Welcome to RICH.CO.KE - Satchu's Wrapup

Satchu's Rich Wrap-Up

Friday 30th of April 2021

Morning

Africa

Macro Thoughts

World Of Finance

“Derivatives,” Alvin said. “I don’t speculate about the future, I trade it.” @NewYorker

World Of Finance

And they were cross‑linked and interwoven and resold in large bundles, “future on future,” Alvin said, handing me a paper towel.

“Forget about the forces of the free market, my friend. Commodity prices no longer refer to any value, past or present—they’re just ghosts from the future.”

US #GDP grew by 6.4% annualized in Q1. Also, YoY GDP growth was +0.4%. @jsblokland

World Of Finance

The US recovery is weak especially given the size of the stimulus. @dlacalle_IA

World Of Finance

Conclusions

The Consensus View appears to be that the Global economy is going to accelerate big time and that its going to BOOM! I beg to differ

oing to accelerate big time and that its going to BOOM! I beg to differ 28-MAR-2021 :: I expect UST 10 YEAR YIELDS TO TARGET 1.45%

World Of Finance

US Sells Treasury Bills At 0% For The First Time Since The Covid Crash @zerohedge

World Of Finance

08-MAR-2021 :: The lights must never go out, The music must always play

World Of Finance

Bonne Nuit Mesdames et Messieurs @MeprisWb

Misc.

Home Thoughts

Misc.

Phosphorescent - "Song for Zula"

Misc.

Blade runner 2049 ~ 𝘋𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘴 𝘝𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘷𝘦 (2017) @Futura_Noir

Misc.

“Ours is the most cryptic of Centuries, it’s true Nature a Dark Secret” @SalmanRushdie

Misc.

Sunrise on Mars @sujithkumardola

Misc.

A Luminous and Fairy Tale feel

Misc.

Sunrise atop Kilimanjaro last October. @MITFlunkie

Africa

The Way we live now [vicariously]

Misc.

Peter Shaffer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun

Misc.

“Have you ever climbed a mountain in full armour? That's what we did, him going first the whole way up a tiny path into the clouds, with drops sheer on both sides into nothing.

For hours we crept forward like blind men, the sweat freezing on our faces, lugging skittery leaking horses, and pricked all the time for the ambush that would tip us into death.

Each turn of the path it grew colder. The friendly trees of the forest dropped away, and there were only pines. Then they went too, and there just scrubby little bushes standing up in ice. All round us the rocks began to whine the cold.

And always above us, or below us, those filthy condor birds, hanging on the air with great tasselled wings....Four days like that; groaning, not speaking; the breath a blade in our lungs.

Four days, slowly, like flies on a wall; limping flies, dying flies, up an endless wall of rock. A tiny army lost in the creases of the moon.”

Sunrise Aconcagua summit @grajalesnet

Misc.

Sunrise on Summit day Mt Aconcagua Chino Gonzalez @hstadventures

Misc.

Sunrise above Zermatt @CalumMuskett

Misc.

The Pandemic is a Portal

Misc.

She told him she dreamed about escaping. That was all she dreamed about. Paris, Texas (1984) dir. Wim Wenders

Misc.

Sunrise on Mount Kenya. Photo by @andreyjosephs

Africa

Kanye West - Touch The Sky (MTV Version) ft. Lupe Fiasco

Misc.

‘It’s feels as though we’re living through a frozen explosion. The shattered pieces of the world as we knew it are all suspended in the air...’ ARUNDHATI ROY

Misc.

Oxford Street Sunrise @annie_zermatt

Misc.

Edward Hopper “leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back,” Peter Schjeldahl writes. @NewYorker

Misc.

The Way We Live Now

Misc.

Political Reflections

Law & Politics

America is coming to fear that it may no longer be able to deter China @TheEconomist via @sunchartist

Law & Politics

28-MAR-2021 :: I expect China to occupy Taiwan before the end of the year

Law & Politics

That big thing may be that he who rules Taiwan rules the world @bopinion @nfergus

Law & Politics

China is "preparing for its final military assault" on Taiwan, the island's foreign minister has told @SkyNews as he vowed to "defend ourselves to the very end"

Law & Politics

In an exclusive interview, Joseph Wu said that China had "been conducting misinformation campaigns, hybrid warfare, and recently they have increased their grey zone activities against Taiwan".

"And all these seem to be preparing for their final military assault against Taiwan," he added.

"This is our country, this is our people and this is our way of life. We will defend ourselves to the very end.

"Taiwan happens to be on the frontline of China's expansion of its authoritarian order. And if Taiwan is taken by China, I think the consequences will be global."

Chinese military aircraft have been making almost daily incursions into Taiwan's air identification defence zone recently, with April being a record month.

This week, it also sent its Liaoning aircraft carrier on a course to the east of Taiwan - the second such manoeuvre in recent weeks.

"We are trying to safeguard the status quo that Taiwan is a free and democratic country, that Taiwan is not run by China."

There has been an increase in Chinese military pressure since September last year. Mr Wu suggested this was because of domestic weakness in China.

"Very often an authoritarian state experiencing difficulties will actively create a crisis externally to divert domestic attention," he said.

He has brought Hong Kong to heel, he is prowling around Taiwan like a Lion prowled around our Tent one night in the Tsavo

Law & Politics

Hong Kong passed a new immigration law on Wednesday that includes powers to stop people entering or leaving the city, raising fears Chinese mainland-style "exit bans" could be deployed in the international business hub -- @AFP @JeromeTaylor

Law & Politics

“Unity is iron and steel; unity is a source of strength,”

Law & Politics

“Complete reunification of the motherland is an inevitable trend..no one and no force can ever stop it!”

"The Dark Forest," which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.” @nfergus

Law & Politics

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.”

Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.”

Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle.

In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost ... trying to tread without sound ...

The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod —

there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people ... any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.

The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.

Law & Politics

The Ukraine – Taiwan Risk Connectivity @Convertbond

Law & Politics

09-NOV-2020 :: The demise of the Reality TV Star turned seriously vaudeville with Mr. Giulani mounting the last stand from the Four Seasons Total Landscaping next to Fantasy Island Adult Books

Law & Politics

The demise of the Reality TV Star turned seriously vaudeville with Mr. Giulani mounting the last stand from the Four Seasons Total Landscaping next to Fantasy Island Adult Books across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

“My take on Trump is that he is an inevitable creation of this unreal normal world,” Adam Curtis says.

“Politics has become a pantomime or vaudeville in that it creates waves of anger rather than argument. Maybe people like Trump are successful simply because they fuel that anger, in the echo chambers of the internet''

Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan Apartment Raided By DOJ; Electronic Devices Seized @zerohedge

Law & Politics

Raid on an apartment, 1957: #Parks @BeschlossDC

Law & Politics

The ISIS Beat | Why Caliphate and Everyone Else Got It Wrong @thedrift_mag @rozina_ali

Law & Politics

In March 2019, I arrived in eastern Syria to witness the demise of the Islamic State. The movement had been largely defeated, having surrendered major cities like Raqqa and Mosul.

All that was left of the Caliphate, which had gripped our collective fears for the past six years, were a few square miles of desert along the Iraqi–Syrian border.

The towns here appeared to be deserted. Car doors were left wide open, and clothes were still hanging on lines. Minarets and domes were etched with bullet holes. Concrete foundations of razed houses jutted out from the ground.

A trail of mattresses and animal-print blankets lay abandoned in piles on the roadsides. From the main street in Shafa City, I could make out a painted ISIS logo on a wall. Not a soul was around.

When I reached the outskirts of Baghouz, the sole remaining ISIS-held town, and the site of the group’s last stand, I could see people leaking through the crevices of a rocky hillside.

Women in niqabs carried backpacks and children, followed by the injured and the elderly, all of whom were surrendering to the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces awaiting them at the summit.

It turned out that there were tens of thousands of people in this small town, many of whom had fled other parts of Syria and Iraq to live here.

Who were they? Why did these families abandon their homes and choose to live in this sliver of desert where ISIS still clung to power?

These are not easy questions, and they require a deep engagement with the history and politics of the region.

But the welter of articles, essays, books, and films that has appeared since the group emerged — carving out a veritable “ISIS beat” in journalism — were less interested in the sociopolitical roots of ISIS than in portraying the group as a cipher for the otherworldly, for what keeps us up at night.

After a decade of the War on Terror and chaos in the Middle East, ISIS seemed to be the ultimate testament to an enduring clash of civilizations.

It is not that surprising that ISIS itself encouraged this fantastical narrative — but it is striking that our media took their word for it.

Until recently, the torchbearer of the ISIS beat was the New York Times’s Rukmini Callimachi.

There’s no doubt that journalism documenting the horrors of groups like ISIS, and the specifics of the devastation they’ve wrought upon communities, is vital.

However, by narrowly focusing on the savagery of ISIS fighters, we miss the deeper and more important story of how ISIS grew into a political force, and of how it moved not just the hearts and minds, but the physical bodies, of tens of thousands.

Even if Caliphate’s source had not lied about going to Syria and taking part in executions, what would his single story have illuminated about ISIS?

What would his adventures, bookended by the declaration of the Caliphate and the victory against it, have told us about what happened in those abandoned towns in eastern Syria before 2014, where ISIS rose to power with a degree of local support, and which we bombed and left behind?

ISIS made itself known to much of the West in the summer of 2014. The organization dissolved the official borders between Iraq and Syria, declared itself a state, and surrounded more than twenty thousand Iraqis, mostly from the indigenous Yazidi minority, on Mount Sinjar.

At the same time, the group’s fighters were barreling towards Erbil and Baghdad, threatening a bloodbath against Kurds and Shias.

That August, the Obama Administration launched airstrikes, first into Iraq, then Syria, drawing the U.S. towards another war in the Middle East.

Soon after, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of journalist James Foley.

This was the era that minted some of the most indelible ISIS images: Western prisoners in orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits, surrounded by rifle-wielding men in black.

Stories of the group’s atrocities emerged in quick succession, echoing the parade of violence ISIS was proudly broadcasting on its own channels: public executions, conscription of child soldiers, disappearances and murders of thousands, Yazidi girls sold into slavery.

The new regime induced shock and horror in Western commentators, whose responses ranged from the lazy (a CNN guest parroted ISIS members’ claims that they were “preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen”)

and the racist (a Fox host declared that ISIS-like violence by Islamists has been happening “for hundreds and hundreds of years”),

to the absurd (a CNN chyron announced that ISIS was luring women with kittens and Nutella).

ABC republished a world map with all of the Middle East, most of Africa and Asia, and some of Europe blacked out; claiming, without verification, that it represented ISIS’s five-year expansion plan. (Experts later determined it was likely fake.)

Explainers at the time offered a few cursory lines to describe locals’ discontent with their governments, but inevitably returned to the main emotive thrust, that the group was so ruthless that even Al Qaeda had disavowed it.

This frenzied interest in the U.S.’s darkly powerful new enemy lured some journalists and analysts to focus on the group full-time.

It emerged as a distinct topic from the Syrian civil war, whose crowded theater was becoming difficult to explain, or the Iraq War, now a nearly-adolescent 11 years old.

Soon, writers covering ISIS, what Wired called “the world’s most important beat,” developed a signature flourish, describing it not just as a terrorist organization, but as an almost supernatural threat.

“It is not clear,” argued a New York Review of Books piece in 2015, “whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.”

The author (who was granted anonymity by the Review and described as a former “official of a NATO country”) lists historical events that influenced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ISIS’s founder, and that helped spawn the group, such as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 uprisings.

And yet, the author concludes, these factors simply cannot explain, in any meaningful way, “the phenomenon of ISIS.”

It’s unclear why anonymity was necessary to make these points, but the article was a perfect distillation of how ISIS appeared in the public imagination: as a movement beyond human understanding.

The only sensible answer to so inscrutable and atavistic an adversary was total war.

As foreign fighters poured into the Caliphate, commentators abandoned their bewildered posture.

Graeme Wood’s seminal 2015 Atlantic article, “What ISIS Really Wants,” which sought to interrogate the group’s appeal, was based on a number of interviews with scholars as well as the group’s supporters and proselytizers around the world, none of whom had actually traveled to Syria or Iraq and joined ISIS themselves.

Referring ostentatiously to Islamic texts, these interviewees offered evidence of the religious underpinning of the Islamic State, which Wood argued shed light on the enemy:

“We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

Wood’s innovation was to listen to and read Salafi thinkers — followers of a puritanical strain of revivalist Sunni Islam — who tend to generate polemics and have left behind a canon of texts.

His deeper point was that to understand a group, we simply have to understand its ideology.

In a distinct but similarly abstract vein, many journalists and analysts started proffering theories about “radicalization” to explain ISIS recruitment.

They interviewed “radicalization experts” on the “classic radicalization process” and hunted for clues in recruits’ personal lives to understand their decisions to travel to Syria.

Even Psychology Today joined in, digging into the past of two young Americans who attempted to join the organization.

But, devoid of any political context, terms like “radicalization” and “ideology” lose meaning.

The New York Post, for example, published a piece about a French journalist who pretended to be a Muslim convert interested in marrying an ISIS fighter.

Over several months, she spoke with an ISIS commander through phone and video calls, and even traveled to Amsterdam so she could understand the network that moved recruits from Turkey into the Caliphate.

The writer never made it to Syria, or even Turkey, but her subsequent book carried the terror-inducing title, “In the Skin of a Jihadist.” What did it mean to be a jihadist, then, if the term could describe a woman who merely spoke to one online?

Even if radicalization spread like an airborne illness from person to person, it would explain little. And even if Wood was right to focus on ideology, his approach fails to answer the more important question:

Why here? Why now? Why did this ideology suddenly resonate in two Muslim-majority countries, and among a tiny fraction of Muslims around the world?

To begin to formulate an answer, we would have to explore the world in which ISIS arose: That would mean trying to understand the role of dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, and oppressive regimes like that of Nouri al-Maliki.

Under their rule, there were no avenues for justice; thousands were routinely disappeared or killed, and certain key tribes and families were empowered at the expense of the rest.

We would also need to understand the long history of foreign powers competing for control over the region: decades of imperialism, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Russia and Iran’s interventions, have irrevocably transformed communities in the Middle East.

Similarly, though ISIS opposes the Saudi government, the Salafi-Jihadi underpinnings of the group could not have gained traction without the Kingdom’s years of effort of exporting and standardizing a particular form of Islam across the Middle East.

What all this points to, uncomfortably, is that the current global order has left many people behind.

Despite the anonymous NYRB author’s claims to the contrary, we cannot dismiss such factors, because people on the ground do not dismiss them.

In late 2014, as the U.S. ramped up airstrikes in Syria, thousands of rebels who had armed themselves after the 2011 uprisings opted to join or align with ISIS.

Though Barack Obama had famously drawn a “red line” as a warning to Assad as his regime slaughtered Syrians, the U.S. did not intervene until ISIS was involved.

“All the locals here wonder why the U.S. coalition never came to rescue them from Assad’s machine guns, but run to fight ISIS when it took a few pieces of land,” one rebel told the Guardian.

Add to the mix material pressures like economic inequality and political marginalization.

Mara Revkin, a scholar who conducted field work on the Islamic State, found that it “could not have captured and governed Mosul for as long as it did without the compliance and active support of some of the city’s population.”

Through a survey of 1,400 residents in the city, she found that civilians were likely to stay in ISIS-controlled territory because, among various reasons, the “quality of governance,” including “availability of electricity, cleanliness of streets, and crime rates,” was better compared to services provided by the Iraqi government.

As Revkin points out, the Islamic State was adept at exploiting Sunni discontent with economic neglect and sectarian discrimination in Iraq.

Such sentiments echoed across the region. In late 2018, I visited the western reaches of Iraq’s Anbar province, near the Syrian border.

Until a few months earlier, ISIS had controlled the villages there, giving it access to a vital border crossing between Iraq and Syria, which allowed for easier movement of weapons and fighters between the two countries.

People tried to flee, and those who didn’t have the means or who didn’t want to abandon their homes resigned themselves to the group’s rule.

In the town of Anah, I met 30-year-old Hassan, who chose to stay when ISIS arrived.

Hassan was a day laborer who tended to his family farm and did odd construction jobs where he could find them.

His father had done the same, even though he had a law degree.

“There are no jobs here,” Hassan told me, explaining that the government only helped certain connected people. He had hoped that the new regime could offer a fairer system.

In parts of the Caliphate, ISIS did promise a different model, at least nominally.

In one piece of propaganda, the group declared, “The people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no difference between the rich and the poor and the strong and the weak. The holder of a right has redress, and the grievance of an injured party will be answered.”

In appealing to residents and new recruits, ISIS touched upon something familiar: the desire for justice, equality, and law and order in a world that has manifestly failed to deliver any.

Women, too, found opportunities under ISIS. In Fallujah, they used the regime’s justice system to secure divorces, which had been more difficult under the Iraqi government.

It’s difficult to cut through this sensationalism without developing expertise in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts or, more generally, the dynamics of rebel movements and civil wars.

Some scholars are doing just that, revealing a more complicated — and more interesting — story.

The political scientist Austin Doctor recently conducted a study of sexual assault by 143 rebel groups around the world, from 1989 to 2011, and separately applied the results of his analysis to ISIS.

He found a correlation between the presence of foreign fighters and increased incidence of sexual violence, which suggests that the Islamic State functioned much like other rebel groups — that ISIS is not so singular as it may seem.

Still, despite the growing and diverse literature on the Islamic State, the dominant narrative of the ISIS beat — in fact, the very existence of the beat — has helped obscure these layers.

This isn’t the failure of any single journalist or outlet; the fact that Caliphate has drawn actual blame makes it an exception that proves the rule — that mainstream media coverage of ISIS receives almost no scrutiny.

But many other publications and reporters have operated on the same flawed assumptions and premises as Caliphate, ones that animated the West’s understanding of the Middle East long before ISIS gained its first foothold.

In its introductory episode, the Caliphate podcast poses the question that drives its interrogation: Who are we really fighting? It was the same one that had stumped us twenty years ago, when George W. Bush first declared the War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11.

Bush’s swift military action offered a sense of certainty in uncertain times.

The ISIS Beat | Why Caliphate and Everyone Else Got It Wrong @thedrift_mag @rozina_ali [continued]

Law & Politics

“This is the world’s fight,” he declared. “This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”

However, as some critics pointed out, this new fight against “terror” did not actually shed light on our opponents; it only made their identities murkier.

“Terrorism is a tactic,” historian Michael Burleigh told a reporter, “so it’s a bit like saying the Second World War was a war against Blitzkreig.”

The enemy was ill-defined, and the conflict lacked parameters, ensuring a war without an achievable end.

But such critiques were rare. By and large, the media accepted the Bush administration’s framing.

By 2006, public criticism of the handling of the Iraq War was mounting, but even then, few questioned the legitimacy of the war itself.

In a 2009 study of media coverage after 9/11, two scholars from the University of Texas found that journalists “helped brand the policy, [then] labeled the frame as public opinion,” ultimately contributing to the acceptance of that frame as a “fact of life,” and a “larger narrative of struggle and heroism.”

Journalists did not treat the War on Terror as a policy decision made by the Bush administration, but as the natural and inevitable order of things.

What the Bush administration argued, and what the media accepted, was that terrorism is not a mere tactic, but a full-blown ideology — what Bush called “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” including “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.”

In practice, this means non-state armed groups not allied with the U.S. should be understood as terrorist organizations — no matter if, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, they have little else in common.

Although Bush was quick to differentiate between Islam and terrorism (“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam”), a core argument for the war depended on the idea that terrorism was, in essence, a form of religious violence.

“The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New York Times Magazine in late 2001.

“The words of Osama bin Laden are saturated with religious argument and theological language. Whatever else the Taliban regime is in Afghanistan, it is fanatically religious…The terrorists’ strain of Islam… surely represents a part of Islam — a radical, fundamentalist part — that simply cannot be ignored or denied.”

The fight against terrorism, in this conception, collapses into a morality play, a civilizational struggle of good versus evil — exactly the type of struggle in which we can’t afford to fret about the niceties of root cause and local context.

Obama seemed to offer a refreshing change, at least in rhetoric. He campaigned against the Iraq War, and as ISIS gained territory in 2014, he was hesitant to take action.

When he eventually dropped bombs into Iraq (at its government’s request) and Syria (without its request), he explained, “If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.”

He also insisted on calling the group the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” pointing out that it was a more accurate translation of its Arabic name. (Some experts argued it wasn’t, and commentators suggested the administration wanted to distance itself from its failures in Syria).

Two years later, Obama again attempted to downplay the “civilizational battle” narrative, claiming that ISIS was “not an existential threat to us.”

But, he explained, “We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”

The enemy was familiarly vicious. One CNN report from 2014 had described ISIS’s takeover of Mosul as a “Blitzkrieg-like sweep.”

As with other battles against evil, the “killers and fanatics” necessitated the dropping of bombs, an operation that Obama’s successor continued.

When I arrived in West Mosul, in February 2018, just two months after the fall of ISIS, the city was gutted by the torrent of American airstrikes.

High-rise buildings sat open-faced, revealing the lives of ghost families: floral print armchairs, frames on the walls, a living room floor spilling out into a pile of rubble below.

Many Iraqis were forced into white tents outside the city, while others tried to make a home amid the destruction and the decaying bodies.

The Manichean framework helps absolve the West of its role and its responsibility in ending an endless conflict.

“Terrorism” has become so synonymous with horrific violence that most Americans are likely unaware that the vast majority of civilian deaths in global conflicts today are caused by states, not non-state actors.

Massacres of Iraqi civilians, deaths of Afghan civilians by airstrikes, and indiscriminate detention and torture and rape have all happened at the hands of state security forces, including those allied with the U.S.

When American airstrikes hit a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Afghanistan in 2015, then-Senator Jeff Sessions justified the incident by stating the U.S. was waging “the good war.”

As the scholar William Cavanaugh has argued, “The myth of religious violence thus allows us in the West to shrug off any specific grievances that the Muslim world might have about U.S. relations with the rest of the world.”

the myth that we are in a struggle between civilization and savagery ignores that the West, too, is shaped by ideology:

“Most American Christians would recoil from the idea of killing on behalf of Jesus Christ under any circumstances, and yet most Americans consider organized slaughter on behalf of the nation — or perhaps on behalf of some ideal like freedom — as sometimes necessary and laudable.”

The U.S., Cavanaugh noted, spends billions of dollars annually on its military, more than the rest of the world combined, to kill in the name of the nation. (The Pentagon’s budget for 2021 is $740.5 billion).

If a war is a “good war,” or merely conceived of as a necessary one, it matters little why a terrorist group gained support, or how we may be inadvertently contributing to the group’s appeal.

Yet, while the current approach to terrorism has been wildly successful in building a cottage industry of extremism and deradicalization experts, it has failed to rid the world of terrorists.

In 2018, a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined that two decades of the War on Terror had only increased the number of militant groups across the world.

“While the United States and allied governments have weakened some groups like the Islamic State, many of the underlying causes have not been adequately addressed,” the report noted.

“Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian and other grievances.”

And yet this conclusion runs the risk of perpetuating the ills of the past — pitting states against militants, leading the U.S. to back autocratic governments as long as they are fighting terrorism.

If our enemy is everywhere, we will seek allies in even the most oppressive of regimes (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to hunt down “terrorists,” no matter if they are gun-wielding militants or political dissidents who believe that the current state of affairs does not serve them.

In spring 2013, in the face of months-long mass protests against the U.S.-backed Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq, security forces opened fire against demonstrators in Sunni-majority cities like Mosul, Fallujah and Hawija.

During the war against ISIS, the Shia-majority Popular Mobilization Units, partnering with Iraqi Security Forces, kidnapped, disappeared, and killed hundreds of Sunni men across Iraq, claiming they were extremists.

More recently, the government and Iran-backed militias have carried out assassinations of peaceful protesters in Baghdad and southern Iraq.

Almost always, the repressive governments used the language of counterterrorism.

Certainly there have been some critics of American crimes perpetrated in the name of the War on Terror.

But mainstream coverage continues to cast these acts as distinct from questions about the legitimacy of the War on Terror itself.

Such framing restricts our ability to explain the world today. If we portray certain enemies solely as existential threats, we sweep over the political conflicts unfolding in places like Iraq and Syria, and the political violence wrought upon these communities, even by those who claim to be fighting a just war.

Before I arrived in Baghouz, on the frontlines of the last stand against the Caliphate, I had been deep in eastern Syria, in towns and cities that were freshly liberated from ISIS and now under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the mostly Kurdish militia that the U.S. had helped create to secure a post-ISIS Syria.

The S.D.F. offers a remarkable vision to counter ISIS’s draconian rule — local councils, farmers’ cooperatives, and committees that promote the rights of oppressed minority groups.

In the village of Jinwar, a female-controlled town, the S.D.F. has built a commune for women and their children, both Kurdish and Arab, seeking to escape oppressive families and realize a community without patriarchy.

According to the constitution of the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the S.D.F.-linked ruling authority in the region, a post-ISIS Syria will be “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.”

In order to realize this vision, part of the S.D.F.’s mandate is not just to govern, but also to annihilate ISIS.

Several soldiers and S.D.F. spokesmen told me that the war against ISIS isn’t over — its aim now, with the support of the U.S., is to destroy sleeper cells and root out the ideology.

In the city of Manbij, I met the family of a young man named Hamza, a store owner. Three years earlier, in 2016, soon after the city was liberated, Hamza had decided he wanted to spend more time on his family’s farm in a village just outside the city.

He was only twenty-four, but he already had a daughter, and his wife, Basma, was pregnant with their second child.

Late one night in August, they were sleeping on the second floor of their home when they awoke to the sound of gunfire.

Masked S.D.F. soldiers rushed into the house, and then upstairs. Pointing guns into the family’s faces, they accused Hamza of being an ISIS member and took him away.

When I met them, Hamza’s family told me that when ISIS was in power, fighters frequented his store, and rumors had started circulating about Hamza’s supposed connections to the group. In 2019, they still had not been able to secure his release.

I heard similar accounts from others. One woman told me she had been searching for her son for three years; he had been arrested by the S.D.F. and subsequently disappeared.

Another told me that after ISIS fell, she elected to continue wearing the niqab, and one day, S.D.F. soldiers stopped her and her husband, took her husband away, and severely beat him — due to her clothing, she believes.

In Qamishli, I spoke with a former Arab member of the Raqqa local council, part of the S.D.F.’s governing structure, who described being intimidated into silence by individuals linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party, which exerts control behind the scenes.

Soon after the Coalition announced victory over ISIS, protests against S.D.F. rule spread across Deir ez-Zor.

The S.D.F. was not exaggerating the presence of sleeper cells. Months after liberation, in one town in eastern Syria, the names of local council leaders were compiled into a hit list and pinned up on mosque doors; in another village, two bodies were found tortured to death.

ISIS attacks continue in Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS has taken control over parts of regime territory in the deserts of central Syria, and slices of S.D.F.-controlled Deir ez-Zor province are witnessing a full-blown ISIS insurgency, underscoring just how central the question of governance is to the group’s appeal.

But the U.S. and its allies’ focus on ideology risks ignoring why ISIS gained support in the first place.

Raids and detentions, torture and execution, and governance that politically marginalizes certain groups and offers few options for justice or accountability will only build anger.

It is these layers of political and social contexts that are lost in most coverage, even if they will shape Iraq and Syria for a long time to come.

Twenty years later, the War on Terror as a conflict between civilization and savagery rings hollow, not just in light of the brutalities waged in our name, but also in the face of extremism at home; after all, weren’t the perpetrators of the Capitol Hill riots part of “our” civilization?

As the persistence of far-right nationalism suggests, ideologies cannot so easily be destroyed — even those we thought we had bombed out of existence seventy years ago.

Yet, the world refracted through this war (the “only one” of the 21st century, Bush hoped) has left us not just morally inept, but also woefully misguided about what is to come next.

Even if we cannot agree on what’s happened at home, there has been a bipartisan consensus that the War on Terror abroad is necessary.

The mainstream media’s critical posture toward the Iraq War debacle evaporated as soon as ISIS — which first reappeared in Iraq — burst onto the scene.

Even while Obama and Trump criticized the forever wars, they both expanded America’s military footprint and backed oppressive regimes for the sake of fighting extremism.

And even as the new Biden Administration announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, to “end” the twenty-year war, it will continue airstrikes and raids to tackle the ever-looming threat of terrorism.

We owe the countries we’ve invaded and bombed more than such a narrow lens of the world, a lens we’ve created. The question we’ve been asking, after all, has yet to be answered: Who are we really fighting?

One of my favourite photographs by Pascal Maitre. The photo is of a policeman in #Afghanistan fighting Taliban @abdu

Law & Politics

As @DrTedros the head of the @WHO puts it, Covid-19 is an international fire and, “if you hose only one part of it, the rest will keep burning”. @FT @gideonrachman

Law & Politics

08-MAR-2021 the ultra hyperconnectedness of the c21st World.

Law & Politics

A new record of nearly 380k from India² leaves the current global trend unchanged: global cases are growing at 1.6%/day. @video4me

Misc.

Countries w/ fast COVID-19 avg growth rate (daily / total) @Jmlukens

Misc.

#Cambodia: 6.40%

#Mongolia: 4.40%

#Thailand: 4.06%

#India: 1.76%

#Cameroon: 1.62%

#Uruguay: 1.54%

#Cyprus: 1.25%

#Nepal: 1.20%

#SriLanka: 1.09%

#Cuba: 1.09%

A virulent plague that “travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire”. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Misc.

5.68 million coronavirus cases were reported this week, the highest on record, along with 87,736 new deaths - WHO @BNODesk

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28-MAR-2021 :: We are once again entering an exponential escape velocity Phase #COVID19

Misc.

The Virus remains an exogenous uncertainty that is still not resolved though all the virologists who have metastasized into vaccinologists will have you believe its all sunlit uplands from here.

Glorious sunrise at the Borana conservancy @nickdimbleby @JamboMagazine

India 29 April #COVID19 snapshot: 386,654 new cases, 3501 deaths & 19.2L tests y'day. 7-day average TPR: 21% @RijoMJohn

Misc.

Health Ministry has identified 41 new cases of the Indian coronavirus variant in Israel, including four in people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19. @haaretzcom

Misc.

And the belief in Vaccine Efficacy is now bumping at euphoric levels. Folks I followed on Twitter for their epidemiological excellence now simply recite Vaccine / Inoculation data like a liturgy.

Misc.

“The variants are like a thoroughbred and our vaccines are like a workhorse,” noted evolutionary biologist Sally Otto.

Misc.

‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe @guardian @gdnlongread

Misc.

During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further.

From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans).

With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd.

“If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said.

“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back.

Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from the mass funerals in India’s cremation grounds is making the front page of international newspapers.

And that all the kabristans and shamshans in his country are working properly, in direct proportion to the populations they cater for, and far beyond their capacities.

“Can India, population 1.3 billion, be isolated?” the Washington Post asked rhetorically in a recent editorial about India’s unfolding catastrophe and the difficulty of containing new, fast-spreading Covid variants within national borders. “Not easily,” it replied.

It’s unlikely this question was posed in quite the same way when the coronavirus was raging through the UK and Europe just a few months ago.

But we in India have little right to take offence, given our prime minister’s words at the World Economic Forum in January this year.

Modi spoke at a time when people in Europe and the US were suffering through the peak of the second wave of the pandemic. He had not one word of sympathy to offer, only a long, gloating boast about India’s infrastructure and Covid-preparedness.

I downloaded the speech because I fear that when history is rewritten by the Modi regime, as it soon will be, it might disappear, or become hard to find. Here are some priceless snippets:

“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world.

It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said 2 million Indians would die.”

“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”

Modi the magician takes a bow for saving humanity by containing the coronavirus effectively. Now that it turns out that he has not contained it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive?

That other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being cancelled? That we’re being sealed in with our virus and our prime minister, along with all the sickness, the anti-science, the hatred and the idiocy that he, his party and its brand of politics represent?

When the first wave of Covid came to India and then subsided last year, the government and its supportive commentariat were triumphant.

“India isn’t having a picnic,” tweeted Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the online news site the Print.

“But our drains aren’t choked with bodies, hospitals aren’t out of beds, nor crematoriums & graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.”

Leave aside the callous, disrespectful imagery – did we need a god to tell us that most pandemics have a second wave?

This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. So where is the Covid-specific infrastructure and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech?

Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes.

Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find.

Parks and car parks are being turned into cremation grounds. It’s as if there’s an invisible UFO parked in our skies, sucking the air out of our lungs. An air raid of a kind we’ve never known.

Oxygen is the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange. Senior politicians, journalists, lawyers – India’s elite – are on Twitter pleading for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. The hidden market for cylinders is booming. Oxygen saturation machines and drugs are hard to come by.

There are markets for other things, too. At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers.

Online medical consultancies in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital.

Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations.

None of this conveys the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and, above all, the indignity that people are being subjected to.

What happened to my young friend T is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar stories in Delhi alone.

T, who is in his 20s, lives in his parents’ tiny flat in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. All three of them tested positive for Covid. His mother was critically ill. Since it was in the early days, he was lucky enough to find a hospital bed for her.

His father, diagnosed with severe bipolar depression, turned violent and began to harm himself. He stopped sleeping. He soiled himself. His psychiatrist was online trying to help, although she also broke down from time to time because her husband had just died from Covid.

She said T’s father needed hospitalisation, but since he was Covid positive there was no chance of that.

So T stayed awake, night after night, holding his father down, sponging him, cleaning him up. Each time I spoke to him I felt my own breath falter.

Finally, the message came: “Father’s dead.” He did not die of Covid, but of a massive spike in blood pressure induced by a psychiatric meltdown induced by utter helplessness.

What to do with the body? I desperately called everybody I knew. Among those who responded was Anirban Bhattacharya, who works with the well-known social activist Harsh Mander.

Bhattacharya is about to stand trial on a charge of sedition for a protest he helped organise on his university campus in 2016.

Mander, who has not fully recovered from a savage case of Covid last year, is being threatened with arrest and the closure of the orphanages he runs after he mobilised people against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2020, both of which blatantly discriminate against Muslims.

Mander and Bhattacharya are among the many citizens who, in the absence of all forms of governance, have set up helplines and emergency responses, and are running themselves ragged organising ambulances and coordinating funerals and the transport of dead bodies.

It’s not safe for these volunteers to do what they’re doing. In this wave of the pandemic, it’s the young who are falling, who are filling the intensive care units. When young people die, the older among us lose a little of our will to live.

T’s father was cremated. T and his mother are recovering.

Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not.

For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of democracy. The rich have been felled, too.

Hospitals are begging for oxygen. Some have started bring-your-own-oxygen schemes.

The oxygen crisis has led to intense, unseemly battles between states, with political parties trying to deflect blame from themselves.

On the night of 22 April, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram. The hospital issued several desperate SOS messages for the replenishment of its oxygen supply.

A day later, the chair of the hospital board rushed to clarify matters: “We cannot say that they have died due to lack of oxygen support.”

On 24 April, 20 more patients died when oxygen supplies were depleted in another big Delhi hospital, Jaipur Golden.

That same day, in the Delhi high court, Tushar Mehta, India’s solicitor general, speaking for the government of India, said: “Let’s try and not be a cry baby … so far we have ensured that no one in the country was left without oxygen.”

Ajay Mohan Bisht, the saffron-robed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who goes by the name Yogi Adityanath, has declared that there is no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state and that rumourmongers will be arrested without bail under the National Security Act and have their property seized.

Yogi Adityanath doesn’t play around. Siddique Kappan, a Muslim journalist from Kerala, jailed for months in Uttar Pradesh when he and two others travelled there to report on the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Hathras district, is critically ill and has tested positive for Covid.

His wife, in a desperate petition to the chief justice of the supreme court of India, says her husband is lying chained “like an animal” to a hospital bed in the Medical College hospital in Mathura.

(The supreme court has now ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to move him to a hospital in Delhi.)

So, if you live in Uttar Pradesh, the message seems to be, please do yourself a favour and die without complaining.

The threat to those who complain is not restricted to Uttar Pradesh.

A spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which runs its own armed militia – has warned that “anti-India forces” would use the crisis to fuel “negativity” and “mistrust” and asked the media to help foster a “positive atmosphere”.

Twitter has helped them out by deactivating accounts critical of the government.

Where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How many dead? How many recovered? How many infected? When will the peak come?

On 27 April, the report was 323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring. Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi.

The number of Covid-protocol funerals from graveyards and crematoriums in small towns and cities suggest a death toll up to 30 times higher than the official count.

Doctors who are working outside the metropolitan areas can tell you how it is.

If Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh?

Where tens of millions of workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to their families, traumatised by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in 2020.

It was the strictest lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their rent, no food and no transport.

Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died on the way.

‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe @guardian @gdnlongread [continued]

https://j.mp/3aNKuCI

This time around, although there is no national lockdown, the workers have left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still running.

They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist.

This year’s exodus has resulted in a different kind of chaos: there are no quarantine centres for them to stay in before they enter their village homes. There’s not even the meagre pretence of trying to protect the countryside from the city virus.

These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with Covid? Are Covid tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t.

Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference where India’s public heart should be.

Early this morning, on 28 April, news came that our friend Prabhubhai has died. Before he died, he showed classic Covid symptoms.

But his death will not register in the official Covid count because he died at home without a test or treatment.

Prabhubhai was a stalwart of the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley. I stayed several times at his home in Kevadia, where decades ago the first group of indigenous tribespeople were thrown off their lands to make room for the dam-builders and officers’ colony.

Displaced families like Prabhubhai’s still remain on the edges of that colony, impoverished and unsettled, transgressors on land that was once theirs.

There is no hospital in Kevadia. There’s only the Statue of Unity, built in the likeness of the freedom fighter and first deputy prime minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who the dam is named after.

At 182 metres high, it’s the tallest statue in the world and cost US$422m. High-speed elevators inside take tourists up to view the Narmada dam from the level of Sardar Patel’s chest.

Of course, you cannot see the river valley civilisation that lies destroyed, submerged in the depths of the vast reservoir, or hear the stories of the people who waged one of the most beautiful, profound struggles the world has ever known – not just against that one dam, but against the accepted ideas of what constitutes civilisation, happiness and progress.

The statue was Modi’s pet project. He inaugurated it in October 2018.

The friend who messaged about Prabhubhai had spent years as an anti-dam activist in the Narmada valley. She wrote: “My hands shiver as I write this. Covid situation in and around Kevadia Colony grim.”

The precise numbers that make up India’s Covid graph are like the wall that was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums Donald Trump would drive past on his way to the “Namaste Trump” event that Modi hosted for him in February 2020.

Grim as those numbers are, they give you a picture of the India-that-matters, but certainly not the India that is.

In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.

Try not to pay attention to the fact that the possibility of a dire shortage of oxygen had been flagged as far back as April 2020, and then again in November by a committee set up by the government itself.

Try not to wonder why even Delhi’s biggest hospitals don’t have their own oxygen-generating plants. Try not to wonder why the PM Cares Fund – the opaque organisation that has recently replaced the more public Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, and which uses public money and government infrastructure but functions like a private trust with zero public accountability – has suddenly moved in to address the oxygen crisis.

Will Modi own shares in our air-supply now?

Understand that there were and are so many far more pressing issues for the Modi government to attend to. Destroying the last vestiges of democracy, persecuting non-Hindu minorities and consolidating the foundations of the Hindu Nation makes for a relentless schedule.

There are massive prison complexes, for example, that must be urgently constructed in Assam for the 2 million people who have lived there for generations and have suddenly been stripped of their citizenship.

(On this matter, our independent supreme court came down hard on the side of the government and leniently on the side of the vandals.)

There are hundreds of students and activists and young Muslim citizens to be tried and imprisoned as the primary accused in the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place against their own community in north-east Delhi last March.

If you are Muslim in India, it’s a crime to be murdered. Your folks will pay for it.

‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe @guardian @gdnlongread [continued]