Pages

▼

Is this how democracy ends? David Runciman

Image result for us democracy end
On election night, almost as soon as it was clear that the unthinkable had become a cold reality, Paul Krugman asked in the New York Times whether the US was now a failed state. Political scientists who normally study American democracy in splendid isolation are starting to turn their attention to Africa and Latin America. They want to know what happens when authoritarians win elections and democracy morphs into something else. The demagogue who promised to kill terrorists along with their families is moving his own family into the presidential palace. Even before he has taken up occupation his children are being seeded into positions of power. There he is on television, shiny and golden, his wife beside him and three of his children lined up behind, ready to take up what daddy has to offer. Here he is back on Twitter, unshackled by victory, rounding on his opponents in the free press. His ten-year-old son is still too young to join in, but he was by his father’s side on election night, looking hardly less bemused than the rest of us, as Trump delivered his notably conciliatory victory speech. Words of conciliation followed by the ruthless personal appropriation of the machinery of government, children in tow. Isn’t this how democracy ends?

It is not to belittle the crisis facing the American republic, and indeed the world, to say that these are the wrong questions. The US is not a failed state. How do we know? Because that’s what Trump said it was during the election campaign and he was lying. He portrayed his country as a place of failed institutions and widespread corruption, its inner cities racked with violence and its political class interested only in enriching itself. It would be a big mistake to think that he won because people believed him. Had they believed him they would hardly have voted for him: putting a man like Trump in charge really would spell the end for American democracy, because it would have left him free to do his worst. People voted for him because they didn’t believe him. They wanted change but they also had confidence in the basic durability and decency of America’s political institutions to protect them from the worst effects of that change. They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump. How else to explain that many people who reported themselves alarmed by the idea of a Trump presidency also voted for him? The Clinton camp made a basic error in choosing to target Trump’s obvious character flaws as the reason to keep him out of the White House. It’s not as if those flaws were hidden. For his supporters they were already baked in: harping on them did nothing except make it sound like the Democrats were crying wolf. If this guy were as dangerous as they say, would he really be a serious candidate for president? Yet he must be a serious candidate for president for them to be saying he’s so dangerous. QED he’s not as dangerous as they say.

This is the crisis facing Western democracies: we don’t know what failure looks like anymore and we have no idea how much danger we are in. The language of failed states doesn’t fit the present moment because it conjures up images that are completely inappropriate for a society like the contemporary United States. There will be no widespread civil conflict, no tanks in the streets, no generals on television announcing that order has been restored. Trump’s victory has been greeted with some haphazard protests around the country, accompanied by sporadic violence. Had he been narrowly defeated, and then refused to concede, the story might have been different. But even then I find it hard to believe that civic order in the US would have broken down. The violence would doubtless have been greater and much of it would have been hateful. But widespread armed resistance to the regime is still very difficult to imagine. The US is nothing like the societies where we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to happen in societies where the median age is in the low twenties; in the US it is close to forty. Its young people are far better educated, or at least educated for much longer. Its levels of violence, though high by 21st-century European standards, are low by any historical measure. Its frustrations are those of a country where all this is true and yet still things are going badly wrong. These are First World problems. That doesn’t make them any less serious. It just makes it much harder to find historical precedents for what comes next.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy-ends
Related:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~
Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace

Brothers in arms: Rise and Fall of Muslim Brotherhood (اخوان المسلمین )

Image result for ‫اخوان المسلمین‬‎
They were waiting for some divine intervention to save their reputation, which they had earned over the past eight decades. They waited for 40 days and were finally shaken. They were Brothers and believed they had acquired the rule in Egypt as a divine reward for their long struggle. In 2013, they had staged a sit-in across the country to provide political and moral support to the Muslim Brotherhood’s first president, Mohamed Morsi. It was an incredible event in Egyptian history which was broadcast live by local and international media, including Al-Jazeera.

Political scientists usually see the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in historical, ideological and contemporary political contexts. But Hazem Kandil, an Egyptian political sociologist at the University of Cambridge, has brought in another perspective to understand the Islamist movement, which is the spiritual element that glues the Brotherhood with its members. In his book, Inside the Brotherhood, Kandil mainly attempts to explore the sociology of the Islamist movement, which defines its ideological and political spectrum as well. But the most interesting part of the book is an explanation of the relationship of the Brotherhood members with the divine.

The Brotherhood members were confident that some divine help would come to rescue their government, but after 40 days, Kandil notes, they were visibly shaken by the absence of any such intervention. This is an important question for a political scientist to understand: why do ideological tendencies undermine the political discourse of a movement? In the Brotherhood’s case it is a structural issue. The movement is a unique case study because it nurtured a specific mindset over eight decades and kept its members in an environment that was conducive to transforming certain perceptions into beliefs.

Hazem Kandil’s book offers an analysis of the various facets of the Muslim Brotherhood movement
The initial chapters of the book deal with the organisational structure of the Brotherhood, including how it evolved its systems and created a close community. Many other Islamist movements across the world learned from the Brotherhood’s practices. The following sentence, which is used to welcome a new member into the Brotherhood movement, may sound familiar to Pakistan’s Islamist organisations: “One cannot choose to join the Muslim Brotherhood; one has to be chosen.”

This verdict is a foundation for the character building of a new member. Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, for example, constitutes five ranks of members. The first rank is muhibin or sympathisers. After initial learning, a sympathiser member can be promoted to the rank of brother, which has its own sub-ranks, and eventually becomes a member of the nucleus group usra, or the family. These ranks are stages of the ideological, religious and sanctimonious growth of an individual.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, had evolved these stages gradually. Before this, the Brothers had to attend a cultivating school, which was opened in 1928 with 70 students. As members multiplied, al-Banna organised them into small study groups. The members of the core group met every week, shared personal and professional concerns and lived like a family. The core group also ran the affairs of the movement. The members of the Brotherhood movement believe that this brilliant organisational method is itself a divine blessing bestowed upon al-Banna and the Brothers.
Image result for ‫اخوان المسلمین‬‎
The Brotherhood considers everything fair to achieve its ultimate goal. In the third chapter of his book, Kandil writes: “In the name of necessity, therefore, Brothers allow themselves considerable latitude.” He notes that the Brotherhood’s most frequent violation had always been disinformation and the irony is that they believe it is all religiously sanctioned.

The fourth chapter deals with the rise and fall of the Brotherhood movement in Egypt. In explaining the factors behind the slow rise and rapid fall of the Brothers, Kandil argues that historically, Muslim scholars and rulers coexisted in separate spheres. They sometimes negotiated, sometimes clashed, but mostly worked around each other with minimum friction. However, al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, whom he calls the Marx and Engels of Islamism, had come up with the approach to bridge the gap.

He also explains how al-Banna’s and Qutb’s different backgrounds contributed to shaping the movement. Though they were born in the same year (1906) in small villages and graduated from the same college, al-Banna had a religious zeal since childhood, and Qutb grew up as a Westernised secularist, and both operated in very different political contexts. Al-Banna started his work under the liberal monarchy of the 1920s, and Qutb in contrast converted to Islamism on the eve of the 1952 coup that led to the authoritarian regime of Mohamed Naguib.

When Egypt’s last monarch first dissolved the organisation in December 1948 — after documents were found about the movement’s militant wing and that resulted in the killing of al-Banna — Qutb revised the whole strategy of the movement. The Brothers responded to the ban and killing of their founder by supporting the coup of 1952. The new Nasser regime had lifted the ban and Qutb was hired as a cultural advisor. This was the time “when [the] Brothers decided to combine the doctrine of al-Banna and Qutb to adapt to their new environment: they would capitalise on the space made available to them by the rulers to garner popular support, while continuing to nurture their pious vanguard to take power when chance allowed (as it did in 2011)”.


Kandil also touches upon the Salafis-Brothers gap and claims that Wahabi thoughts influenced Egypt after the oil boom. The immediate response of the Brothers was “how to absorb the fundamentalist (Salafi) youth that had been active in universities under the rubric of a new organisation: The Islamic Group (Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya)”. Interestingly, the Islamic Group’s religious and political views were quite different from those espoused by the Brotherhood movement. Kandil elaborates that Islamic Group activists “had no elaborate theories about the comprehensiveness of Islam or the laws of history; they simply wanted to put pressure on rulers — as fundamentalists had done throughout Islamic history — to implement a few legal injunctions: prohibiting alcohol, outlawing usury, segregating genders, etc.” And when the Brothers failed to absorb them, they came up with quite an opposite approach. “Yet [the] Brothers realised that if they did not co-opt them, they would have to compete with them (as they did with their progeny in 2013),” Kandil notes. The Salafis and Brothers divide also helps readers understand how ‘pious’ Egyptians could turn against the Brothers in 2013 without feeling that they had turned against religion as such.

However, the major reasons behind the electoral success of the Brotherhood were its organised political and organisational structures. Apart from other reasons which contributed to the downfall of the movement, two factors were crucial. First was their strict political position: they failed to deliver because of their ineptitude at political bargaining — a skill they had never developed. Second, they attempted to keep relations smooth with the military establishment. Kandil describes how the Brothers dutifully avoided any hint of challenging the autonomy and privileges of the armed forces and even the president buried a fact-finding commission report detailing security abuses during the 18-day uprising. One can justify their accommodative approach giving the reason that the Brothers had earned the right to rule after eight-and-a-half decades of spiritual purification and socio-political toil. They adopted the appeasement policy with the armed forces, but at the same time their major focus was to regulate public morality, foil global conspiracies against Islam, and eventually secure worldwide hegemony. For this purpose they needed an army, which they did not have, and counted instead on divine support to boost their ranks.

The last chapter of the book focuses on Islamism in Egypt and beyond, and provides a comparative analysis of Islamist movements in different regions. Overall this is a comprehensive study of a contemporary Islamist movement, which could also help in understanding the violent expressions of other Islamist movements.

The reviewer is a security analyst and director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), Islamabad.

Inside the Brotherhood: (SOCIO-POLITICS) By Hazem Kandil, Polity Press, UK, ISBN: 978-0745682914, 240pp. Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 20th, 2016
Source: http://www.dawn.com/news/1297506/brothers-in-arms

Related:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~
Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace

These 63 Websites Will Make You Incredibly Smarter

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” — Albert Einstein



Learning should not end after formal education. Lifelong learning, the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge can enrich your understanding of different topics and make you a better person every day. Your career, personal life, and total well-being will never be the same if you can commit to some of these awesome resources.
Peace Forum - : Knowledge, Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Tolerance, Peace
1/ BBC — Future — In-depth coverage of science, health and technology
2/ 5-minute Drops: Learn a new language for no more than 5 minutes per day.
3/ Makezine: DIY projects, how-Tos, electronics, crafts and ideas for makers.
4/ Peace-Forum: Knowledge, Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Tolerance, Peace
5/ Daily Bits Of: Learn anything, anywhere, with daily courses via email.
6/ Skillshare for Mobile: Learn just about anything.
7/ Medium: Don’t miss the amazing pieces here every week.
8/ The School of Life: A place that tries to answer the great questions of life with the help of culture.
9/ Chalk Street: Learn the things that are important to you.
10/ Guides.co: Modern “How To” guides.
11/ University of Reddit: Learn 1,000’s of new things, from reddit.
12/ Highbrow: Expand your knowledge universe in just 5 minutes a day.
13/ InstaNerd: Be smart, instantly.
14/ Degreed: A lifelong learning platform.
15/ Daily Curiosity: Get informed with 5 new amazing
topics, delivered daily.
16/ Lrn: Learn to code at your convenience.
17/ Flowkey: The easiest way to learn piano.
18/ Big Think: Articles and videos featuring expert “Big Thinkers.”
19/ Code School: Learn to code by doing
20/ Lookmunk: Find the best websites to learn something new everyday!
21/ Greatist: Real facts and doable steps for your happiest life
22/ 99U (YouTube) — Actionable insights on productivity, organization, and leadership to help creative people push ideas forward.
23/ Youtube EDU — The education videos that unlock knowledge.
24/ WikiWand — A slick new interface for Wikipedia.
25/ The long read (The Guardian) — In-depth reporting, essays and profiles.
26/ TED Ideas— Insighful essays on creativity, ideas and global issues.
27/ iTunes U — Learning on the go, from some of the world’s top universities.
28/ InsightfulQuestions (subreddit) — Intellectual discussions that are not necessarily genre-specific.
29/ Cerego — Cerego helps you build personalized study plans based on your strengths and weaknesses to retain knowledge.
30/ University of the People — Tuition-free online university that offers higher education in multiple course streams.
31/ OpenSesame — Marketplace for online training, now with 22,000+ courses.
32/ CreativeLive — Take free creative classes from the world’s top experts.
33/ Thinkful — 1-on-1 coding mentorship to help advance your career.
34/ Zidbits: Huge collection of fun facts, weird news, and articles on a variety of topics.
35/ Quora — You ask, the net discusses — with top experts and fascinatingback and forth on everything.
16. Digital Photography School — Read through this goldmine of articles to improve your photography skills.
36/ Scientific American: Explores issues that matter including the human mind, earth, and space.
37/ Brain Pickings — Insightful long form posts on life, art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more.
38/ Peer 2 Peer University or P2PU, is an open educational project that helps you learn at your own pace.
39/ MIT Open CourseWare is a catalog of free online courses and learning resources offered by MIT.
40/ Gibbon — This is the ultimate playlist for learning.
41/ Investopedia — Learn everything you need to know about the world of investing, markets, and personal finance.
42/ Udacity offers interactive online classes and courses in higher education.
43/ Mozilla Developer Network offers detailed documentation and learning resources for web developers.
44/ Future learn — enjoy free online courses from top universities and specialist organisations.
45/ Google Scholar — provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
47/ Brain Pump — A place to learn something new everyday.
47/ Mental Floss — Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and brain teaser games.
48/ Learnist — Learn from expertly curated web, print and video content.
49/ DataCamp — Learn data science online.
50/ edX — Take online courses from the world’s best universities.
51/ CoffeeStrap: Learn a language by meeting cool people.
52/ Coursmos — Take a micro-course anytime you want, on any device.
53/ Platzi — Live streaming classes on design, marketing and code.
54/ Alison: Free online courses from the world’s top publishers.
55/ Course Buffet: Find and compare hundreds of free online courses.
56/ Now I Know: Learn something new every day, via email.
57/ Curious: Play the game of lifelong learning.
58/ Memrise: Learning, made joyful.
59/ Snapguide: How-to guides on all your favourite topics.
60/ 99U: Actionable insights on productivity and creativity.
61/ Nautilus: A magazine on science, culture, and philosophy for the intellectually curious.
62/ Aeon: A magazine of ideas and culture.
63/ Psychology Today is devoted exclusively to everybody’s favorite subject: Ourselves.
What is your favourite learning website or app that is not on this list?
If you enjoyed this post, you will love Peace Forum. It’s my FREE  digest of the best productivity, life and life improvement posts from around the web. It challenges you to become the best version of yourself.
The-pleasures-of-seeking-knowledge:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~
Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace

 For Trump, Pakistan And Afghanistan Pose Challenges Without Easy Solutions


When Donald Trump finally has his feet under the desk in the Oval Office and opens the files marked "Afghanistan" and "Pakistan," he will find much to worry about.

Relations between Pakistan and India, which both have big nuclear arsenals, are in crisis. These days, their armies regularly trade shots along the Line of Control, the de facto border in disputed Kashmir — sometimes with fatal consequences.

Fears abound that Afghanistan could melt down into violent chaos that could spill beyond its boundaries.

Islamist militant groups that pose a global threat are establishing fresh roots in the region, despite a crackdown following the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pakistan's army has driven out the local Taliban from the mountains bordering Afghanistan, but other homegrown militants whom it uses as proxies in neighborhood conflicts are allowed to move freely.

This is not a region can safely be ignored by the world's biggest superpower. Yet tackling this long list of problems (and there are others) is a mammoth task.

Policymakers in the region have little idea how the inexperienced Trump and his team will approach this, and are anxiously rooting around for clues.

Article continues after sponsorship
Within Afghanistan's government, concern is now sure to focus on whether Trump's generally isolationist outlook will prompt him to withdraw the remaining U.S. troops now supporting Afghan security forces in their widening fight against the Taliban.

U.S. troops remain

President Obama has said he intends to keep 8,400 forces there until his term ends. If Trump pulls these out, many Afghans worry their government will collapse.

Although Trump has not said much in detail about foreign policy, he has made clear that he objects to American taxpayers' money being squandered in faraway lands. He will find the record of massive, endemic corruption in Afghanistan particularly hard to swallow.

Pakistanis are bracing themselves for a rough ride. There is speculation that Trump, backed by a Republican-led Congress, will take a tougher line with the civilian and military leadership, focusing narrowly on U.S. security interests, and demanding tangible results in curbing jihadist activity if aid dollars are to continue to flow.

Trump may well demand that Pakistan finally acts decisively against all Islamist militant organizations operating from its soil, including the Haqqani network in Afghanistan and the anti-India jihadist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

This will likely go down badly within Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence establishment. However, the country's progressive minority has long been calling for these groups to be shut down.

"A blessing in disguise for Pakistan?" asked a front-page headline in the English daily Express Tribune over an article speculating that dealings with Donald Trump will be more transparent.

Pakistan tries to assess Trump

Once he gets down to work, Trump will swiftly discover that words matter greatly on the global stage and can easily backfire if they are not selected with care. Trump's campaign threat to ban Muslims from entering the United States, albeit temporarily, will not be forgotten anywhere in the Islamic world.

"Very few would argue that Trump's success is because of the overt racism present in his speeches or the misogynistic remarks that were uncovered later," said an editorial in Thursday's Daily Times. However, the paper described his election as "a commentary...on the tolerance for intolerance in the U.S. nation."

Trump's recent expressions of friendship with India also caused disapproving frowns in Pakistan. The U.S. has been tilting towards New Delhi for a long time — not least because it sees India as a counterweight to China. But any sign that this friendship is getting even cozier will stir alarm in Islamabad.

However, Pakistanis will have also taken note that Trump said in his acceptance speech that he wants to "get along with all other nations willing to get along with us."

Pragmatism and self-interest defines everything. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif sent Trump an enthusiastic message of congratulation, saying his "momentous success" is a testimony to the confidence Americans have in his "leadership and vision," and inviting him to Pakistan at the earliest opportunity.

This was further evidence that Islamabad's relations with Washington, though marred by squabbles and suspicion, are remarkably durable. They survive because they have to.

U.S. concerns about key security issues — Afghanistan, Islamist groups, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, the risk of an India-Pakistan war — mean that it must remain engaged. So, too, must Pakistan. While Islamabad attaches great importance to its deepening economic ties with neighboring China, it also fears being cold-shouldered and ignored by the West, and is reluctant to lose U.S. aid dollars. The U.S. has given billions to Pakistan, one of Washington's top recipients of military aid and economic assistance.

Managing this relationship requires skill and guile on both sides. Can Trump do it? Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, thinks Trump's inexperience in foreign affairs could work in the relationship's favor, though "with troubling implications for U.S. interests," he said.

"Trump may well take at face value the Pakistan military's constant reassurances that the country is acting against all terror groups, even though we know this is untrue. Pakistan has been known to talk a big game with American interlocutors, and only the more seasoned U.S. diplomats and officials can separate the fiction from the reality," he said.

"In effect, Pakistan knows how to play the Americans, and they really could play Trump well, to the point that he concludes Pakistan is doing all the right things on terror. This is why it's critical that the Trump White House has knowledgeable foreign policy officials."
By Philip Reeves, npr.org

Related:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~
Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace