Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Those who intervened

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It is the 20th anniversary right now of the start of the Rwandan Genocide. In Yugoslavia, in the same time span, there were many massacres and ethnic purges occurring as well, as the country continued to disintegrate over the the 1990s. (Next year will be the anniversary of the worst European massacre in postwar history.) There have been a number of compelling and important perspectives and accounts surfacing now, two decades later, from both episodes.

In Rwanda, there was very little outside intervention until the very end, when it was already over. In Bosnia and the wider Yugoslav conflict, there was some intervention off and on by outside powers to try to halt the violence, but it was generally too little too late. Certainly much of the external narrative focuses on those who failed to stand up — inside and outside the countries — to protect the innocent civilians. I think that’s important and justified, in that we should not forget and must do better. But it’s also important to remember and honor those who did intervene in these crises, at great personal risk — because their stories are the ones that remind us we could have and should have helped.

Here are two accounts I’ve read this week that I wanted to highlight. I’ve pulled just one paragraph from each, to encourage you to read the full articles.

Rwanda

Background: As the cowardly UN Security Council voted to start pulling hundreds of peacekeepers out of Rwanda during the genocide, a Ghanaian general decided on his own (for which he would be scolded by his president later) that he would not withdraw his last 454 troops from the country. They were young, inexperienced, and barely armed. The militias had already brazenly executed Belgian peacekeeping troops with impunity. And still the Ghanaians stayed. They are credited with saving as many as 30,000 lives, often simply by refusing to move out of the way and talking and talking until the militiamen left in frustration. There were only 5 casualties.

Excerpt from “Ghana peacekeepers remember Rwanda’s genocide” by Chris Stein for Al Jazeera:

The colonel demanded that they call their commanders, going back and forth with the leaders of the assembled mob for hours. The militiamen would threaten him with grenades, going so far as to pull out their pins in front of his face. [Col.] Yaache would pick the pins up off the ground and put them back in the grenades himself.

Yugoslavia:

“I Found the Man Who Saved My Family From a Balkan Death Camp” by Kenan Trebinčević for Slate.

Excerpt:

I realized that Pero never had the power to stop the massacres. Yet he’d carry our murdered citizens on his conscience. I could never forget: He saved my family. I decided he was a noble man trapped in a depravity he didn’t ask for. While I was a bilingual world traveler nearly able to move on, history held him hostage, keeping him from rest. I wondered for the first time if he’d suffered more than I did.

When is a disputed territory not disputed anymore?

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Obviously the simple answer to that question is a matter of when everyone officially agrees to stop disputing it, but that may never happen in some cases. So how do we balance the long-term geopolitical realities on the ground with the higher-level political concerns? That answer is not so easy.

Several weeks ago, I published a (disapproving) essay on National Geographic’s decision to transfer Crimea from Ukraine to Russia on its maps as soon as annexation occurred. Given the extremely contested circumstances surrounding the referendum to leave Ukraine, I felt this was overly hasty and risked reinforcing Russian claims without good reason, before the dust had even settled.

David Miller, a former Senior Editor at National Geographic, tweeted us his very compelling blog post on how (in the abstract, beyond National Geographic specifically) one makes a decision on how to map disputed territories, since it is indeed a bit subjective (as I had argued).

In “Crimea: A Map Controversy”, Miller notes the deep controversy over the referendum (held essentially at Russian gunpoint amid major boycotts), and then he lays out some factors to weigh deciding when it’s time to flip control on the map:

For accurate mapping of political sovereignty, the cartographer should consider four points: political claim, control of territory, international recognition of sovereignty, and time.

 
Let’s take them one at a time, as he does in the piece.

He observes that the governments of Ukraine and Russia both claim the territory. So it’s disputed, but anyone can dispute anything indefinitely, which means you have to look at the other factors.

He also observes that Russia must have military, political, and economic control of the region. It’s getting pretty close, but at the time National Geographic made its decision, the Ukrainian military hadn’t even evacuated the peninsula. It still hasn’t fully right now, I believe.

On the third point, he observes that there’s very little international recognition for this move and probably won’t be. Even Russian allies, such as Serbia, are hesitant to acknowledge the action for fear of de-legitimizing their own opposition to separatism and other neighborhood border disputes.

You rarely achieve resolution on all these points, but of course it’s about subjectively weighing them against each other before you color in the map.

Finally, the most subjective — and probably most important — factor to consider: time.

Time determines whether sovereignty is enduring or fleeting. Months or years may be necessary to judge a country’s claim and control of a region. For example, Morocco has claimed Western Sahara as a part of Morocco for decades, but its political control is limited and sovereignty is disputed. When Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, Iraqi sovereignty was disputed, and then it was overturned in 1991.

 
Outside the context of mapping, here’s another example that came to my mind on the issue of factoring in time: The U.S./U.N. abandoning its recognition of the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan as the “legitimate government” of mainland China, three decades after the ROC had lost control of the mainland to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Objectively, in that situation, there was no fundamental change on the ground or between the factions in 1979 that suddenly signaled that the PRC was more legitimate and permanent than it had been in, say, 1965. I’m sure certain political actions in the 1960s (such as the PRC’s brutal “Cultural Revolution”) probably didn’t help speed up U.S. recognition, but — other than Mao finally dying in 1976 — it probably wouldn’t have been any less arbitrary to normalize relations in 1960, 1965, 1972, etc.

All of which is to say sometimes in sovereignty disputes you really do just wait around to see how things play out and then one day you wake up and say to yourself “yeah, I think we better just accept this is the situation.”

That’s an definitely arbitrary and subjective solution, but at least giving a situation time ensures that it actually is going to remain that way rather than being reverse in a few more weeks. Crimea probably is going to remain Russian indefinitely and probably won’t be reversed back to Ukrainian control any time in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to change the color on the map to match Russia’s the second the referendum ends.

Miller’s verdict:

At this time, Crimea should be shown as disputed territory, which is usually a gray color on National Geographic maps with no sovereignty color.

 
But I do encourage everyone to read the full post, as I have only drawn a few bites out here and there, and he is a far more qualified person to speak on this subject than I am.

Thanks for sending it our way! If other readers also have articles/essays on the matter, let us know, or post a comment.
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Mozilla ouster a win for counter-speech

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The reaction to Brendan Eich’s firing at Mozilla shows U.S. conservatives learned little from the “Duck Dynasty” controversy.

If you missed it, the prominent computer programmer Brendan Eich recently became (very briefly) the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation (which makes the Firefox web browser among other things). After much protest — including, notably, within the company at both employee and upper management levels — he was fired due to his contributions to the extremely hateful 2008 California Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage in the state, in line with a viewpoint he still holds today.

This immediately prompted outcry by many white, (mostly) male, cisgender, heterosexual Christian conservatives who are convinced that — after centuries of de facto rule over the United States — any time one of them faces consequences for expressing an objectionable opinion, the world is ending in a torrent of unendurable oppression against them (even though they still remain very powerful in a majority of states right now).

In this outcry defending Mr. Eich they were joined by a number of liberal apologists who seem to confuse market forces, both inside and outside the company, with “censorship.”

Of course, no one said he couldn’t express or hold the bigoted views that he holds. They just said there would be consequences to holding them as the CEO of that particular company.

Considering that, in many U.S. states right now, people can still be fired for being gay without legal recourse, it hardly seems unreasonable to apply pressure on a prominent executive who holds objectionable and damaging views.

But more importantly, as I said before with the Duck Dynasty blow-up — wherein the cable network (temporarily) suspended (before restoring) the show helmed by a raging racist and homophobe and his hateful legion fans cried foul — according to the American understanding of free-speech, this cycle is exactly how the system is supposed to work. Just as their beloved Founding Fathers and Constitutional Framers intended.

Let’s circle back to this excerpt from my popular December post “First Amendment refresher (Duck Dynasty edition)“:

In contrast [with Europe], the United States has developed a much more libertarian approach to freedom of speech, based on the 18th century ethos of the Framers. They believed in concepts like the marketplace of ideas, where viewpoints could be traded on a free exchange. Early concepts from Adam Smith’s late 18th century work on the study of economics and trade came to be seen as apt metaphors for how ideas circulate.

So just like competition allows some providers of goods & services to rise to the top in real markets, the libertarian view on speech says that the best solution to problems like hate speech is to let it compete freely with counter-speech — rather than government intervening as regulators — and the rationality and supremacy of less horrid counter-speech will prevail.

Thus, if the public responds angrily to some idiot’s hateful comments, this is not an infringement of free speech. It is the system “working” according to the American principles of how the intellectual free market is supposed to work.

 
So as you can see, Brendan Eich made a publicly reported political donation (free speech, according to the U.S. Supreme Court), and then his employees, board of directors, and customers expressed their “counter-speech.”

Their counter-speech prevailed in this instance, but it often doesn’t, which is actually why many communication theorists have suggested the American system of handling objectionable speech is pretty flawed in practice (especially compared to systems that intervene more aggressively against hate speech by members of the majority against those in the minority). Usually, the ruling group drowns out the objections of everyone else.

Funny how many conservative Republicans get up in arms when liberals use market pressure successfully to stop the expression of certain views…but it’s ok when they do it, for example, against the so-called “liberal media” when they don’t like a sit-com’s “agenda.”

As Markos Moulitsas put it, “Brandon Eich was a victim of market forces, conservatives should applaud”:

Of course this is intolerance. Would Sullivan rush to this guy’s defense if it turned out he was a Grand Wizard in the KKK? Of course not. We are allowed to be intolerant of people who operate outside the bounds of civil decency. This wasn’t governmental action infringing on any Constitutional rights. This was Mozilla developers saying they refused to do work with a bigot, private websites blocking access to the Firefox browser because they refused to do business with a bigot, and employees of the firm speaking up because they refused to work for a bigot.

In short, it was the free market expressing itself. Eich was perfectly within his rights to stay at Mozilla, but he would then face a hostile market and eventually faced the reality that he couldn’t do his job in that environment. The free market spoke, and a free market enterprise was forced to react.

 
Even these days, you don’t have to go far to find a Christian conservative telling you that it is their “right” to be “intolerant of immoral behavior” (an actual statement I’ve heard). So, apparently, it’s 100% acceptable for them to be avowedly “intolerant” of LGBT folks, but it’s in no way acceptable for other people to be intolerant of them in return?

It’s almost as if the “free market” and “free speech” were only awesome when they were able to keep the ethnic minorities, gays, and women from participating. The moment it actually starts to become genuinely freer and slightly more balanced, then they’re suddenly being oppressed.

How to respond to Russia (safely)

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Arsenal Essay: This isn’t Neville Chamberlain in 1938. It’s the world NOT taking the bait of Serbian gunmen in 1914.
nato-logo-200The Crimea annexation has raised a crucial question: What is the world to do when a country with a large military and nuclear weapons decides to end a (voluntary, it turns out) period of non-aggression toward its neighbors?

For a while, the Soviet Union and Russia was so bogged down by the 1980s Afghanistan debacle and economic problems of the 1990s that it wasn’t in a strong position to intervene militarily in its European neighbors’ political affairs as it had once regularly done.

But by the mid-2000s, Russia’s military was back up and ready. The United States and the wider Western world appears to have mistakenly convinced itself that Russian non-intervention in Eastern Europe was due to universalizing of norms against such interference and some sort of implicit global check against it.

Putin doesn’t appear to feel bound by any of those norms, after all (though the United States has had an extremely iffy track record on that as well since 1999). For some time now I’ve been firmly in the camp that this has more to do with restoring the pre-1914 Russian Empire and little to do with restoring the USSR. I think Putin’s vision of Russia is a lot like the Russia that was a European power with an inferiority complex and a Peter the Great-inspired desperation for Europe’s respect but not its approval.

It also calls to mind the arrogant Russia that saw itself as the older brother (and divinely chosen leader) of all Slavs everywhere, whether they liked it or not — and the White Man’s Burden Leader of the near abroad (especially Central Asia, as we’ve seen flashes of again recently). We’ve seen the revived patronizing attitude of Russians who simply can’t comprehend why Ukraine wouldn’t want to be part of Russia again.

Of course — as I’ll return to later in this essay — that was the same “Older Brother Russia” with the largest land army in the world that invaded the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in response to an Austrian police action in Serbia following the Serbian assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 (and Serbia’s alleged refusal to hand over the terrorists).

Rather than the Slavic World-Tsar liberating the Yugo-Slavs (the Slavs of the South), it brought the world into a devastating war that collapsed four empires, including Russia’s.

But let us return to Putin’s neo-imperial Russia of today. The lack of Russian invasions in Eastern Europe in the past nine years — apart from the disputed circumstances of Georgia in 2008 — seems now to have been more out of the “goodness” of Putin’s heart than out of any real commitment to respecting the independence of the Federation’s neighbors.

Putin’s revelation is that the 1956 rules still apply no less than they did in 1956, when the Soviet Union violently invaded Hungary (an anti-NATO Warsaw Pact member) to preserve communist rule there, and NATO was forced to watch passively because it could not risk a nuclear war over the matter.

Does the current Russian leadership, like the Soviet leadership of 1956, have enough sense to realize that it can only get away with interventions in its “sphere of influence” or will he press his luck? At the end of the day, it’s at least partly a matter of voluntary forbearance, as to how far Russia pushes. But partly as the hawks are telling us, it’s also about whether NATO and the United States are a credible umbrella for NATO members in Eastern Europe. As in: Is NATO really prepared to honor its defense obligations to the Baltic Republics if Russia intervenes there too?

I don’t know for sure if we’d actually launch a war if Russia invaded Estonia, say, but I do know that the United States isn’t twiddling its thumbs either — and is working to make sure that doesn’t happen in the first place, so that we never have to find out. Contrary to Republican belief, President Obama has been taking strong measures to shore up NATO allies in Eastern Europe against Russian aggression. Here’s the New York Times on the moves:

Since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered troops to seize Crimea, Mr. Obama has become increasingly engaged, blitzing foreign leaders with telephone calls, imposing sanctions and speaking out more frequently.

To reassure nervous allies, he sent six extra F-15C Eagles to Lithuania and 12 F-16 fighter jets to Poland. Mr. Obama, who met here with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, will further bolster defenses in Eastern Europe by rotating more ground and naval forces for exercises and training in Poland and the Baltic countries; update contingency planning; and increase the capacity of a NATO quick-response force.

“Putin just declared war on the European order and it’s demanding that the United States focus on Europe again as a security issue,” said Damon Wilson, a former national security aide to Mr. Bush and now executive vice president of the Atlantic Council. While some Republicans have pushed the president to be tougher, Mr. Wilson praised Mr. Obama’s response. “I don’t think I’ve seen the president more personally engaged on any foreign policy crisis in a concerted way as he has been on Ukraine.”

 
This might not do much to help or re-assure non-NATO members such as Ukraine, Moldova, or Sweden, but we haven’t ever legally bound ourselves to defend them in the event of a foreign attack. The administration is striking a balance by re-affirming our existing commitments and alliances without drawing us into fresh entanglements that risk a World War I-style avoidable meltdown into war between major powers.

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This week in awful old U.S. laws

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A xenophobic 1907 U.S. law stripped U.S. citizenship from any native-born woman who dared to marry a foreign man. Senator Al Franken (DFL-Minn.) is trying to secure an official Senate apology for the 1907 law — which likely would have affected many women in Minnesota in the early 20th century after waves of immigration to the state — since it doesn’t seem to be possible to reverse its effects posthumously for those wronged.

In the early part of the last century, during the rush of European immigration to the United States, Congress stripped citizenship from any American woman who married a foreigner. The little-known Expatriation Act of 1907 stayed on the books until 1940, so even after women won the right to vote in 1920, those who were married to a non-American could not exercise that newfound right.

Franken would like the Senate to offer, through legislation, its sympathy and regret for passing a law “incompatible with and antithetical to the core principle that all persons, regardless of gender, race, religion, or ethnicity, are created equal.”

Franken’s office first learned of this blemish in U.S. history from a constituent who was seeking posthumous citizenship for his grandmother. She lost hers when she married a Swedish man in 1914. Franken’s office couldn’t accomplish that, so is seeking an official apology as the next-best commendation.

 
Here is a summary of the relevant provisions from the Wikipedia page for the Expatriation Act of 1907:

Section 3 provided for loss of citizenship by American women who married foreigners.[1] Section 4 provided for retention of American citizenship by formerly foreign women who had acquired citizenship by marriage to an American after the termination of their marriages. Women residing in the U.S. would retain their American citizenship automatically if they did not explicitly renounce; women residing abroad would have the option to retain American citizenship by registration with a U.S. consul.[5] The aim of these provisions was to prevent cases of multiple nationality among women.[13] Nevertheless, these resulted in significant protests by members of the women’s suffrage movement, and just two years after women gained the franchise these were repealed by the Cable Act of 1922.[5][14] However, the Cable Act itself continued to provide for the loss of citizenship by American women who married “aliens ineligible to citizenship”, namely Asians.[15]

 
The Supreme Court upheld these loss-of-citizenship provisions in 1915 (Mackenzie v. Hare) and said Congress could do whatever it wanted to native-born American citizens’ citizenship as long as it wasn’t arbitrary and there was a set of established rules that would result in loss of citizenship. Since the law clearly said that marrying a foreigner resulted in a loss of citizenship for a woman, the majority opinion held that women couldn’t complain if they married a foreigner and lost their citizenship as a result because it was “voluntarily entered into, with notice of consequences.”

Ugh. Props to Sen. Franken for trying to make things right.

Mocha Autism Network: Autism Awareness Month

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If, like me, you don’t support the “mainstream” groups involved in autism activism (some of them are incredibly problematic and damaging for reasons I’m sure I’ll discuss at another time), consider supporting alternative groups such as the Mocha Autism Network this month. They’re dedicated to presenting a different and more inclusive perspective. Below are some starter facts from their Facebook page:

#RoyalBlueForAutismAwareness

FIRST DAY FACTS:

  • 1 in 68 children are currently diagnosed on the #autism spectrum.
  • By gender, it is broken down as 1 in 42 boys, 1 in 189 girls.
  • Black/Latino boys are diagnosed as late as 2.5 years later than White boys.
  • Girls (all ethnicities) are diagnosed the latest.
  • In California, only 10% of pediatricians are equipped to provide Autism assessments in Spanish.

Join us in April as we provide the resources and information you can share to educate our communities

 

Resources to get involved

Mocha Autism Network
Website: mochaautismnetwork.com
Facebook: facebook.com/BayAreaMochaAutismNetwork
Twitter: @MochaAutismNTWK
Instagram: @mochaautismntwk
Google Plus: +Mocha Autism Network

Guns, symbols, sectionalism, and political communication

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Paul M. Barrett last week in Bloomberg Businessweek discussed the state of the (once again) failed “gun debate” following Newtown. He zeroes in on what might be termed the ‘narrative gap’ in the country’s divided political communication over this issue, which has prevented gun control policy advocates from achieving much in recent years.

This particular line from Barrett jumped out at me, in light of the research presented in my own book on divided interpretations of rhetorical symbols surrounding the American Dream:

For better or worse, gun ownership has come to symbolize a range of deeply felt ideas about culture and government authority.

This is definitely going to become a recurring theme, I sense. It’s partly a communication issue and partly a sectionalism issue, in the vein of the country’s original cultural-historical sections identified by authors such as Colin Woodard in “A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”. (Full disclosure: Though I own a copy of that book, I have not yet had a chance to read it. I have, however, read some of his interviews and extended essays drawn from the book, which I highly recommend.)

Essentially, some regions of the country don’t have much need for guns in a practical sense anymore — and historically never held the views about government that make some regions use guns as “emblems of liberty and traditional values,” as Barrett puts it.

To many people in the former places, which always tended to support strong central government, opposition to gun control — or more properly the concept of gun rights at all — is genuinely baffling because the two are basically viewed as unrelated.

To many people in the latter regions, which have always opposed or questioned strong central government (witness early nullification challenges in Kentucky, or South Carolina), support for gun control is genuinely viewed as tyrannical. Even if one doesn’t literally believe that gun owners would successfully repel a totalitarian government, many see gun control policies as a metaphor of other perceived overreaches. And the gun is a symbolic resistance against that.

So the real question is going to be how to bridge that chasm dating back centuries. A total failure to communicate means no policy change but increasing bitterness on all sides.

We’re going to have to figure out an alternative route that allows us to speak the same language on this issue rather than just staring blankly or angrily at each other. As Barrett says, it’s not going to work to just keep repeating facts and figures over and over while condemning the “liberty” arguments as paranoid and unrealistic. I’ll admit I’m guilty of that approach, but I can also see it’s not working.

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