On Friday 14th of February Lebanon commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of the brutal assassination of former prime minister, Rafic Hariri. On the eve of the commemoration, the current prime minister, Hassan Diab, lamented how, in Hariri’s absence, ‘Lebanon lacks the regional and international presence to save us from crisis.’
Diab was brought in to lead a new government following mass demonstrations that began in October of last year. He has been tasked, no less, with pulling Lebanon back from the brink of economic collapse.
Yet the formation of a new government has done little to assuage public anger. Events in the capital, Beirut on Tuesday 11th of February made this abundantly clear.
By mid-morning downtown the Lebanese capital was bracing itself as parliamentary deputies gathered for a vote of confidence on the newly-formed government. Protesters were also assembling at various locations around the city in an attempt to disrupt the vote.
Waving flags, many pre-empting what was to come with helmets and gas-masks, the protesters were articulating a widely-held view that, regardless of what happens in parliament, the new government is a sham, cooked up by the same rotten elite that protesters have been demonstrating against for months.
Twitter and other social media were aflame, with digitally savvy individuals using hash-tags ‘like no confidence!’ ‘Tuesday Rage!’ ‘Lebanon Rises!’, to thread together the assembled masses, while urging everyone ‘to meet us on the streets’, as videos showed busloads of citizens converging on the capital.
Expecting trouble, security forces had erected concrete barriers the previous day, blocking off major approaches to Parliament Square. Meanwhile, protesters gathered around the barriers.
One girl sat atop a slab, waving a Lebanese flag, while a water cannon sprayed either side of her creating a rainbow effect. Others pulled down segments of the wall only to be met by further barrages from water cannons barring their way.
Deputes trying to enter parliament to take part in the confidence vote were welcomed by angry protestors.. it took hundreds of security forces & elite army forces to secure their entry #Lebanon#لبنان_ينتفضpic.twitter.com/wi3lWzDdjz
Elsewhere protesters disrupted traffic towards parliament. En route, one deputy had his car surrounded by protesters chanting ‘thief thief thief!’
Other parliamentarians had eggs thrown at their convoys, while one had stones hurled at him by a protester, smashing his car window and then striking his head, forcing him to divert to a nearby hospital for medical attention. Yet he made it to the parliament in the end, battered and bruised but there to vote.
Pro-regime Thugs
But anti-government protesters weren’t the only ones out on the streets. Groups of pro-regime thugs, sent out by their political bosses, zipped about town protecting harangued deputies and hampering the protesters.
On scooters these hired hands roamed from one flashpoint to the next, seeking confrontations with what seemed implicit approval from the security forces – themselves willing to give occasional beat downs to isolated protesters getting under their skin.
Meanwhile, as the toxic whiff of tear gas was spreading downtown, the barricaded parliament was slowly filling up. But numbers were still lacking for the quorum required to begin the two-day session.
Eventually the parliamentary Speaker, Nabih Berri – widely regarded as thug-in-chief – decided to commence proceedings, despite the small numbers, leading to allegations on the streets of constitutional trickery.
Embed from Getty Images House Leader Nabih Berri (right) pictured with Walid Joumblatt (centre) and Yasser Arafat (left) in 1982.
Either way, the session began and after nine hours, the vote was held prematurely, quashing any hopes of it being derailed. The new government won, as expected, while the protesters licked their wounds outside: three-hundred-and-fifty people having been injured over the course of the day.
Lebanese of All Stripes
The day’s events demonstrated to many people that the revolution has been sold short; as one observer put it: ‘while the Prime Minister speaks to a half empty-parliament about the importance of the right to protest, security forces were throwing tear gas and beating people up outside.’
Indeed, Tuesday the 11th was the 118th day of a revolution that began on October 17th of last year, triggered by a proposed tax on WhatsApp that inspired national outrage.
The streets have been filled with Lebanese of all stripes, saying with one voice: ‘the political class, every last one of them, must move aside, taking their corrupt, decades-long mismanagement with them, and give us our country back.’
The local and international media dared to believe that something truly special was happening in Lebanon. For the first time in living memory a unified political voice that transcended sectarian divisions seemed to be exploding into life.
During the early days there really was something special in the air. Streets were buzzing with revolutionary optimism; mass rallies crowded the streets, with a distinctly festival-like-atmosphere attracting children and families.
Sunni-dominated Tripoli, Lebanon’s largest northern city, long tarnished by a Salafist reputation, went from being perceived as Beirut’s neglected cousin, to ‘the bride of the revolution’, following memorable demonstrations. Suddenly Tripoli felt a lot closer to Beirut.
Embed from Getty Images An early demonstration in Tripoli turned into a rave that went viral across the country and reset the city’s image.
Sectarianism
Inspired by such scenes, protesters organised a human chain the length of the country. Up and down Lebanon, demonstrators stood hand-in-hand along the coastal highway. Stretching from north to south in a powerful gesture the message was clearly anti-sectarian, saying ‘We are not Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze. We are Lebanese.’
In Lebanon political representation is still based on a confessional quota system that renders governance a power-sharing puzzle between sectarian groups. Governments are patched together through tenuous coalitions predicated on back-door deal, widely seen as an impediment to addressing deep structural problems.
All the while, Lebanon has been careering towards an economic abyss. After a decade of economic stagnation, with foreign remittances drying up and Saudi money deserting a country increasingly seen as an Iranian orbit, the collapse has come into plain view.
The corrupt ineptness of the ruling elite has been called out by an enraged public, watching on in horror as the country’s potential is squandered by politicians, who hide behind the excuse of sectarian power-sharing.
In reality they have pilfered from the state coffers in order to maintain patronage networks, without regard the wider public interest. Thus protesters say: ‘Shame on them.’ Indeed, nowadays politicians are likely to be refused service in restaurants or are jeered if they enter fashionable bars.
The foreign minister’s humiliation at a Davos panel discussion stirred jubilation back home, with replays giddily shared online. A wave of hostility towards the political elite, regardless of sect, is in full swing.
Banking Crisis
The public outcry is not surprising. Spiraling national debt dwarfs national GDP, as the government digs itself deeper into a deeper whole of debt, in turn selling these off to Lebanese banks, thereby threatening ordinary people’s savings.
In October banks closed suddenly and remained shut for two weeks. People were unable to withdraw dollars from ATMs. Slowly it became apparent that the banks were running on empty, through acute shortages of U.S. dollars, the currency which is pegged to the Lebanese lira.
This led the banks to impose capital controls to prevent a run. Meanwhile the Central Bank failed to step in to regulate the situation, leaving individual banks to do so on an ad hoc basis. Then rumours (since confirmed) began to circulate that the ruling class were transferring billions abroad,[i] fuelling suspicion that the banks and politicians were in on the act.
Among ordinary people there are fears that the days of the lira being pegged to the dollar are numbered, causing deposits to plunge in value.
On a daily basis panicked customers engage in furious arguments with bank staff who refuse to release dollars, while on the black market the lira’s value is collapsing. Smashed up ATMs and banking outlets are a familiar sight, and sign of the growing anger.
Embed from Getty Images Vandalized bank fronts in Beirut and elsewhere are have become a common sight.
Ongoing Crisis
The dollar shortage has driven up prices on everyday items, and workers are being laid off; tourism has ceased to a trickle; butchers’ sales are said to be down by 50%; the young talk increasingly about emigrating; malls and high streets are empty; migrant workers crowd outside their embassies attempting to flee a country where the currency crisis makes it almost impossible to send money home.
Now economists predict that the country will sink into a pit of poverty that will bring a lost decade, where college graduates will become street sellers and refugees will go even hungrier than they already are.
So amidst these increasingly severe conditions, the tone of protest has shifted from optimism to anger. While the early success in dislodging the former government was celebrated, the protesters demand for a technocratic government without political ties has not been met. The new government tasked with enacting reforms continues to co-exist with the vested interests that appointed it.
Embed from Getty Images Renewed protests shifted in tone with more aggression from protesters and security forces.
Yet reforms are essential if the government is to unlock the financial assistance that international players like the IMF could offer. A cliff-edge is imminent with interest on a Eurobond due to be paid next month and politicians arguing about whether to cough up. This has triggered rumours that there’ll be nothing left over to pay the salaries of civil servants.
Whatever happens in the short term, it seems as if life is only going to get harder for ordinary Lebanese before there is any sign of improvement.
[i] Naharnet Newsdesk ‘Hammoud Replies to Berri: All Lebanese Banks Transferred Funds Abroad’ Naharnet February 7th, 2020, http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/268948-hammoud-replies-to-berri-all-lebanese-banks-transferred-funds-abroad
So the Phony War continues in the Democratic Primaries as Bernie takes the New Hampshire primary by a small margin over Buttigieg, while Klobuchar finished a surprise third. But this month’s column is concerned with the bigger picture, and how the apparently unstoppable Trump procession to the Presidency could be halted by a virus beyond its control.
Apparently the app used had security issues, and little or no training had been given to a largely elderly and volunteer army of caucus chairpersons (all 1,600 of them across the State). Also, internet trolls publicly posted the number used to call in results, rendering the phone lines that acted as a ‘fail-safe’ useless.
Whatever the reason, it should be clear by now that politics has got a lot dirtier. Yet Democrats cannot comprehend this simple point, as many are unable to let go of a bygone era when the game was played by vastly different rules. Had they learned so by now, they would have over-prepared, playing chess rather than horseshoe.
Open Mike
Enter Mike Bloomberg. The media declared the entire week a triumph for President Trump, who was ‘acquitted’ of impeachment; while Iowa showcased Democrat ineptitude to the delight of Republican pundits.
Although Buttigieg and Sanders shared the Iowa honors when the results were finally announced, Bloomberg was the real winner. He was in the process of hiring a staff of over two thousand the same week as the Iowa poll.
Bloomberg’s approach is simply to run the best campaign money can buy, spending more than any other Democrat candidate. Ever.
As Charlie Pierce put it in Esquire: ‘Bloomberg is not coming for the other candidates. He’s simply waiting, on the ground that he’s prepared, for them to come to him.’[ii]
Also, potentially at his disposal is an army of mayors and special interest groups he’s funded for years. No doubt he expects to be rewarded for his investments.
New York tabloid market
Left-leaning Dems are crying foul at the thought of a general election between two soon-to-be octogenarians New York billionaires. Clearly that’s the future America! But seriously here’s the rub.
Before the Internet deluge, the New York tabloid market operated like the modern-day internet, offering content to the highest bidder, with an attentive public and a small number of ‘kingmaker’ platforms fighting it out for relevance. Oh and all of this happening in a city that famously never sleeps.
Trump and Bloomberg were ahead of their time, for decades sharpening their claws in the then biggest media market in the world, long before the rest of us became online trolls.
Still, while you wouldn’t bet against Mike pulling off a shock he’s still a long shot. So far he has avoided the intense scrutiny the other candidates have been subjected to, but having spent $300 million this will change in the coming weeks.
Feel the Bern?
What about the rest of the Democratic field? Pete Buttigieg the surprise package; Bernie Sanders, the old timer shooting from the hip knowing it’s his O.K. Carrol; or the New York Times’s darlings Klobuchar and Warren?[iii]
If the results of the New Hampshire and Iowa polls are any indication, the center left is far more crowded than the lane further left occupied by Warren and Sanders. If Warren pulls out sooner rather than later because of her poor showing to date, it could spell trouble for Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Warren supporters are more ideologically in tune with Bernie supporters. Notice we haven’t even mentioned Joe Biden, another center-left candidate.
Here’s why. Biden currently lacks the mental dexterity. He also has a Ukraine problem courtesy of Trump. At the very least, it was inadvisable for Hunter Biden, the son of a Presidential candidate, to accept $50,000 a month to sit on the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company. It smells of corruption, and his poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire were a direct result of this and the tired ‘same old’ feeling surrounding his campaign.
The Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Warren campaigns call to mind the words of the ‘Father of Advertising’ David Ogilvy: ‘Remember to give people a logical reason to justify their emotional decision.’
Not many would choose Warren, Buttigieg or Klobuchar on a purely emotional basis. Warren comes across as a good-natured librarian with a tendency to lecture. Klobuchar is sensible, but without a clear edge and unpredictability factor.
Likewise Buttigieg – the McKinsey nerd – sounds too rehearsed and polished, if very sensible. He’s also unable to connect with anyone under thirty – which should scare Democrats more than any inability to connect with African-Americans. Still, the emotional pull of being the first ever openly gay presidential candidate make him attractive to some voters.
That leaves us with Sanders. Feel the Bern? The Bernie Bros are the only group currently capable of pushing back against the formidable online army that Trump has built up, deploying similar bullying tactics online. For a full outline of these sinister trends I recommend this excellent article by McKay Coppins for The Atlantic.[iv]
Yet Bernie scares a lot of middle Americans suspicious of radical socialist ideas at a time when the economy is doing relatively well. His railings against billionaires disturbs many among a middle class that have done well off the back of the recent stock market upsurge.
Still, while his path to the nomination is more obvious than the others, three weeks is a long time in politics, and things could still change significantly any time up to March 3rd – dubbed Super Tuesday – when we should have a clear picture on who will take on Trump in November.
What hasn’t changed is the prediction we made in this column in January – Trump will win the election. Unless, of course, something drastic happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLz6ydbq3D8
Coronavirus
We can’t finish this month’s column without talking about the Coronavirus.
After the initial round of panic reason set in. Then panic hit again. And currently we have a mixture. Now dare mention the economic impact and people call you insensitive. But let’s stare the reality squarely in the face.
As of writing, the Dow Jones is still near record highs, but this could change dramatically in the months ahead. Trump’s stock market rally has seen the Dow gain 48% since the inauguration, making believers out of Republicans, as the Impeachment vote demonstrated when only Mitt Romney broke ranks.
Coronavirus might be the trigger to collapse this deck of cards. How soon? Probably by April, maybe May. The virus is expected to peak around April, but by then the quarterly earnings will have been impacted.
Should most of us in the U.S. be afraid of Coronavirus? It depends. If you’re healthy and don’t work in healthcare you’ve little to worry about. Based on the limited information we can glean from the Chinese news bubble, people with an otherwise healthy immune system, who are not regularly exposed to the virus, can rest easy. Apparently it is doctors, the elderly and other vulnerable categories who are susceptible to infection.
But that won’t stop many of us from cancelling cruise ship vacations, holidays to Asia, and even overseas trips to trade fairs. It will also impact global supply chains, which rely heavily on China. All this means lost revenue, which will hit the markets once results first show up on balance sheets in April.
The length of this market downturn will ultimately decide November’s election result.
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[i] Meghan Mistry ‘Mike Bloomberg’s campaign is looking to pay influencers’, CBS News, February 7th, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-bloomberg-2020-campaign-pay-influencers/
[ii] Charlie Pierce, ‘Michael Bloomberg Is the Doomsday Money-Bomb Waiting for Every Democratic Candidate’ Esquire, February 9th, 2020, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30834790/michael-bloomberg-looms-over-new-hampshire-primary/
[iii] Untitled, ‘In a break with convention, the editorial board has chosen to endorse two separate Democratic candidates for president.’ New York Times, January 19th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/19/opinion/amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-nytimes-endorsement.html
[iv] McKay Coppins, ‘The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President’, The Atlantic, February 10th, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
Having grown up around favelas in the East Side of São Paulo I was expecting a similar scene of poverty mixed with a strong sense of community. Instead Moria has a post-war feeling, as it is for many people living there, who showed me evidence on their phones of the destruction they were escaping. It’s a tough and unfriendly place, until you meet the families.
The first smell that hits you is the smoke from wood, plastic and anything else that burns, as they cook on open fires. A blind person would think the whole place was on fire. The second smell is a strong male odour. It’s there because there are hardly any facilities for people to wash.
It’s completely dirty everywhere. The bathrooms are covered in shit. It’s even on the ground where people do business and cook food.
But life goes on. There are market stalls selling soft drinks, fruit and vegetables and clothing. I met two barbers working within their communities.
“The first smell that hits you first is the smoke from wood, plastic and anything else that burns, as they cook on open fires.” Moria Camp, Lesbos, December 2019. Fellipe Lopes.
The air pollution and dreadful hygiene cause a lot of sickness. The men also smoke a lot. Everyone is coughing all the time. I developed a chest infection myself afterwards. The Irish doctor said it came from bacteria prevalent in camps such as this.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) do have a medical facility, but the clinic is overwhelmed. They can’t accommodate everybody. Whether you get medical attention also depends on which camp you live in. If you are lucky you might get to attend a hospital in Mytilene, the capital and main town of the island of Lesbos.
At one point a lady from Syria showed me a document indicating she suffers from cancer, but she wasn’t receiving the medication she requires.
Many of the kids have skin problems. But the worst part is the mental torture of living in the camp that brings out the worst human characteristics.
At one point a guy passed five metres away from me with a machete, a massive knife, and I heard the noise of stabbing. As a photo-journalist my instinct was to go and take a shot, but as soon as I moved a friend, Mohammed, held me back, saying what must have been “don’t go” in Arabic. I understood from the strength he exerted that I shouldn’t move.
An African man had been killed. The perpetrator disappeared. This sort of thing happens every single day in a camp built for a maximum of 4,000 people, now housing more than 20,000 and growing. A friend said that over the last two weeks another two hundred tents had been erected. I looked down and saw a wave of them across the hillside.
Yet I didn’t feel unsafe. As the days went by I became more confident. I knew the friends I had been introduced to would protect me. That’s how it works in Moria.
Moria Camp, Lesbos, December 2019. Fellipe Lopes
When you enter the camp you notice the separation between nationalities. In one part there are Africans, mainly from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Congo, in another you find the dominant Afghan groups, with black and white scarfs speaking different languages. There is a small part of the camp where the Syrians live.
I grew close to the Syrian community, speaking a mixture of broken Arabic and broken English, and also using phones to translate. Most of them say the system is not working for them; that if you are a Syrian in Moria you have no chance of being relocated elsewhere in the European Union. You will be denied documents.
Many Syrians believe they are stuck there forever. I met members of one family who have been waiting for a year-and-a-half now.
In general, cases are not being resolved. There are people waiting for official refugee status, or waiting other documentation. Each case is different. But some people are being scheduled for appointments in 2021, just to start the process. Until then they are not permitted to leave the island. They have to sit and wait in the apocalypse that is Moria.
The Prison’
There are three areas in the camp. First there is the so-called ‘Friendly Campus’ run by Movement on the Ground, which has most of the better accommodation, which is not saying a lot. Throughout the camp you find structures built from any wood and plastic they find, and tents of different sizes; some are big enough to sleep twenty people, others are the kind of two-man tents you would expect to see at a music festival.
Then there is ‘the Prison’, which is the original camp. There you find the so-called ‘boxes’, which are temporary structures, some of which even have AC devices that take the chill off the freezing January temperatures. Journalists are not allowed to enter this part. A bus sits at the entrance with eight policemen bearing big guns. But where there is a will there is a way.
The Prison, Moria camp, Lesbos. Fellipe Lopes
I entered with a small camera inside my jacket pocket. People were helping me to get in and out. They knew when and where there would be no cops around and I could walk in and out.
Another part is called ‘the Jungle’, which is really a forest where people are living. I met one guy who had carved a hole in a tree and now sleeps inside the bark with a plastic sheet for shelter. A man forced to live inside a tree in the European Union in 2020.
“I met one guy who had carved a hole in a tree and now sleeps inside the bark with a plastic sheet for shelter.” Moria camp, Lesbos, December 2019. Fellipe Lopes
There is a part of the camp that has electricity, and where people can charge their phones. Most parts, however, have no access whatsoever.
They cook for themselves, improvising with things like old paint tins over open fires. The camp is next to an olive grove so there is some wood available and they burn whatever else they can find.
There are two options for food. The first is to take it directly from the camp dispensary. There you queue and receive a free meal. On Sundays you get chicken and rice; for the rest of the week it’s beans and vegetables.
But the food is awful. I couldn’t imagine eating it. So what most families do is recook it, using containers to carry it to their fires, mixing it with the spices they carry. It seems to become a bit more digestible.
Another option is available to families who receive allowances of approximately €90 per month. They can catch a bus, or take a one-hour-and-a-half journey by foot, to the island’s capital Mytilene and purchase the cheapest food they find in the supermarket, usually rice, beans or noodles.
How much any family receives seems to be a lottery. There is no apparent formula. Some families get nothing. The lucky ones are given a UNHCR MasterCard with credit on it rather than hard cash.
For water there are taps to refill plastic bottles. I drank it a few times and thankfully it didn’t make me ill. Locals don’t seem to drink the tap water.
Moria camp, Lesbos, December 2019. Fellipe Lopes
The frequency of rape
Until I came to Moria, I had never been to a place where there was no sense of hope. In the favelas people have a seriously tough life, but most of them believe that things will get better. In Moria, however, ninety percent of people I spoke to believe they will be staying there forever. They don’t see a future, believing either they will be killed, or live out their days there. Just a few families I spoke to saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
One thing I heard that made me feel really emotional was that I was bringing hope: “you are a guy from Brazil living in another country. You are an immigrant too who came here to tell our stories”.
In the camps there are loads of suicides, including kids under the age of ten.
One thing I should say is that rape is getting more frequent inside the camp. Women are of course victims, but I have heard that a number of young boys between the ages of seven and twelve have been targeted too.
One man came to me and told me his heart was breaking. He took my phone, translating from Arabic into English that his young son had been raped in the bathrooms. He said he was afraid to inform the authorities because he feared retaliation. As a result he, and others, keep their kids inside the tents.
Some of the families do manage to send their kids to school. But I didn’t hear of any teenagers attending high school. They go to cultural centres, the Hope Project and One Happy Family, where they spend an hour painting or playing football, and can take English lessons. But there is no regular schooling for that age group.
Empowerment and Love
European NGO workers say they want to empower people living in the camp. But how do you empower someone living in these conditions? The NGOS are doing what they can, but people are unfamiliar with the European concept of empowerment.
Yet around the rest of the island life goes on as normal. You would hardly even know Moria existed, with farmers working the fields, on an island that is a place of great natural beauty, and still popular with tourists.
There is some local sympathy for the refugees, but it has to be said most people are inclined to ignore them. Taxi drivers were asking why I was going there, or warned me against visiting.
On one occasion I was in a supermarket where a cashier refused to serve a Congolese man. She just told him to get out. She said he couldn’t make his purchase. She wouldn’t accept his card, so I intervened to pay for his drink and snack.
Another time a Syrian family came along with us to a restaurant. The waiter would not direct a word at them, and looked for the permission of myself and my colleague Caoimhe Butterly for what they could order.
I was lucky enough to be staying in guesthouse accommodation in Mytilene. Every night when I called a taxi to get away from the foul-smelling camp I felt a wave of guilt. Knowing how those people were living made me uncomfortable in my clean bed.
On New Year’s Eve we hung out with friends from Syria, Ghana and Ethiopia in the town. We went to a bar, where people were drinking and taking drugs.
Towards the end of the evening Haya from Syria began crying. She said: “I wished so much to be outside the camp, and now I see those people having fun and I just miss my family. I just want to be in the box. Because that is all I have left in my life. I don’t have money, I don’t have a job, I don’t have expectations. The only thing I have left is my family, and I’m here.”
That broke my heart, as I had a similar feeling after a phone call with my mother in Brazil. At the end of the day you have your family.
What holds those people together? It is love. There is no social programme. There is nothing from the U.N. and there is nothing much from the NGOs either. If you get close to them, to the families, what you find is loads of love between them, and kindness to strangers. That generosity of spirit holds us together.
‘The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy.’ J.G Ballard, Millenium[i]
The 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report points to increasing de-politicisation across the Western world. This accompanies a seemingly inexorable rising tide of ‘identitarian’ Populism, globally led by Steve Bannon. The movement channels latent anger into cynicism towards central governments and supra-national institutions such as the E.U.; just when we require solidarity to address climate chaos.
Symptomatic were Conservative Party tactics during U.K Election 2019 – under the influence of Bannon – promising nothing beyond ‘getting Brexit done’; in other words a negation of the country’s institutional ties with other states – rather than a vision for improvement. This recalls Donald Trump’s ongoing pledge to ‘DRAIN THE SWAMP’ of Washington politics.
In a climate of suspicion, roguish buffoons like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have lied and cheated their way to high office. The moral landscape has altered to a point where the truth doesn’t seem to count for much anymore; in contrast to a cosy relationship with Big Data, and plenty of campaign dosh, which is more vital than ever.
Delving deeper, these political trends are tremors from a seismic Internet Revolution radically re-shaping our societies and very brains. This new medium has proved a fruitful ground for the advancement, and enrichment, of varied corporate entities and human beings. Those benefitting include Canadian psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, arguably the first public intellectual of the Digital Age – with many of his lengthy YouTube lectures hitting numbers associated with music videos.
It is instructive that Steve Bannon targeted Peterson’s online devotees before the last Presidential election. Peterson came to prominence especially through the so-called culture wars, contributing to a ‘woke’ caricature, which really should be attributed to the liberal centre, given the emphasis leading lights such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton placed on political correctness and multiculturalism.
Peterson’s cult status brings adulation of a type associated with Pop stars, drawing huge audiences to venues across the English-speaking world. A predominantly male audience has been impressed by a refusal to pay the usual fealties to political correctness, and offered the kind of sound, fatherly advice that many seem to lack, but Peterson abuses his power by peddling climate change denial, while demeaning collective institutions, and governments.
Politicide
In 2003 Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling published a book called Politicide, which charted the destruction of the Palestinian nation as a political entity. He claimed the state of Israel was transforming Palestinians into a leaderless community struggling for an identity – as had previously been the case.[ii] Thus in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir questioned the existence of a distinctive Palestinian people, an inquiry that might soon be aired again.
Israel’s erosion of Palestinian identity has been achieved through collective impoverishment, targeted assassination of key leaders and the age-old technique of divide and conquer. Now the Palestinian voice on the international stage has been reduced to a barely audible whimper.
A similar, though less overtly violent, campaign of Politicide is being waged by Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings and other unelected political advisors across the Western world. Democracy is being corroded by sophisticated technology, including from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, mining data from social media and other online interactions to develop advertising specific to targeted groups in key marginals.
The old left that forged bonds both within countries and internationally, especially through working class solidarity is the immediate target of attack ads that are having an effect. In this respect, Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment ‘And you know, there is no society’ recalls Golda Meir’s aspersion of Palestinian identity. Lacking sufficient resources for social media campaigns, and pilloried by journalists increasingly beholden to conservative billionaires such as the Koch brothers, socialism is on the decline across Europe and beyond.
Drawing support away from the old left, so-called Populists – who really have little in common with the agrarian-radical originals of the late nineteenth century led by William Jennings Bryan – are incubating acceptance of a global corporate order, directing oppositional energies against what they characterise as a corrupt state – which of course is being hollowed out by those same corporations, through lobbying and regulatory capture.
An important component of Politicide is for growing numbers to be turned off news content altogether. Thus the Reuters Digital News Report for 2019 found an average of 32% across a large number of countries actively avoid it, up from 29% the previous year. In the U.K. that figure reached 35% in the election years of 2019, a striking 11% increase on the previous poll. Such shifts do not occur by accident. Turning people off trusted news sources increases susceptibility to fake news arriving via political ads.
The success of the Bannon formula is not measured purely in terms of increasing vote share, but also in opponents losing support through apathy and despair. The most important social media platform remains Facebook, still the dominant player by quite a margin, especially for older people. There we find the kind of attack ads long a feature of U.S. political culture targeted precisely at voters in marginal or swing constituencies or states.
Both Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings are clever political operators, they are not, however, geniuses. But the project of politicide, working distinctly to the advantage of large corporations, is the product of broader cultural currents. The first wave of the Internet Revolution is fraying old systems of thought, and recasting political discourse. The Jordan Peterson phenomenon is instructive.
The rise of the ‘Petersonites’
Notably, Steve Bannon mined the data of the followers of Jordan Peterson before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as ‘they were looking for a father figure to tell them what to do,’ according to a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.[iv] Apparently they possessed ‘the big five traits’ of easily manipulatable men: frustrated economic opportunities; an estranged father; enjoyment of word salad; not showering on a regular basis; and ranking in the top quartile for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Jordan Peterson is not, however, a political extremist – by North American standards at least. Nonetheless, his generally compelling talks – with ideas distilled in particular from the archetypes of C.S. Jung and Aristotle’s virtues – have been adopted, and glossed, by a legion of far-right digital warriors. He also represents a successful formula for the entrepreneurial pursuit of an online personality in this neo-liberal zeitgeist that has been copied more broadly.
Peterson’s fame, or notoriety, derives mainly from impressive public speaking performances and televised debates rather than through books. Indeed, his literary output is a relatively modest two publications[v] – the most recent a self-help bestseller.
Like Donald Trump, Peterson is a master of the new digital medium. While the U.S. President specialises in cutting brevity – ‘show me someone who has no ego and he is a loser’[vi] – Jordan Peterson represents the opposite pole, opting for grandiloquent expression; dazzling audiences with a flurry of references; fluently recalled using streams of synonyms ‘maxing out’ any SAT Writing and Language test. He reaches a crescendo of self-righteousness when laying waste to scruffy woke opponents.
The Digital Age
We are in the early stages of a communications revolution reconfiguring human societies, and perhaps rewiring our brains.[vii] This Digital Age is characterised by a ‘secondary orality’ conveyed through video, podcast and memes that still depends on an inheritance of books.[viii] As the pace of change accelerated with the arrival of affordable smartphones from 2010, the quality of political journalism declined in tandem.
The great U.S. reporter Seymour Hersh recently offered a withering assessment of contemporary media to the effect that ‘We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.’[ix]
It is perhaps unsurprising that abandonment of books in favour of digital ephemera should herald a cultural decline. On social media the image is king, and language, as Richard Seymour argues in the Twittering Machine, is increasingly reduced to its effects, like all manipulative communication, from marketing to military propaganda.[xi]
These developments are unravelling a profound cultural inheritance. Walter Ong contends that ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.’[xii] ‘By separating the knower from the known’, he says, ‘writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the objective world quite distinct form itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.’[xiii]
It is through textual records, passed down and renewed by each generation of scholars, that the wide-ranging dialectics required for scientific research and philosophical enquiry occur. The development of writing allowed us to determine and convey facts.
The increasing dominance of a ‘secondary orality’ of video and podcast is shifting political debate away from philosophic “articulate intropsectivity”, and also bringing celebrity veneration, as “the knower” (or quickfire know-all such as Jordan Peterson) merges with what is “known.”
Moreover, unlike public intellectuals of the recent past, who conveyed facts and ideas in books, the output of a digital-era leading light arrives in a stream of video, more challenging to parse, or counter, than the venerable medium in print form. Thus, previously agreed upon facts are more easily dismissed as we enter an era of post-truth.
‘An explosion in identity talk’
Alongside devotion to vacuous celebrity, Richard Seymour observes that over the course of the last decade, as the numbers regularly accessing Twitter and Facebook grew into billions, there has been ‘an explosion in identity talk.’[xiv]
Jordan Peterson is perhaps the intellectual apotheosis of this trend. Thus, in 2016 after igniting controversy for refusing to adopt gender-neutral pronouns, he released a series of videos justifying his positions.[xv] Soon he had emerged as a global conservative champion in the culture war, ‘destroying’ interlocutors with well-rehearsed, and often, it must be said, reasonable arguments.
Peterson railed against a woke-ish political correctness that many on the left already acknowledged had lurched into absurdity, to the exclusion of more pressing discussions of climate change, ecological collapse, spiralling inequality and unaccountable digital platforms.
Amy Chua identifies acute problems with identity politics ‘on both sides of the political spectrum,’ which she says, ‘leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.’[xvi]
Peterson has amassed a reasonable fortune in the process of emerging as both hero and villain in the febrile culture war. Knowingly or otherwise, he has served the interests of Bannon and his ilk.
Narrowing Debate
Jordan Peterson is broadly correct that the parameters of debate in Anglophone so-called liberal – or ‘woke-ish’ to use the term de jour – media such as The Guardian and TheNew York Times have narrowed. The phenomenon of no-platforming outspoken thinkers such as Germain Greer for questioning whether a transgender individual should be considered a woman is disturbing. The media’s obsession with celebrity sex scandals often amounts to little more than clickbait.
Harvey Weinstein believes he can rebuild career if cleared of charges https://t.co/CJbsye1pIR
Moreover in America, and elsewhere, a range of media from Fox News to Breitbart have picked up the slack, accommodating so-called conservative, increasingly far-right, standpoints.
Similarly, right-wing views are well represented in U.K. media by established players such as The Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express as well as newcomers like Spiked, whose founders’ journey from Marxism to the alt-right is symptomatic. The traditional viewpoint that Peterson purports to represent is far from being marginal across the Anglophone world.
A shift towards identity politics can be traced to the fissuring of the political order at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream centre-left parties in the U.S. and U.K. pivoted to the centre-right.
Thus in the U.S., Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama essentially ignored spiralling inequalities attending the rise of the digital behemoths, assuaging discontents by endeavouring to roll out state-funded medical care that has done little to break the dominance of Big Pharma and an epidemic of legal drug addiction. With identity politics centre-stage, Obama’s victory – that ‘Audacity of Hope’ – was mistakenly viewed as the harbinger of a tolerant and inclusive society.
Then stories such as the ‘birther’ controversy– an unfounded rumour that Obama had not been born in the United States which, if true, would have debarred him from the presidency – generated endless columns in the liberal media,[xvii] to the exclusion of reporting on social and environmental issues highlighting the despoliation of the Earth by large corporations.
Focus on identity politics, from race to feminism and same-sex marriage, not to mention abortion, diverted attention from the long-standing exclusion of the poor of all ‘races’, with real wages stagnating for decades,[xviii] while extraordinary wealth and privilege has been concentrated in increasingly few hands.
Donald Trump tapped into economic insecurities – offering up poor Latino immigrants as a scapegoat to blue collar workers – to win the Presidency of 2016. Hilary Clinton and her handlers persevered with identity politics, emphasising the importance of a female candidacy, and focusing on her opponent’s philandering, rather than addressing entrenched poverty and social exclusion, let alone the excesses of the military industrial complex, and lost.
In the U.K., the Labour Party also settled in the centre, or even centre-right, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010). New Labour essentially accepted Margaret Thatcher’s (1979-90) market deregulations and privatisations to the satisfaction of the newspaper barons that tend to decide elections. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ read Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after John Major’s come-from-behind victory in 1992 – a cheeky headline masking a sinister political reality.
The Sun newspaper, April 11th, 1992.
As Mark Fisher memorably put it: ‘Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of Thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, of politeness over antagonism, of middle class utility over proletarian art.’[xix]
Later David Cameron and his fellow ‘modernisers’, or ‘One Nation’ Tories, rebranded the Conservative Party in the dress code of New Labour, embracing non-economic issues such as marriage equality and increasing the visibility of female and ethnic minority representatives, while pursuing Thatcherite, austerity policies in the background.
This approach yielded electoral success in 2010 and 2015, before Brexit derailed the formula. Similar to Trump’s victory over Hilary, Brexit bubbled up, dialectically, inside the cauldron of identity politics first stirred by the centre-right.
It is disingenuous therefore for Jordan Peterson to bemoan the excesses of identity politics given it was the centre-right he claims to support that has promoted ‘woke-ish’ causes. Grandstanding on controversies over transgender identity simply gives oxygen to debates that are of little consequence, at least by comparison with fundamental issues of human welfare and climate chaos.
Logos
As a psychologist with extensive clinical experience Jordan Peterson is acutely attuned to what makes a primarily male target audience tick. Skillful rhetoric taps into the concerns of essentially Anglophone or Nordic males, perturbed by suggestions they should be ashamed of privileged upbringings, another unhelpful idea that entered debates around identity politics.
Importantly, Peterson also gave intellectual credibility to belief in God after decades of sustained attacks from evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, and, following Jung, identifies the role of spirituality in recovery from mental illness. His appeal to mythology also presented novel insights to an audience jaded by a dominant discourse of scientific materialism.
More problematically, however, Peterson also styles himself a philosopher and scientist. But as James Hamblin pointed out in The Atlantic what Peterson is really selling is a sense of order and control. Thus, while science is about settling questions and determining facts, self-help is concerned with supplying immediate answers to the question of how to live in the world. Hence, a recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules as ‘an antidote to chaos.’[xx]
A crucial concept that Peterson has pronounced on is ‘logos’, which the Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice Which Rationality describes as follows:
To engage in intellectual enquiry is then not simply to advance theses and to give one’s rational allegiance to those theses which so far withstand rational refutation; it is to understand the movement form thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.
Essentially, logos, in contrast to moral relativism, permits us to pronounce on moral ‘truths.’ In the wrong hands, however, it leads to moral absolutism, and is a sinister recipe for totalitarianism of a sort the Catholic Church institutionalised through the idea of a Pope speaking ex cathedra.
In our time, where celebrity veneration increasingly equates the knower with the known, real danger lurks in vesting any individual with a singular authority. We should instead assess the merit of their ideas on a case-by-case basis.
Jordan Peterson makes compelling arguments regarding the excesses of political correctness, and even in assessing virtues necessary for a good life, but he should certainly not be considered omniscient, or even competent, in fields beyond his ken.
The ‘Lion Diet’
Notably, Peterson has revealed himself as a climate change denier having argued before the Cambridge Union that views on climate change are inseparable from political orientations,[xxi] an assumption no doubt resting easily with a conservative fanbase, or market. It would certainly have pleased Steve Bannon.
Here we can see the contradiction that lies at the heart of Peterson between the scientist and the charmer, with the latter winning out. One may speculate as to why he holds these views that are at variance with scientific orthodoxy. Perhaps adherence to a ‘carnivore diet’ led to the distortion and departure from science, and logos.[xxii]
The edifice of Peterson’s ideas starts to crumble when we examine the ‘Lion Diet’ he has adopted on the advice of his daughter Michaela. James Hamblin recalls how:
On the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.
Bannon
Trump’s victory and the Brexit Referendum are products of a profound, and arguably justifiable, disillusionment with the political status quo. Washington and Brussels are both seen as corrupt centres of power. Many of the arguments against these institutions are valid, but ignore the essential functions federal and supranational institutions still perform, with the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in the case of Brexit.
Of more importance to Populist success, however, has been the growing sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, derived from identity politics. Mistakenly characterised as ethnic pride, it diminishes solidarity between human beings. Thus we enter the third decade of the millennium increasingly lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive and dependent, to quote Erich Fromm.
The Internet Revolution has brought opportunities for a few, particularly the first corporations to optimise social media, and aggressively pursue audience share through acquisition of kindred platforms in Facebook’s case. It has also allowed human beings of varied intelligences to thrive, from Donald Trump to Jordan Peterson, and more encouragingly, Greta Thunberg.
Peterson is the reigning conservative intellectual champion, who has used an undeniable talent to deflect attention from the real challenges confronted by humanity. His strawman of the left is really a creation of the liberal centre. Peterson may prove to be a dangerous guru whose eccentric tastes have brought climate denial.
The intellectual decay associated with Peterson provides the soil wherein Bannon’s seedlings germinate. Peterson informs his legions of fans to stand up straight and ‘own’ their prejudices (whether against transgender individuals or supranational institutions), while Bannon’s software prowls online preferences for signs of alienation.
We are only slowly coming to terms with a Digital Age reshaping our reality. The rise of a “secondary orality” is fraying our allegiance to the older print medium of books that acted as a conduit for facts. Video and podcast are easily accessed but content is not easily parsed. Moreover, as we retreat into a solitary cyberspace the view of the world is often jaundiced, and Bannon wins.
Feature Image by Gage Skidmore/wikicommons: Jordan Peterson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Hyatt Regency DFW Hotel in Dallas, Texas.
[i] J. G. Ballard, Millennium People, Fourth Estate, London, 2003, p.109.
[ii] Deaglán de Bréadún, ‘Contemplating Politicide’, Irish Times, August 9th, 2003, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/contemplating-politicide-1.369096
[iii] Dominic Cummings, ‘‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…’ Blog Post, January 2nd, 2020, https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
[iv] Andrew Hall, ‘Steve Bannon Targeted Jordan Peterson’s Followers Because They Were ‘Easy To Manipulate’’, Laughing in Disbelief, November 4th, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2019/11/steve-bannon-targeted-jordan-petersons-followers-because-they-were-easy-to-manipulate/
[v]Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, Abingdon, 1999 and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Penguin Random House, New York, 2018. Peterson has also authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers.
[vii] Hilary Bruek, ‘This is what your smartphone is doing to your brain — and it isn’t good’, March 1st, 2019, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-smartphone-is-doing-to-your-brain-and-it-isnt-good-2018-3?r=US&IR=T
[viii] Walter Ong, ‘Orality and Literacy – The Technologisation of the Word METHVE and co. London, 10982 p.2
[ix] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.3.
[x] Untitled, ‘Leisure Reading in the U.S. is at an all time low’, Washington Post, June 29th, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/
[xi] Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, Indigo, London, 2019, p.118
[xv] Jessica Murphy, ‘Toronto professor Jordan Peterson takes on gender-neutral pronouns’, BBC News, November 4th, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695
[xvi] Amy Chua, ‘How America’s identity politics went from inclusion to division’, The Guardian, March 1st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division
[xvii] Michael Calderone, ‘Fox News Gives Donald Trump A Pass On Birther Crusade It Helped Fuel’, Huffington Post, August 23rd, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-donald-trump-birtherism_n_57e54a06e4b08d73b830d54e
[xviii] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, August 7th, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
[xix] Mark Fisher, K-Punk – The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), Shepperton, London, 2018, p.61
[xx] James Hamblin, ‘The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet, The Atlantic, August 28th, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peterson-family-meat-cleanse/567613/
[xxi] Jordan Peterson at the Cambridge Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY
[xxii] Adam Gabbatt, ‘My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water’, The Guardian, September 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-diet-jordan-peterson-beef
Five predictions for 2020: The Trump Card, an analysis of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, CES 2020, implications of 5G rollout and a Republican climate change pivot.
The Trump Card
For all the talk of a fading U.S. Superpower since President Trump came to office, there is one statistic firmly in his favor. The U.S. remains the world’s most powerful global economy in absolute terms, and home to the largest stock market.
In truth, economic indicators have rarely looked better. Corporate taxes have been cut and red tape slashed. As a result, the stock market has surged to an all-time high[i] and unemployment is hovering at levels last seen in 1969.[ii] Sure there is still serious inequality, and poverty, but at least there are employment opportunities for those willing to work.
The big question for 2020, then, is whether the bull market continues. As ever, we’re feeling Bullish, but not as much about the political ramifications.
Whatever the latest polls are saying in the wake of the Impeachment, when the economy is in this state, it’s hard to see an incumbent President losing an election.
Over the course of 2020 we anticipate billions of dollars being spent on influencing the American electorate which way to vote. All of this will be keenly watched by a global audience, who are aware that where the U.S. travels, others follow.
The outcome has a sense of inevitability, hinging as it does on the health of the stock market. As Bill Clinton, another President who faced Impeachment, famously said: ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’, and this still holds true. Barring a dramatic stock market crash, or a natural disaster, Trump is going to be re-elected.
Patriot Act
In the event of the stock market crashing, Bull Moose predicts Trump will wrap himself tightly in the star-spangled banner, much in the way his one-time mentor Roy Cohn did whenever he faced trouble.
The big question is whether appealing to patriotism will be enough to save him. After all, this approach can be replicated by the Democratic opposition, even if Republicans have owned the story in recent times.
Enter another iron law of U.S. politics: whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
‘whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
Much in the same way as other ‘strongman’ leaders have done – Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin and Kim-Jong Un spring to mind – Trump is likely to develop a rallying cry, awakening fears of an external threat beyond anything the Democrats are serving up to him – just like the Bush administration used the War on Terror to galvanise its base.
He’s sure to deploy the usual rhetoric about the dangers of socialism and the ‘woke’ left, epitomized by ‘The Squad’, a group of four Congresswomen (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan), all from so-called ‘minority’ backgrounds. But against a more centrist Democrat candidate, such as Joe Biden, this might not prove to be enough. Trump needs a scarier prospect, an enemy to make mainstream Democrats quake.
Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez
The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd was aimed at a domestic audience as much the Iranian regime. Much remains to be said, but henceforth every decision taken by this President should be viewed in the context of a single-minded preoccupation: to win re-election for another term.
Reuters Report
Hot off the press, The Reuters Institute Digital News Report[iii] makes for interesting reading about the state of news journalism in the world. Perhaps the most important takeaway is this:
There is no sign that the majority of people are about to pay for online news, although many recognise that information on the internet is often overwhelming and confusing. Younger audiences in particular don’t want to give up instant, frictionless (and ideally free) access to a range of diverse voices and opinions. They don’t want to go back to how the media used to be.
The global media landscape has changed forever. There is no going back.
Specific to the United States, the report reflects our view that ‘audiences remain deeply polarised, much more so than most other countries.’ This reflects what we said back in July: ‘Among the least discussed, but perhaps most important influence of the Digital Age is our tendency to live in bubbles. We no longer have to be rich to live in the equivalent of gated communities.’ A near total absence of communication between the two sides is a clear and present danger to democracy itself.
It should also be noted that many media organisations are still struggling hugely in the digital era, despite the rosy economic picture overall. Nonetheless, a few leading companies continue to do well, in effect consolidating their market dominance – think Washington Post, New York Times & Fox News.
The report points to jobs cuts affecting a variety of lesser publications, from the venerable Cleveland Plain-Dealer to digital-platform First Look Media. Notably, in January 2019, BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its worldwide workforce (a total of 220 positions). That very week Verizon Media Group, which owns HuffPost, announced a 7% reduction across its media properties, totalling about 800 positions. Gannett, the leading U.S. news publisher, also announced layoffs at local newspapers across the country.
The Report says this is ‘stoking continued concerns about the future of local news,’ although perhaps more reassuringly viewership on local television news has remained steady.
Podcasts are bucking the downward trend, however, with the U.S. leading the world in listenership, including daily news-focused offerings. The New York Times’ ‘The Daily’ began broadcasting in 2017 and now averages 1.75 million daily downloads. It is joined by the Washington Post’s ‘Post Reports’, Vox’s ‘Today Explained’, Slate’s ‘What Next’, ABC News’ ‘Start Here’, among others. Another notable development is VICE News partnering with Spotify to produce the bilingual podcast series ‘Chapo.’
While these may seem like the usual suspects, a host of small players are also succeeding in this space. This trend is likely to continue in 2020, increasing the depth and breadth of coverage around the world and inviting people to step outside their news media bubbles. This bodes well for micro-operators, such as the Joe Rogan podcast and our own Cassandra Voices, that offer fresh angles.
CES 2020
January is the time of year that for the great and the good to gather in Vegas for CES 2020 and discover the latest news and hands-on reviews from the world’s biggest tech show.[iv] Well over 200,000 people attended this year’s event, providing a useful bellwether on where the digital economy is headed in the years to come.
Amid heightened concerns about infringements on personal data, the headline panel featured representatives from Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, to discuss privacy.
Alarm bells should be ringing that measures are being taken by the conglomerates themselves, rather than restraints being imposed on them by democratically elected representatives. While most Americans are interested in protecting their privacy, an unspoken consensus seems to have developed, where convenience is the trade-off for the loss of personal data. The question is how long the truce will last, before consumers start to object to being told what they desire.
Bull Moose had some cause for concern himself over the holidays after being surprised to receive a data usage warning from his latest model Galaxy smartphone – unusually all 64GB of storage had been used up. On top of all that, the photo and video file cache was empty.
Facing a choice between asking his young nephew to figure out how to delete the files, Bull Moose plugged the phone into his computer to explore what was happening. Lo and behold, he came across a cache of external sites that had been collecting data on the phone’s activities – involving all manner of companies and apps.
Collectively, these were using 32GB of storage, and after deleting these nothing was lost in terms of functionality. Presumably this data was there for companies to access relevant information at their time of choosing.
Let’s be clear, the primary reason data is collected is to allow companies to profile you in order to sell you goods and services, which they believe you will want.
On the surface, a limited amount of this is ok – advertising is often a bit of a shot in the dark after all – and people are ultimately free to make up their own minds. It’s just about fine provided there is government oversight to prevent identity theft or malicious use of data. The problem is there isn’t any.
It’s only really the relatively toothless and tedious GDPR, enacted by the E.U. in 2018, and California’s new Consumer Privacy Act[v] that are attempting to curb the data free-for-all.
The Rise of 5G
Enter 5G technology, which is likely to alter the way our societies interact with technology. 5G-enabled technologies and networks are characterized by delivery of ultra-high-speed bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high reliability of service. It is believed this will lead to connection speeds up to one hundred times faster than we are used to. But it will also generate greater possibilities for tracking and data collection.
CES 2020, then, will be an opportunity for tech makers to demonstrate that 5G will be an actual thing this year, and they’re not going to hold back. Some of these announcements will be around specific devices, like Dell’s 5G-ready Latitude laptop. Others will be around chipsets: MediaTek, for example, plans to roll out a premium 5G chipset for phones at CES, and Qualcomm will likely expound upon the announcements it made at its annual Hawaii summit back in December. Most importantly, expect infrastructure updates, as the US carriers continue to expand their 5G networks and show off how the fifth-generation of wireless will transform healthcare, “smart” cities, and autonomous vehicles.[vi]
While most consumers view 5G much like the arrival of 3G or 4G, i.e. as just another smartphone upgrade, in fact it will have a transformative impact on the technology we use ever more in our daily lives.
Besides privacy questions and public health issues (5G requires a great number and more integrated cell-phone towers), there are also concern around China’s, and specifically Huawei’s, lead in this new technology. As Linsday Gorman in the Atlantic puts it:
Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, from European economics ministers to President Donald Trump, have viewed the 5G dispute first as a trade issue … the West has ample reason for caution about Chinese 5G suppliers. For one, the recent Chinese National Intelligence Law requires these companies to comply with Communist Party demands to turn over data or otherwise engage in snooping or network-disruption activities.
… recent revelations about how China’s ruling party exploits the full panoply of personal information it has amassed about its citizens—facial-recognition images, mandatory DNA samples, 24-hour GPS coordinates, and search-history and online-activity tracking, as well as plain old eavesdropping—to quash religious freedom and basic rights should give major pause to Western governments and wireless carriers alike.[vii]
Taken together – trade, security, changing interaction with technology, tracking and personal health – the issues that came to the fore around 5G in 2019 seem likely to gain traction.
Five Predictions for 2020
The stock market run will finally come to an end, forcing President Trump to play his remaining card. Military involvement in the Middle East will escalate as the President wraps himself in the flag to counter ‘unpatriotic’ Dems.
News fatigue and mistrust will reach all-time highs. On the positive side, however, the demand for reliable information and fresh content will see people exploring beyond their news bubbles.
Trump will be re-elected. Each one of the four realistic Democratic Presidential candidates, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg has weaknesses that will be mercilessly exploited.
The roll out of 5G will bring renewed scrutiny of Big Tech, with fears over data intrusion becoming a political issue.
Global warming will continue to hog the headlines as fires and other disasters occur around the world. Here we may see a Republican pivot, with denials giving way to acknowledgement and the identification of opportunities, just as Putin’s Russia is looking ‘to use the advantages’ brought by climate change.[viii] Notably, Trump has recently acknowledged that climate change is no hoax.[ix] Watch this space.
Featured Image: Tampa, Florida, USA 24th Oct, 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hugs an American flag as he takes the stage to speak at a campaign rally at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa, Florida, the third of five cities Trump is visiting during a two-day campaign swing through Florida. (Paul Hennessy/Alamy)
If you appreciated this argument please do us a favour and share it. Also, feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts on what you think are the big issues that will affect the U.S. in 2020 to bullmoose@cassandravoices.com.
[i] Yun, Li, ‘Here’s what happened to the stock market on Tuesday,’ CNBC, December 24th, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/what-happened-to-stock-market-tuesday-new-all-time-high-for-nasdaq.html
[ii] Untitled, ‘U.S. Unemployment fell to 3.6%, lowest since 1969,’ Washington Post, May 3rd, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/03/us-economy-added-jobs-april-unemployment-fell-percent-lowest-since/
[iii] Reuters Institute, ‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019,‘ Oxford University, December, 2019, http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/
[v] Cohen Coberly, ‘California’s Consumer Privacy Act has taken effect, bringing GDPR-like data protections to the US,’ Techspot, January 2nd, 2020, https://www.techspot.com/news/83385-california-consumer-privacy-act-has-taken-effect-bringing.html
[vi] Untitled, ‘The 8 Things We Expect to See at CES 2020,’ Wired, January 4th, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/ces-2020-preview/
[vii] Linsday Graham, ‘5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge,’ The Atlantic, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/5g-where-china-and-west-finally-diverge/604309/
[viii] Agence-France Press, ‘Russia announces plan to ‘use the advantages’ of climate change’, The Guardian, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/05/russia-announces-plan-to-use-the-advantages-of-climate-change
[ix] Rachel Frazin, ‘Trump says ‘nothing’s a hoax’ about climate change,’ The Hill, January 9th, 2020, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/477548-trump-says-nothings-a-hoax-about-climate-change
Long Term Patterns: the U.K. Prefers Oxford University-Educated Conservative Prime Ministers.
Only Winston Churchill, and John Major among election-winning Prime Ministers since World War II did not pass through ‘the city of the dreaming spires’ during their formative educational years (neither University of Edinburgh-educated Gordon Brown nor Jim Callaghan, who could not afford a university education, won an election to become Prime Minister).
A former President of the Oxford Union, Boris Johnson (Baliol College, 1987), joins a list that includes Theresa May (St Hugh’s, 1974), David Cameron (Brasenose College, 1988) Anthony Eden (Christchurch College, 1922), Harold MacMillan (Balliol College, 1914) Edward Heath (Balliol College, 1939), and Margaret Thatcher (Somerville College, 1947), as well as Labour PMs Tony Blair (St John’s, 1974), Harold Wilson (Jesus College, 1937) and Clement Atlee (University College, 1904).
Apart from political points of difference, the well documented hostility exhibited towards Jeremy Corbyn, across the media spectrum, since he was first elected party leader[i] may be attributed to bias (unconscious or otherwise) against an individual perhaps deemed to lack the necessary polish – or debating skills – conferred by the elite institution.
Moreover, it is clear that Conservatism, an admittedly amorphous and pragmatic body of ideas, fluctuating historically between pro- and anti-European Community positions, represents the mainstream of British politics, with the Party holding power for forty-four of the seventy-four years since the end World War II (or 60% of that time); rising to twenty-seven out of the last forty years (or 68% of the time since 1979).
Shares of the vote in general elections since 1832 received by Conservatives (blue), Liberals/Liberal Democrats (orange) and others (grey).
The Conservative formula has been based inter alia on a partisan press, Atlanticist foreign policy involving periodic military commitment, increasing Euroscepticism since Margaret Thatcher, free trade, low taxation, privatisation of government services, and emphasis on financial services in the south-east of the country as opposed to manufacturing industry in the north and west (apart from an arms industry that earned £14 billion in export revenues in 2018[ii]). Moreover, particularly under Tony Blair, New Labour (1997-2010) broadly embraced Conservative policies.
Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist politics thus represented an usual anomaly in U.K. politics – a genuine threat to the Conservative consensus on how to govern Britain, through a grassroots movement, albeit focused in the south of the country. The scale of the threat is demonstrated by Corbyn’s ability to attract almost as many votes to the Labour Party in the General Election of 2017 (c. 12.9 million) as Tony Blair did in his 1997 landslide victory (c. 13.5m).
The disturbing character of the campaign to defeat the Labour Party under Corbyn in 2019 has exposed the limits of democracy in the United Kingdom, and bears the fingerprints of Steve Bannon’s tactic of unsettling opponents by ‘deliberately crossing the line, defying normal courtesies, disrupting debate by scorning its conventions.’
The ‘Bannonisation’ of the Conservative Party: my @tortoise piece on the profound change triggered by Boris Johnson’s leadership – and the battle ahead for the party’s soul #CPC19https://t.co/VhIiRtTAvl
The Labour Party Bucks European Social Democratic Decline (to an extent).
Much has been made of the commonalities between Trump’s election and the Brexit referendum, but as the Polish writer Stefan Bielik observed ‘With its lurch to the right, Britain is no longer special in Europe.’[iii]
The relative decline in the fortunes in the British Labour Party can be placed in a broader European context, wherein a traditional ‘working class’ no longer support mainstream social democratic parties. In many cases this ‘blue collar’ constituency has shifted to Populist nationalist (or Nativist) parties, including Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) in France, Lega in Italy, and Alternative für Deutschland in Germany – although in many cases these parties adopt causes traditionally associated with the left.
Similarly, during the Brexit Referendum the Leave side made increased funding for the NHS a central plank of its campaign. The crucial distinction with socialism is that government services are envisioned as being restricted to the native population.
Brexit Bus Pledge, 2016.
Johnson’s proposal to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland also fits with the Populist, Bannonite formula. Post-Truth politics permit imaginative policies that barely consider logistical challenges or advantages, such as a wall the length of the U.S.-Mexican border, and as with Trump’s main policy proposal going into the last Presidential election, someone else would pay for it, in that case the Mexican government; whereas the EU is set to foot the bill for the bridge.
In the U.K. election of 2019, the Labour Party secured a 32% share of the electorate (or 10.2 million votes), which represented a significant decline on the 40% (12.9 million) received in 2017. That proportion, however, compares favourably with the fortunes of other mainstream European left-wing parties, especially when the success of Scottish and other national or regional parties is taken into account.
Among other large European countries, only in Spain did left-wing parties (Socialist Party and Podemos) secure a greater combined share of the vote than Labour in the U.K.. The steep decline of the German Social Democrats from 40% of the national share in 1998 to just 20% in 2017 might serve as a warning to those complacent enough to assume that Labour cannot sink any further.
U.K. figures are skewed by a first-past-the-post electoral system that leads to tactical voting, and seriously diminishes opportunities for smaller parties. Nevertheless, at least by comparison with other European socialist parties, the U.K. Labour Party has emerged from Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure in relative good health, crucially, having retained its position as the second major party, it lives to fight another day.
The U.K. election in 2019 witnessed another poor performance from the Labour Party in Scotland. This decline stems from the 2015 election under Ed Milliband’s leadership, when the Party lost all but one of its seats. This election emphasises that Scotland is a political entity increasingly at odds with the rest of the United Kingdom, in which the Scottish Nationalist Party (S.N.P.) won forty-eight out of fifty-nine seats (with 45% of the vote); as in Northern Ireland, constitutional questions, including membership of the European Union and the United Kingdom are now deciding factors for the electorate.
In contrast, in Blair’s landslide victory, the Labour Party won fifty-six out of seventy-two seats there. Thus, the bald statement that this was Labour’s worst result since 1935 fails to take the altered politics of Scotland into account.
Vitally, Labour under Corbyn fought off the Liberal Democrat attempt to assume the mantle of challenger to the Conservative Pary, and potential extinction in an unforgiving first-past-post-system. An early surge in Lib-Dem support saw them surpass Labour (23% v. 21%) in at least one poll prior to the election at the end of September.[iv] The party had become a refuge for both disaffected Labour politicians (including Chuka Umunna and Alastair Campbell), and claimed support from Conservative grandees such as John Major and Michael Heseltine.
In the election itself, however, Liberal-Democrat support fell away to just under 12% of the total – an improvement on 2017 when the party won just 8% of the total – but a massive disappointment nonetheless considering their high hopes of becoming the main party of opposition, especially through favourable coverage in the pro-Remain The Guardian.
It might have been expected that in an election in which the Conservative Party put Brexit front and central that the only U.K.-wide party fully committed to remaining in the European Union would emerge as the main challenger. But this re-running of the referendum did not materialise.
Again bearing in mind the unrepresentative, and arguably anti-democratic, nature of the first-past-the-post system, a socialist message, articulated by Jeremy Corbyn, appears to remain a vote winner – at least among those opposed to the Conservative Party – by comparison to the centrist liberal platform; with many voters also aware that the Liberal-Democrats had entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015 that implemented austerity economic policies.
Thus, reasserting a centrist, Blairite approach, including a swift return to the European Union, does not seem a likely formula for a Labour Party revival unless its policies cleave closely to the Conservative consensus to a point where the electorate is indifferent to the outcome: as under New Labour when voter turnout dipped below 60% in 2001, compared to 68% in 2017 and 66.5% in 2019.
Unequivocal Brexit Policy Proved Crucial to Conservative Victory.
It is widely assumed – with the former BBC Newsnight journalist Paul Mason a prominent advocate of this view[v] – that Jeremy Corbyn’s unwillingness to make a firm commitment to remaining within the European Union was the Labour Party’s undoing. The argument runs that had Corbyn campaigned with a defiant promise for a yes vote, perhaps in alliance with the Liberal-Democrats, he would have carried the day. But this flies in the face of the reality.
After years of bickering inside Parliament, leading to the infamous proroguing, and courtroom battles, it would appear that serious Brexit fatigue had set in among the electorate. The Conservative pledge ‘To Get Brexit Done’, repeated at every possible juncture throughout the campaign with admirable unity of purpose, proved an unbeatable platform – helped of course by an overwhelmingly supportive media, increasingly hysterical in its opposition to Corbyn.
Even Remain-voting Conservatives seem to have been attracted by the simplicity of the message, albeit the claim that a vote for the Liberal-Democrats could bring Corbyn to power may also have proved effective. More importantly, the Conservatives exploited an enduring grievance that the democratic will of the people, as expressed in the Referendum of 2016, was being ignored by a political elite – an argument that resonated strongly in Brexit-voting parts of the country: Labour’s so-called ‘red wall.’
All of these constituencies, bar Stroud in Gloucestershire, Kensington in London and Ipswich in Norfolk, are in the North of England or Wales – Labour’s traditional industrial heartland.
This emphasises the extent to which Brexit dictated the electoral outcome, especially given Labour retained seats in those same constituencies in 2017 with a manifesto promising to respect the result of the referendum.
Thus, while opinion polls register distaste for the Labour leadership among the electorate, after a sustained campaign of vilification in the press, this cannot be separated from the substance of policies (particularly indecisiveness over Brexit), as the opinion questionnaire purports to.
We asked voters why they had not voted for particular parties in our on the day poll (12th December). For Labour the key issue was the leadership. pic.twitter.com/pu7iBWDp94
Thus, both David Broder[viii] and Owen Jones[ix] have persuasively argued that Labour’s failure to replicate its Brexit policy from the 2017 election was its undoing. Labour certainly lost votes and even seats to the Lib-Dems and S.N.P. in 2019, but these parties would probably have supported a minority Labour government which promised to re-run the referendum.
Jeremy Corbyn can certainly be faulted for adopting what appears to have been a principled neutrality on the question of Brexit, but perhaps it was the decision of his leading lieutenant John McDonnell to advocate for another referendum and a Remain vote – contrary to the Bennite anti-EU tradition within the Labour Party to which he belonged – that was the real problem; indeed, revealingly, McDonnell has ‘owned’ the electoral disaster.[x]
It may plausibly be argued that the stubborn refusal of many within Britain – and without – to accept the clear verdict of the British people on membership of the European Union, however sinister the tactics of the Leave side, permitted the political gambler and serial liar that is Boris Johnson to win the U.K General Election of 2019, by a handsome margin.
According to Matthew D’Ancona there ‘really is no way to understand how radically’ Boris Johson is ‘trying to remould the Conservative Party, and the very specific way in which he is framing contemporary political debate, without reference to the self-appointed father figure of the worldwide right-wing nationalist movement.’
2019 marked a new low in British democracy, as fake and misleading information became central to the Conservative Party’s campaign of undermining its opponents, in particular Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party for the most part, fought a clean fight, essentially winning the campaign on the relatively free medium of Twitter,[xi] where organic sharing is rewarded above political advertisements.
Conservative Party distortion began in earnest during the first leaders’ debate, when its press office temporarily changed the name on its official Twitter handle to ‘FactCheckUK’, implying it was an independent fact-checking source. That the Party was prepared to do so given the near certainty of discovery is indicative of the cynicism of Post-Truth contemporary political campaigning. Under the guidance of Steve Bannon, who masterminded Donald Trump’s victory, Populists bend reality and impugn the motives of all politicians.
Thus, Adam Ramsay describes the Conservative strategy as being to: ‘wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth.’ The Hobbesian project ensures ‘the whole experience is miserable, bewildering and stressful.’ All that remains is to ‘ask voters to make it go away.’[xii]
Although those with an interest in politics tend to gravitate towards Twitter, Facebook actually has three times as many daily visits in the U.K.,[xiii] and as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed, users of the platform are susceptible to sophisticated propaganda, and political ads are not verified.
Moreover, the Conservative Party raised more than three times as much as Labour in large donations (over £7,500) over the course of the campaign (£18 million compared to £5 million), providing them with ample resources for online campaigns targeting key marginal constituencies.
Added to this, the Conservative Party retained partisan support from most of the widest circulating newspapers in the country, including The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Times and The Sun. Only The Daily Mirror was demonstrably supportive of Labour.
Left-leaning or liberal broadsheets, The Guardian and The Independent were generally opposed to the Conservatives, but tended to be at least as supportive of the Liberal Democrats as Labour, and ran stories damaging to the latter, including unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn.[xv]
The Guardian also ran a damaging opinion piece by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in which he amplified these claims. He made great play on Corbyn’s unsatisfactory responses to aggressive questioning by Andrew Neil (whose formidable inquisitorial skills Boris Johnson refused to be subjected to) in which the interviewer demanded that Corbyn condemn the proposition that Rothschild Zionists were controlling world governments. Montefiore also referred to the Labour leader’s 2012 support of a grafitti artist’s work apparently featuring antisemitic tropes, in what was an article strikingly thin on substantive evidence for a damaging allegation.[xvii]
In a Facebook post in 2012, Corbyn offered his backing to Los Angeles-based street artist Mear One, before subsequently conceding he was wrong to support the graffiti artist.
Alongside criticisms of Corbyn by leading cultural figures in the liberal media, in an unprecedented move, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote an article for The Times[xviii] arguing Corbyn was unfit to be Prime Minister.
Notably, antisemitism charges were hardly leveled against Corbyn prior to the 2017 election. The extent of the campaign running up to the 2019 elections suggests a coordinated, prolonged strategy, designed to impugn the reputation of a long-term anti-racist campaigner in Jeremy Corbyn, just as Arthur Scargill’s reputation was smeared at the height of the miners’ strike.
‘Good luck Jeremy…you’re better than them. Nice one’
This gent explains, in 60 seconds, why the establishment attacks @jeremycorbyn#ge2019
The episode recalls Fyodor Dostoyevksy’s 1872 Devils, towards the end of which the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked, ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ to which he responds that it was to promote:
the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralise everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.[xx]
The BBC is no longer a guardian of British democracy (if it ever was).
Considering the distinct disadvantages that the Labour Party laboured under during this election, with traditional media and fake Facebook ads ranged against it, British democracy was reliant on the BBC to provide a measure of balance. Alas, the public service broadcaster not only failed to vindicate its public service mandate, but actively participated in the fake news campaign in support of the Conservative Party. It was left to Channel 4 to provide meaningful criticism of the Conservatives on the television.
The BBC’s subtle falsification of news content began early in the campaign with the use of archive footage from 2016 of a dignified Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary laying a wreath outside the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday – in place of actual footage of a dishevelled Boris Johnson making a mess of placing a wreath at the ceremony in 2019.
There followed the doctoring of a video in which laughter greets Boris Johnson’s claim that he always told the truth, which was used in subsequent news bulletins.
As Peter Oborne pointed out in a stinging critique, the BBC tends to be biased in favour of any sitting governments, but the level of duplicity of 2019 is unprecedented in recent history. The broadcaster reverted to depicting a general lowering in political standards, encompassing the Labour Party and presumably itself. Thus on the night before the election Radio 4 broadcast a montage of moments seemingly aimed to make the point that all the protagonists were misleading voters.[xxiii]
The conduct of the national broadcaster reflects the radical challenge posed by Corbyn and his team to the ruling Conservative consensus.
Jeremy Corbyn took the U.K. establishment by surprise during the 2017 Election campaign, coming within a whisker of victory. This would have had serious ramifications for the domestic economy, but perhaps more importantly also U.K. foreign policy, and the arms’ industry, both in the U.K. and the wider military industrial complex in the U.S., in particular.
It is unsurprising, therefore, then that a sophisticated and well organised campaign involving elements within both the BBC and other liberal media should have been deployed to undermine Corbyn and his politics.
has a single #bbcnews journalist resigned in protest over having been asked to become an essentially a State News Agency, & smearing the opposition so as to bring an extreme right-wing, racist government into power? Even one?
Finally, conspiracy theories are just that, but it is perhaps notable that the London Bridge stabbings was the only so-called ‘terrorist’ attack that has occurred on U.K. soil since, again suspiciously, the spate of attacks preceding the 2017 election.
We have no evidence of provocateurs in action – as during a CND protest that occurs in Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British Coup – but the febrile atmosphere generated by hysterical media in the wake of any terrorist attack is certainly advantageous to a Conservative Party long associated with law and order – especially when confronted by a Labour leader, who previously welcomed former terrorists into the political fold.
Notably, within hours of the attack a screenshot of a fake tweet, depicting the Labour leader as unsupportive of the police response, easily shared via WhatsApp, emerged.
Fake Jeremy Corbyn Tweet that appeared soon after the attack.
‘Corbynism’ has shifted the mainstream of British Politics to the left, but socialism still needs a makeover.
Jeremy Corbyn is now a lame duck Labour leader, while the Party considers a replacement. His generation of Bennites, who remained true to socialist and pacifist principles throughout the long period of New Labour centrism under Tony Blair, have, almost miraculously, seized the opportunity to define the philosophy of the Party for the forthcoming decades. This maintains the threat to the ruling Conservative consensus operating since World War II, notwithstanding Boris Johnson’s ‘thumping’ majority.
The ranks of the Labour Party swelled to over half million under Corbyn, having stood at barely two hundred thousand while Ed Milliband was at the helm.[xxiv] Exceeding Conservative Party membership by three hundred thousand, it is among the most formidable, and youthful, left-wing parties in the developed world, and the largest of its kind in Europe.
Moreover, running parallel to the Party is the campaigning Momentum movement, with forty thousand members. Any prospective Labour leader must now appeal to this young radical constituency. An immediate reversion to a centrist Blairite leader is an impossibility, and moreover is unlikely to be well received by an electorate in the grip of Bannonite Populism.
‘Corbynism,’ such as it is, is often derided as a middle class and metropolitan phenomenon. This is considered a structural weakness of most social democratic parties around the world. It ignores, however, the shifting dynamics of altered economies, as those once considered middle class are squeezed increasingly by high property prices and diminishing opportunities in careers such as education and the arts.
It should also be born in mind that crippling poverty, afflicting a majority of the population, generated socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. Even for much of the twentieth century, a considerable proportion of the population was actually malnourished, whereas today the poor are more likely to be obese. Notwithstanding the food banks that emerged during the Cameron era of austerity, the extreme poverty that engendered socialism has largely been eliminated.
Ironically, the tangible gains socialism brought to Britain and other European societies in providing for cheap food, accommodation, education and healthcare now actually work to the benefit of Populists that prey on consumer and entrepreneurial aspirations, while incubating a fear of an imminent immigrant ‘other’ destined to appropriate indigenous welfare, educational and healthcare entitlements.
Unlike their older peers, young people across the U.K. were, however, disproportionately attracted to a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn,[xxv] including principled opposition to militarism, a Green New Deal and effective redistribution of wealth, including inter-generational transfer. This reveals a growing awareness that high capitalism has brought unprecedented inequality and rampant corporate control, requiring decisive state intervention. This should provide the impetus for a reconceived socialism that merges an aspiration to raise human welfare with the environmental and anti-war movements.
It should also be conceded that the Labour campaign’s robust defence of the NHS against privatisation, and outside interference, has probably ensured the Conservatives will maintain public health services, at least to British citizens, for the time being. Thus, in defeating Corbynism the Conservative Party has been forced to adopt policies that many among its ranks do not support.
The Conservatives now have unanimity on Brexit, but it remains to be seen how long a Party prone to factionalism will hold together, especially after absorbing Populist Brexiters. This will provide opportunities for Labour to chip away at the Conservative consensus.
A priority for the Labour Party will be to develop policies to defeat the Conservative Party in the North of England and Wales. With Brexit ‘done’ the Conservative hold over the ‘red wall’ seems fragile, especially with younger people preferring Labour, and Conservative supporters dying out. Ongoing wrangling with the E.U. could cause serious economic damage, including to manufacturing industries in the North, which the Conservatives will surely be held responsible for.
Hearteningly, the idealism of the Corbyn years has provided a learning ground for a generation of activists, now attuned to the difficulty of challenging the Conservative consensus. There are genuine grounds for optimism that a new generation of tech savvy activists can ultimately defeat Bannonite Populism, and lay the political and economic foundations for a carbon neutral New Jerusalem. But the dominant Conservative faction will, as ever, be difficult to shift, especially in the current atmosphere of Post-Truth, and attendant disillusionment with the political process.
To lay the foundations for a New Jerusalem it is incumbent upon the Labour Party to redefine the socialist project, accommodate entrepreneurial innovation – with the mantra that ‘small is beautiful’ – and avoid the bureaucratisation that was a hallmark of New Labour under Blair and Brown.
Labour can, and should, offer principled opposition to the enormous corporations, including Facebook, whose interests the Conservative Party has long served, and which New Labour in its giddy appreciation of business leaders also embraced.
A moral obligation to address the poverty and inequality, still strikingly evident throughout the U.K., should be accompanied by an appeal to small business people. The message that eradicating poverty and reducing inequality serves entrepreneurship should be made loud and clear: an impoverished population cannot sustain new ventures. Thus, the Labour Party may appeal to a nation of shopkeepers, selling new and environmentally friendly innovations, and no longer reliant on dark satanic mills that loom across post-Industrial Britain, fueling a Populist right.
[i] Dr Bart Cammaerts, Brooks DeCillia, João Carlos Magalhães, Dr Cesar Jimenez Martinez, ‘Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press’, LSE, 2016, http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/representations-of-jeremy-corbyn
[ii] Dan Sabbagh, ‘UK reclaims place as world’s second largest arms exporter’, The Guardian, July 30th , 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/uk-reclaims-place-as-worlds-second-largest-arms-exporter
[iii] Stefan Bielik ‘With its lurch to the right, Britain is no longer special in Europe’, The Guardian, December 24th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/24/lurch-right-britain-special-europe-authoritarian
[iv] Gus Carter, ‘Lib Dems overtake Labour in latest poll’ Metro, September 19th, 2019,
[v] Paul Mason, ‘AFTER CORBYNISMWHERE NEXT FOR LABOUR’, paulmason.org, December 16th, 2019, https://www.paulmason.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/After-Corbynism-v1.4.pdf
[ix] Owen Jones, ‘Brexit and self-inflicted errors buried Labour in this election’, The Guardian, December 19th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/brexit-labour-election-corbyn-left
[x] Rowen Mason, ‘’I own this disaster’: John McDonnell tries to shield Corbyn’, December 15th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/15/i-own-this-disaster-john-mcdonnell-tries-to-shield-corbyn-rebecca-long-bailey.
[xi] Annabelle Timsit, ‘The UK election result shows why Twitter does not speak for most voters’, Quartz, December 13th, 2019, https://qz.com/1767195/uk-election-result-shows-twitter-doesnt-speak-for-most-voters/.
[xii] Adam Ramsay, ‘Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away’, Open Democracy, 22nd of December, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-made-politics-awful-then-asked-people-vote-it-away/.
[xiii] S. O’Dea, ‘Leading social networks by share of website visits* in the United Kingdom (UK) as of June 2019’, Statista, September 3rd, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/280295/market-share-held-by-the-leading-social-networks-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/.
[xiv] Rupert Evelyn, ‘88% of Conservative ads on Facebook ‘misleading’’, ITV News, December 6th, 2019, https://www.itv.com/news/2019-12-06/88-of-conservative-ads-on-facebook-misleading/.
[xv] Letter: ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to apologise for antisemitism proves he is unfit to be prime minister’ Independent, November 27th, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-labour-andrew-neil-interview-chief-rabbi-election-a9220576.html.
[xvi] Letters, ‘Concerns about antisemitism mean we cannot vote Labour’, The Guardian, November 14th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/14/concerns-about-antisemitism-mean-we-cannot-vote-labour.
[xvii] Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘This antisemitism poisons any good Labour might do’, The Guardian, November 30th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/30/antisemitism-poisons-any-good-labour-doing-simon-sebag-montefiore.
[xviii] Ephraim Mirvis, ‘Ephraim Mirvis: What will become of Jews in Britain if Labour forms the next government?’ The Times, November 25th, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/ephraim-mirvis-what-will-become-of-jews-in-britain-if-labour-forms-the-next-government-ghpsdbljk.
[xix] Adam Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson called gay men ‘tank-topped bumboys’ and black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’’, Business Insider, November 22nd, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-record-sexist-homophobic-and-racist-comments-bumboys-piccaninnies-2019-6?r=US&IR=T.
[xx] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Devils, (translated by Michael R. Katz), Oxford, 1999, p.748.
[xxi] Untitled, ‘BBC caught in the crossfire: why the UK’s public broadcaster is becoming a big election story’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/bbc-caught-in-the-crossfire-why-the-uks-public-broadcaster-is-becoming-a-big-election-story-128639.
[xxii] Peter Oborne, ‘In its election coverage, the BBC has let down the people who believe in it’, The Guardian, December 3rd, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/election-coverage-bbc-tories.
[xxiii] Ramsay, 22nd of December, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-made-politics-awful-then-asked-people-vote-it-away/.
[xxiv] Rowena Mason, ‘Labour membership falls slightly but remains above 500,000’, The Guardian, August 8th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/08/labour-membership-falls-slightly-but-remains-about-500000.
[xxv] Adam McDowell and Chris Curtis, ‘How Britain voted in the 2019 general election’, YouGov, December 17th, 2019, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election.
For new Americans, spending Thanksgiving in the U.S. comes as a surprise. It’s the busiest travel time of the year, ranking ahead of Christmas and the 4th of July. While some associate Thanksgiving with shopping bonanzas like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, for most it’s simply an opportunity to spend time with family and friends; watching football or just gathering around the dinner table.
Given that it’s always the last Thursday of November, it also marks the beginning of the holiday season. A time then to take stock, reflect and make plans for the year ahead, finishing any business before the year closes.
It is little secret that Americans are becoming ever more polarized politically, in no small part due to the comfortable bubbles with which we surround ourselves, in our day-to-day-lives and online.
All too easily, we can tune out people with whom we disagree. Except when it comes to Thanksgiving. Sitting around the dinner table, it’s hard to steer conversation away from current events. Issues like climate change, inequality, the composition of the Supreme Court, the mess in DC, what to make of Trump, or even football, bubble up.
Polarization may also be causing people to fall out with one another over politics: according to Pew research more than eight-out-of-ten U.S. adults (roughly 85%) say political debate in the country has become more negative and less respectful.[i]
Interestingly, a lot of Republican voters feel victimized in this regard. By a wide margin, Republicans believe the mainstream of political discourse is more hospitable to Democrats than to the GOP. Interestingly, Dems also think Republicans are more comfortable sharing their viewpoints, but only by a few percentage points.[ii]
Given this toxic climate, many choose simply to stay away from any issue that is remotely political, especially given how few people are likely to be dissuaded from their current stance.[iii]
The problem is that not taking ownership of political views can be harmful. It begs the question as to whether any democracy built on the free sharing of opinions and facts can survive in the face of this extreme polarization within social media bubbles and alternative facts. The jury is still out.
It seems as if truth and facts are becoming ever harder to determine. People have warmed to the argument that there are always two sides to every issue.
But there are plain facts which don’t have two sides – the truth.
In today’s America, it has become commonplace to argue over facts. In some quarters, it might seem improper to suggest that sea levels are rising, despite the mounting evidence; or that a crowd at an inauguration was smaller than a previous one, or that black unemployment is at an all-time low.
As in other parts of the world, truth is under attack, muddled by a barrage of special interest and nation states seeking to weaken the very democracy the West is built on. If this sounds alarmist, it is. As an aside – I suggest you watch Sacha Baron Cohen give his views on social media moguls, and their blatant lack of responsibility with regards to the truth.
If you think this is simply a problem on the right of the political spectrum, you’re mistaken. The left is just as adept at bending the truth to suit themselves. The ‘woke’ left is famous for eating its own, so to speak. Writing in The Bulwark, Tim Miller brilliantly documents how Pete Buttigieg, who aspires to be America’s first openly gay President, is a under a multi-prong attack from so-called ‘progressives.’[iv]
‘Washington DC’s most interesting ‘power’ couple’
So, on to the Impeachment Hearings. What we are witnessing is a political tactic that is as old as democracy itself. If you cannot win an argument with facts, you shout louder than the other side.
Say what you like about the proceeding, but the Republicans are shouting louder. With the political theater gripping the nation – the needle of public opinion has hardly moved in recent months – Republicans are screaming about the unfair process and treatment to Trump.
Last week, when a legal scholar remarked that even Barron Trump could not become a Baron as Trump is not King, Republicans erupted in indignation. How could Democrats drag a thirteen-year-old boy into the conversation?[v]
Ah, the moral outrage. On and on the playbook goes – shout, distract, divide – with little change in public opinion on whether Trump should be removed from office.
Did the Democrats call out the Republicans on this fake moral outrage? No. Actually the legal scholar later apologized for bringing Barron into the conversation. One of the few to call out Republicans on the ‘nothing burger’ was George Conway III – one of Trump’s harshest critics, and none other than spouse to Kellyanne Conway.
Wait, what? The same Kellyanne Conway, advisor to Trump, who famously coined the term ‘alternative facts’ when asked about the true size of the crowds the latter’s inauguration?
Yes, together they form Washington DCs most interesting ‘power’ couple. One is a fervent Trump supporter, and survivor of a White House where few, except family and Stephen Miller, survive for long.
The other thinks Trump suffers from a ‘narcissistic personality disorder’[vi] and is constantly feuding with him online. Interestingly, he was once the head of the conservative Federalist society at Yale and reportedly was introduced to Kellyanne by none other than Ann Coulter. He also dated Laura Ingraham. For anyone unfamiliar with Laura Ingraham, she currently hosts the 10pm weekday evening slot on Fox – and is the reigning queen of conservative broadcasting.
Home Comforts
Over Thanksgiving dinner Bull Moose posed a question to some of his more left-leaning friends: ‘why are Republicans more aggressive in their use of social media and defense of their own?’
We hear the standard answer: ‘it’s because of corporate media control.’ The argument runs that billionaires are not giving voice to Democrat views. It holds some truth, but at best it’s an incomplete picture. Look at George Conway or AOC – if you are willing to shout loudly there are ways around the filters.
But maybe, also, it’s the very nature of today’s mainstream left to care inherently about another person’s point of view, which makes them less aggressive in the defense of their viewpoint.
What is certain is that it’s high time for ordinary Americans, right and left, to stop being afraid of hurting one another’s feelings, and being offended by a different point of view. If Kellyanne and George – who Donald has called a husband from hell and a stone cold LOSER – can do it, maybe the rest of us can engage in a bit more civilized discourse over dinner, without fear of reprisal.
George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!
[i] Untitled, ‘Public Highly Critical of State of Political Discourse in the U.S.’ Pew Research, June 19th, 2019, https://www.people-press.org/2019/06/19/public-highly-critical-of-state-of-political-discourse-in-the-u-s/
[ii] Bradley Jones, ‘Republicans see a national political climate comfortable for Democrats, but less so for GOP’, Pew Research, June 24th, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/24/republicans-see-a-national-political-climate-comfortable-for-democrats-but-less-so-for-gop/
[iii] Domenico Montanaro, ‘Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Say Impeachment Hearings Won’t Change Their Minds’, NPR, November 19th, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/19/780540637/poll-americans-overwhelmingly-say-impeachment-hearings-wont-change-their-minds
[vi] Daniel Lippman ‘Kellyanne Conway defends Trump after he attacked her husband’, Politico, March 20th, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/20/kellyanne-george-conway-trump-1229193
A national strike was called in Colombia for Thursday, the 21st of November. In Bogotá, it would be the beginning of two weeks of protests, parties, and panics.
Iván Duque, Colombia’s right-wing president, was elected in 2018. Since then he has tried to implement the typical Latin American neo-liberal programme: pension privatisation; privatisation of government agencies; cuts to education budgets; cuts to corporation tax; cuts to the minimum wage for young people; the violent suppression of the left; the violation of peace treaties; the murder of social leaders. The strikes are a response to that programme.
Bouncing in the spotlight of the Andean sun
The marches began on Thursday morning. Thousands walked along the main routes into the centre of the city. Approaching from a few streets over, it sounded like the noise from a football stadium. There was music and whistles and horns. Crowds bounced in the spotlight of the Andean sun. Police helicopters hovered over the tree-topped mountains which enclose the city. Theatre groups twirled white flags like batons. Trapeze artists hung red ribbons from bridges and performed for the crowds passing underneath. The multi-coloured indigenous flag – the Wiphala – sparkled in the sunshine. The flags of over fifty trade unions waved above the walking crowds. Topless protestors posed for photographs. People in traditional indigenous clothes played music and danced in a circle. Fireworks went off.
One group of marchers carried a naked, blood-covered doll to represent the eight children who had been killed in August by the Colombian military.[i]
There were pictures of pigs everywhere. The president, whenever he appears on television, has a bewildered look that is made worse by the porcine upturn of his nose. There were pig masks, pig posters, pig flags, people dressed as pigs, the president’s face on the body of a pig, a puppet of a pig being controlled by Álvaro Uribe.
President Donald J. Trump shakes hands with the President of the Republic of Colombia Ivan Duque Marquez prior to participating in a bilateral meeting Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Mr. Duque is widely considered to be a proxy for Mr. Uribe, the influential former president. The name Uribe alone evokes, for some Colombians, images of death squads, narco money, pro-business corruption, and the genocide of poor and indigenous people. For others, Uribe means safety, progress, prosperity, and victory over left-wing terrorists.
In a surprise move, students from the National University of Colombia turned west to block the airport. The were stopped along the route by ESMAD, Colombia’s controversial riot police unit.[ii] The riot police fired teargas and stun grenades. The students held their hands up and chanted Sin violencia, both a statement of intent and an accusation directed at the riot police’s reputation for brutality.
The rest of the marches continued on towards Plaza Bolívar, the historic centre of Bogotá. The protestors stood around in the early afternoon as the sky darkened. They listened to the shouts of the anti-government speeches from a stage at the top of the plaza. The trouble started when the rain started falling.
Some of the protestors pulled down the black cloth which had been put up to protect the historic buildings around the plaza. They burned the black cloth in the shelter of stone pillars. The riot police cleared the plaza with teargas and stun grenades. The water cannon trucks, black and square and as slow as tanks from the first world war, rolled in and sprayed the remaining protestors out into the narrow streets nearby. They would fight their way back into the plaza and be repelled again many times over the next few hours.
Fires burned at intersections
The rain continued to fall. The televisions stations divided their screens in four to show the different riots across the city. The police sirens kept a high pitched background beat as the TV presenters described the rioting.
Stones were smashed on the ground and broken into smaller pieces and thrown at the riot police. Teargas was fired, the canisters skipped over the wet streets with a trail of white smoke behind them. The smoking canisters were picked up and thrown back towards the riot police. The water cannon trucks were surrounded and attacked and sprayed with graffiti and pounded with stones.
Bus stations were smashed up with hammers. Fires burned at intersections in working class suburbs, the smoke could be seen from across the city. People with hoods up and their faces covered with scarves ran at the riot police and ran back as the riot police advanced. They chased each other up and down the streets as it got dark.
They chased each other up and down the television screens in the wealthier northern suburbs where nobody protests. Bogotá is used to such scenes. Rain. Plumes of teargas. Scarfs across faces. Smashed glass. Smashed stones. The streets in the rain soaked north, by comparison, were silent. Christmas trees flickered in the windows of multi-story apartment blocks. In the empty bars and the empty restaurants, bored staff watched the riots on television. There was an empty feeling in the streets like in the days after Christmas.
For many people in the north of the city, they first heard the distinctive sound of what became known as the ‘Cacerolazo’ from their phones. They saw videos of pots and pans being banged in protest on WhatsApp or Twitter or Facebook.
It was only when they opened their windows or stepped out onto their balconies that they heard the tinklings of this new protest in the buildings around them. Windows which had previously been lights on the skyline revealed people, more and more as the night went on, banging pots and pans.
It was happening all over the divided city. Videos of it went viral. The president held a press conference to denounce the riots and the vandalism of the late afternoon. On the news, after he was finished, they showed[iii] the chess pattern lights of tall residential buildings ringing with the sound of the protest.
In Cali, a large city in southwest Colombia, the protests had led to looting. The night had brought terror. They were calling it the ‘Cali Purge’. A curfew had been set. There were rumours of gangs breaking into houses. Vigilantes stood outside apartment buildings and shot at any shadow that moved.
The protests in Bogotá continued on Friday. In the south of the city, a bus was hijacked. The videos would be replayed all day on television.[iv] The bus succumbed to a crowd of people after a failed attempt at reversing back down a muddy street. The bus was then driven around with the cheering crowd on board, while others cheered and chased after it. In CCTV footage, the bus was rammed through the shutters of a supermarket while the workers inside scrambled to reinforce a temporary barricade of cardboard boxes. The workers were buried under their fallen barricade as looters ran in through the gap in the crumpled shutter.
‘A shallow gene pool of private schools and country clubs’
The Colombian elite are a paranoid, jittery group at the best of times. They are like pure-bred dogs; overly groomed, prone to neuroticism, easily panicked by outsiders. They mate in a shallow gene pool of private schools and country clubs.
They survive on inherited money, stolen land, and a reflexive violence towards any sign of redistribution. In response to the looting and riots, the mayor banned the sale of alcohol and called a curfew. It would be the first curfew in forty-two years. By 9pm on Friday night, everyone in Bogotá would have to be inside.
The dark, empty streets would terrify a city that is already afraid of the night. While Colombia may be associated with magical realism, Bogotá is a noir city. The dark here is heavy. The streetlights can barely push it out of their way. On a normal evening, people hurry home in the dark, rushing in out of the cold, fearful of the empty streets. It is a corrupt, distrustful city, marred by heavy rain and armed muggings and the memory of kidnapping, bombs, and assassinations.
The rumours started after the curfew. As in Cali, gangs of looters were said to be invading apartment buildings and houses. The word went around by WhatsApp voice notes.
On Twitter people posted their address and wrote some version of ‘they have entered my building, please help.’ The emergency police line went down. Alarms went off. Gunshots were reported. Families hid under their beds. Old ladies cried on the phone to relatives in the US. The purge had come to the wealthy, northern suburbs.
The city has millions of desperate poor and they were out there in the dark. Some said they were gangs of Venezuelan refugees. Some said they were Colombians down from the hillside slums. Vigilante groups formed to defend their apartment buildings. They were shown on television, holding their broomstick handles and golf clubs and hammers and knives in poses of self-defence.
The fear was illogical. Why loot an occupied apartment building when there were unguarded shops all over the city? Unless there was another motive. Unless the chaos and the curfew had unleashed the stored up hate that the poor feel for the rich. Unless it was revenge. Revenge for the way this city and this country had operated for years. It was guilt, as much as rumour, which caused the panic.
The army was called in to save the northern suburbs. Tanks[v] rolled down the streets and were cheered by the vigilantes outside their apartment buildings. Helicopters hummed over the empty streets. They found nothing. By Saturday morning, it would be revealed to be fake,[vi] though no one knows yet what kind of fake.
Some say the police had rounded up criminals in trucks and unleashed them on the residential buildings of the upper middle class. Some say it was all orchestrated by Twitter bots. Others believed that the story of the fake terror was itself fake.
Dilan Cruz
On Saturday afternoon, a protestor, Dilan Cruz, was shot[vii] in the head as he ran away from the riot police. He was hit by a non-lethal projectile, fired from a riot policeman’s shotgun. The eighteen-year-old lay in an induced coma on Saturday evening. Protestors stood in a circle around the blood stained spot where he had fallen. They laid wreaths. They held moments of silence. The other protests around the city were louder, buzzing with the energy of Saturday night. These days of chaos had been like a heatwave or a World Cup for many people – a break from the mundane.
On the street outside the compound where the president has his private home, it was like the second night of a music festival.
Jugglers got up on people’s shoulders and threw flaming torches back and forth. A band in the centre of the two lane street kept a drum beat which was matched and added to by everyone else, banging their pots and pans and dancing along. A police helicopter with its lights on watched from above. Fireworks shot up into the air and exploded. The crowd turned on their phone torches and waved them from side to side in a moment of semi-silence for Dilan Cruz.
Riot police with their shields up stood in a line on the lawn in front of the compound. The other residents of the other expensive houses stood behind them, watching the party. Friends found friends in the crowd until it grew to block both sides of the street.
Girls got up on their boyfriend’s shoulders and waved homemade protest signs. People bought beer from a small shop nearby. The smell of weed was sewn into the air like a musical note. The crowd chanted, to the rhythm of a drum beat, ‘A parar para avanzar, viva el paro nacional’ (To advance we must stop, long live the national strike). The party went on until around 2am when the crowd grew small enough to be tear gassed by the riot police.
Epa Colombia
Monday brought more protests and more stories. Epa Colombia, a Youtuber who first became famous for saying ‘Epa Colombia’, had filmed herself smashing up a bus station with a hammer during Thursday’s marches. She became a symbol for what some considered to be the mindless vandalism of the protests. She was arrested,[viii] fined, and banned from all social media.
Fifty-nine Venuezalans were deported[ix] by military plane. While they were charged with looting, their deportation was a symbolic act, a sign of the anti-Venezuelan feeling which had developed around the protests. A soldier recorded a video in support of the strikes, it went viral, he took his own life[x] out of fear over what might happen.
On Monday night, Dilan Cruz died. It made international news, which is unusual. Colombia normally gets an easy ride from the anglophone media.[xi] It is written about as an up and coming tourist destination,[xii] if it’s written about at all. The systemic murder of social leaders is ignored, while Colombia is referred to as a foodie paradise.[xiii]
Marches in Hong Kong and Caracas make front pages, while bigger protests in Bogotá are rarely mentioned.
On Tuesday, union leaders called another national strike for the following day. A video went viral on Tuesday night. It showed a water cannon truck, as usual, spraying protesting students off the motorway in front of the national university. The students walked towards the truck with their hands raised. The truck reversed.[xiv]
The national strike on Wednesday brought thousands onto the streets again. The students took over the main motorway. They walked north and were cheered as they went. They got to the edge of the city around 9pm. The riot police cornered about two hundred of them in quiet streets near the motorway. They were beaten and tear gassed. Many students were reported to be missing the following morning.[xv] One was seriously injured.
There was another national strike on the following Wednesday, 4th of December. Thousands marched again, but the government continued to implement its neoliberal agenda.
Normality, corrupt and violent and internationally accepted, appears to have been restored. The sound of pots and pans banging has grown faint. The streets no longer buzz with the feeling that anything is possible. There are rumours, though, of more strikes to come. The beat of ‘A parar para avanzar, viva el paro nacional’ is stuck in the memory of the city like an earworm. There are many who still listen for it on these quiet nights between protests.
[i] Untitled, ‘Colombia defense minister resigns amid pressure over bombing casualties,’ Reuters, November 6th, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-colombia-politics/colombia-defense-minister-resigns-amid-pressure-over-bombing-casualties-idUSKBN1XG36K
[ii] Untitled, ‘Colombianos exigen desmontar el Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Esmad) tras 20 años de represión homicida,’ Globovision, November 30th, 2019, https://globovision.com/article/colombia-protestas-esmad-manifestaciones-violencia
[iii] El Tiempo, ‘Histórico cacerolazo se toma las calles de Bogotá | EL TIEMPO’, Youtube, November 21st, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuekRtoKJfo
[iv] Red MAS Noticias, ‘Red+ | Vándalos roban bus del SITP y rompen puerta de almacén para saquearlo,’ Youtube, November 22nd, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbBYCjJP_UU&has_verified=1
[v] Maria Fernada Pulecio U, @PulecioU, Twitter, November 23rd, 2019, https://mobile.twitter.com/PulecioU/status/1198106200845541377
[vi] Untitled, ‘¿Cuentas falsas en Twitter inventaron disturbios en Cedritos durante toque de queda?’, November 23rd, 2019, NACION, https://www.bluradio.com/nacion/cuentas-falsas-en-twitter-inventaron-disturbios-en-cedritos-durante-toque-de-queda-233588-ie435.
[vii] NoticiasUnoColombia, ‘El video que subió Dilan Cruz cuando marchaba pacíficamente antes de ser impactado’, Youtube, November 24th, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxYq1UvUfTQ
[viii] Noticias Caracol, ‘Epa Colombia tendrá que cerrar sus redes sociales,’ Youtube, November 29th, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oQzQBP2M4o
[ix] ‘Expulsan de Colombia a 59 venezolanos por actos vandálicos en Bogotá’, El Tiempo, November 25th, 2019, https://www.eltiempo.com/bogota/expulsan-a-venezolanos-por-actos-vandalicos-en-bogota-436974
[x] Adriaan Alsema, ‘Soldier commits suicide citing stigmatization over support for Colombia’s national strike,’ Colombia Reports, November 26th, 2019, https://colombiareports.com/soldier-commits-suicide-citing-stigmatization-over-support-for-colombias-national-strike/
[xi] Nell McShane Wulfhart, ‘36 Hours in Bogotá’, New York Times, December 27th, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/travel/what-to-do-in-bogota.html
[xii] Brooke Porter Katz, ‘Five Places to Go in Bogotá,’ New York Times, December 5th, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/travel/five-places-to-go-in-bogota.html
[xiii] Paul Richardson, ‘’You get five countries for the price of one’ – how Colombia became a foodie superpower,’ The Telegraph, January 8th, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/south-america/colombia/colombia-foodie-gastronomy/
[xiv] Joshua Potash, ‘Student protesters in Bogota, Colombia forcing police to retreat.’ Twitter, November 27th, 2019, https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1199762726324752386
[xv] Adriaan Alsema, ‘20 students missing’, 1 injured after US endorsement triggers brutal repression of Colombia’s peaceful protest,’ Colombia Reports, November 27th, 2019, https://colombiareports.com/20-students-missing-1-injured-after-us-endorsement-triggers-brutal-repression-of-colombias-peaceful-protest/
The future of a generation born during over eight years of conflict in Syria is under threat. More than half of all school-aged Syrian children living as refugees in neighbouring countries do not have access to formal education. In this second of a two-part series humanitarian activist and author Bruna Kadletz addresses the educational crisis for school-aged refugees.
From the balcony on the second floor where an orphanage shelters around forty Syrian children, you can see on the horizon a majestic natural wall of snow-capped mountains. Between the building, the clear blue sky and the highlands, plantation plots, mosques and other edifices adorn the fertile valley, which served as foodstuffs for the Roman provinces of the Levant, during antiquity.
The Beqaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, has since become a place of intense pressure, oscillating between hospitality and hostility. In the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 90), the government dedicated itself to rebuilding the capital Beirut, but neglected rural areas. As a result, the Beqaa Valley has one of the highest levels of inequality in the country, concentrating a mix of poverty and political abandonment.
Since 2011, the influx of Syrian refugees, have exacerbated the inequality and poverty in the valley. Due to its proximity to the Syrian border, with Mount Lebanon to the west and the Anti-Lebanon range to the east, it received approximately three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand[1] refugees, who escaped the brutality of the on-going Syrian Civil War. This influx has had a profound impact on the region´s political, social and economic environment.
Throughout this period, waves of hospitality have been punctuated by xenophobic attacks, harming refugees in need of protection, and generating further hostility. In June 2019, an apparently accidental fire[2] near the Deir al-Ahmar Refugee Camp displaced around six hundred refugees in the valley, exposing the latest tensions between residents and refugees. According to Nasser Yassin, researcher at the American University of Beirut, the incident, and how it was handled, is an example of ‘collective punishment’ perpetrated by local governments in order to push Syrians away.
Despite the harsh living conditions for both local populations and newcomers, punitive responses and policies inflict further exclusion and trauma on refugees, with particularly adverse effects on children, who are restricted from enjoying a dignified life and education.
In April 2019, I travelled to the Beqaa Valley to visit the Molham House, an orphanage housing Syrians kids who have lost their parents or the families taking care of them. The Molham team is responsible for the physical, emotion and social well-being of the children, particularly those who carry the trauma of the war.
Before moving to the orphanage, many of the Syrian children did not enjoy access to education, food, or a clean and safe place to live. Some could not speak on arrival in the house, reflecting psychological wounds, while others were scarred with physical injuries. The Molham team has been working to improve the children’s lot by offering a home, medical care, psychological support and education.
We arrived in the late morning, when the children were getting ready for school. Ghaithaa, a Syrian refugee herself, who works and lives in the Molham House, introduces the house to us. As we walk through the building´s chambers, the playful children follow us excitedly.
After our short tour, I found my way to the balcony. The view was breathtaking not only for its natural beauty, but also because of the tough living conditions of refugees. There were countless informal tented settlements spread next to plantation plots. During the wintertime, when freezing temperatures, snow and torrential rain wreck the settlements, refugees are left in desperate need of emergency aid.
Access to decent housing is one of the many challenges in the region. Preventing child labour and ensuring an education for school-aged children and youth is another. In early 2015, the Lebanese government suspended the registration of Syrians entering the country and imposed legal restrictions on those already inside the territory, suspending access to formal work, documentation and freedom of movement, and implementing a yearly residency renewal fee of US$200.
Adults are thus unable to provide for their families and live with scarce resources in precarious conditions. In this extreme context, families end up depending on child labour to survive. Recent research published by UNICEF: Survey on Child Labour in Agriculture in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon: The case of Syrian refugees[3], revealed that ‘4,592 children, between the ages of 4 and 18 years, were reported as actively working, out of a total of 6,972 children living in the surveyed households.’ The research also found that 74.8% of surveyed children work in the agriculture sector and for 85.6% of the working children, family support was the leading motive to work.
Besides insufficient public schools, lack of financial resources to pay for transportation, school supplies and registration fees, child labour also curtails education opportunities through non-enrolment, school dropout, and/or poor academic performance.
In the orphanage in the Bekaa Valley, children face familar challenges on arrival. The main reasons for low enrolment levels are lack of documents and financial problems.
Another issue for the children is the period in which they are permitted to study. Lebanese public schools segregate Lebanese students from Syrian refugees. Ensuring education for all, schools work double shifts. In the morning, it´s learning time for Lebanese students and other foreigners, whereas in the afternoon, it´s the Syrian refugees’ turn to learn.
Ghaithaa tells us that ‘some kids complain about going to school in the afternoon, they feel tired studying from 1 to 7pm. They return home very tired. Plus, they´re not psychologically fit to study.’
‘Refugees in Lebanon have a very hard life,’ she concludes.
Despite all the difficulties, the sentiment permeating the environment is one of care. In the orphanage, Ghaithaa is responsible for ten girls, ranging in age from six to twelve.
‘Each one carries a story. Of course, all of us have fled from Syria, from the war, and we left in harsh conditions. Many of the children have lost someone they love, so this house is a shelter for them, a place where they feel safe, where they are loved, where they are being educated.’ she says.
‘Kids are the most important thing for us,’ she says, with tears in her eyes.
During times of humanitarian crisis and uncertainty, access to a quality education is a daily challenge faced by millions of refugee children and youth around the world. Maintaining access to education in times of crisis is complex, demanding local, regional and international efforts, and political will. Beyond dismantling punitive politics toward refugees, ensuring inclusive policies and developing plans for education, we must cultivate a culture of care and affection.
In creating a safe, healthy and playful environment for children deeply wounded by the atrocities of wars, armed conflict and social collapse, we may regenerate lost generations.
What is the experience of a refugee caught in the crisis on the Mediterranean Sea? Approximately 18,910 lives have been lost or are missing since 2014, including three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi in 2015; so far in 2019 there have been an estimated 1089 deaths.[i]
Frontline Witnesses Search and Rescue Briefing, Dáil Éireann, November 7th, 2019.
The NGOs provided accounts of ongoing tragedies from a hidden frontier.
Their work is conducted against the backdrop of systematic criminalization of Search and Rescue missions there, as well as misinformation campaigns from Far Right movements in Italy and Spain. Piracy is rife, and the Libyan coast guards are a law onto themselves.
NGOs fill a void left by the EU’s abnegation of responsibility, fulfilling Article 98 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, in spite of the consequences.
First to speak was the impressive Ismail Adam, a young man from Sudan. He has lived in Ireland since 2017 after a two-year journey. He described Libyan detention centres, months of hiding in a household working in exchange for shelter, and the eventual Italian crossing.
The traffickers told the group the passage would take three to four hours. After perhaps two days the boat was still in the middle of the sea. Ismail was just sixteen-years old at the time.
Since arriving in Ireland this resilient young man has embarked on the Leaving Certificate, having gained refugee status – assisted by the intervention of the Irish Refugee and Migrant Coalition.
In his own words:
I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future, losing a future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market.
I am here to speak for all generations to come with new ideas … I am only a young man and I don’t have all the solutions but we can work together and make it better.
I feel that we have such an opportunity, in this really connecting world, to get know each other.
In my anger I am not blind and in my fear I’m not afraid of telling the world how I feel.
In Ireland we live a privileged, safe and great life.
I think that is enough now.
Ismail Adam
How we respond to this global humanitarian crisis, involving over seventy million refugees worldwide,[ii] poses major question for receiving countries. All too often we lose sight of precious humanity who become pawns in political games.
