Wednesday, June 15, 2022

National hate group monitor unmasks a Lehigh Valley-area publishing company peddling Nazi and fascist literature

By Daniel Patrick Sheehan
The Morning Call
LEHIGH VALLEY NEWS
Jun 15, 2022 

“In His Own Words: The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler.”

“Burning Souls,” described as a “poetic memoir” by Leon Degrelle, a Belgian who enlisted in the German army during World War II, became an officer in the Waffen SS and — sentenced to death in absentia — lived out his days in the fascist Spain of Francisco Franco.

“A Handbook for Right-wing Youth” by Julius Evola, an antisemite and Nazi sympathizer considered a hero among the “alt-right,” a group that embraces racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and populism.

Antelope Hill’s owners — Macungie native Vincent Cucchiara, 24, his wife, Sarah Cucchiara, 25, and their partner, Dimitri Anatolievich Loutsik — operated anonymously until this week, when the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights foundation that tracks hate groups, published a lengthy story about the business and its principals on its Hatewatch blog.

The four reporters identified the owners through document searches and by navigating a labyrinth of websites and podcasts where the Cucchiaras, who appear to be more active in the business than Loutsik, have periodically done interviews under pseudonyms.

Vincent Cucchiara graduated from Emmaus High School. He was a Boy Scout and became an Eagle Scout in January 2016, earning the rank with a project that restored trees to part of a community park. He also served as a VFW bugler.

None of the owners spoke to Hatewatch. Two reporters who visited a house in the tiny Montgomery County borough of Green Lane, which is listed in public records as the Cucchiaras’ address, met a man who didn’t identify himself.

“I know who you are. I know who both of you guys are,” the man told the reporters during the June 10 encounter, after indicating he was familiar with the SPLC. “We’ll see each other again one day.”

The Cucchiaras blocked a Morning Call reporter who contacted them through their Facebook pages, and no contact information was available for Loutsik.

This striving for anonymity is typical of white supremacist culture, said Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter and spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Few supremacists ever use their real names in communications or publications.

“The most important thing to understand about pseudonyms and white supremacy is that they know what they’re doing is wrong,” said Hayden, who began covering white supremacy in the wake of the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“They may tell you it’s not wrong, but they know it’s anti-social behavior,” he said. “If they felt that this was something they wanted to put their names to they would do it. This is something they want to do to people.”

Hayden said the Hatewatch team started looking into Antelope Hill because the publisher’s titles ― which include children’s books under the company’s “Little Frog” imprint — kept cropping up at white supremacist rallies. And recently, an Antelope Hill author who goes by “Raw Egg Nationalist” appeared in a preview for a documentary on masculinity by Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Hayden said investigations of white supremacists and other hate groups can take many months or even years, but he and the three other reporters on the inquiry pulled this one together in a few months after getting some leads on the publishers’ identities.

The reporters determined that the Cucchiaras and Loutsik, who were friends at Penn State, started the company in early 2020, concealing ownership information by using an out-of-state business registration and listing the address as a private mailbox at a UPS Store in Quakertown.

It didn’t take long for the publisher to find its audience.

“Antelope Hill has profited from hate by translating historical works by 20th-century Nazis and fascists, offering a publishing platform to contemporary white power propagandists and shipping books around the world using selling platforms including Amazon,” the article says.

Hatewatch also found “considerable evidence of close cooperation between the Antelope Hill principals and a network of far-right actors associated with the white supremacist National Justice Party (NJP) and The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network.”


Neo-Nazis, alt-Right and white supremacists march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the night before the "Unite the Right" rally in 2017. The Southern Poverty Law Center says a Montgomery County publisher has ties to groups that took part in the rally.
(TNS)

The National Justice Party, which was suspended from Twitter, was formed in 2020 by white supremacists who attended the “Unite The Right” rally. The Anti-Defamation League calls the group “virulently anti-Semitic.” Among its platform positions is a 2% cap on Jewish employment in “vital institutions.” The party was formed by members of The Right Stuff network.

The Cucchiaras and Loutsik haven’t always worked in the shadows. During their Penn State days, Loutsik and Vincent Cucchiara organized a pro-Trump movement called the Bull-Moose Party and occasionally landed on the pages of the college paper.

On one occasion, two students who vandalized Trump signs at one of the group’s rallies were fined more than $700. They mounted an online campaign to raise twice that amount and donate the extra money to Planned Parenthood in Loutsik’s name.

In 2016, Loutsik resigned from the Bull-Moose Party when someone leaked a transcript of the group’s private chats, which were full of homophobic and racist slurs.

Vincent Cucchiara is a real estate agent, according to Hatewatch, and helped Loutsik buy a $290,000 house in Harleysville, Montgomery County, this year.

Sarah Cucchiara was a teacher in the Norristown Area School District but left in 2020 after racist postings on her Facebook wall became public, Hatewatch said. Public records show she once lived in Macungie.

Hatewatch linked her to a Twitter account under the name Maggie, where she frequently decries mixed-race marriages and makes antisemitic comments.

Hatewatch notes that the number 88 in Maggie’s Twitter handle is often used by neo-Nazis as code for “Heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. A previous Twitter account linked to Sarah Cucchiara contained the number 14 in its handle, commonly used to refer to a 14-word statement of white supremacy, Hatewatch said.

Hayden said the white supremacist movement is smaller now than it used to be in terms of organized hate groups, but at the same time, the level of conflict it promotes has increased. One explanation is that white supremacists in the social media age no longer need in-person groups surreptitiously distributing hate literature to spread their message.

“There is an entire subculture around putting a pseudointellectual sheen on what is essentially just racism,” Hayden said. “To people who are predisposed to a simplistic way of looking at things, they can really believe they are doing something impressive or cutting edge.

“They refer to themselves as dissidents. Pardon the language, but it’s really just a-hole behavior.”

Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com
U.S. issues new warnings on 'forever chemicals' in drinking water

Reuters
June 15, 2022


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday released new warnings for synthetic pollutants in drinking water known as "forever chemicals" saying the toxins can still be harmful even at levels so low they are not detectable.

The family of toxic chemicals known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have been used for decades in household products such as non-stick cookware, stain- and water-resistant textiles and in firefighting foam and industrial products.

Scientists have linked some PFAS to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems. But the chemicals which do not break down easily, are not yet regulated.

The agency is set to issue proposed rules in coming months to regulate PFAS. Until the regulations come into effect, the advisories are meant to provide information to states, tribes and water systems to address PFAS contamination.

The EPA also said it would roll out the first $1 billion to tackle PFAS in drinking water, from a total of $5 billion in funding in last year's infrastructure law. The funds would provide states technical assistance, water quality testing and installation of centralized treatment systems.

The updated drinking water health advisories for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) replace ones EPA issued in 2016. The advisory levels, based on new science that considers lifetime exposure, indicate that some health problems may still occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero and below EPA’s ability to detect.

"Today's actions highlight EPA's commitment to use the best available science to tackle PFAS pollution, protect public health, and provide critical information quickly and transparently," said Radhika Fox, the EPA's assistant administrator for water.

The agency encourages entities that find PFAS in drinking water to inform residents and undertake monitoring and take actions to reduce exposure. Individuals concerned with PFAS found in their drinking water should consider installing a home filter, it said.

INDUSTRY WHINERS

The American Chemistry Council industry group - whose members include 3M and DuPont among others - said the EPA rushed the notices by not waiting for a review by the agency's Science Advisory Board. The group said it is concerned that the process for developing the advisories was "fundamentally flawed."

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
Kremlin critic Navalny confirms move to ‘one of Russia’s scariest prisons’

Agence France-Presse
June 15, 2022

Alexei Navalny. © AFP

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Wednesday he had been transferred to a strict-regime penal colony described by his allies as “one of Russia’s scariest prisons”.

Last month President Vladimir Putin’s top foe, citing inmates, said Russian authorities had been preparing a “prison within a prison” for him.

Navalny had been serving two-and-a-half years at a jail in the town of Pokrov, 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Moscow, for violating parole on old fraud charges in what his allies say is punishment for challenging the Kremlin.

In March, the 46-year-old had his jail time extended to nine years after he was found guilty of embezzling donations to his political organizations and contempt of court.
“Hello to everyone from the strict regime zone,” Navalny said in a statement posted on Instagram on Wednesday.

“Yesterday I was transferred to IK-6 ‘Melekhovo’,” Navalny said, adding he was in quarantine and did not have “much to say”.

The penal colony near the town of Vladimir and about 250 kilometers east of Moscow has been subject to multiple media investigations into the abuse of inmates.

Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said in May that “the place where he is to be transferred is notorious for its prisoners being tortured and killed”.

She described the Melekhovo prison colony as “one of Russia’s scariest prisons.”

Navalny rose to prominence as an anti-corruption blogger and, before his imprisonment, mobilized anti-government protests across Russia.


In 2020, he barely survived a poisoning attack with Novichok, a Soviet-designed military-grade nerve agent. Navalny has accused Russian authorities, but the Kremlin has denied any involvement.

He was arrested last year on his return from treatment in Germany, sparking widespread condemnation abroad and sanctions from Western capitals.

(AFP)
Boris Johnson never took full control of the Tory party – uniting it now seems impossible

THE CONVERSATION
Published: June 9, 2022 
Does Johnson have enough power behind him?
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Boris Johnson is a weakened prime minister after the recent confidence vote by his party’s MPs. The view among many political analysts and academics is that the 211-148 vote in his favour is too damaging, and he is unlikely to turn things around. Some backbenchers expect him to be replaced by the summer – and lessons from academic research suggest they are right.

For many, Johnson was once a strong leader, at least during the first six months of his leadership. However, my own view of strong leadership is that it goes above and beyond delivering strong electoral results. As Eoin O'Malley and I have argued in our research on leadership, a strong party leader is both in control of the organisation of their party, and can set and articulate the party’s priorities.

According to this definition, Johnson was never a strong leader. He delivered a large electoral victory to the party, but lacked a clear vision and policy message. He has been unable to express the party’s vision and ideology, and to articulate what the Conservative party stands for beyond “get Brexit done”.

A strong leader gains control of the party because of the organisational, electoral and policy benefits they bring, which is why strong leaders often end up damaging their party electorally when they step down, as our research shows. Johnson has not taken any such control – if he had, he would not have suffered a vote of no confidence by 41% of his MPs.

Barely three years into his party leadership, Johnson’s authority is so damaged that it seems almost impossible for him to survive as PM to the next election.

Perhaps we got here because his MPs and voters distrust him due to partygate and other corruption allegations. This is not just down to bad luck, but his inability to unite the party behind him during his premiership – Conservative MPs have organised into different, quite polarising ideological groups.

As party leader, he should also connect with the public. Perhaps he did in 2019, but polls suggest that this is not the case any more.
Time to turn the page

The big question then is whether the Conservative party, and the country as a whole, are better off replacing Johnson or uniting behind him until the end of the government term.

A prime minister leading a deeply divided party is not able to govern successfully. Instead of being responsive to the public or staying true to the party’s electoral promises such as achieving net zero by 2050 or fixing social care, he is likely to adopt policies that primarily seek to appease the different Conservative party factions.

More likely, Johnson will be unable to initiate any policy at all. There are already suggestions that rebel Tory MPs will abstain from voting on key parts of Johnson’s legislative agenda.

Theresa May’s second government suffered from inaction due to party divisions. She stayed in office six months after winning a confidence vote, but ultimately resigned after failing to gain support for her Brexit agreement.

Theresa May resigned as prime minister after winning a confidence vote. Is Johnson next? 
Will Oliver / EPA-EFE

Johnson’s government is more likely to be one where money is sent to constituencies that serve party unity instead of the country’s and citizens’ needs. Research into Italian governments finds that when parties in government are divided, spending increases and policy reform is less likely.

In fact, there is speculation that party-motivated spending is already happening, with many of the funds dedicated for the government’s levelling-up agenda given to better-off constituencies of government ministers.

A day after the confidence vote, ministers and backbenchers from the right wing of the party called for drastic tax cuts and even demanded Johnson overrule his chancellor. With MPs from northern constituencies expecting investment and funding of projects as per the levelling-up agenda on the one hand and demands for tax cuts on the other, it becomes quite hard to balance the books.

Those optimistic about Johnson might argue he could unite the party behind a new vision for the country. This is extremely unlikely, as it would require Johnson appointing a cabinet that reflects the party’s views and divisions. Successful PMs did that – even strong leaders such as Margaret Thatcher. It has been shown that most British PMs have appointed cabinets that reflect the party’s ideological position rather than their own.

However, Johnson appointed his loyal supporters, people who stood by him during his leadership and pro-Brexit campaigns, and relies on their backing so is unlikely to replace them. If he cannot unite the party at the cabinet level, which he does control, he is unlikely to ever unite it across the legislative chamber.

Author
Despina Alexiadou
Senior Lecturer at the School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde
Why can’t you remember being born, learning to walk or saying your first words? What scientists know about ‘infantile amnesia’

The Conversation
June 08, 2022

Baby with a bottle (Shutterstock.com)

Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day their younger sibling was born.

Despite vast differences in the details, these memories do have a couple of things in common: They’re all autobiographical, or memories of significant experiences in a person’s life, and they typically didn’t happen before the age of 2 or 3. In fact, most people can’t remember events from the first few years of their lives – a phenomenon researchers have dubbed infantile amnesia. But why can’t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants? Does memory start to work only at a certain age?

Here’s what researchers know about babies and memory.

Infants can form memories

Despite the fact that people can’t remember much before the age of 2 or 3, research suggests that infants can form memories – just not the kinds of memories you tell about yourself. Within the first few days of life, infants can recall their own mother’s face and distinguish it from the face of a stranger. A few months later, infants can demonstrate that they remember lots of familiar faces by smiling most at the ones they see most often.

In fact, there are lots of different kinds of memories besides those that are autobiographical. There are semantic memories, or memories of facts, like the names for different varieties of apples, or the capital of your home state. There are also procedural memories, or memories for how to perform an action, like opening your front door or driving a car.

Research from psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s lab in the 1980s and 1990s famously showed that infants can form some of these other kinds of memories from an early age. Of course, infants can’t exactly tell you what they remember. So the key to Rovee-Collier’s research was devising a task that was sensitive to babies’ rapidly changing bodies and abilities in order to assess their memories over a long period.


A mobile in motion can keep a baby entertained.


In the version for 2- to 6-month-old infants, researchers place an infant in a crib with a mobile hanging overhead. They measure how much the baby kicks to get an idea of their natural propensity to move their legs. Next, they tie a string from the baby’s leg to the end of the mobile, so that whenever the baby kicks, the mobile moves. As you might imagine, infants quickly learn that they’re in control – they like seeing the mobile move and so they kick more than before the string was attached to their leg, showing they’ve learned that kicking makes the mobile move.

The version for 6- to 18-month-old infants is similar. But instead of lying in a crib – which this age group just won’t do for very long – the infant sits on their parent’s lap with their hands on a lever that will eventually make a train move around a track. At first, the lever doesn’t work, and the experimenters measure how much a baby naturally presses down. Next, they turn the lever on. Now every time the infant presses on it, the train will move around its track. Infants again learn the game quickly, and press on the lever significantly more when it makes the train move.

What does this have to do with memory? The cleverest part of this research is that after training infants on one of these tasks for a couple of days, Rovee-Collier later tested whether they remembered it. When infants came back into the lab, researchers simply showed them the mobile or train and measured if they still kicked and pressed the lever.

Using this method, Rovee-Collier and colleagues found that at 6 months, if infants are trained for one minute, they can remember an event a day later. The older infants were, the longer they remembered. She also found that you can get infants to remember events for longer by training them for longer periods of time, and by giving them reminders – for example, by showing them the mobile moving very briefly on its own.

Why not autobiographical memories?


If infants can form memories in their first few months, why don’t people remember things from that earliest stage of life? It still isn’t clear whether people experience infantile amnesia because we can’t form autobiographical memories, or whether we just have no way to retrieve them. No one knows for sure what’s going on, but scientists have a few guesses.


A lot of development needs to happen for him to remember an exciting experience.

One is that autobiographical memories require you to have some sense of self. You need to be able to think about your behavior with respect to how it relates to others. Researchers have tested this ability in the past using a mirror recognition task called the rouge test. It involves marking a baby’s nose with a spot of red lipstick or blush – or “rouge” as they said in the 1970s when the task was created.

Then researchers place the infant in front of a mirror. Infants younger than 18 months just smile at the cute baby in the reflection, not showing any evidence that they recognize themselves or the red mark on their face. Between 18 and 24 months, toddlers touch their own nose, even looking embarrassed, suggesting that they connect the red dot in the mirror with their own face – they have some sense of self.

Another possible explanation for infantile amnesia is that because infants don’t have language until later in the second year of life, they can’t form narratives about their own lives that they can later recall.

Finally, the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that’s largely responsible for memory, isn’t fully developed in the infancy period.

Scientists will continue to investigate how each of these factors might contribute to why you can’t remember much, if anything, about your life before the age of 2.

Vanessa LoBue, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University - Newark
Scientists map brain network linked to addiction

Agence France-Presse
June 13, 2022

Human anatomy illustration, central nervous system with a visible brain (Shutterstock)


Researchers said on Monday they had mapped the network in the brain linked to addiction by studying long-time smokers who abruptly quit after suffering brain lesions.

They hope the research will give future treatments a target to aim for in the fight against addiction to a range of substances.

To find out where addiction resides in the brain, the researchers studied 129 patients who were daily smokers when they had a brain lesion.

While more than half kept on smoking as normal after getting the lesion, a quarter immediately quit without any problem -- even reporting an "absence of craving", according to a new study in the journal Nature Medicine.

While the lesions of those who stopped smoking were not located in one specific region of the brain, they mapped them to a number of areas -- what they called the "addiction remission network".

They found that a lesion that would cause someone to give up an addiction would probably affect parts of the brain like the dorsal cingulate, lateral prefrontal cortex and insula -- but not the medial prefrontal cortex.

Previous research has shown that lesions affecting the insula relieve addiction. But it failed to take into account other parts of the brain identified in the new study.

To confirm their findings, the researchers studied 186 lesion patients who completed an alcohol risk assessment.

They found that lesions in the patients' addiction remission network also reduced the risk of alcoholism, "suggesting a shared network for addiction across these substances of abuse", the study said.

Juho Joutsa, a neurologist at Finland's University of Turku and the study's author, told AFP "the identified network provides a testable target for treatment efforts".

"Some of the hubs of the network were located in the cortex, which could be targeted even with non-invasive neuromodulation techniques," he added.

Neuromodulation involves stimulating nerves to treat a range of ailments.

One such technique is the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last month for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It already targets many of the same areas of the brain as the addiction remission network identified in Monday's study.

Joutsa said he hoped his research would contribute to a TMS coil targeting addiction.

"However, we still need to figure what is the best way to modulate this network and conduct carefully designed, randomized, controlled trials to test if targeting the network is clinically beneficial," he added.

© 2022 AFP

 

China confirms water on the Moon

H2O is present in the rocks gathered by the Chang'e-5 lunar lander, Chinese scientists have said
China confirms water on the Moon











Indications that water could be present in the rocks gathered by Chang'e 5 lander on the Moon have been confirmed by testing on Earth, Chinese scientists have reported. They've shared their findings in an article, published this week in the magazine Nature Communications.

The lunar lander touched down on the Moon in December 2020, gathering some 1.7 kilograms (over 3.5lbs) of rocks and lunar soil, known as regolith.

The craft also used its on-board instruments to measure the chemical composition of the samples that it collected.

This data allowed Chinese researchers to suggest that molecules of water could be present at about 120 parts per million (ppm) in some type of moon rocks and at 180ppm in others.

Now, a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has confirmed the presence of water in the samples by directly studying the cargo that Chang'e-5 brought back to Earth.

The soil analyzed by the scientists turned out to be relatively dry – even by lunar standards – showing levels of water at 28.5 parts per million.

However, they also discovered that the mineral apatite was among the samples to boast an H2O content of 179ppm, which was consistent with earlier forecasts.

Telescope and satellite observations have long led scientists to suspect that water existed on the Moon, as either hydroxyl or H20 in the rocks.

The hope is that cosmonauts and astronauts, colonizing Earth's satellite in the future, will be able to extract molecular oxygen and hydrogen out of the environment to produce water and pure oxygen for themselves.

US faces new crisis after baby formula shortage – Time

TAMPONS

A successful ad campaign has been named as one of the causes behind a national tampon deficit


© Getty Images / zoranm

The US is experiencing a severe deficit of tampons, with an extremely successful ad campaign being cited as one of the factors contributing to the shortages, TIME Magazine claimed earlier this week.

In 2020, popular comedian and actress Amy Schumer was hired by Procter & Gamble as a ‘face of Tampax’ – the most popular tampon brand in the US. In the ad campaign, Schumer played the role of a helpful tampon supplier who appeared in toilets and ‘saved’ women from getting into trouble by supplying them with Tampax.

Since then, “retail sales growth has exploded,” the company’s spokeswoman Cheri McMaster told TIME. Demand for Tampax is up 7.7% over the past two years, which prompted the manufacturer to run its plant in Auburn, Maine, 24/7.

However, as research conducted by TIME’s Alana Semuels revealed, the successful advertising campaign has not been the only cause of tampon shortages which have been well documented by social media users: Twitter, Reddit and other social media are flooded with photos of empty shelves where some of the most-needed hygienic products were supposed to be.

“This isn’t as bad as toilet paper shortages in Spring 2020, but it’s not great,” Dana Marlowe, the founder of I Support the Girls charity which provides homeless people with bras and menstrual hygiene assistance, wrote on Twitter.

The shortage first became clear during the Covid pandemic when people were stocking up on essentials. Later on, according to TIME, another problem compounded matters: a raw materials shortage. As demand for face coverings and other medical supplies was growing, the demand for raw cotton and rayon was also on the rise. As a result, tampon manufacturers have been struggling in sourcing these materials. The fact that the price of cotton was rising fast (in April it was 71% higher than in the previous year), further aggravated the problem.

Rising costs of transportation have made delivery of the products to the US more expensive. The CEO of startup The Organic Project, Thyme Sullivan, told TIME that the cost of getting its tampons to the US is up 300% from last year.

In addition to all the listed problems, manufacturers are also struggling with staff shortages amid the rising demand for its products. As tampons are considered to be medical devices, they are subject to strict control regulations and therefore “companies can’t put just anybody on the assembly line, so production lagged demand,” the author of the research explained.

“Increased demand, staffing shortages, raw material shortages – none of these factors are unique to tampons. Yet what makes the tampon shortage so persistent and problematic is that unlike most other items that the supply chain has made it hard to access, tampons are not something women can stop buying until supplies return,” TIME explains.

Tampons are not the only scarce product in the US. Last month, New York authorities were forced to declare a state of emergency over a shortage of baby formula. The deficit of the vitally important product was triggered by the February shutdown of a Michigan plant operated by Abbott Laboratories, over contamination concerns. The facility, which accounts for roughly 40% of the formula in the US market, recalled some of its products and shut down a manufacturing plant after four babies who had been fed formula made at the facility contracted a rare bacterial infection. Two of them later died.
Coffee Trumps Tradition in Lebanese City

For years, a cafe in the city center has offered a safe haven to minorities. But political and economic stresses are pushing a more open culture to the margins

June 2, 2022
Lawyer and activist Khaled Merheb reads his book in the eclectic, salon-style interior of Ahwak Community Cafe, a haven for Tripolitans from every pavement of the city / George Sopwith


It would be easy to walk past Ahwak Community Café, brushing it off as another attempt at a European-style neighborhood coffee shop. But there is more to Ahwak than the coffee it serves.

Behind its turquoise door is a hideout for a small community of Tripolitans who are striving for cohesion and creativity in a city alienated by political corruption, violence, insecurity and religious divisions.

Located in the unassuming commercial area of Dam w Farez, within throwing distance of Sahet al-Nour, Tripoli’s central square, Ahwak and its community constitute an overlooked part of the city — a place where liberals, conservatives, Muslims, Christians, atheists, artists, intellectuals, LGBTQ people, the young and the old, can talk and drink together.

It is an antidote to Tripoli’s troubles, conspicuous in a city infamous for poverty, the ebb and flow of fundamentalism, and home to some of Lebanon’s wealthiest politicians, including caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Inside is a homely, salon-style room; the walls are pink or papered with gold print, sofas and armchairs fill the floor, while a medley of round tables hold cappuccinos and espressos. The colorful space reflects the eclectic clientele who, since 2008, have relished the atmosphere created by Ahwak’s owner, Sahar Minkara.

Minkara is perched on a sofa sipping a cafe blanc, a hot drink scented with orange blossom, as she recounted the days her fragmented city united for the first time during Lebanon’s October 2019 revolution.

Ahmad Jenzarli, 22, and Ahwak’s owner Sahar Minkara, 47, laugh during an evening at Ahwak Community Cafe in Tripoli, Lebanon / George Sopwith

“It was a big moment for us,” she said. “There were people smoking marijuana on the square. … There were young boys holding rainbows. They were dancing to techno [music] under the Allah sign [in the middle of the square].”

For a few months, sects, gender and class were forgotten, and the country erupted in furor against a decades-old, corrupt and incompetent ruling class. “We were so oppressed in the city. Everyone is so oppressed,” Minkara said.

For years, Lebanon’s northern capital has embodied the country’s troubles. It has endured occupations and conflict, repelling investment and opportunities, leaving its residents feeling forgotten. Minkara is one of them, yet not due to deprivation or unemployment, but because she is speaking up for a community others want to silence.

“What you are seeing today in Tripoli is way more conservative than the Tripoli I grew up in,” she said.

Born and raised in the city, Ahwak’s 47-year-old proprietor defies the typical expectations of a Tripolitan woman. Not only is it unusual to have a female-run coffee shop, but with her black leather pants, monochrome bomber jacket and wave of freshly pouffed hair, she also counters Tripoli’s conservative image.

“[The city has gone] backwards at a huge speed. My generation sees this immensely. We were the last generation who saw the city in both cultures … who saw the diversity of the city.”

After returning from a year in Australia during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and seeing the city’s neglected state, Minkara felt energized to create something positive. From friends emigrating, to villagers from rural areas seeking work in the city, everyone was searching for better opportunities, while regional instability also meant that Tripoli became host to different ethnic groups. The dynamic of the city was evolving but with little prosperity, she explained. “I saw the start of a declining city, and I thought, I need to make a platform for somebody, and I need to push it culturally.”

Minkara wanted to re-create a pocket of the past Tripoli, the cosmopolitan society that shaped her childhood. She was also inspired by the historic prominence of coffee: “I think coffee shops have always played huge roles in societies — whether it was the Industrial Revolution, the early 1920s, ’30s, [Jean-Paul] Sartre … coffee shops are a platform where everyone can speak.”

In Lebanon, coffee is on every street corner. It is found on the backs of motorbikes, steaming out from a neat machine, or in Turkish copper dallah pots, lugged by a fez-donning old man clinking his cups to catch passersby. It is so integrated into the morning routine of what’s known as “sobhiye”: gossiping with friends or neighbors over coffee.

With the rise of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism in the 1950s, Tripoli’s coffee rooms became Arab nationalist havens. Local men gathered around the old quarters of Tal square to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and dissect Lebanese President Camille Chamoun’s pro-Western, Christian outlook. The rooms have survived the ravages of time with the same plastic chairs, checkered brown tiles, smoke-stained walls and large analog clocks.

Like its predecessors, Ahwak also grew into a coffeehouse of debate and ideas, but with an edge. Customers nurtured an atmosphere of free thinking, culture and, ultimately, fun.

“First, it was a big hit,” Minkara said of Ahwak’s early years. “I got to attract a beautiful community of creative people; open-minded, youngsters, [the] super creative, musicians. The LGBTQ-plus [community] as well, not because I was like putting a rainbow on the front [of the shop]. But because here, nobody was judged, everybody was free to do anything.”

Ahwak molded to its patrons: One evening it would be a music venue, the next day, a library. Minkara made a point to promote young artists, holding exhibitions and attracting local press, as the sounds of late-night revelry became one with the community.

“I had veiled women coming here, I had somebody who would come, cover his coffee, go to the mosque opposite, pray and then come back,” she said. “And even we had a sheikh, Raheem, who used to come here, and he was very nice. … He used to sit here and see me drinking beer and open conversations with me,” Minkara remembered.

Yet as the cafe became a magnet for the city’s young people, it attracted suspicion from the wider community, including the mosque across the street. Ahwak garnered an array of nicknames, like “the coffee shop for gays and sluts,” and the “safara,” the Arabic word for embassy, a reference to all the foreigners who frequented the cafe.

Minkara eventually found herself face-to-face with the wrath of the sheikh from the mosque opposite Ahwak

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The outside of Ahwak Community Cafe, with Al-Rahman Mosque in the background, inDam w Farez, Tripoli. In 2017, the mosque blamed Ahwak for a power failure during prayers / George Sopwith

One evening during Ramadan in 2017, as the adhan boomed from the minaret, the power cut, as is common under Lebanon’s fragile electricity network. Ahwak was immediately blamed.

“They thought I came and cut the wires,” Minkara said. A backlash erupted on social media, and an anonymous Islamic group, who called themselves the “Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” threatened Minkara, ordering her to shut down Ahwak and evacuate the city within 24 hours.

Undeterred, she grabbed the phone and called the sheikh. “I told him, ‘If anything happens to me or to my clients, I’m going to sue you.’ And I did,” she said. Local politicians became involved, who were “all very supportive,” while the army stationed a tank between the mosque and Ahwak.

The next day, high on rebellion, Minkara dressed in “the shortest crop top with the tightest jeans and the highest heels” and sat outside Ahwak, in full view of the mosque.

“I remember the beautiful thing, the next day after the incident, the whole community came to support, they were sitting all over the coffee shop. People came in solidarity, people who hadn’t come for years,” she said.

Tripoli is majority Sunni, but it is also home to a small Christian community, Alawites, and a number of displaced Syrians, Palestinians and Iraqis. Some fear the city has been undergoing Islamification because of the increasing reach of Sunni political and religious authorities in recent years, which some believe has cultivated an insular and watchful atmosphere.

The diverse demographic has led to tensions. During the summer of 2013, hostilities from Syria’s civil war spilled over the border, and the city was engrossed in daily clashes between warring Sunni and Alawite neighborhoods.

The city was on edge, but day-to-day business continued, and Ahwak was packed with patrons each evening.

However, one evening, three men dressed in black and wielding guns barged into the busy cafe and accused Minkara of serving alcohol. “And you know what they did?” she said, acting out someone nudging her elbow with a gun. They grabbed the bottles of coffee syrup and started sniffing them: “They were saying, ‘Is this alcohol?’”

“To be honest, I was scared,” she admitted.

“They are always trying to break people like Sahar and me,” said Khaled Merheb, one of Ahwak’s earliest customers, referring to the city’s religious conservatives. “Because we talk without gloves, without consequences.”

Merheb, a 51-year-old openly gay human rights lawyer and activist, is accustomed to defamatory rumors and gossip.

“This is a conservative city. … I’m very liberal, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-women’s rights, I’m pro-children’s rights. … And I’m very vocal about it, I’m not ashamed,” he said.

He gained critics after once defending gay rights on television and lost work because of it.

“I don’t care because I’m a person who does what they want to,” he said.

It is thanks to Ahwak that Tripoli’s gay community has a place to meet without fear of judgment, and young Tripolitan Ahmad Jenzarli views the cafe as an integral branch of a limited LGBTQ scene. The law student highlighted the open culture, which allows him and his friends to hang out at ease.

“In other cafes, you would hear whispers, of course,” he said, since Tripoli has “always been perceived as an Islamic city,” and both Muslim and Christian religious authorities oppose homosexuality.

“[The LGBTQ community is] limited in safe spaces and opportunities, so if they lose one, then they don’t have a plan B,” Jenzarli added 
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Photographs of a music concert at Ahwak Community Cafe in 2017, the years before Tripoli became submerged in a revolution and economic depression / George Sopwith

Lebanon’s gay community faces discrimination, and in Tripoli there are barely a handful of safe spaces. While Lebanon has no specific law concerning same-sex relations, Article 534 penalizes any sexual activity “against nature.”

Recently, however, judges in Lebanon have been acting in support of LGBTQ rights, and with jurisprudence, it is widely acknowledged that homosexuality is not penalized, Merheb explained. “Legally, we are free to talk, we are not stopped from talking about gay rights, lesbian rights, about anything. For example, if someone wants to display homosexuality, it’s totally free, it’s totally legal.”

But the country’s economic depression is threatening to turn back the clock on social progress. Now in its third year, the financial crisis, described as one of the worst globally since the mid-19th century, is yet to be resolved. The Lebanese pound has lost over 90% of its value, while the World Bank estimated an inflation average of 145% last year, among the highest in the world.

Everywhere the impact is evident; from fuel and medicine shortages to electricity rationing and the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, the crisis has left people not just in poverty, but also exhausted.

The euphoria of October 2019 has been replaced with an air of hopelessness. The smell of burning rubber tires and overturned garbage bins is a daily feature in Tripoli; a symbol of fed-up youth who have resorted to blocking roads as a desperate protest against the miserable living conditions and government ineptitude. While others, pushed to the brink, have been risking their life for better opportunities by setting off in boats from Tripoli’s coastline, creating a new route to smuggle people to Europe.

Today, Ahwak’s spark is flickering, and it is obvious Minkara is surviving off the remnants of better days. She is both inspired and depressed by her city, committed but losing love in the current climate. “We were drenched,” Minkara said. “They drenched us with the economic situation. If it wasn’t because of that, we would still be on the streets, or maybe burnt everyone’s [politicians] houses [by now].”

This year is unlikely to bring much relief for Lebanon. General elections took place in May. They risk deepening divisions, as a vulnerable population returns to old faces for support.

Ahwak faces an uphill struggle too, with its community shrinking in a deflating city. What is more, Minkara once again is battling to keep Ahwak open. “The new landlord doesn’t like me much and wants me to close,” she revealed, adding that she believes it is for “political” reasons.

And while Minkara feels heavy with nostalgia, the presence of her cafe in Tripoli remains poignant. “I always say: The day I close this shop, the city will be over. We might be a minority in this city today, but we exist.”

Rosabel Crean is a freelance journalist covering social issues in Lebanon
When the Establishment No Longer Calls the Shots in Writing History

From Tiananmen Square to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, deciding how the past is remembered is one of the invisible roles of rulers. But newer social movements are challenging whether the narrator should be a hero or a villain

A statue of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis lies on the street after protesters pulled it down in Virginia in 2020
/ Parker Michels-Boyce / AFP via Getty Images


“What you can’t do is go around seeking to change our history retrospectively,” proclaimed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in January 2022, “or to bowdlerize it or edit it in retrospect.” The prime minister was reacting to a jury verdict acquitting four protesters who had joined a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol, England, in June 2020. The four were prosecuted for toppling a public statue of the 18th-century philanthropist and slave merchant Edward Colston.

One Conservative member of Parliament, Tom Hunt, added that the verdict would give a “green light for all sorts of political extremists . . . to ransack our past.” Another party member and former minister, Tim Loughton, objected that the jury decision “effectively allows anyone to rip down statues, vandalize public art and memorials or desecrate buildings because they disagree with what they stand for.” But the left-leaning writer Nesrine Malik fired back, accusing these Tory grandees of overlooking “deep inequalities that run, like cracks, from the past to the present.” Malik cast British history as a “legacy of supremacy, both racial and national” — a legacy that still lives on “not just in our streets and squares but in our politics, our education and our economy.” Malik charged that the country remains “as delusional about the moral integrity of its colonial heroes as it is about the health of its race and ethnic relations.”

Nothing about these disputes is uniquely British. Iconoclasm dates back over millennia, recurring in many cultures during turbulent times. When rival factions clash, their politics end up tied to memory. Moreover, in today’s world, social media fuel street rebellions by increasing their payoff, particularly when monuments seem to glorify, say, European imperialism or the American Confederacy. Militants who deface these displays enjoy instant audiences and can spark global movements — or rather, they can do so if they live within sufficiently open societies. After all, China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre claimed over 10,000 victims, yet when Hong Kong universities removed public memorials commemorating it in 2021, barely a peep was heard. Few Chinese can afford to ruin their or their families’ lives by candidly challenging official histories. The ordinary citizen cannot even obtain basic information about the uprising (China has banned search engines such as Google and Yahoo, allowing only more restricted ones), so many people know little about it.

The warning sounded by George Orwell back in 1949 still rings true today: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This raises a question that is relevant from Bristol to Beijing: Can we discover any patterns in how governments around the world promote public understanding of history?

Official histories usually glorify the state’s heroes, lament its victims and condemn its enemies — but rarely do such histories proclaim open remorse for past sins. Those that do tend to come from democratic rather than autocratic governments, even if the line between the two is sometimes hard to draw.

One context in which officials openly condemn their own state’s past is revolution, as far as the new government proclaims a sharp break with its predecessor. By emphatically charging the old order with wrongdoing, the new regime aims to bolster its public approval. The French revolutionaries of 1789 were eager to proclaim the state’s past injustices so the revolutionaries could then be seen as legitimate, rightly overthrowing the brutal and corrupt ancien régime. They presented the aristocracy as traitors, as aliens, as part of the “they” and not part of the “we,” or even as a kind of foreign occupying force. In the 20th century, Bolsheviks condemned tsarism in similar terms, just as Mao’s cultural revolution turned on older imperial remnants. Cuba, Nicaragua and others furnish further examples. In these revolutionary contexts the government realigns itself with the state, as if it were not only the government but also the state itself that was being renewed. The new officials feel confident about condemning the state’s past wrongdoings as a means of justifying the overthrow of their predecessors.

Yet revolutions are the exception in history. Most of the time officials wish to exhibit continuity between the state and government. They hesitate to condemn past evils committed by their own states, particularly when those evils do not lie far back in time, because that would mean condemning some predecessor government along with often vast portions of the population who supported it. After the demise of leaders such as Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Spain’s Francisco Franco, any official proclamations of their crimes became a perilous affair, likely to spark outrage and faction, likely to divide populations and even families. Former administrators and supporters of those regimes — also called collaborators, depending on where you stand — were still alive, often still young and professionally or civically active. For many governments, silence seems to offer the only pathway toward national reconciliation.

Today, we can make sense of the politics of memory, of who is remembered and how, by starting with four assumptions. Each of them, it seems, is uncontroversial. First, most nations today have emerged because someone exerted power over others, whether that power be military, economic, ethnic, national, religious, gender-based or something else. Second, those power differentials have bred injustices, at least in the eyes of later generations, if not always from the standpoint of those who held power at the time. Third, it remains rare for governments to publicly proclaim their own responsibility for histories of mass and systemic injustice. Official histories usually glorify their own heroes, lament their own victims and condemn their real or fabricated enemies — but rarely do they proclaim open remorse for the state’s own wrongdoings, at least insofar as the existing constitutional order is still largely in place. Indeed, highly autocratic governments sanitize history by turning such acts into taboos, as in North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere. Democratic regimes may be more inclined to issue such statements, but the wording is often parsimonious since officials seek to avoid not only political backlash but also lawsuits from victims or their descendants who may be numerous and may demand large sums in compensation.

Yet despite all such obstacles, governments do, from time to time, confess past wrongs, which leads us to the fourth precept: The dividing line between the governments that are willing to acknowledge guilt and those that are not falls largely between democracy and autocracy — even if boundaries between these two terms have become ever harder to draw. Not only between democracies and autocracies, but also within democracies we witness autocrats like former U.S. President Donald Trump, France’s far-right provocateur politician Eric Zemmour or the former leader of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party Alexander Gauland pushing against self-critical histories in favor of sanitized national histories. To be sure, officials within democracies generally have an easy enough time apologizing for incidental mishaps, for example, by openly apologizing for the death of a military recruit who has been killed in a botched military exercise. The harder task is to take responsibility for mass injustices.

Only after World War II do we witness a break from those habits of silence and avoidance, most notably in what was then West Germany, when the government and intelligentsia adopted the narrative of a collectively responsible “we.” The disgraced Nazi regime would henceforth be treated not as “other” but as part of an ongoing history for which present and future governments would have to take responsibility. This has come to be known as “Erinnerungskultur,” literally “memory culture.” The phrase may sound stilted in Anglophone ears, but it has become mainstream, almost colloquial in Germany, where it no longer sounds novel or exotic.

To be sure, public consciousness is one thing, but public consensus is another. Even in Germany’s political mainstream, commemorative projects spur controversy. Berlin’s massive Holocaust memorial, built in 2005, has long sparked quarrels about its aims and design. For many people, its conception seems inappropriately amorphous; at worst, there is the unseemly reality that visitors can easily flaunt their disrespect. Similarly, since reunification in 1990, disputes surrounding the former East Germany have proved contentious around topics like the dictatorship’s political legitimacy, its citizens’ participation in it, and West Germany’s overt and covert dealings with it during the Cold War. And yet surely all these disputes display not the weaknesses of Erinnerungskultur but its strengths. If democracies thrive through collective self-examination, then surely they offer a natural home for self-critical histories. When people like Trump reject critically minded memory, they reject the very idea of democracy as an arena for collective and deliberative reflection.

Obviously, stories of national guilt need not eclipse all others, nor do stories of national loss need to be excised. Russian or Polish authorities can credibly commemorate mass sufferings at the hands of Nazis. China can justifiably remember atrocities committed by Japan. Vietnam and Cambodia can rightly recall the victims of American war crimes. But when officials entrench mythologies about their nation solely as the hero or the victim, silencing any discussion about its role as a perpetrator, then they take ever further steps away from democracy itself. The problem is not that there is necessarily autocracy wherever we find sanitized history, but the converse: Wherever we find autocracy, we are sure to find sanitized history. In the same way, we do not necessarily find self-critical history wherever we find democracy, but the converse: Wherever we find self-critical history, we can surely expect to find at least incipient, if not yet full-fledged, democracy.

One hotly disputed by-product of Erinnerungskultur has been Germany’s ban on public statements that deny the occurrence or the extent of the Holocaust. Such a ban, also adopted in France and many other Western democracies, ends up placing one civic value above another, since the government’s constitutional duty to protect free expression becomes subordinated to a collective ethical duty of remembrance. The anti-denialist law coerces citizens either to confirm both the existence of the Holocaust and its gravity, or to dodge the matter when speaking publicly. What results is a rift in memory politics. In opting for such bans, countries like Germany or France subscribe to “militant democracy” as immortalized in the words of the 18th-century Jacobin Louis Antoine de Saint-Just: “no freedom for the enemies of freedom.” That philosophy contrasts with the Anglosphere’s traditionally laissez-faire policies, where governments certainly engage in commemorative activities yet prefer to leave much of the discussion, debate and research in the hands of citizens without imposing bans, as in the United States, or imposing comparatively mild ones, as in Britain.

Despite such surface disagreements between contemporary democracies, we should not exaggerate the divergences between Western European and Anglo-American attitudes. What unites them is a goal of strengthening the democratic public sphere, even if they dispute the best means of achieving that goal. In the past I have criticized speech bans by arguing that democracy cannot legitimately subordinate free expression to historical commemoration. I continue to hold that view, yet the difference between the age-old policies of officially self-glorifying histories and this newer, self-critical stance reveals something unprecedented, indeed admirable, about the German and French policies. Whatever may be the advantages and disadvantages of their speech bans, the anti-denialist laws contrast starkly with, for example, Poland’s 2018 legislation imposing criminal penalties on speakers who blame the Polish state or nation for complicity in Nazi atrocities.

What’s the difference? Polish authorities like to equate their ban with the German one, defending their crackdowns by arguing that Germany does the same. Yet the aims and effects of the two countries’ bans could not be more different. For all its faults, the German ban adopts the democratically credible stance of acknowledging the nation’s wrongdoings, while the Polish ban merely defaults to the old sanitizing rhetoric of officials proclaiming their nation’s heroism or victimhood. The Polish ban penalizes references to historically documented events, while the German one primarily obstructs the dissemination of patent falsehoods and conspiracy theories (which, incidentally, tend to be laced with hefty doses of antisemitism). The German ban raises concerns about democracy as far as it curbs speech, and yet it strengthens democracy by entrenching a culture of collective self-criticism. The Polish policy fails on both counts.

Apologists for the Polish ban complain that frequent references to “Polish” concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor, which the Nazis built in the occupied country, run the risk of misleading the public by suggesting that those compounds had been managed under Polish authority. But that’s a poor excuse. Warsaw’s lawmakers know that there are alternative means of avoiding that error without having to adopt a law so blatantly designed to curtail public discussion and scholarly research about Poles’ wartime crimes. Polish officials’ bad faith is underscored when we recall that, even before 2018, the governing party had sought to bring prosecutions for criminal libel against the Polish-American historian Jan Gross, who has published research on atrocities committed by Poles against Jews during the war.

It is important to add that Germany has also promoted measures that are less coercive but more effective — measures that can advance Erinnerungskultur without having to punish speakers. In particular, German school curricula do much to promote Holocaust and wartime education, often including guided class trips to former concentration camps, as well as long-standing policies within the mass media to expand documentary programming, and promotion of information and discussion through museums and other public forums.

Similar policies have been adopted by other Western nations, yet not without backlashes. In former imperial powers such as Britain, France or the Netherlands, it has become increasingly untenable to discuss the achievements of the empire without paying serious and even primary attention to the prices paid by colonized and Indigenous peoples. Recently in the Netherlands, some commentators have argued that the time has come to stop calling the 17th century — the era of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Spinoza, Huygens, the world’s first stock exchange and the Dutch East India Company — the “Golden Age,” given blights of slavery, poverty, imperialism and warfare that followed on its heels. Meanwhile, in recent decades American classrooms have devoted greater attention to the bleak pasts of slavery and Jim Crow along with the brutalization of various Indigenous and immigrant peoples yet have simultaneously faced hostility from reactionaries who seek to erase or downplay those histories and would restore schoolbooks to tales of Anglo-Saxon glory.

Despite the emergence of more self-critical official histories, it is self-glorification that continues to dominate throughout much of the world. People who face struggles in their daily lives may feel little sympathy for victims and events that seem far away. Many crave collective pride, not collective shame. Few politicians score points by telling the nation how horrid its ancestors were. Yet democracies have no other option. Self-critical history is not only a necessary ingredient of truth-telling at home but also of credibility abroad if democracies are to challenge others about past and present human rights violations.

Against the backdrop of official histories, how and why did this new countercurrent of self-criticism start to emerge? After all, self-evaluation is an ancient norm, found in many cultures and belief systems. Socrates launched much of Western philosophy by embracing such self-criticism, and yet he urged it only on individuals, not on governments acting in their official capacities. Similarly, we cannot rule out the origins of autocritique in medieval Christian practices of self-chastisement, yet here, too, such rituals were individual, never formally instituted as government practice.

The late Middle Ages and Renaissance gave rise to “mirrors for princes” and “mirrors for magistrates,” namely handbooks for rulers on good governance that highlight the value of self-reflection. These texts urged leaders to embrace self-mediating qualities of humility, compassion and other such virtues of benign government (as poignantly ironized in Shakespeare’s mirror-smashing moment in “Richard II”). Desiderius Erasmus’ “The Education of a Christian Prince” offers a prominent example of the genre, but similar advice can also be found in non-European systems such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Islam. Albeit in their own idioms, all such traditions urge rulers to exercise power with erudition, yet here too, these teachings never recommend that governments must engage in open self-rebuke by taking public responsibility for mass injustices.

One might argue that earlier societies felt no need for official proclamations of wrongdoing given that their evils did not take place on the scale witnessed in industrialized societies. Yet that argument is unpersuasive. After all, mass atrocities were certainly known in premodernity, even if not in numbers witnessed in more recent times. And at any rate, it would seem easier for officials to take blame for wrongdoings that were smaller in scale, so it does not seem to be the sheer degree of wrongdoing that explains the recent shift toward self-critical history.

The reasons for the shift lie elsewhere and can be viewed as the logical conclusion of an admittedly idealistic, post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that reached a pinnacle around the mid-20th century in response to the horrors of World Wars I and II. Idealistic cosmopolitanism is a worldview that envisions a society of critically aware citizens who jointly agree about past failures and future reforms. It assumes a common “human family” sharing universal moral values, as witnessed when the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a document that opens by proclaiming that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

Of course, the problem with that humanist idyll is that no such universal conscience ever existed. The U.N. Declaration’s drafters, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Peng Chun Chang, Charles Malik and others, were well-meaning yet privileged elites who shared little with ordinary people. In the long chronicle of human civilization, the shift from sanitized histories toward collective self-rebuke may yet prove to be a flash in the pan, a luxury of momentary prosperity.

Yet no one who believes in democracy can take an entirely pessimistic outlook. Policies of national self-inculpation are likely to remain the rare exception. But let’s not forget that constitutional democracy itself remains exceptional in history.

Eric Heinze is the professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University of London
May 27, 2022