Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Orbanism Rising

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“American ambassador’s frank memoir of Hungary’s slide into autocracy” – The Washington Post: Eleni Kounalakis, former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, reports on the once-promising democracy.

“The problem in Hungary, I realized, wasn’t just the rise of anti-Semitic, neofascist voices and acts. Hungarian society at large was responding to those radical voices with disproportionate silence and apathy.”

As U.S. ambassador to Hungary from January 2010 to July 2013, Kounalakis had a front-row seat for the implosion of what was once the most promising new democracy in the former Soviet bloc. Neo-fascists were elected to parliament. Prime Minister Viktor Orban presided over a rewriting of the constitution and the passage of hundreds of laws eroding the independence of the judiciary, the civil service and the media. […]
Yet the international response to Orban’s “Two-Thirds Revolution” was muted at first. For months, the European Union said nothing as one of its members disassociated itself from Western liberalism. Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, meeting Orban during a 2011 visit, took it on himself not to raise constitutional concerns after being spun by a sweet-talking deputy.

 

Logo of the right-wing "Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance" ruling party of Hungary.

Logo of the right-wing “Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance” ruling party of Hungary.

Recently on AFD:
Border fence politics comes to the EU (in Hungary)

Charleston: I’m out of new things to say

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Today I felt, for one of the few times in my life, like I finally had nothing left to say on a huge story in the news. The Charleston AME church shooting in this case.

I’ve written post after post after post on White America’s violence against Black America. I’ve written post after post on violent ideologies versus mental illness. I’ve written post after post on gun control and mass shootings. I’ve written post after post on Confederate apologism. I literally don’t know what else to say at this point. This happens so often — even just in the last couple years — and the facts are so similar that there’s no new ground to cover. Whatever I’d write on it would be hollow and a waste of space.

This isn’t a mysterious and inexplicable tragedy. It’s just the latest act of terrorism in a vast pattern that seems like it won’t end.

At this point I’ll direct everyone to Black authors and social media commentators. Anything they have to say is almost certainly going to be more worth hearing than anything new I could come up with. If you don’t know where to start, I’ll point you toward our columnist De Ana. Beyond her own tweets, her Twitter stream will give you a jumping off point to other voices you should hear.

Justice Kennedy asks us to rethink U.S. prisons broadly

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy not only wants the Court to hear a case as soon as possible on the constitutionality of solitary confinement, in the aftermath of the suicide of Kalief Browder, but he wants lawyers to start thinking more seriously about the prison system in general when they’re putting people there:

But Kennedy’s concurrence also seemed to be directed toward the American legal community, whose disengagement from prison issues he has previously lamented. “In law school, I never heard about corrections,” he told a congressional hearing on March 23, two weeks after the Davis oral arguments. “Lawyers are fascinated with the guilt/innocence adjudication process. Once [it] is over, we have no interest in corrections. Doctors and psychiatrists know more about the corrections system than we do.”

Although no one realized it at the time, his brief soliloquy on the crisis of “total incarceration” in March was a preview of today’s concurrence. “Too often, discussion in the legal academy and among practitioners concentrates simply on the adjudication of guilt or innocence,” Kennedy wrote. “Too easily ignored is the question is the question of what comes next. Prisoners are shut away—out of sight, out of mind.” Consideration of these issues, he stated, “is needed.”

 
I’ve been thinking about this (the theme Kennedy highlights in the quotes above) a lot while watching legal dramas. The lawyers on both sides plea-bargain in abstractions with no real sense of what they might be condemning the accused to, even for a few years. I don’t think it’s much different in the real world. Even a year or two in general population, let alone solitary confinement, is a pretty strong punishment, and I suspect many lawyers don’t think too hard about that.

Which is not to say that all prison sentences (or even most) are somehow inherently unjust, but rather that we need serious prison reform to ensure that prisons are actually constructively “correcting” and proportionally punishing criminal actions, without being excessive or abusive. We’ve got a hell of a long road ahead of us considering our society still thinks “prison rape” is a hilarious subject, not a serious problem, or that abuses by guards are irrelevant even when someone is serving time for a very minor offense because prison should be as harsh as possible.

We have a very destructive system that is killing people and destroying lives permanently, even for minor or non-violent crimes, without any consideration toward rehabilitation or even true justice.

Border fence politics comes to the EU (in Hungary)

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The anti-liberal far-right reign of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán continues, once again defying all basic principles of the European Union his country joined in 2004 after a referendum with overwhelming voter approval.

“Hungary to erect fence on Serbian border” – Irish Times:

Hungary plans to build a security fence along its entire border with Serbia to halt the flow of illegal migrants, despite domestic and international criticism of its handling of the issue.

Officials say more than 53,000 people – mostly Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans – have lodged asylum requests in Hungary this year, compared with 43,000 last year and 2,157 in 2012. Most file a request before moving west, however, and prime minister Viktor Orban has been accused of taking a harsh line against refugees to counter the rise in popularity of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party.

Mr Orban’s office said yesterday the government had ordered the interior ministry to “prepare for closure of the Hungarian-Serbian border by next Wednesday; this will be achieved by erecting a four-metre-high fence” along its 175km length.
[…]
Mr Orban’s government has also erected billboards around the country, with slogans such as “If you come to Hungary, you can’t take Hungarians’ jobs”.

 
Clever differentiation of his far-right party from the even further right Jobbik Party. He holds a huge majority while they are a minor presence. They’re essentially a stalking horse to justify his outrageous policies.

Fascist is as fascist does. Orbanism rising. 

Primary weakness?

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Thinking out loud on Clinton’s road to and through the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses.

How are we like a month into the Clinton Campaign and she’s already had to hold a “relaunch” rally? How are they still this mediocre at national campaigning despite 24 years of opportunities to practice and prepare?

It’s truly amazing that — just barely more than 7 years ago — her people were the ones trying to convince Democrats that Senator Obama’s team could never win a general election…when they couldn’t even win a nomination contest because they forgot to check the rules.

She supposedly has almost no opposition this year and already a month in she’s floundering enough to relaunch. True juggernauts aren’t this weak.

Australia now bribing human traffickers in anti-migrant move

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In his continued bid to combine the buffoonish incompetence of George W. Bush with the crass cruelty of Chris Christie to become the worst elected leader in the world, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has reached a new height: paying human traffickers to avoid receiving migrant refugees into Australia. That stunning allegation comes from both the UN High Commission on Refugees and the government of Indonesia, according to the BBC, and Abbott did not deny the charge:

Migrants on a boat headed for Australia have told the UN that the crew was paid by the Australian navy to turn back.

James Lynch, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), told the BBC that passengers saw smugglers being paid after the boat was intercepted.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Friday admitted using “creative” strategies to stop migrant boats but refused to go into detail.

The country’s immigration and foreign ministers denied payments were made.

“The boat that was rescued by the Indonesian navy on 31 May – we have interviewed the 65 passengers and they have said that the crew received a payment,” said Mr Lynch.

He said the passengers – 54 from Sri Lanka, 10 from Bangladesh, and one from Myanmar – were transferred to a customs boat for four days “before being put on two boats and sent back to Indonesia”.
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The Indonesian navy said it intercepted the boats on their return and arrested the crew, who said they had each been paid A$5,000 ($3,900; £2,500) to turn back.

Local police chief Hidayat told AFP news agency: “I saw the money with my own eyes.”

Speaking to Radio 3AW on Friday morning, Mr Abbott refused to deny that a payment had been made, saying simply that “creative strategies” had been developed to stop the migrant boats.

 
To recap, this appalling story means Australia used government funds to pay human traffickers nearly US$4000 each — not to mention bringing the migrants onto customs boats for several days before handing the people back over to the human smugglers.

Added: More, from The New York Times:

Richard Marles, the opposition Labor Party’s spokesman for immigration, said Saturday that Mr. Abbott’s refusal to clearly deny having paid human traffickers “leaves one with the only possible assumption that that may well have been exactly what happened.”
[…]
“Paying cash bribes to boat crews amounts to people trafficking,” Sarah Hanson-Young, a Greens senator, said Saturday in a statement. “The government does not have a mandate to break the law or a blank check to allow handing over wads of cash in the middle of the ocean.” She said Parliament had a responsibility to find out what had happened.

 

To the right, to the right

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Slate, “Democrats Haven’t Gone as Far Left as Republicans Have Gone Right”:

Today’s GOP is more conservative than any party formation in 100 years, versus today’s Democratic Party, which is only modestly more liberal than it was during the Clinton administration.
[…]
Among Republicans [polled by Gallup], 70 percent identify as conservative. By contrast, just 43 percent of Democrats call themselves liberals. It’s a substantial shift from the recent past, but nothing like the GOP’s conservative supermajority. Different data, from the Pew Research Center, tells a similar story.

 
And don’t forget the other big factor in consolidating conservatives firmly under the Republican banner and outside the Democratic ranks: The “polarization” resulting from segregationist / southern conservative Democrats quitting the party to join the Republicans in a few big waves in the past half-century.

Even just in the past few years, losses for Democrats in Congress came heavily from among conservative Democrats in the South (and the Mountain West to some extent), making the remainder more liberal only by subtraction, while noticeably strengthening the ranks of conservative Republicans.