monday stressed that the mainland is willing to create broad space for peaceful reunification across the Taiwan Straits, but will definitely not leave any room for separatistactivities aimed at "Taiwan independence."

Chen Binhua, a spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, made the remarks in response to recent comments from Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim, politicians with Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party, on cross-Straits relations. According to media reports, they expressed the view that there was no timetable on the mainland side to attack Taiwan region by force.

Chen said the mainland would not tolerate or show leniency to the "Taiwan independence" forces if they dared to take risks and instigate incidents promoting "Taiwan independence."

He cited the Anti-Secession Law to say that the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

"I want to emphasize that 'Taiwan independence' means war," the spokesperson added.

Lai and Hsiao, both "Taiwan independence" separatists, have distorted facts and downplayed the harmfulness and danger of "Taiwan independence" separatist activities to deceive voters in the 2024 leadership election in Taiwan, Chen said.

He called on residents in Taiwan region to oppose "Taiwan independence" and promote the return of cross-Straits relations to the path of peaceful development.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency

Taiwan’s latest poll shows outsider leading presidential race

Taiwan People’s Party’s nominee Ko Wen-je (right) had an approval rating of 31.9 per cent. 

TAIWAN – A new poll of Taiwanese voters found that the top opposition candidate for president has jumped past the ruling party’s hopeful into lead position ahead of the January 2024 election, the latest twist in a drama-filled race.

Mr Ko Wen-je, the Taiwan People’s Party’s (TPP) nominee, had an approval rating of 31.9 per cent versus 29.2 per cent for the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Lai Ching-te, according to the poll released on Nov 27 by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation.

The opposition Kuomintang’s (KMT) Hou Yu-ih was third with 23.6 per cent, according to the survey conducted from Nov 19 to 21. The margin of error for the poll is 2.99 per cent.


The timing of the poll means voters were queried about their preferences after the TPP and KMT, Taiwan’s main opposition parties which favour greater engagement with China, said they intended to form a joint ticket.

The survey was conducted too early to capture the reaction to the talks collapsing.

Mr Ko and Mr Hou each officially registered as presidential candidates on Nov 24, ending any prospect that they might share a ticket.

Foxconn Technology Group’s billionaire founder Terry Gou dropped out of the race on the same day.

The collapse of the alliance should improve Mr Lai’s chances of victory by splitting the opposition vote between two candidates.

An administration under the DPP, which has sought to strengthen Taiwan’s ties with the United States and its allies as a counterweight to China, would further obstruct Chinese President Xi Jinping’s stated goal of bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and while it has pledged to seek peaceful unification, Beijing has also not ruled out the use of force.

Mr Ko’s emergence as the leading candidate in this latest poll, the first time he has beat Mr Lai in a survey by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, underscores how unpredictable the race has been.

Positioning himself as an outsider looking to topple the traditional parties, Mr Ko has been especially popular among young and well-educated urban voters. The foundation described him as “a horrible nightmare” for the DPP and KMT.

Although the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll is seen as one of the island’s most reliable, it is not the only survey of voters.

According to local media reports, Mr Wu Tsu-chia, the head of the online news outlet My-formosa.com, said late on Nov 26 that its latest poll showed Mr Lai leading with 31.9 per cent, Mr Hou second with 30 per cent and Mr Ko at 26 per cent. BLOOMBERG

Georgia case over railroad’s use of eminent domain could have property law implications


BY JEFF AMY
November 26, 2023

ATLANTA (AP) — It’s a fight over land in one of rural Georgia’s poorest areas, but it could have implications for property law across the state and nation.

A hearing is scheduled to begin Monday to help determine whether a railroad can legally condemn property to build a rail line 4.5 miles (7.25 kilometers) long that would serve a rock quarry and possibly other industries.

A hearing officer will take up to three days of testimony, making a recommendation to the five elected members of the Georgia Public Service Commission, who will ultimately decide.

The line would be built by the Sandersville Railroad, which is owned by an influential Georgia family. It would connect to the CSX railroad at Sparta, allowing products to be shipped widely. Sparta is about 85 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of Atlanta.

People in the rural neighborhood don’t want a train track passing through or near their property, in part because they think it would enable expansion at a quarry owned by Heidelberg Materials, a publicly traded German firm.

Some residents already dislike the quarry because it generates noise, dust and truck traffic. Supporters say if the railroad is built, the quarry will move its operation farther from houses, trains will reduce trucks on roads and the railroad will build berms to shield residents.

But owners say losing a 200-foot (60-meter) wide strip of property to the railroad would spoil land they treasure for its peace and quiet, hunting, fishing and family heritage.

“Sandersville Railroad does not care about the destruction of my family’s property or our way of life,” Donald Garret Sr., one of the owners, said in written testimony in August. “They just care about their own plans for my property, which won’t serve the public, but will just help them expand their business and the quarry’s business.”

Opponents have high-powered allies, including the Institute for Justice, which hopes to use the case to chip away at eminent domain, the government power to legally take private land while paying fair compensation.

The Libertarian-leaning legal group was on the losing side of a landmark 2005 case allowing the city of New London, Connecticut, to take land from one private owner and transfer it to another private owner in the name of economic development. The decision set off a widespread reaction, including more than 20 states passing laws to restrict eminent domain.

Railroads have long had the power of eminent domain, but Georgia law says such land seizures must be for “public use.” Opponents targeted the project by saying it would only benefit the quarry and doesn’t meet the definition of public use.

“This is not a taking of necessity from private property owners to serve truly public interests and the public as a whole. Rather, this is a naked wealth transfer,” Daniel Kochan, a law professor at Virginia’s George Mason University, testified for opponents.

The Sandersville Railroad says there are other users, including a company co-located with the quarry that blends gravel and asphalt for paving. Several companies have said they would truck products from the Sandersville area and load them onto the short line, noting they want access to CSX, but opponents question whether that business will materialize.

The case matters because private entities need to condemn private land not only to build railroads, but also to build other facilities such as pipelines and electric transmission lines. There’s a particular need to build additional electric transmission lines in Georgia and other states to transmit electricity from new solar and wind generation.

Sandersville Railroad President Ben Tarbutton III said in testimony that the Institute for Justice is engaged in “transparent efforts to change federal and state constitutional law regarding condemnation.”

Others who live nearby, organized as the No Railroad In Our Community Coalition, are represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Janet Paige Smith, a leader of the group, testified the railroad would further burden a neighborhood with many Black retirees on fixed incomes.

“We already suffer from traffic, air pollution, noise, debris, trash, and more from the Heidelberg Quarry, but this project would make everything worse,” Smith testified.

Israel, Gaza, and International Law: A Humanitarian Crisis Roils the Academy

BY CHRISTINE SCHMIDT - ELIZABETH SCHMIDT

 NOVEMBER 27, 2023
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Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the retaliatory genocide being waged by Israel in a total siege of Gaza have roiled academic communities in the United States and abroad. Charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia have divided colleagues, terrified students, destroyed friendships, and threatened the basic integrity of academic freedom that institutions of higher education hold dear. A brief look at two examples through the historical lens of international law illustrates the gravity confronting scholars who dare to challenge the Israeli narrative.

Two cases, one in the United States and the other in Israel, illustrate this point. In the United States, Dr. Lara Sheehi, an Arab woman professor of clinical psychology who teaches at George Washington University, was targeted by a pro-Israel lobby group, StandWithUs, that prompted some Jewish students to complain that she and a guest speaker from Palestine had made them feel “vulnerable and unsafe.” On behalf those students, StandWithUs filed a complaint against GW University with the U.S. Department of Education and released the complaint on rightwing social media even before filing it. Clearly, the intention was to manufacture controversy.

Dr. Sheehi’s guest was Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an internationally acclaimed scholar and advocate for children’s rights. She spoke on the topic, “Global Mental Health ‘Expertise’, ‘Therapeutic’ Military Occupation and Its Deadly Exchange.” According to the speaker, most of the students were engaged and posed good questions. However, a small number charged that the talk had been a “diatribe against Israel,” according to the StandWithUs complaint filed with the Department of Education.

The George Washington University administration took an unusual step and hired a law firm to pursue an external investigation. Was the pressure from a pro-Israel lobby group accompanied by a rightwing media smear campaign too much for the university to bear? Eventually, both investigations concluded that neither the university nor Dr. Sheehi were guilty of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has become the target of another smear campaign. Following Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s retaliatory mass bombing of Gaza, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed a letter protesting the genocide of men, women, and children in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. In this case, it was the university that attempted to silence the professor, urging her to consider abandoning her post despite the fact that she had in no way justified Hamas’s horrific attack. Nor have the vast majority of civilians in Gaza, where IDF retaliations have now claimed the lives of some 11,000 people, 40 percent of whom are children. These people have been collectively punished for Hamas’s atrocities.

The argument about genocide made in the letter Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed is firmly rooted in the international legal framework that emerged after World War II. In 1948, the year that Israel became a nation, the international community joined survivors of the Holocaust by promising that never again may such horror be allowed to happen, and never again may the international community turn a blind eye while such atrocities are occurring.

That year, in a belated response to the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million others in the 1930s and ‘40s, the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found. The Convention defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Such acts included “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Genocide Convention also required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found.

In later years, further measures were added. In 1949, collective punishment was termed a war crime under Geneva Convention (IV), Article 33, “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” In 2005, the UN General Assembly, prompted by the international community’s failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, passed a resolution commonly known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which allows the international community to intervene if governments do not protect their citizens from gross human rights violations. Deference to “state sovereignty” can no longer be used as an expedient to allow ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other crimes against humanity to proceed unhindered.

Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, therefore, is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. More than 800 international lawyers and scholars have termed the actions conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza a possible genocide. Just as nothing can justify Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, nothing can justify the Netanyahu government’s brutal response.

Like the attack on Dr. Sheehi, the request that Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian to “consider stepping down” from her position because she signed a public letter of protest that adheres to the norms of international humanitarian law violates the principles of democratic academic freedom. George Washington University ultimately cleared Dr. Sheehi of wrongdoing—although it could not give back the peace of mind that was stolen from her or extinguish the threats of violence that continue to plague her. Unless the Hebrew University of Jerusalem does likewise, its status as a site of genuine independent scholarship and intellectual achievement will be undermined. Other institutions should pay heed. Will they walk the walk of academic freedom or simply talk the talk?

Christine Schmidt, LCSW, CGP is Co-President, Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and on the Steering Committee of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network. Elizabeth Schmidt, Ph.D. is professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland and vice president elect of the African Studies Association. A scholar-activist, she has written six books about Africa, covering U.S. involvement in apartheid South Africa, women under colonialism in Zimbabwe, the nationalist movement in Guinea and foreign intervention in Africa from the Cold War to the war on terror.

Telling the Complex History of Korea’s Occupation

BY JOHN FEFFER

 NOVEMBER 27, 2023
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Photograph Source: Driedprawns at en.wikipedia – CC BY 2.5

On the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the twisted wreckage of a train sits on a set of rails that end abruptly before they can proceed northward. The wreck, what remains of a train bombed during the Korean War, rests outside Woljeong-ri train station, the northernmost station on the Gyeongwon line before the border. When I visited the DMZ in 2018, I stood before this rusted remnant — a poignant reminder of the tragedies of war and the division of the peninsula — without knowing very much about the train or its history.

Only when I picked up the latest novel by the celebrated Korean writer Sok-yong Hwang did I get the rest of the story. The locomotive in question is a Mater 2-10 — the name comes from the Japanese abbreviation for mountain — and it was put into operation in the first part of the 20th century when Japan began its colonization of Korea.

Mater 2-10 is also the title of Hwang’s novel. The story dramatizes Korean resistance to the Japanese occupation, connecting it narratively to labor protests in contemporary South Korea. It is a dense and ultimately rewarding work that introduces readers to such unexpected details as the operation of steam trains, the production of pounded rice cake, and the ideological disputes among Communist cadres in the Korean underground.

Hwang has published an astonishing array of novels, using settings that range across the broad expanse of modern Korean history. Some of these books are long and dense, and more detailed than most non-Korean readers might be willing to absorb. But at their best, Hwang’s novels reveal the complicated histories behind their narratives. The Shadow of Arms covers Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War and the role of war profiteering; The Old Garden follows democracy activists during the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on the Gwangju Uprising of 1980.

Even his shorter novels contain surprises. The Guest introduced me to a hidden history that I thought I knew, in this case an atrocity that took place in Sinchon during the Korean War and that I learned about, inaccurately as it turned out, when I visited the North Korean site in 1999. Like Mater 2-10, The Guest pulled aside a curtain that I barely knew existed so that I could peek at what lay on the other side.

The period of Japanese colonialism is never far from Hwang’s writing, because for most Koreans that era is not ancient history. Although the Japanese withdrew from Korea at the end of World War II in 1945, nearly 80 years ago, the colonial legacy still complicates Korean-Japanese relations today, most prominently around the Korean demands for an apology and compensation for the women who were forcibly drafted into military sexual slavery by Japan during the long Pacific war. Less prominent, but equally consequential, is the debate in Korea over the contributions that Japan did or did not make to the modernization of the Korean peninsula.

Trains are a key component of the industrialization of a country. They not only convey passengers more quickly across territory, they open hitherto inaccessible industrial and agriculture regions to national and global markets. In a colonial system, trains also facilitate the exploitation of natural resources that enrich the colonizing power.  By 1945, the investments that the colonizer made into tracks and rolling stock had turned Korea, according to historian Bruce Cumings, into “the most developed rail system in Asia outside of Japan.”

The price tag on this economic development for Koreans was high, and Mater 2-10 explores these costs, including the Japanese expropriation of Korean land to build the lines and stations. One of the characters in the novel exclaims:

“Japan is like a thief placing a ladder against the wall so they can climb over and rob our house. Do you really think they built the railroads for us? From the beginning, the tracks that lead from the peninsula up into the continent were called a military railway. That’s how they were able to grab all that land and labour to build it.”

It wasn’t only land: Japan also expropriated Korean souls. It drafted Koreans to build the railroads and then, eventually, to staff them. Yet it was a rare privilege to become an engineer on one of the enormous locomotives that pulled passengers and freight from Busan in the south all the way up to the Japanese territory of Manchuria in northeastern China.

Mater 2-10 focuses on a pair of brothers, one of whom, Ilcheol Yi, becomes just such a train engineer. To rise to that position, however, Ilcheol must make a series of compromises with the colonial authorities, whether speaking Japanese with his Japanese colleagues or ultimately giving up his Korean name in favor of a Japanese one. His brother Icheol, meanwhile, takes the route of resistance, risking imprisonment, torture, and eventually death.

The tensions between the brothers — whose names mean “one steel” and “two steel” in Korean — form the backbone of the novel. They stand in for the two halves of the Korean population at the time, those who collaborated and those who resisted.

At one point, Icheol says to his brother, “I know being a slave to the Japanese is how you survive, but…”

“You can curse at me all you want, but this is how all people without a country live,” Ilcheol replies.

Since my own first novel was about trains, I enjoyed reading about the details of Ilcheol’s job as an engineer, from the spraying of sand on the rails to improve traction during inclement weather to the screech of the wheels as the train traversed tracks that widened by a mere 10 millimeters. Hwang is a master of such details.

But even though I’m similarly fascinated by the politics of underground movements, I’m frankly mystified by Hwang’s inclusion of what seem to be historical materials from Icheol’s activities as a clandestine organizer. Readers are thus subjected to the full text of the Red Flag mission statement with all of its wooden agitprop content. Later, Hwang reprints a transcription of Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast of “surrender,” followed by an extended commentary. Then, as if that were not enough documentary material, the texts of Douglas MacArthur’s post-war proclamations take up a couple more pages of the novel.

I understand Hwang’s desire to detail the exceptionally brave work of the underground resistance during Japanese colonialism. But the splits among various Communist factions over strategy don’t have much bearing on the development of the novel’s plot. The documents covering the Japanese surrender and the new rules of the U.S. occupation authority certainly reinforce Hwang’s point that not much changed after 1945, aside from the replacement of one colonial authority by another. But surely he could have devised a more novelistic way of conveying that information. So, too, could he have avoided some rather wooden exposition that clumsily relates his points:

The Korean people had taken a huge leap toward building the independent nation and democratic society of their hopes and desires. Having those hopes crushed by the U.S. military occupation so immediately after Liberation gave the people a bitter education in history and the laws of social development.

Even if they happen to be true, slogans make for weak literature.

Although the bulk of the novel takes place during the colonial period and just after, Hwang connects this historical story to the modern day with a clever framing device. A descendent of the Yi family, Yi Jino, is described at the beginning of the novel as being 45 meters up in the sky, atop a chimney connected to a heat-and-power plant. A labor activist protesting the dismissal of his fellow workers, Jino is camping out on a narrow catwalk in a tent with a sleeping bag. His comrades send up his food and take down his excretions.

Hwang was himself a labor activist who was jailed for his efforts. With Mater 2-10, he brings to life working-class characters who are present in Korean novels only as fringe characters if at all. Jino is a familiar figure in Korean life — labor activists were integral in the fight for democracy in the 1970s and 1980s and they continue to push for better working conditions and pay in South Korea today. However, the modern industrial worker is a rare figure in Korean literature, as Hwang notes in the novel’s afterward. With compassion, Hwang captures the frustrations of these workers:

“In the past, workers had doused themselves with petrol and set themselves on fire, one after the other, as if the idea were contagious. Now what shattered workers wasn’t rage but despair — a mighty, terrifying enemy that slowly gnawed away at them day after day. Another protest assembly would end, and the workers would be on their own. Even after returning home to their waiting families, they were alone. The world has always been as indifferent as the universe. It is lonely, still, and silent. Tedious, worthless everyday life crushed them all. Dismissal was murder.”

Like the holy ascetics of old who sat on columns in the desert, Jino sits atop the chimney and waits for a sign from above, this time in the form of a capitulation from a corporate CEO. It eventually comes, and he can descend from his catwalk. But like so many stories that take place on the Korean peninsula, it’s ultimately not a happy ending.

As in many of his novels, Hwang injects a measure of magical realism into Mater 2-10 by introducing various ghosts, psychics, and soothsayers. Atop his tower, Jino not only meditates on how his struggle connects with those of his predecessors, he actively summons these long dead figures to tell their stories, like character witnesses testifying in his defense during his trial by ordeal. The dead, it seems, are not dead, and the past clings to the characters like a powerful odor.

Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae do a masterful job of translating the novel, retaining many of the specific Korean words describing food and personal relationships. The Korean custom of referring to parents as the father or mother of the child becomes especially poignant at one point when Ilcheol is referred to as Jangsan Abeoji — the father of Jangsan — when the child Jangsan has been dead already for some time. The dead indeed stay with us in many ways.

So, too, can the full flavor of Korean life be experienced in the novel when Icheol is initially released from prison and his parents buy dog meat for medicinal dishes to restore his health — the “royal soup” of boshintang, the slices of meat (suyuk) that are wrapped in leaves with condiments, the spicy stir-fried duruchigi.

Dog meat is, of course, not to everyone’s taste, especially outside of Korea. Mater 2-10 might also test the patience, and even offend the literary tastes, of non-Korean readers. However, readers should hold back on any judgment of this complex novel and appreciate the extraordinary privilege of being invited as an honorary guest on a tour of Korean history and culture. This trip across the landscape of history and up into the heights of activism — the crucial axis of experience for many Koreans — ultimately proves both exhilarating and unforgettable.

Originally published in Korea Quarterly.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.

Dublin Riots: the Social Engineering of Xenophobia in Ireland

BY DAVID ROVICSFacebook

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 NOVEMBER 27, 2023

Photograph Source: David Rovics

In these days of a genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza and a widespread blackout in both the mainstream media in the west, and on social media, the choice between a news blackout on Facebook and a polarized, all-or-nothing “discourse” on X, trying to make sense of anything happening in the world that you’re not directly witnessing yourself can in many ways be more challenging than ever, oddly enough, in this epoch of supposed “connection.”

Following events taking place in Dublin, Ireland, since November 23rd, all the same sorts of factors are at play in trying to make real sense of anything, it seems to me.  I’m not sure if it’s any different for people who live there, at least judging from the sorts of things we’re hearing from the Irish politicians or Irish media outlets.

So although I know many Irish people in Ireland who share my take on recent history there and ongoing developments in Irish society that have been taking place on the island in our shared lifetimes, perhaps my vantage point as an outsider who is also a frequent visitor with an interest in sociology might be of use.

For the many people out there in the world with Irish ancestry or just anyone with a deep sense of connection with various themes from Irish history or with Irish music, dance, poetry, etc., it’s easy to paint the Irish past and present with broad brushes and unhelpful generalizations.  I’ll just admit right here that I’m one of those people apt to make such generalizations, being a history buff with a bit of an obsession with Irish traditional music.  But I’ll endeavor to avoid any inaccurate pronouncements, even if I may make a few broad historical statements along the way.

For those who missed it, an Irish citizen with an immigrant background seems to have lost the plot and began attacking small children with a knife, on one of Dublin’s busiest streets.  One of the children’s teachers and a quick-thinking Brazilian immigrant on a motorcycle were able to put a stop to the man’s stabbing spree.  What then followed were large groups of young men engaging in the torching of city buses and police cars and apparently the chanting of xenophobic slogans (“get them out”), the targeting of a refugee asylum center, it seems, with one of the burning vehicles on fire directly in front of it, and then larger groups of people taking the opportunity created by the chaos to loot some downtown shops.

Politicians and pundits are saying these riots are unprecedented, in a number of ways.  They’re very understandably expressing revulsion.  But just as often, they seem perplexed.

If they are actually perplexed, and not just faking it for the cameras, it could still be understandable.  The politicians are usually around my age or older, unlike these young rioters.  The politicians grew up in something more along the lines of the Ireland I first visited in the 1980’s, and then again much more in the 1990’s.

The Irish Republic they grew up in — and the Irish Republic I first visited — was overwhelmingly white, Irish, Catholic, and poor.  It was the first country to be colonized by the British Empire, and one of many to throw off the yoke of imperial domination only to replace it with a partial independence that had a lot to be desired, and still does.

But the Ireland they grew up in also had, at least by my recollection, certain consistencies about it that many people found comforting.  Most people were poor, but then that was true of most people you knew, and there were very few ostentatiously wealthy people of any description, even in the center of the biggest cities, flaunting their riches and wearing mink coats and staying in fancy hotels back then.  Many people were on the dole — probably half the young people I met back when I first visited — but rent was cheap in most of the country, and most everyone could at least squeak by under the circumstances.

Although many people had complaints about the two-party duopoly that had been (and still is) running the Republic of Ireland for most of its existence since independence, there was also a widespread feeling that a lot of people in the world had it worse than Ireland did at the time.  There was, and still is, a widespread sense of solidarity with other formerly colonized lands and peoples around the world, whether they were other former victims of the British Empire or victims of other empires.  There was a widespread and frequently-expressed revulsion for the racist attitudes many Irish people associated with Irish-Americans, and as an American visiting Ireland I was often told by people that “we’re not like that here.”

To say what is overwhelmingly obvious to anyone my age or older who grew up in Ireland, the whole foundation of Irish nationalism was that it was a nationalism of a colonized nation against an imperial one.  And to the extent that most of the island became independent in 1921, Irish nationalism maintained this internationalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and also fundamentally anti-racist and anti-xenophobic character, as it was rooted in all the colonized people uniting against their common oppressors, and very rooted in socialist notions generally.  As any Irish person passingly familiar with Irish history knows, the leaders of the Irish independence struggle were also socialists.

Ireland was thus also not only an island with a disproportionate number of great musicians, but its population on average was one of the most generous in the world, in terms of donating to and volunteering for humanitarian organizations, which is just one quantitative measure of the attitude of the average Irish person.

So many aspects of this Ireland I’m describing began to change in the 1990’s, with the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon.  Overnight, it seemed, Ireland became a country of immigration rather than emigration.  Suddenly, jobs were plentiful, but they were being taken not only by Irish people but my immigrants from other EU countries and beyond.

IT companies were moving in in droves and setting up their European headquarters in Ireland.  This was good for Irish IT experts, but for everyone else, as in places like San Francisco, it meant skyrocketing rents and other skyrocketing expenses for so many other people.

Ireland was obviously at a crossroads, in the 1990’s, and in a situation where really big decisions desperately needed to be made about regulating the housing market under the circumstances, lest the cost of living become completely disconnected from what the average person earned.  Despite efforts to increase social spending to keep up with rising inequality, inequality has continued to rise in Ireland, by my observation and also according to something I just read from the International Monetary Fund.  Where this is most apparent is within the ranks of the top 10%, and particularly the top 1%, of Irish society.

As with the US and so many other countries, although perhaps it would be a stretch to call the Irish Republic a failed state, it is a state that, like the US, has been completely unable to rise to the occasion that is demanded by the situation, and effectively control the housing market, which is of course one of the biggest reasons the wealthy keep getting wealthier, and so many other people can’t pay the ever-increasing costs.  The average apartment rental in Dublin is now well over $2,000, and getting worse all the time.

And who are the beneficiaries of this growing divide?  Some of the biggest are those who own the land — the land, and the buildings, that once were only moderately profitable to own as a landlord, which have become tremendously profitable.  Which has led, in Ireland as with the US, to a further concentration in ownership of the housing stock, by investors with ever less connection to the society whose basic needs it is their business to profit from.

This kind of untenable situation might give rise to lots of people identifying their problem as being all caught up with capitalism and things like the housing market being woefully insufficiently regulated.  People might demand that all the landlords in the Dáil resign!  People might recognize Ireland for the terribly divided class society that it is, now more than ever, and they might try to address this problem head-on.

While there are people trying to organize renters in Ireland, of course, what has characterized the Irish left by my observation over the past two decades or so has been the same sorts of division and atomization that has been easy to witness here in the United States.  Identity politics has largely taken over political discourse in the Republic of Ireland, unlike reality on the ground in Northern Ireland, where the same phenomenon has not taken hold to anything like the same degree, though it’s evident there, too.

I don’t know what the various motivations are for the different actors involved here, but what is very evident to observe on social media in the wake of the riots, and generally on social media consumed by Irish people for many years, are people constantly promoting the same kinds of nominally anti-racist arguments that are steeped in a sort of white guilt and anti-working class sentiment very familiar to Americans, but which seems especially alien in the Irish context.  Or at least it used to.  Now, it seems to have taken root.

After years and years of people in Ireland expressing nationalist sentiments being told by anonymous actors on the internet — some of whom may actually be fellow Irish people, who knows — that their patriotic pride or nationalistic sentiments were nothing more than expressions of racism and xenophobia, that they were uneducated people, that they were scum, eventually this kind of message being driven home continually on corporate, American-owned social media platforms managed to take root.  Eventually, some combination perhaps of their ever-more-stressed circumstances, of the unfamiliar displays of ostentatious wealth that are now so easy to find in the center of every Irish city, of the direly precarious and ever-worsening housing market, and of the competition for jobs and housing with an ever-growing population of immigrants and refugees, created the xenophobic outburst that was being socially engineered for so many years, in so many ways.

When I look at the kinds of messaging I’m seeing on social media platforms using hash tags like #DublinRiots I see organized, professional trolls who have an agenda in mind to foment division within Irish society and to foment racism and xenophobia in it.  Of course it doesn’t need to be professional to appear to be organized or to have terrible consequences.  The right algorithms can create that appearance and have the same effect.

But whether professional actors are involved or not, who might they be and what interests might they be promoting?  The possibilities are endless.  The ones that first come to mind to me would be anyone who might have an interest in de-socializing Irish nationalism, and turning it into a racist, rightwing phenomenon.  Up to this point, Ireland has had no far right party.  It is definitely in the interests of various actors, such as MI5, just to take a less-than-random possibility, to divide the Irish nationalist community as much as possible.

It would also be in the interest of the Irish ruling class — the 1% of Irish society that owns a third of the wealth there — which is profiting at a heretofore unprecedented rate from the basic need of the island’s population to have a place to live.  Much better to have the nationalists and the refugees competing with each other for a place in Irish society, rather than having them unite against their common class enemy.

David Rovics is a frequently-touring singer/songwriter and political pundit based out of Portland, Oregon.  His website is davidrovics.com.

The War against Wind Farms

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

 NOVEMBER 27, 2023
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Photograph Source: National Rural – CC BY 2.0

The fossil fuel lobby has had a busy year on the eco-camouflage front.  Earlier this year, interest started to rumble and rage against the stranding of humpback whales on the east coast of the United States.  Suddenly, opponents of wind turbine technology – and renewable technology more broadly – had identified an invaluable, if tenuous nexus: a link between whale mortality and offshore wind farms.

One true enthusiast for the proposition proved to be Donald Trump.  Speaking at a rally in South Carolina in September, for example, the Republican presidential contender suggested that these “windmills” were driving whales “crazy”, inflicting death in such numbers that they were washing up on shore “on a weekly basis”.

Such technology is the subject of frenzied study, and it would be remiss not to mention that various environmental concerns have been raised.  These are often specific to their intended locales.  One need only consult recent work commissioned by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an adjunct of the US Department of the Interior, to appreciate the complexity of the field.  The report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concerned the Nantucket Shoals region, an area of complex hydrodynamics and ecology.  The authors acknowledged that large turbines of the size planned for the region had not, as yet, been built in US waters, and would therefore require extensive modelling on oceanographic effects, notably on zooplankton populations upon which whales feed.

Rob Deaville of the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme also admits that disruptions to marine wildlife can take place in the construction phase of wind farms given the presence of percussive noise.  Animals such as porpoises or dolphins “may move out of that area while you’re installing the wind farms, but then the longer-term picture: in some areas they may never come back, in some they may come back in larger numbers than before.”

Such concerned albeit cautious observation sits differently with claims of mass whale mortality that has become a hobby horse for opponents of renewable energy sources.  But look behind these newly converted whale-loving types, and you are likely to find an avid fossil-fuel lobbyist, the cash-filled account of the commodities sector, or those advocating the merits of nuclear energy.

The issue has also made its way across the Pacific to Australia, that great bastion of fossil feud mania.  In the state of New South Wales, residents of the Hunter and Illawarra regions woke up to posters making the claim about the harmful effects of wind turbine technology.   A roadside billboard in Port Stephens, north of Newcastle, featured a beached whale with a background of wind turbines, sporting the words, “Stop Port Stephens Offshore Wind Farms”.

Fictional articles have also made similar claims.  One, in particular, purports to have been published in the academic journal Marine Policy, asserting that offshore wind farms in the Illawarra and Hunter would result in an annual whale death toll of 400.  The journal’s disconcerted editor-in-chief, Quentin Hanich, could find no evidence of the phantom study with its alleged origins in the University of Tasmania, which had been shared on a Facebook group No Offshore Wind Farm for the Illawarra.  “We never received this imaginary paper … I am seeing no evidence that the study ever took place.”

None of this seems to trouble members of the Liberal National Coalition.  The federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has claimed, somewhat erroneously, that there had been “no environmental consideration of what these huge wind turbines, 260 to 280 metres out of the water, will mean.”

Another example of a fossil fuel parliamentarian turned green populist is Queensland Nationals Senator, Matt Canavan, who recently admitted that he had a soft spot for these cetacean casualties.  But then again, he also claims to have a fondness for all of Mother Nature’s glories, now facing the scourge of wind farm technology.  As he told Sky News, that favourite network for scratching populists and reactionaries, “massive amounts of wind farms, and solar panels which take up enormous amounts of land […] destroy koala habitat [and have] a massive impact on our environment … we destroy the environment to try and save it.”

The same senator has been a spoiler of any net zero emissions policy regarding greenhouse gases, much to the consternation of many members of his own party, and could barely conceal his delight at the wording of the 2021 Glasgow Climate Change communique that countries “phase down” rather than “phase out” coal burning.  For Canavan, this meant that COP26 had given the “green light” for Australia to keep digging and “supply the world with more coal because that’s what brings people out of poverty.”

This burst of anti-wind farm criticism ignored the inconvenient fact that almost all the humpback whale strandings the subject of concern showed signs of vessel strike.  In February 2023, the Marine Mammal Commission released a statement confirming the view that “there is no evidence to link these strandings to offshore wind energy development”.

This month, Greenpeace published a piece stating that “offshore wind farms aren’t killing whales.”  While admitting the answer is a nuanced one, it concluded that “building offshore wind is way, way better for ocean wildlife than fossil fuels, especially offshore gas and oil.”  No single peer-reviewed study, Greenpeace went on to note, has found that offshore wind farms are responsible for whale mortality.

The greatest threat to various whale populations lies in fishing, ship strikes, and oceanic disruptions arising from climate change.  As, it would seem, those figures in eco-camouflage such as Dutton and Canavan, who continue to coddle fossil fuel companies intent on seismic blasting and offshore drilling.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com