Democracy gone Astray: Thursday, September 12, 2024

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, September 12, 2024

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today

This past weekend the prominent Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize for political thought under police protection in Germany. But the event, which was to be a grand ceremony hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the city hall of Bremen in north-west Germany, almost did not happen at all after Gessen published an essay in the New Yorker comparing Gaza before 7 October to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe.

A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.

“This is horrific,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Monday.

“Donald Trump’s description of immigrants who are coming to the southern border is dehumanising and fascist rhetoric. These are dangerous lies, designed to villainise immigrants and make horrific policy seem somehow acceptable.

Donald Trump, just weeks after using the fascist terminology “vermin” to describe sections of American society he dislikes, again declared at a New Hampshire rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Condemned for his previous remarks at the last rally he held in New Hampshire – where he threatened to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” – Trump appeared to double down in Durham on Saturday.

Fluffy pink slippers on her feet and scarves thrown over her hair and pyjamas, Amal Abu Ghazi, 39, leaned against a wall as she watched her family clear out the rubble from their ruined house in the Jenin refugee camp, in the north of the occupied West Bank.

Her husband used a stick to smash the remaining shards of glass out of the window frames of their two-storey home and her brothers-in-law hauled out the remains of sofas and tables; somehow, a laptop had managed to survive intact. Israeli soldiers had burst in two nights ago, Abu Ghazi said, arresting her sons, 20 and 18, and ordering the rest of the family to wait outside before troops used explosives to demolish the building.

Often, when Kostiantyn Grygorenko walks the streets of Izium, he spots people he suspects collaborated with the Russians during the five-month occupation of his home town last year.

He used to feel an overwhelming rush of emotions when he saw them. Now, he tries to conserve his energy and nerves and ignore them. But still, it gets to him.

“These people are walking around the town, living among us, and they think they’re not guilty of anything. But I think they’re criminals and should go to jail,” said Grygorenko, editor-in-chief of the local weekly newspaper Izium Horizons.

Masha Gessen was heading to Germany to receive a prominent cultural prize when they heard that the ceremony wasn’t going forward. That’s because an essay they had published in The New Yorker had apparently tripped alarms in Germany for its references to ghettos in Europe and Gaza.

Gessen was not entirely surprised by the controversy. When they had reviewed with fact-checkers the passage that appeared to cause offense, they had predicted that this would be “when the reader is going to throw their laptop across the room,” they said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.

The conservative supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch took just 10 minutes to approve without changes a 98-page draft of the opinion that would remove the federal right to abortion that had been guaranteed for nearly 50 years, the New York Times reported.

According to the paper, Samuel Alito, the author of the opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, the case that struck down Roe v Wade, from 1973, circulated his draft at 11.16am on 10 February 2022.

Joe Biden’s bond with Israel and the Jewish people runs so deep he is said to feel it in his kishkes (that’s “guts”, for the non-Yiddish speakers among you). Biden demonstrated that early in the current crisis by visiting Israel within days of the 7 October massacre, which saw 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, killed, many tortured and mutilated. He demonstrated it again, just as swiftly, with the dispatch of two US aircraft carriers to the region, aimed at deterring Hezbollah and its Iranian backers from attacking Israel from the north – his one-word message: “Don’t.” And he showed it once more just last week, wielding the US veto at the United Nations – making Washington all but a lone voice against the global chorus demanding that Israel end its offensive in Gaza, which has left so many thousands dead.

Rudy Giuliani on Thursday declined to testify in his defamation case in Washington — signaling an abrupt about-face for the former Donald Trump election lawyer.

As the second half of his trial kicked off this week, Giuliani had told reporters that he would “definitively clear” his name by taking the stand and proving that his lies about two Georgia election workers weren’t lies at all.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed that there would be no peace in Ukraine until his goals are achieved and said those objectives remain unchanged at a year-end news conference.

Offering rare detail on Moscow’s operation, Putin dismissed the need for a second wave of mobilization of reservists, saying there are some 617,000 Russian soldiers currently in Ukraine, including around 244,000 troops who were called up to fight alongside professional Russian military forces.

WASHINGTON ― Republicans in the House of Representatives voted Wednesday to formally authorize their already ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

The vote was a show of unity for an often-divided Republican conference and a clear step toward eventually impeaching the president, though Republicans swore they would only go where the evidence takes them. The vote on the House floor was 221 to 212.

“We are now at a pivotal moment in our investigation,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), one of the leaders of the impeachment effort, said on the House floor before the vote.

WASHINGTON — The House will vote Wednesday on whether to formally authorize Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

The vote is mostly symbolic, signaling impeachment will remain a top priority for House Republicans in the new year — but Biden’s alleged misdeeds are not new, nor are GOP efforts to litigate them.

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk slammed Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu as Sunday “clear and present danger” to the country, and called on him to resign “before he does even more damage to Israel.”

“[Netanyahu’s] determination to stay in power no matter the cost is a clear and present danger to Israel. He needs to resign…yesterday!” Indyk wrote in a post on X Sunday morning.

Prominent civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill is abandoning X, formerly known as Twitter, following the announcement that Elon Musk would be reinstating conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ X account after a five-year ban.

After encountering a post mentioning the life and memory of Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, a first-grader murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre, Ifill said she took it as a sign to quit the social media platform and post solely on Threads.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has branched out again, going live Monday with his Tucker Carlson Network.

The streaming platform costs $9 a month or $72 for a year ― all in the name of, ahem, stopping the “propaganda spiral,” the network says on its website.

“News coverage in the West has become a tool of repression and control,” the site says. “Reporters no longer reveal essential information to the public; they work to hide it.”

Since announcing he won’t run again for Senate, Joe Manchin has left open the door to a third-party presidential campaign. Democrats are naturally anxious about the West Virginia senator’s intentions, fearful of the possible effects of an independent bid on Joe Biden’s reelection chances.

They have good cause to worry: A presidential run would be a fitting capstone for Manchin, who’s built a career around putting his own interests ahead of his party. His brand of centrism has helped him survive West Virginia’s rapid transformation from a blue to red state. But it also helped sow the seeds of the Democratic Party’s demise back home.

Rudy Giuliani, the politician who was once lauded as “America’s mayor” but descended into the rabbit hole of Donald Trump’s election denial lies, will face a Washington DC jury on Monday in a landmark case which could see him saddled with millions of dollars in damages.

For the first time at trial, Giuliani will be confronted in a federal district court with the consequences of the conspiracy theories he disseminated as Trump’s 2020 election lawyer. He will come eye-to-eye with the mother and daughter poll workers from Georgia who claim that he destroyed their lives and caused them ongoing emotional distress by maliciously accusing them of election fraud.

December 8, 2023

The pair of images above, Gaza “before and after,” has circulated in Israel as an image of victory over Hamas. If it were perceived by its perpetrators as evidence of a crime, it would have been censored so that it could not be used as proof of the spaciocide waged upon Gaza. Rather, it has been disseminated with pride, announcing that Palestinians can no longer walk along Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, and more broadly cannot return to the Northern part of Gaza, which became a territory free of Palestinians.

“Ceasefire now,” “lift the siege,” and “stop the killing” are emergency calls to put an immediate end to Israel’s bombardment and destruction in Gaza. They are voiced by millions of people all over the world, in the streets and on social media. And yet, they are being rejected by liberal governments of the West as well as by institutional leaders from academia to the medical organizations. These groups turn these bare minimum demands—stop the killing—into controversial statements. Indeed, in an effort to convince the world that the violence waged upon Gaza is not genocidal, governments and institutions in the West have enacted an ideological campaign of terror, weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who reject these claims and the conflation of Jews and Israelis.

In 1979 Benjamin Netanyahu and his father Benzion—both newly returned to Israel—convened, in Jerusalem, the first-ever conference on “international terrorism.” The event was hosted by the Jonathan Institute, which the Netanyahus had formed in 1976 in the memory of their son and brother Jonathan, an Israeli fighter killed in a raid on Entebbe International Airport in Uganda to rescue passengers on a hijacked plane. The conference brought together Israeli military and political officials (among them current and future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres) with U.S. neoconservative groups and politicians.

NEW YORK — The chairman of an Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis, the conservative Twitter star behind the anti-trans Bud Light backlash and former President Donald Trump all walked into a bar.

Seriously.

On Saturday night in Manhattan, amid butler-delivered bellinis, sequined ball gowns and a five-course French service meal, characters from all corners of the Republican Party’s MAGA faction gathered for “a night of dinner, drinking, and love of country.”

Democracy gone Astray