Buruma: In the U.S., the left has fallen into the populist right’s culture-war trap

2023/03/13 Leave a comment

Of note:

The United States is in the midst of a book-banning frenzy. According to PEN America, 1,648 books were prohibited in public schools across the country between July, 2021, and June, 2022. That number is expected to increase this year as conservative politicians and organizations in Republican-controlled states such as Florida and Utah step up efforts to censor works dealing with gender, sexual and racial issues.

Today’s book bans are largely driven by right-wing populist politicians and parent groups claiming to protect wholesome, family-oriented Christian communities from the decadence of urban America. As such, a children’s book featuring LGBTQ+ characters apparently falls under their definition of pornography.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential contender, is arguably the leading advocate of state censorship and modern-day book bans. Last month, Mr. DeSantis and his allies in the state’s House of Representatives introduced a new bill that would prohibit universities and colleges from supporting campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” The bill also seeks to remove critical race theory, gender studies, and intersectionality, as well as any “derivative major or minor of these belief systems,” from academic curricula.

But even though there are fewer calls from left-wing progressives to ban books, they, too, can be intolerant of literature that offends them. Such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been removed from some school reading lists because they contain racial slurs and might “marginalize” certain readers.

To be sure, the right-wing crackdown on academic freedom is more dangerous than the left’s literary allergies. What is interesting, however, is how much left-wing and right-wing intolerance have in common. Right-wing populists like Mr. DeSantis tend to mimic progressive rhetoric about “inclusivity” and “sensitivity” in the classroom. White students, they claim, must be shielded from learning about slavery or the role of white supremacy in American history because it might upset them and make them feel guilty.

Progressives who want to stop teaching Huckleberry Finn in schools or demand that words like “fat” be taken out of Roald Dahl’s children’s books follow the same logic. They, too, do not want children to feel offended or “unwelcome,” even if it means they don’t learn how to absorb information and think for themselves.

Right-wing mimicry of left-wing jargon can be viewed as a form of bad-faith payback. After all, the driving force behind conservative puritanism in the U.S. has always been fundamentalism, not inclusion. But religious dogmatism is intimately linked to the fear of being offended. The controversy that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 is a case in point. In addition to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the author’s death, Christian conservatives condemned Mr. Rushdie for mocking religion. Some on the left, though they did not belong to any religion, still criticized Mr. Rushdie for offending millions of Muslims.

Christian puritans do not oppose books about gay topics just because the Bible forbids homosexuality, but also (and perhaps primarily) because it violates what they believe to be the natural order. This is not so different from the sentiments of thousands of people who recently signed a letter protesting the coverage of transgender issues in the New York Times. Signatories were upset by the fact that some articles assumed that the question of gender might not be scientifically settled. The next day, another by the columnist Pamela Paul defending J.K. Rowling caused more offence; Ms. Rowling does not believe that being a woman, or a man, is simply a matter of choice.

Progressives who call for the banning of Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potterbooks (which are also denounced by right-wing zealots for promoting witchcraft) do not on the whole do so for religious reasons. Again, they talk about unwelcoming workplaces, marginalization, insensitivity, and so on. But they are often as dogmatic as religious believers; to doubt their conviction about trans identity, as Ms. Rowling does, violates their view of nature.

This is not to suggest that threats from the left to students’ access to books are as serious as those coming from the far right. Unlike extreme right-wing parties, including today’s Republican Party, left-of-centre politicians do not generally call for state-enforced legal bans. Nevertheless, some progressive rhetoric is playing into the hands of the populist right.

Bereft of a coherent economic platform, the Republicans have gone all in on the U.S. culture wars. But given that appeals by religious and social conservatives tend to gain more purchase with voters than dogmatic positions on racial and sexual identities, this is not a war the left is likely to win. Democrats, and other progressive parties in the Western world, would be well advised to concentrate less on hurt feelings and more on voters’ economic and political interests.

Source: In the U.S., the left has fallen into the populist right’s culture-war trap

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Buruma: Does soccer really unite the world? Of course not

2022/12/12 Leave a comment

As we enter the semi-finals, a good column (I’m rooting for Morocco):

Count on the International Federation of Association Football, better known as FIFA, to come up with a fatuous slogan for the World Cup in Qatar: “Football Unites the World.” An official promotional video has Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Brazil’s Neymar mouthing the words in Spanish and Portuguese, respectively.

Is it true? Does football really unite the world?

Of course not. It does not even unite countries. In Brazil, the team’s yellow-and-green colours have been co-opted by supporters of the recently ousted president Jair Bolsonaro (backed by Neymar), which has annoyed supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (backed by Brazilian striker Richarlison).

The idea that sporting events unite the world is an old obsession, going back to Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s invention of the modern Olympic Games in 1896. Sports, in the Baron’s mind, ought to transcend politics, international tensions, and any other discord. FIFA, too, subscribes to the fantasy of a world without politics, where conflict is confined to the playing fields.

In fact, the choice to hold this year’s tournament in Qatar, a tiny oil-rich sheikdom with no footballing history or evidence of robust local interest in the game, is itself political. The country’s ruling emir craved the prestige of a global event, and Qatar had the money to buy it. Thick envelopes are said to have been slipped into the pockets of voting FIFA officials. And FIFA was richly rewarded for giving broadcasting rights to Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-funded TV channel.

FIFA, evidently, was unbothered by Qatar’s poor human-rights record, abuse of immigrant workers, and laws that punish homosexuality – certainly no more than even dodgier venues of the past. After all, the last World Cup tournament was held in Russia, which was already under international sanctions.

But the fact that tiny Qatar, the first Middle Eastern country to host the World Cup tournament, wields such clout, shows how much power has shifted in recent times. FIFA, like the International Olympic Committee, always bends to the power of money, making it clear that neither the players nor visiting European dignitaries should wear armbands with the phrase “OneLove.” That expression of support for people’s right to love who and how they want was seen as a political statement, and FIFA cannot allow sports and politics to mix.

Except that they can and they do. It has been perfectly acceptable for Moroccan, Saudi or Qatari fans to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause by waving Palestine’s flag in the World Cup stadiums. Meanwhile, the Dutch Minister for Sport, Conny Helder, could do no more than wear a tiny “OneLove” pin to a match as the Qatari official sitting next to her calmly tied on a Palestinian armband.

Any criticism of human-rights violations in Qatar has been swiftly met with accusations of racism, backed by FIFA’s Swiss president, Gianni Infantino, who reminded fellow Europeans of “3,000 years” of Western imperialism. T-shirts bearing the words “woman” and “freedom” were prohibited as well, lest they irritate the Iranian theocracy, which is being challenged with those slogans at home.

Just as notable is the lack of national unity. Demonstrators in Tehran and other Iranian cities, protesting the regime’s efforts to bask in the glow of its football victories, cheered when their team lost to the United States, of all countries. Most remarkable of all was the refusal of the Iranian players themselves to sing the national anthem before their opening match. They were reportedly warned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps not to repeat this brave act of defiance.

Then there was the extraordinary defeat of the young German team. Like most national teams, the German side is multiethnic, and when they failed to proceed to the knock-out stage (only because Spain lost to Japan) conservative pundits in Germany blamed it on a lack of the traditional German fighting spirit. Even before this World Cup, the team was attackedin certain right-wing circles and accused of not being truly German.

One of the ironies of modern football is that national teams whip up passions in a kind of carnivalesque performance of patriotic partisanship. But the players themselves are mostly colleagues in club teams all over Europe who usually speak several languages and are often close friends off the field, making them unsuitable avatars for this type of chauvinism. They are members of an extremely wealthy, truly cosmopolitan elite. So, the football stars are, in a sense, united, even if the World Cup unites no one else.

Still, one can understand why FIFA chose its 2022 World Cup slogan. “Money makes the world go ‘round” would have been a little too honest.

Ian Buruma is the author, most recently, of The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.

Source: Does soccer really unite the world? Of course not

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ICYMI: Trump’s Racist Ban on Anti-Semitism | by Ian Buruma

2019/12/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

US President Donald Trump thinks that anti-Semitism is a serious problem in America. But Trump is not so much concerned about neo-Nazis who scream that Jews and other minorities “will not replace us,” for he thinks that many white supremacists are “very fine people.” No, Trump is more worried about US college campuses, where students call for boycotts of Israel in support of the Palestinians.

Trump just signed an executive order requiring that federal money be withheld from educational institutions that fail to combat anti-Semitism. Since Jews are identified in this order as a discriminated group on the grounds of ethnic, racial, or national characteristics, an attack on Israel would be anti-Semitic by definition. This is indeed the position of Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, who believes that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

There are, of course, as many forms of anti-Semitism as there are interpretations of what it means to be Jewish. When Trump and his supporters rant in campaign rallies about shadowy cabals of international financiers who undermine the interests of “ordinary, decent people,” some might interpret that as a common anti-Semitic trope, especially when an image of George Soros is brandished to underline this message. Trump even hinted at the possibility that the liberal Jewish human rights promoter and philanthropist was deliberately funding “caravans” of refugees and illegal aliens so that they could spread mayhem in the US. In Soros’s native Hungary, attacks on him as a cosmopolitan enemy of the people are unmistakably anti-Semitic.

Conspiracy theories about sinister Jewish power have a long history. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery published in 1903, popularized the notion that Jewish bankers and financiers were secretly pulling the strings to dominate the world. Henry Ford was one of the more prominent people who believed this nonsense.

The history of extreme anti-Zionism is not so long. In the first years of the Jewish state, Israel was popular among many leftists, because it was built on socialist ideas. Left-wing opinion in Europe and the United States began to turn against Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Arab territories were occupied by Israeli troops. More and more, Israel came to be seen as a colonial power, or an apartheid state.

One may or may not agree with that view of Israel. But few would deny that occupation, as is usually the case when civilians are under the thumb of a foreign military power, has led to oppression. So, to be a strong advocate for Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli policies, on college campuses or anywhere else, does not automatically make one an anti-Semite. But there are extreme forms of anti-Zionism that do. The question is when that line is crossed.

Some would claim that it is anti-Semitic to deny Jews the right to have their own homeland. This is indeed one of the premises of Trump’s presidential order. There are also elements on the radical left, certainly represented in educational institutions, who are so obsessed by the oppression of Palestinians that they see Israel as the world’s greatest evil. Just as anti-Semites in the past often linked Jews with the US, as the twin sources of rootless capitalist malevolence, some modern anti-Zionists combine their anti-Americanism with a loathing for Israel.

In the minds of certain leftists, Israel and its American big brother are not just the last bastions of racist Western imperialism. The idea of a hidden Jewish capitalist cabal can also enter left-wing demonology as readily as it infects the far right. This noxious prejudice has haunted the British Labour Party, something its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has consistently failed to recognize.1

In short, anti-Zionism can veer into anti-Semitism, but not all critics of Israel are anti-Zionist, and not all anti-Zionists are prejudiced against Jews.

Quite where people stand on this issue depends heavily on how they define a Jew – a source of endless vagueness and confusion. According to Halakha, or Jewish law, anyone with a Jewish mother, or who has converted to Judaism, is Jewish. That is the general Orthodox view. But more liberal Reform Jews allow Jewish identity to pass through the father as well.

On the other hand, while most Orthodox Jews consider a person to be Jewish even if they convert to another religion, Reform Jews do not. Israel’s Law of Return grants “every Jew” the right to immigrate, but refrains from defining Jewishness. Since 1970, even people with one Jewish grandparent have been eligible to become Israeli citizens. In the infamous Nuremberg laws, promulgated by the Nazis in 1935, people with only one Jewish parent could retain German citizenship, while “full” Jews could not.

The whole thing is so complicated that Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, once sought to simplify the matter as follows: “Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew, is a Jew.”

There is, in any case, something ill-conceived about the stress on race and nationhood in Trump’s order on combating anti-Semitism. Israel is the only state claiming to represent all Jews, but not all Jews necessarily identify with Israel. Some even actively dislike it. Trump’s order might suggest that such people are renegades, or even traitors. This idea might please Israel’s current government, but it is far from the spirit of the Halakha, or even from the liberal idea of citizenship.

Defining Jews as a “race” is just as much of a problem. Jews come from many ethnic backgrounds: Yemenite, Ethiopian, Russian, Moroccan, and Swedish Jews are hard to pin down as a distinctive ethnic group. Hitler saw Jews as a race, but that is no reason to follow his example.

To combat racism, wherever it occurs, is a laudable aim. But singling out anti-Semitism in an executive order, especially when the concept is so intimately linked to views on the state of Israel, is a mistake. Extreme anti-Zionists may be a menace; all extremists are. But they should be tolerated, as long as their views are peacefully expressed. To stifle opinions on campuses by threatening to withhold funds runs counter to the freedom of speech guaranteed by the US Constitution. This is, alas, not the only sign that upholding the constitution is not the main basis of the current US administration’s claim to legitimacy.

Source: Trump’s Racist Ban on Anti-Semitism | by Ian Buruma

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How to speak to far-right nationalists: Buruma

2017/11/13 Leave a comment

Buruma is always interesting to read and his general advice worth reflecting upon:

Something many right-wing populists have in common is a peculiar form of self-pity: the feeling of being victimized by the liberal media, academics, intellectuals, “experts” – in short, by the so-called elites. The liberal elites, the populists proclaim, rule the world and dominate ordinary patriotic people with an air of lofty disdain.

This is in many ways an old-fashioned view. Liberals, or leftists, do not dominate politics any more. And the influence that great left-of-centre newspapers, like The New York Times, once had has long been eclipsed by radio talk-show hosts, right-wing cable TV stations, tabloid newspapers (largely owned by Rupert Murdoch in the English-speaking world) and social media.

Influence, however, is not the same thing as prestige. The great newspapers, as with the great universities, still enjoy a higher status than the more popular press, and the same goes for higher learning. The Sun or Bild lack the esteem of the Financial Times or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and evangelical colleges in rural parts of the United States cannot compete in terms of cachet with Harvard or Yale.

Social status arouses more envy and resentment in our populist age than money or fame do. U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, is a very wealthy man, who was more famous than any of his rivals for the U.S. presidency, including Hillary Clinton. And yet he seems to be in an almost permanent rage against people who have greater intellectual or social prestige than he does. The fact that he shares this resentment with millions of people who are much less privileged goes a long way toward explaining his political success.

Until recently, figures on the extreme right had no prestige at all. Driven to the margins of most societies by collective memories of Nazi and fascist horrors, such men (there were hardly any women) had the grubby air of middle-aged patrons of backstreet porno cinemas. Stephen Bannon, still a highly influential figure in Mr. Trump’s world, seems a bit like that – a crank in a dirty raincoat.

But much has changed. Younger members of the far right, especially in Europe, are often sharply dressed in tailor-made suits, recalling the fascist dandies of pre-war France and Italy. They don’t shout at large mobs, but are slick performers in radio and TV studios, and are savvy users of social media. Some of them even have a sense of humour.

These new-model rightists are almost what Germans call salonfaehig, respectable enough to move in high circles. Overt racism is muted; their bigotry is disguised under a lot of smart patter. They crave prestige.

I had occasion to encounter a typical ideologue of this type recently at an academic conference organized by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College in the United States. The conference was about populism, and the ideologue was Marc Jongen, a politician from the far-right Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) party with a doctorate in philosophy. The son of a Dutch father and an Italian mother, born in Italy’s German-speaking South Tyrol, Mr. Jongen spoke near-perfect English.

Self-pity lay close to the surface. Mr. Jongen described Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to give shelter in Germany to large numbers of refugees from Middle Eastern wars as “an act of violence” toward the German people. He called immigrants and refugees criminals and rapists (even though crime rates among refugees in Germany are far lower than among “natives”). Islam was robbing the German Volk of its true identity. Men like Mr. Jongen were always being called Nazis. And so on.

I had been asked to furnish some counterarguments. I did not call Mr. Jongen a Nazi. But I did my best to point out why I thought his claims were both wrong and dangerous. We shook hands at the end. And that, as far as I was concerned, was that.

Then a minor academic storm broke out. More than 50 distinguished U.S. academics signed a letter protesting the Hannah Arendt Center’s decision to invite Mr. Jongen to speak. The point was not that he didn’t have the right to express his opinions, but that Bard College should not have lent its prestige to make the speaker look respectable. Inviting him to speak made his views seem legitimate.

This strikes me as wrong-headed for several reasons. First, if one is going to organize a conference on right-wing populism, it is surely useful to hear what a right-wing populist actually has to say. Listening to professors denouncing ideas without actually hearing what they are would not be instructive.

Nor is it obvious that a spokesman for a major opposition party in a democratic state should be considered out of bounds as a speaker on a college campus. Left-wing revolutionaries were once a staple of campus life, and efforts to ban them would rightly have been resisted.

The protest against inviting Mr. Jongen was not only intellectually incoherent; it was also tactically stupid, because it confirms the beliefs of the far right that liberals are the enemies of free speech and that right-wing populists are victims of liberal intolerance. I like to think that Mr. Jongen left the Bard conference politely discredited. Because of the protest, he was able to snatch victory from defeat.

via How to speak to far-right nationalists – The Globe and Mail

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Cosmopolitanism, Trump and ignorance as a weapon: Buruma

2017/08/11 Leave a comment

Good piece on the historical antisemitism behind the word “cosmopolitan” and “cosmopolitanism:”

President Donald Trump’s administration has announced that it wants to cut legal immigration to the United States by half and favour well-educated immigrants who speak good English. When CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, the son of a Cuban immigrant, challenged Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller by stating that the United States traditionally welcomed the world’s poor, most of whom did not speak any English, Mr. Miller accused Mr. Acosta of “cosmopolitan bias.”

One wonders whether Mr. Miller had any idea of the historical use of cosmopolitan as a derogatory term. As the descendant of poor Jews fleeing Belarus more than a century ago, he should have.

“Rootless cosmopolitan” was the code phrase used by Joseph Stalin for Jews. In the early years after the Second World War, the Soviet dictator launched a campaign against Jewish intellectuals, scientists and writers who were accused of disloyalty to the Soviet Union and bias toward the West. Not considered to be part of the native Russian people, Jews were assumed to belong to an international cabal, and hence to be inherently treacherous.

But Stalin didn’t invent this idea. In the 1930s, Fascists and Nazis also denounced Jews, as well as Marxists and Freemasons, as “cosmopolitans” or “internationalists” – people whose loyalty was suspect. It is the kind of vocabulary that emerges from nativist movements that are hostile to ethnic or religious minorities, or to financial or intellectual elites who supposedly conspire to undermine the true sons and daughters of the nation.

To pre-war fascists, the United States was often regarded as the symbol of cosmopolitan decadence. The offensive use of cosmopolitanism, then, has a profoundly anti-American provenance.

One of the oddities of the Trump administration is that several of its main representatives have revived traditionally anti-Semitic rhetoric, even though some of them, like Mr. Miller, are Jewish. The chief ideologue of ethnic nationalism in the Trump Age, Steve Bannon, is a reactionary Catholic. He has a penchant for early-20th-century French and Italian fascist thinkers, such as Charles Maurras (of the Action Française) and Julius Evola, a sinister figure who admired Heinrich Himmler and worked for the German police during the Second World War.

But to see anti-cosmopolitanism as an especially Catholic pathology would be a mistake. The first offensive use of cosmopolitanism came as part of the Protestant rebellion against the Catholic Church. Rome, to Protestant rebels at the time of the Reformation, was regarded as the centre of a global “cosmopolitan” network which oppressed national aspirations. Traces of this prejudice can still be found in some opponents of the European Union, who see the EU’s Brussels headquarters as the new Rome.

It is unlikely that Mr. Miller, who grew up in a liberal family in California, is an anti-Semite. Perhaps his early attraction to right-wing extremism was a form of rebellion, too, albeit a rebellion that soon put him in the company of toxic allies. As a student at Duke University, he became friends with Richard Spencer, who would later become a promoter of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to preserve white civilization, whatever that may be.

One thing that unites many of Mr. Trump’s followers – as well as right-wing populists in other countries, including Israel – is a shared grievance against Muslims and the liberal urban elites who are often accused of coddling them. When Mr. Miller speaks of cosmopolitan bias, that is probably what he means.

But distrust of Muslims is only part of the story. Social elites, liberal intellectuals, and critical journalists are the enemy of those who crave power but feel looked down upon by people who appear to be more sophisticated. This is not always a matter of social class. President George W. Bush, for example, despised American reporters who spoke French.

This, too, is not a new phenomenon. The upper classes in many societies often like to distinguish themselves from the common herd by adopting the language and manners of foreigners whose cultures were thought to be superior. European aristocrats in the 18th century spoke French. Modern English nationalism started as a revolt against this kind of foppery in the name of John Bull, roast beef, and Old England.

Not all populist rebellions are inherently racist or fascist. Democracy, too, was a product of resistance to aristocratic rule. But it is hard to believe that Mr. Trump, or his ideologues, like Mr. Miller or Mr. Bannon, are interested in expanding democratic rights, even though they pretend to speak for the common – or as they like to say – “real” people. Mr. Bannon, for one, is proudly anti-liberal. He is said to have described himself as a Leninist who seeks to destroy the state.

Still, let us give Mr. Miller the benefit of the doubt. When he uses cosmopolitanism as a curse, he has no idea of the term’s antecedents. The history of fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist anti-Semitism is unknown to him. The past does not really exist. He is simply an ignorant critic of what he sees as the liberal establishment. But ignorance can be as dangerous as malice, especially when it is backed by great power.

Source: Cosmopolitanism, Trump and ignorance as a weapon – The Globe and Mail

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The threat of the demagogues: Ian Buruma

2016/06/14 Leave a comment

Good piece on the threat to democracy and society:

It is clear that today’s demagogues don’t much care about what they derisively call “political correctness.” It is less clear whether they have enough historical sense to know that they are poking a monster that post-Second World War generations hoped was dead but that we now know only lay dormant, until obliviousness to the past could enable it to be reawakened.

This is not to say that everything the populists say is untrue. Hitler, too, was right to grasp that mass unemployment was a problem in Germany. Many of the agitators’ bugbears are indeed worthy of criticism: the European Union’s opacity, the duplicitousness and greed of Wall Street bankers, the reluctance to tackle problems caused by mass immigration, the lack of concern for those hurt by economic globalization.

These are all problems that mainstream political parties have been unwilling or unable to solve. But when today’s populists start blaming “the elites” (whoever they may be) and unpopular ethnic or religious minorities for these difficulties, they sound uncomfortably close to the enemies of liberal democracy in the 1930s.

The true mark of the illiberal demagogue is talk of “betrayal” – the cosmopolitan elites have stabbed “us” in the back; we are facing an abyss; our culture is being undermined by aliens; our country can become great again once we eliminate the traitors, shut down their voices in the media, and unite the “silent majority” to revive the healthy national organism. Politicians, and their boosters, who express themselves in this manner may not be fascists, but they certainly talk like them.

The fascists and Nazis of the 1930s did not come from nowhere. Their ideas were hardly original. For many years, intellectuals, activists, journalists and clerics had articulated hateful ideas that laid the groundwork for Mussolini, Hitler and their imitators in other countries. Some were Catholic reactionaries who detested secularism and individual rights. Some were obsessed with the supposed global domination of Jews. Some were romantics in search of an essential racial or national spirit.

Most modern demagogues may be only vaguely aware of these precedents, if they know of them at all. In Central European countries such as Hungary, or indeed in France, they may actually understand the links quite well, and some of today’s far-right politicians are not shy about being openly anti-Semitic. In most West European countries, however, such agitators use their professed admiration for Israel as a kind of alibi and direct their racism at Muslims.

Words and ideas have consequences. Today’s populist leaders should not yet be compared to murderous dictators of the fairly recent past. But by exploiting the same popular sentiments, they are contributing to a poisonous climate, which could bring political violence into the mainstream once again.

Source: The threat of the demagogues – The Globe and Mail

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The taint of anti-Semitism from Europe’s left: Ian Buruma

2016/05/05 Leave a comment

Good piece by Buruma:

When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the Soviet Union and leftists in general were sympathetic. For several decades, socialists of Russian and Polish extraction dominated Israeli politics. Zionism was not yet regarded as a noxious form of racism, along with apartheid in South Africa. Things began to change in the early 1970s, after the occupation of the West Bank and other Arab territories. Two intifadas later, the Israeli left finally lost its grip, and the right took over.

Israel became increasingly associated with the very things leftists had always opposed: colonialism, oppression of a minority, militarism and chauvinism. For some people, it was perhaps a relief that they could hate Jews again, this time under the guise of high-minded principles.

At the same time, and for much the same reasons, Israel became popular on the right. People who might have been fervent anti-Semites not so long ago are now great champions of Israel. They applaud the Israeli government’s tough line with the Palestinians. Israel, in a common right-wing view, is a bastion of “Judeo-

Christian civilization” in the “war against Islam.”

It is remarkable how often the old anti-Semitic tropes turn up in the rhetoric of these cheerleaders for Israel. But this time it is Muslims, not Jews, who are the target. Muslims in the West, we are repeatedly told, can never be loyal citizens. They always stick to their own kind. They will lie to people outside their faith. They are naturally treacherous, bent on world domination. Their religion is incompatible with Western values. And so forth.

The genuine threats coming from a violent revolutionary movement within the Islamic world can make such assertions seem plausible. But, in most cases, they should be recognized for what they are: tired old prejudices meant to exclude an unpopular minority from mainstream society. Islamist violence only helps to boost the politics of hatred and fear. Many Western warriors in the so-called war against Islam are nothing but modern-day anti-Dreyfusards.

None of this excuses the vile language of Mr. Livingstone and others like him. Left-wing anti-Semitism is as toxic as the right-wing variety. But the role of Israel in Western political debate shows how prejudices can shift from one group to another, while the underlying sentiments remain exactly the same.

Source: The taint of anti-Semitism from Europe’s left – The Globe and Mail

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Are we watching the death throes of American (and in other countries) liberal democracy? – Ian Buruma

2016/02/12 Leave a comment

Buruma on the disturbing trends in the US and elsewhere:

What is steadily falling away is not democracy, but the restraints that de Tocqueville thought were essential to make liberal politics work. More and more, populist leaders regard their election by the majority of voters as a licence to crush all political and cultural dissent.

De Tocqueville’s nightmare is not yet the reality in the United States, but it is close to what we see in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and perhaps Poland. Even Israel, which, despite its many obvious problems, has always had a robust democracy, is moving in this direction, with government ministers demanding proof of “state loyalty” from writers, artists and journalists.

It is hard to see how traditional elites are going to regain any authority. And yet I think de Tocqueville was right. Without editors, there can be no serious journalism. Without parties led by experienced politicians, the borders between show business and politics will disappear. Without limits placed on the appetites and prejudices of the majority, intolerance will rule.

This is not a question of nostalgia or snobbery. Nor is it a plea to trust anyone with a plausible air of authority. Anger at the elites is not always unjust. Globalization, immigration and cosmopolitanism have served the interests of a highly educated minority, but sometimes at the expense of less privileged people.

And yet, the problem identified by de Tocqueville in the 1830s is more relevant now than ever. Liberal democracy cannot be reduced to a popularity contest. Constraints on majority rule are necessary to protect the rights of minorities, be they ethnic, religious or intellectual. When that protection disappears, we will all end up losing the freedoms that democracy was supposed to defend.

Source: Are we watching the death throes of American liberal democracy? – The Globe and Mail

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How fear became the politician’s weapon of choice

2015/12/08 Leave a comment

Ian Buruma on the politics of fear:

As long as France’s state of emergency lasts, police may arrest people without warrants, break down the doors of private residences in the middle of the night, take over restaurants and other public places with armed force, and generally behave like agents in a police state. Most French citizens are now so frightened of Islamist attacks that such measures are widely supported. But they are almost certainly counterproductive.

A national leader can declare war on a state, not on a network of revolutionaries. Islamic State, despite its claims, is not a state, and Mr. Hollande should not treat it as one. Besides, even if bombing IS strongholds in Iraq or Syria makes military sense, it won’t break the spell of Islamist revolution for frustrated, bored and marginalized young people in French slums.

On the contrary: The canny leaders of IS also rely on an apocalyptic “us or them” view of the world. Most Muslims are not violent revolutionaries who condone, let alone admire, mass violence. IS seeks to broaden its support, especially among young Muslims, by convincing them that true Muslims are in an existential war with the West – that the infidels are their mortal enemies. For them no less than for Mr. Trump, fear is the most powerful weapon.

So the more a Western government allows its policemen to humiliate and bully Muslims in the name of security, the more IS is likely to win European recruits. The only way to combat revolutionary Islamist violence is to gain the trust of law-abiding Muslims in the West. This will not be easy, but arbitrary arrests are surely the wrong way to go about it.

Likewise, when it comes to civil wars in the Middle East, Western restraint is usually a better strategy than hasty military intervention driven by domestic fear. Republican candidates in the United States are already using the recent murder spree in Paris to blame President Barack Obama, and by extension any future Democratic candidate, for being weak. Mr. Trump has promised to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”

This bellicosity has had the effect of pushing Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, into distancing herself from Mr. Obama. As with Mr. Hollande, she has to assuage public fear by talking tough and promising more military action.

Mr. Obama has consistently resisted the temptation to unleash more wars. His policies have sometimes been inconsistent and irresolute. But in his refusal to give in to panic and act rashly, he has been far braver than all the big talkers who accuse him of being a wimp.

Source: How fear became the politician’s weapon of choice – The Globe and Mail

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What drives anti-immigrant sentiment? – Ian Buruma

2015/01/06 Leave a comment

Ian Buruma on the drivers on anti-immigrant sentiment and the increased divide between educated metropolitan elites and the “less sophisticated, less flexible and, in every sense, less connected provincials.”

Canada does not figure in his commentary, perhaps because we have managed these tensions – which we have – better than most:

Populist rabble-rousers like to stir up such resentments by ranting about foreigners who work for a pittance or not at all. But it is the relative success of ethnic minorities and immigrants that is more upsetting to indigenous populations.

This explains the popular hostility toward Mr. Obama. Americans know that, before too long, whites will be just another minority, and people of colour will increasingly be in positions of power. At this point, all that Tea Partiers and others like them can do is declare, “We want our country back!”

Of course, this is an impossible demand. Short of unleashing massive and bloody ethnic cleansing – Bosnia, on a continental scale – Americans and others have no choice but to get used to living in increasingly diverse societies.

Likewise, economic globalization cannot be undone. But regulation can and should be improved. After all, some things are still worth protecting. There are good reasons not to leave culture, education, lifestyles or jobs completely exposed to the creative destruction of market forces.

What drives anti-immigrant sentiment? – The Globe and Mail.

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