dinsdag 4 januari 2022

The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it

On the edge of civil war? The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both long-standing and accelerating. Illustration: Anthony Gerace/The Guardian

The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions

Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.

On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.

In Washington, in the winter of 1861, Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, declared that “not one man in America wanted the civil war or expected or intended it”. South Carolina senator James Chestnut, who did more than most to bring on the advent of the catastrophe, promised to drink all the blood spilled in the entire conflict. The common wisdom at the time was that he would have to drink “not a thimble”.

The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.

The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.

The United States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.

You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.

wo things are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.

Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”

Anti-government patriots have used the reaction against Black Lives Matter effectively to build a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting the blue lives matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if [anti-government patriots] had uniformly decided not to target police any more. But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.

Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times.

t this supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc – becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves powerless faster than their enemies can.

What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.

There will be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent; their ends were not.

It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.

The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to work for living people, rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their ghostly constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit people, not the other way around.

Does the country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work? Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so. America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.

Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans. But it is time to face what the Americans of the 1850s found so difficult to face: The system is broken, all along the line. The situation is clear and the choice is basic: reinvention or fall.

Stephen Marche is the author of How Shakespeare Changed Everything, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea and, forthcoming, The Hunger of the Wolf. He writes a column for Esquire as well as regular features and opinion pieces for the Atlantic, the New York Times and elsewhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Opinie: Bestuursrechters benadelen ook arbeidsongeschikten

Afgelopen oktober publiceerde de Raad voor de Rechtspraak een kritisch rapport over de rol van bestuursrechters in de toeslagenaffaire. In het rapport wordt onder meer geconcludeerd dat zij onvoldoende oog hadden voor het belang van de burger en dat zij te gemakkelijk de rigide lijn van de Raad van State, de hoogste rechter in deze zaken, volgden.

Dat betekende bijvoorbeeld dat de volledige toeslag werd teruggevorderd, terwijl het in kwestie ging om een betalingsverschil van 3 euro.

Diezelfde Raad van State liet recentelijk weten dat zij ook zelf niet goed heeft geacteerd in de rechtszaken over het terugvorderen van de kinderopvangtoeslag. Het ‘alles-of-niets-beleid’ dat de Raad hanteerde was onrechtvaardig en de ouders werden hiervan ten onrechte de dupe. De menselijke maat ontbrak en de rechtsbescherming van de burger kwam danig in de knel. En dat nota bene door toedoen van de rechterlijke macht. De Raad voor de Rechtspraak en de Raad van State maakten excuses en beloofden beterschap.

Maar dat is niet genoeg en verhult dat er meer aan de hand is in het land van de bestuursrechtspraak. Ook op het terrein van sociale verzekeringen, en dan in het bijzonder die met betrekking tot de arbeidsongeschiktheid, schieten rechters tekort. Ook daar zijn burgers de dupe van een weinig empathische en partijdige bestuursrechter.

Klachten

Onder meer een onderzoeksrapport van de SP (‘Ziek van het UWV’) registreerde het afgelopen jaar talloze klachten over de gebrekkige uitvoering van de ZW (Ziektewet), de WIA (Wet werk en inkomen naar arbeidsvermogen) en de WAO (Wet op de arbeidsongeschiktheids-verzekering) door het UWV.

Ik kan deze vaststelling aanvullen met honderden voorbeelden uit mijn eigen praktijk. Als je aanspraak maakt op een arbeidsongeschiktheidsuitkering word je gekeurd door de verzekeringsarts en de arbeidsdeskundige. Die keuringen stellen weinig voor. Het gesprek bij de arts duurt vaak amper een uur. Soms is het niet meer dan twee keer buigen, drie keer slikken en hoppatee, je wordt geacht aan het werk te kunnen.

De arbeidsdeskundige bespreekt vervolgens met je welke functies geschikt zijn. Met behandelend artsen wordt vaak geen contact opgenomen, terwijl die verzekeringsarts jou nauwelijks kent. Hij moet over jouw arbeidsvermogen oordelen met een vaak onvolledig dossier en een kort spreekuurcontact. Bovendien zijn verzekeringsartsen geen expert op het gebied van bepaalde ziektes en aandoeningen en de beperkingen dien daaruit voortvloeien.

Ten slotte, de verzekeringsarts en de arbeidsdeskundige zijn in dienst van het UWV. Zij zijn dus niet onafhankelijk. Het is een publiek geheim dat zij met (politieke) targets werken. Uitgangspunt: zo min mogelijk mensen de ZW, WIA of WAO in.

Bezwaar

Maar gelukkig kun je dan altijd nog je recht halen bij de rechtbank, zou je denken. Dat zou inderdaad het geval moeten zijn, maar de werkelijkheid is vaak anders. Wanneer je het oneens bent met het UWV en meent aanspraak te hebben op een uitkering kun je, na een bezwaarprocedure bij het UWV, de zaak aan de bestuursrechter voorleggen. De rechter is meestal goed op de hoogte van het dossier. Hij neemt dus ook kennis van het feit dat het UWV-onderzoek gebrekkig is, dat verzekeringsartsen geen experts zijn en dat zij, evenals de arbeidsdeskundigen, in dienst zijn van het UWV. De tegenpartij dus van de klager en derhalve op voorhand niet onafhankelijk en objectief.

Ondanks dat alles zijn bestuursrechters in verreweg de meeste procedures van mening dat er geen reden is te twijfelen aan het oordeel van de verzekeringsarts en arbeidsdeskundige, dat betrokkene volledig arbeidsgeschikt is en de uitkering stopgezet kan worden. Maar de rechter oordeelt daarbij zonder enig onderzoek. Hij neemt de woorden van het UWV, in het bijzonder van de verzekeringsarts, voor waar aan. Het verhaal van de klager wordt niet serieus genomen.

Kortom, de bestuursrechter neemt zo ongeveer over wat het UWV heeft verklaard. Het UWV heeft voorgekauwd, de rechter slikt door. Een beleid dat in de toeslagenaffaire voor veel ellende en slachtoffers heeft gezorgd. De bestuursrechter doet geen recht aan de argumenten en de positie van de klager. Het onderzoek naar het recht op uitkering door het UWV is al niet eerlijk, maar wanneer de rechter zich dan zo gemakkelijk bij de uitkomsten daarvan aansluit, is er geen sprake van een behoorlijke rechtsgang.

Partij kiezen

Dat steekt temeer nu de bestuursrechter geen arts is en hij daarom de vaststelling van de verzekeringsarts niet inhoudelijk kan beoordelen. Hij kiest onomwonden partij voor het UWV. Klager is weer de dupe. De kansen van klagers in een procedure over het recht op een arbeidsongeschiktheidsuitkering worden door het gebrekkige onderzoek van het UWV en de legitimering hiervan door de bestuursrechter, geminimaliseerd.

Het is aan de bestuursrechter zelf hierin verandering te brengen en inhoud te geven aan zijn boodschap van beterschap beloven. Bestuursrechters moeten een (medisch) deskundige aanwijzen wanneer partijen van mening verschillen over de vraag of betrokkene tot werken in staat is. Dan komt er in ieder geval een eerlijk(er) oordeel. Zolang dit niet gebeurt hebben ook klagers in zaken over arbeidsongeschiktheid te maken met een partijdige bestuursrechter. Het land van de bestuursrechters verdient niet alleen een frisse wind in toeslagzaken.

Jean-Louis van Os is lid van het Advocatencollectief Tilburg.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-bestuursrechters-benadelen-ook-arbeidsongeschikten~ba6ebc0e/

dinsdag 28 december 2021

In Keir Starmer’s Anti-Racist Universe, Palestinians Don’t Count

Keir Starmer is a racist endeavour.

by Barnaby Raine

18 November 2021

The reddened face of Labour leader Keir Starmer

My mother once told me that a book she’d found on my desk had radically altered her politics. Before Their Diaspora, by the great Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, features photographs of Palestinian life – bustling and serene, urban and rural – before 1948. As a teenager in Habonim, the “socialist Zionist” movement, and later as a volunteer on a kibbutz, my mother had been taught that these people did not exist; that Palestine was empty land when Jews arrived to colonise it, the terra nullius fabled by colonisers from Australasia to the Americas. If there were any Palestinians, my mother remembers being told, they were a tiny band of savages. It is eerie to know that atop the ruins of the homes and schools captured in these pages, different homes and schools now stand, while exiled former residents dream of return.

There is a tension in the colonial project. On the one hand, indigenous populations must be sufficiently subhuman to justify their destruction: “It is natural for a superior race to dominate an inferior one,” as Winston Churchill said. Palestinians were clearly one such “inferior” race: Churchill described them as a “dog in the manger”, and in 1944, the Labour party called euphemistically for the “transfer” of Palestinians from their land. On the other hand, indigenous populations are sufficiently human that their cleansing conjures shame. It is a memory that must be repressed. Israel’s current ambassador to Britain calls the Naqba an “Arab lie”. Harold Wilson claimed that Israel’s ethnic cleansers “made the desert flower”. There was barely anyone here before, just sand. Civilisation came to the wilderness.

This week, at a lunch organised by Labour Friends of Israel, Keir Starmer quoted Wilson’s chilling rendition of the old colonial cliché without embarrassment. He also called former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres a “comrade in the international struggle for equality, peace and freedom”. That same Shimon Peres said “I am at peace” after his army killed 106 civilians sheltering in a UN compound in Lebanon in 1996. He signed a secret nuclear deal with Apartheid South Africa. He celebrated the imposition of military law over Palestinians after 1948, stressing that the freedom to seize their land and homes would aid “Jewish settlement and Jewish immigration”, and called for “settlements everywhere” after 1967. He blamed Palestinians when Israeli forces gunned down their children on a beach in 2014. That Starmer called him a comrade in a speech ostensibly about anti-racism only highlights the colonial predicament. To coin a phrase, some people don’t count.

To most Israelis, let alone Palestinians, Starmer’s speech would have sounded bizarre. Israel is constructed by Starmer – much as the European Union often was by its British admirers in the Brexit debate – through a set of projections that fix an imaginary country with little relation to reality. He extolled Amos Oz, Yitchak Rabin and the Oslo process in front of an applauding ambassador who regards all three as dead. Starmer clung to old hymns about the two-state solution while praising Trump’s Abraham Accords (designed singly to exclude the Palestinians and normalise the status quo of occupation) and the current Israeli government, whose prime minister has repeatedly insisted that there will never be a Palestinian state. Its ambassador to Britain, speaking alongside Starmer, has previously attacked the Board of Deputies of British Jews for talking of two states. She openly yearns to see the Israeli flag flying over Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Consider the contrasts. Starmer spoke of Israel’s “lively tradition of debate, dissent, and disagreement,” and said the current Israeli government “is showing the difference progressive politics can make in power.” That government has labelled Israel’s six leading human rights organisations terrorist groups. It plans to demolish an EU-funded school for Palestinians in the West Bank, bulldozing 16 other schools too, while approving 3,000 new homes for Jewish settlers. For Starmer to single out the government that blockades Gaza, starving its people of electricity and basic essentials, as offering “humanitarian” assistance to the strip reads like a cruel and contemptuous joke. Palestinians are at best objects of thin pity (Starmer wants a two-state solution for them, after all). They are not human beings with voices: when virtually the whole of Palestinian civil society calls for boycotts of the state that dispossesses them, they’re castigated and dismissed. Colonial thinking works like class society, by coding people differently along a hierarchy of rights. It would not be acceptable for Britons to be treated like this; Palestinians, though, are playthings for other people’s political wrangles.

We live in an era of anti-racist racism. Racism today does not generally come cloaked in the language of the subhuman, but in the language of equality. No wonder such an age feels it urgent to attack Critical Race Theory, which claims that racism describes a social structure and not only individual bigoted speech acts. Black Lives Matter: we must kneel to say it, then defend the police forces that kill Black people. Texan rangers are probably invited to unconscious bias training before whipping Haitian refugees. The defenders of Enlightened Europe condemn xenophobic nativism while guarding Poland’s barbed-wire borders against freezing migrants. After the Holocaust, the anti-colonial revolutions and civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, we feel no awkwardness at rhetorically insisting, as Starmer does, on human equality while permitting and even perpetuating the facts of dispossession and humiliation that define a racist world order.

Grasping this post-1945, post-1968 novelty is important. Discourses of antisemitism are transformed by it, since embracing an antisemitic image of Jews as simultaneously outsiders and the apex of whiteness can now aid the defenders of a white world order to portray its war on the savages as an anti-racist crusade.

This is the precise racism at work in Starmer’s text, the racism that mocks with its talk of equality amid the endurance of racist violence. In refugee camps and emaciated bantustans, Palestinians are punished so that Europe can feel better about its centuries of antisemitism. An ounce of Europe’s guilt is expunged with each new weapon sent to disappear the Palestinian people. Every document of civilisation remains a document of barbarism.

Barnaby Raine is a doctoral student at Columbia University and a faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

https://novaramedia.com/2021/11/18/in-keir-starmers-anti-racist-universe-palestinians-dont-count/