Pakistan’s Role in India’s Elections

Indian ministers accuse Pakistan of terrorism, hinting at potential military action, leveraging ambiguity for political gain

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

April 16, 2024

 

4 mins read

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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to his supporters as he arrives to attend a rally in Guwahati, India, February 4, 2024. [ Photo: REUTERS/Anuwar Hazarika/File Photo]

INDIA’S ROLE IN EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLINGS

Recently the Guardian reported on allegations that India’s government had orchestrated as many as 20 extrajudicial killings in Pakistan since 2020, targeting suspected terrorists. The allegations may give ammunition to critics abroad concerned about signals of India’s increasing willingness to resort to carrying out assassinations overseas, following developments in Canada and the United States last year. But at home, with national elections set to begin next week, the Guardian report will provide a boost to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It validates the ruling party’s boasts about taking a tough line on Pakistan, which play well politically in India.

DOES PAKISTAN AID ANTI-INDIAN MILITANT GROUPS?

The report also validates long-standing claims by India, as well as the United States, that Pakistan sponsors or at least gives free rein to militant groups within its borders. In February 2019, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a Pakistan-based terrorist group, attacked a military convoy in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 40 soldiers. India retaliated with airstrikes against what it said were terrorist bases in Pakistan. The crisis became a dominant theme during India’s elections that year. The BJP slammed Pakistan and accused the political opposition of helping Islamabad by demanding proof that the Indian strikes hit their stated targets.

PAKISTAN’S ANTI-INDIAN ATTITUDE HELPED NARENDRA MODI TO WIN ELECTION.

The BJP handily won the 2019 vote, and India has since maintained a hard line against its neighbor and rival. Its decision to revoke the special autonomous status of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 was excoriated by Pakistan. Despite a 2021 border truce, Modi has largely refused to engage with Islamabad during his second term. And India has conditioned formal dialogue on Pakistan taking action against terrorists on its soil who target India. Unsurprisingly, BJP leaders have returned to the 2019 crisis on the campaign trail this year. This week, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath declared that Pakistan is “frightened” because “they know that the new India … storms into their country through airstrikes and kills terrorists.” Tellingly, India has said little about the Guardian report. Local media have quoted the External Affairs Ministry saying that allegations of extrajudicial killings are “false and malicious anti-India propaganda,” only repeating previous statements. But when questioned directly about the latest allegations, senior Indian officials have not denied them.

This week, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke of Western media bias and blamed Pakistan for harboring terrorists. But Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said that if “terrorists run away to Pakistan, we will enter Pakistan to kill them.” This ambiguous response will likely reap political benefits. It encourages voters to respond to the allegations in one of two ways: to reject them as Western propaganda against the BJP or to accept them as proof of the ruling party’s muscular tactics against Pakistani threats. The Guardian report helps the BJP politically in other ways.

First, it counters criticism—often voiced by the opposition—that India’s strength abroad is compromised by its struggle to counter growing Chinese threats, from border incursions to naval power projection. Some Modi critics may also applaud India taking out terrorists in Pakistan; counterterrorism is a decidedly less divisive issue among the electorate than the BJP’s Hindu nationalism. Given his popularity and the weak and divided opposition, Modi is poised to win a third straight term this year and doesn’t seem to need another political gift. Still, anything helps, and the BJP can exploit the latest report to back up its claims of acting with strength abroad to advance its security interests and to showcase its tough stance against Pakistan. Her Power 2024 is here! On April 18th explore how economic empowerment for women is economic empowerment for the world.

PAKISTANI PRIME MINISTER VISITS SAUDI ARABIA

Recently Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Saudi Arabia, marking his first overseas trip since returning to power in March. Saudi Arabia is one of Pakistan’s closest allies, although the relationship hasn’t always been easy. In 2020, the two sides sparred over Riyadh’s position on the Kashmir dispute, and India’s growing ties with Saudi Arabia pose a challenge as well. But currently, ties between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are warm, and Sharif’s trip went well. The visit yielded a significant commitment to expedite a $5 billion investment package to Pakistan. Islamabad’s Special Investment Facilitation Council has prioritized securing funding from the Arab Gulf states, which will be a major focus of the Sharif era: Both he and his brother, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, have close personal ties to Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani economy has recently stabilized a bit. Although inflation remains high, it has come down in recent months, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal last year gave the economy some breathing room. Additional IMF funds will likely be released in the coming weeks. But debt remains high, and Pakistan’s currency continues to perform poorly—making Saudi funding even more important. Indian court rejects opposition appeal.

ARVIND KEJIWAL’S APPEAL REJECTED BY DELHI HIGH COURT

 Delhi High Court rejected an appeal against the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and an opposition leader with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which governs nearby Punjab as well. Kejriwal was detained last month on corruption charges, which the AAP and other opposition groups have rejected. The court said Kejriwal’s arrest “cannot be termed as illegal.” In a separate ruling last week, Kejriwal was ordered to be kept in jail until April 15, four days before India’s elections begin. The AAP, which has two other top leaders detained on similar charges, reacted angrily to Tuesday’s news and has vowed to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, India’s largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, is dealing with its own travails, including heavy penalties for tax violations, which the party has rejected as a state attempt to weaken its finances before the elections. These moves, which critics say undermine India’s electoral playing field, are unlikely to hurt Modi at the polls.

 

President Putin’s Red Line of Warning to The Western Powers

Russia is seeking longer-term security guarantees from the Alliance that Ukraine will not be admitted as a Member State and that NATO military infrastructure will not be deployed in the country.

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

April 8, 2024

 

7 mins read

 

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they arrive for the U.S.-Russia summit at Villa La Grange in Geneva, Switzerland, June 16, 2021. [File Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]

President Putin seldom appeared in public since the pandemic began. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the West not to cross a “red line” with Russia, saying such a move would trigger an “asymmetrical, rapid, and harsh” response. The warning came in his annual state of the nation address, amid heightened tension with the West over Ukraine and jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny. President Putin said Western powers were constantly trying to “pick on” Russia. Police have detained nearly 100 Navalny supporters rallying in several cities.

Hundreds staged pro-Navalny protests on Wednesday in eastern cities including Vladivostok, Irkutsk, and Krasnoyarsk. The authorities have declared them illegal. The anti-corruption campaigner is being treated at a prison hospital in Vladimir, about 180 km (112 miles) east of Moscow. He is on hunger strike, and his allies say his life is in danger. In central Moscow, police cordoned off the area around Manezh exhibition hall, where Putin addressed both houses of parliament. Navalny supporters planned to rally in the area. “No to war, repression, and torture”: A pro-Navalny march in Vladivostok. Two close aides to Navalny were among those detained.

BELARUS ‘COUP PLOT’

Putin focused most of his speech on Russia’s battle against Covid-19 and its plans to improve welfare and economic development. But he accused the West of threatening stability in Russia and its ex-Soviet neighbors Belarus and Ukraine. “The use of unjust sanctions is growing into something more dangerous: a coup attempt in Belarus,” he said. He backs Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who faces huge opposition since claiming re-election last year, in a vote widely condemned as rigged. The two Presidents held talks in Moscow. Later Belarusian authorities announced that they had foiled a US-backed plot to assassinate President Lukashenko. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had detained two Belarusians allegedly involved in the plot. The coup claim was dismissed by the exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as a “provocation”. Since last August’s disputed election, massive demonstrations in support of her have taken place, with thousands of protesters beaten up by police and detained.

WARNING TO WEST

President Putin said some Western countries were like jackals trying to please the US, just as a jackal behaves with the tiger Shere Khan in Kipling’s tale The Jungle Book. “We don’t want to burn bridges, but if somebody interprets our good intentions as weakness, our reaction will be asymmetrical, rapid, and harsh,” he said. “We’ll decide for ourselves in each case where the red line is.” Media caption, Gauging the Russian mood: BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg traveled to the city of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia to report tensions building over Ukraine. Russia backs the separatists holding a swathe of eastern Ukraine, and its maneuvers have fueled fears of a new Russian military intervention.

In his speech, President Putin said that “the West didn’t think about Belarus or Ukraine when the Maidan events were going on there”. Mass protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square led to Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing to Russia in February 2014. “The organizers of any provocations against Russia will regret their actions in a way they never have before,” Vladimir Putin warned. His spokesman later described the “red lines” as “our external security interests, our internal security interests in preventing any outside interference, whether in our elections or other domestic political processes”. Last week the US government accused the Kremlin of “malign activity” and expelled 10 Russian diplomats. Russia responded tit-for-tat. Similar hostile exchanges of diplomats took place between Russia and both the Czech Republic and Poland.

HOUSE OF COMMONS LIBRARY RUSSIA’S RED LINE

In early November 2021, Russia began building up its military forces along the borders of Ukraine, for the second time in a year. Over 100,000 Russian military personnel and assets have been deployed in Crimea and in the Voronezh, Kursk, and Bryansk regions of Western Russia. Russian naval assets from the Baltic and Northern fleets have deployed to the Black Sea, and 30,000 Russian troops are currently on exercise in Belarus, close to the Ukrainian border. Tensions have escalated following a US intelligence assessment in December 2021, which suggested that Russia could be planning an invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Russia’s “red lines” Russia has denied suggestions that it is planning to invade and has linked its actions to what it regards as provocative actions by NATO.

Russia is seeking longer-term security guarantees from the Alliance that Ukraine will not be admitted as a Member State and that NATO military infrastructure will not be deployed in the country. The Kremlin has said these are “red lines” for Russia’s national security. International response Western nations have made clear their support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and its right to choose its security partnerships. They have warned Russia that any military escalation will have significant economic consequences.

Among the measures being discussed are sanctions against Russia’s financial institutions, energy sector, and individuals close to the Kremlin. Russia’s controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe could be halted as part of any sanctions package. Military assistance from the UK, US, NATO, and the EU is also being provided to Ukraine. Diplomatic talks Diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation are underway. A series of meetings between the US, NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and Russia were held in mid-January. Those Commons Library Research Briefing, 18 February 2022 4 Ukraine: Russia’s “red line” meetings discussed Ukraine, but also European security more broadly, including Russian proposals for legally binding security guarantees between the US, NATO, and Russia. Talks aimed at achieving a political solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine also resumed between the countries of the Normandy Format: Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany. No breakthroughs were achieved, and Russia did not commit to de-escalate and withdraw forces from the Ukrainian border. What happens next?

Russia has since been accused by the West of planning a series of aggressive moves against Ukraine as a pretext for military action, allegations which it denies. Russia stands by its statement that it has no plans to invade Ukraine and President Putin has accused the US of trying to draw Russia into a war. In mid-February the Russian Ministry of Defense said that several units had begun to withdraw from the region back to their permanent locations, having completed their exercises. NATO said it had not seen any signs of de-escalation on the ground, thus far. In the meantime, shelling between pro-Russian separatist forces and Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine has increased.

Diplomacy continues with several world leaders having visited Moscow for talks in recent weeks. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether the Kremlin will agree to NATO’s proposal for more substantive security talks in the longer term. A Russian response to the US’s counter-proposals on legally binding security guarantees was received by the US administration on 17 February and is currently being considered. On 14 February 2022, however, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said “I think our opportunities are far from exhausted. Of course, they should not be endless, but I think we should still continue to pursue and build on them at this point”. Deterrence as well as diplomacy In the meantime, NATO allies have moved to shore up the defense of Eastern Europe with the deployment of additional ships and fighter aircraft to the region. Further consideration is being given to the deployment of additional battlegroups in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe.

NATO forces will not be deployed on the ground, however, as Ukraine is a partner country of the alliance and not party to NATO’s Article V mutual defense clause. Commons Library Research Briefing, 18 February 2022. Jailed Russian opposition figure and outspoken Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny died at the age of only 47. According to the Russian Prison Service, Navalny felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness. A long thorn in the side of Putin, he returned to Russia in 2021 after being poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s top opposition leader and President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, was buried in a Moscow suburb in a funeral that drew thousands of mourners amid a heavy police presence. Navalny, who was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, died Feb. 16, according to Russia’s prison service. He was moved in December from his former prison in central Russia to a “special regime” penal colony — the highest security level — above the Arctic Circle. In the span of a decade, he went from being the Kremlin’s biggest foe to Russia’s most prominent political prisoner.

IS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION LETTING THE RUSSIANS ADVANTAGE OF MARITIME CONTROL IN THE BLACK SEA BY DELAYING MILITARY AID TO UKRAINE

Max Boot, in a recent article in The Washington Post, reported on criticism from Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe, criticizing the shortage of political will in the administration’s unwillingness to more forcefully challenge Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea coast after the collapse of a grain export deal. Since then, Russia has been targeting Ukrainian grain facilities. Putin wants to bring Ukraine to its knees and doesn’t care about inflicting hunger on millions of people around the world who need Ukrainian grain to survive. Yet the Biden administration is not doing enough to contest Putin’s reprehensible power play. Retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, said in an interview that he thought of a dangerous potential precedent in not more aggressively contesting Russia’s de facto maritime control of a large swath of international waters in the Black Sea. He argued that NATO ships should start escorting merchant vessels carrying food and fuel, keep NATO combat aircraft on constant patrol over the Black Sea, and provide anti-ship missiles and drones to Ukraine to keep the Russian fleet at bay.

According to him, there is no indication that the Biden administration is seriously pursuing any of those options. However, the Biden administration deserves praise for committing a huge amount of money as military aid to Ukraine. But it continues to drag its feet on providing other critical assistance that Ukraine desperately needs at a time when its counteroffensive is not advancing as rapidly as hoped. Breedlove doesn’t mince words in explaining why the administration isn’t more aggressive: In his opinion, the Biden administration does not want to see Ukraine succeed, as in his words, “because we are deterred, we are intimidated, and we don’t want Putin to widen or deepen the war.” Biden’s fears, once understandable, now seem excessive. The Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia should relieve exaggerated fears about the consequences of crossing Putin’s supposed red lines. Providing more aid to Ukraine won’t significantly raise the risk of a wider war — but it could shorten the existing conflict

 

Largest Prison in The World

Israeli authorities claim “broad powers and discretion to decide who may enter its territory” and that “a foreigner has no legal right to enter the State’s sovereign territory, including for transit into the West Bank or aboard.”

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

April 14, 2024

 

4 mins read

 

Palestinians are seen at a temporary shelter in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 13, 2023. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

The UK Guardian reported in March 2024 that Cruising south along Israel’s coastal highway, there are almost no signs that one is approaching Gaza. Two million people live trapped on a thin slice of land along the Mediterranean, but someone could easily drive past and miss it altogether. For visitors to the strip, restricted mainly to diplomats, aid workers, and journalists, the last stop in Israel is a service station, where Red Sea-bound tourists and commuters sip lattes and eat chocolate croissants at an American-style coffeehouse. Walking back to their cars, they may glimpse the only hint of Gaza’s existence – a white orb high in the southern sky, a tethered surveillance balloon that provides the Israeli army with a 24-hour overhead view of the enclave.

A REPORT BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORTED ON HOW ISRAEL’S TRAVEL BAN CRUSHED THE DREAMS OF THE PALESTINIANS IN GAZA. ISRAEL’S OBLIGATION TO GAZA UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

 Israeli authorities claim “broad powers and discretion to decide who may enter its territory” and that “a foreigner has no legal right to enter the State’s sovereign territory, including for transit into the West Bank or aboard.” While international human rights law gives wide latitude to governments about the entry of foreigners, Israel has heightened obligations toward Gaza residents. Because of the continuing controls Israel exercises over the lives and welfare of Gaza’s inhabitants, Israel remains an occupying power under international humanitarian law, despite withdrawing its military forces and settlements from the territory in 2005. Both the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardians of international humanitarian law, have reached this determination. As the occupying power, Israel remains bound to provide residents of Gaza with the rights and protections afforded to them by the law of occupation. Israeli authorities continue to control Gaza’s territorial waters and airspace, and the movement of people and goods, except at Gaza’s border with Egypt. Israel must respect the human rights of Palestinians living in Gaza, including their right to freedom of movement throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory and abroad, which affects both the right to leave a country and the right to enter their own country. Israel is also obligated to respect Palestinians’ rights for which freedom of movement is a precondition. The UN Human Rights Committee has said that while states can restrict freedom of movement for security reasons or to protect public health, public order, and the rights of others, any such restrictions must be proportional and “the restrictions must not impair the essence of the right; the relation between the right and restriction, between norm and exception, must not be reversed.” While the law of occupation permits occupying powers to impose security restrictions on civilians, it also requires them to restore public life for the occupied population. That obligation increases in a prolonged occupation, in which the occupier has more time and opportunity to develop more narrowly tailored responses to security threats that minimize restrictions on rights. In addition, the needs of the occupied population increase over time. Suspending virtually all freedom of movement for a short period interrupts temporarily normal public life, but long-term, indefinite suspension in Gaza has had a much more debilitating impact, fragmentating populations. The impact is particularly damaging given the denial of freedom of movement to people who are confined to a sliver of the occupied territory, unable to interact in person with the majority of the occupied population that lives in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and its rich assortment of educational, cultural, religious, and commercial institutions. After 55 years of occupation and 15 years of closure in Gaza with no end in sight, Israel should fully respect the human rights of Palestinians, using as a benchmark the rights it grants Israeli citizens. Israel should abandon an approach that bars movement absent exceptional individual humanitarian circumstances it defines, in favor of an approach that permits free movement absent exceptional individual security circumstances.

 YOUNG PALESTINIANS GROWING UP IN ISRAELI PRISON

 Most Palestinians who grew up in Gaza under Israeli closure have never left the 40-by-11-kilometer (25-by-7 mile) Gaza Strip. For the last 25 years, Israel has increasingly restricted the movement of Gaza residents. Since June 2007, when Hamas seized control over Gaza from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA), Gaza has been mostly closed. Israeli authorities justify this closure on security grounds, in light of “Hamas’ rise to power in the Gaza Strip,” as they lay out in a December court filing. Authorities highlight in particular the risk that Hamas and armed Palestinian groups will recruit or coerce Gaza residents “for the commission of terrorist acts and the transfer of operatives, knowledge, intelligence, funds or equipment for terrorist activists.” Their policy, though, amounts to a blanket denial with rare exceptions, rather than a generalized respect for the right of Palestinians to freedom of movement, to be denied only based on individualized security reasons.

SEPARATION BETWEEN GAZA AND WEST BANK

As part of the closure, Israeli authorities have sought to “differentiate” between their policy approaches to Gaza and the West Bank, such as imposing more sweeping restrictions on the movement of people and goods from Gaza to the West Bank and promoting separation between these two parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The army’s “Procedure for Settlement in the Gaza Strip ” published in 2018, that “in 2006, a decision was made to introduce a policy of separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in light of Hamas’ rise to power in the Gaza Strip. The policy currently in effect is explicitly aimed at reducing travel between the areas.” In each of the 11 cases Human Rights Watch reviewed of people seeking to reach the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, for professional and educational opportunities not available in Gaza, Israeli authorities did not respond to requests for permits or denied them, either for security reasons or because they did not conform to the closure policy. Human Rights Watch also reviewed permit applications on the website of the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee, or screenshots of them, including the status of the permit applications, when they were sent to the Israeli authorities and the response received, if any. In short, one may easily conclude that Benjamin Netanyahu has to disappear from Israeli politics for the sake of Israel to exist as an entity and as Senate Majority Leader in the US and Pope Benedict’s most recent advice to Ukraine to surrender to the Russians for the world to live in peace.

 

Responsibility of The Muslim World On Israeli Actions In Gaza

Does the Islamic World have any responsibility for the incessant and horrific injustice being committed by Israel towards the Palestinian people?  

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

March 18, 2024

 

5 mins read

 

People wait to receive aid supplies in Gaza City, March 17, 2024. (Photo by Mohammed Ali/Xinhua)

HARRY TRUMAN’S COVER OF ISRAELI AIRSPACE

Does the Islamic World have any responsibility for the incessant and horrific injustice being committed by Israel towards the Palestinian people?  Is it because Harry Truman not only recognized Israel as an independent country and as such gave cover to Israeli air space during the short war with Egypt when Anwar Sadat could have given a death blow to Israel but for the US cover of Israeli air space?

HISTORIAN LAWRENCE REES AND ADOLF HITLER                  

Lawrence Rees, historian, and author, in his newest book published in March 2024 titled The Holocaust, wrote that “The fundamental precondition for the Holocaust happening was Adolf Hitler,” he explained that   “Even as far back as 1921, Hitler said that solving the Jewish question was a central question for National Socialism. And you can only solve it by using brute force.” Hitler had no blueprint for the Holocaust at that point, says Rees. But he did have a pathological problem with Jews. “Hitler believed that something needed to be done,” Rees explains, “and that evolved and changed according to circumstances and political opportunism. “An intriguing part of Rees’s book is his determination to figure out when the collective set of initiatives we now call the Final Solution became official Nazi policy. It’s a question that doesn’t come with a straightforward answer, Rees maintained. What is clear, though, is that in the summer of 1940, there was still no concrete plan in place for the extermination of Jews. Furthermore, up until that point, Rees argued, the Nazis were still clinging to the belief that in the long term, the way to solve what they called “the Jewish question” was by expulsion and hard labor. At that point, mass murder was still not the preferred option. By the summer of 1942, however, a sea change had taken place. By that time, the Holocaust was in full swing. Therefore, within the previous two-year period, Rees points out, there were several milestones on the road towards mass extermination. But trying to pinpoint an exact moment where the decision was taken to commit to mass killing is very difficult, says Rees — especially since much of the planning was done in secret without written records. Hitherto, many historians, filmmakers, and writers have pointed to a single meeting where plans for the Holocaust were finally decided upon in the power structures of Nazi officialdom.

WANSEE CONFERENCE AND ABSENCE OF HITLER, HIMMLER AND GOEBBELS

This was known as the Wannsee Conference. It was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in January of 1942 and involved several mid-ranking Nazi officials devising a plot to murder Jews over a shorter timescale and in more efficient ways. But even then, Rees says, no final plans were resolved at the infamous conference. He also points out that key figures from the upper tiers of the Nazi hierarchy — Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler himself — were not present. “I cannot see how there can have been a decision in 1941,” said Rees. ‘By that stage, you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been The moment of no return for the Holocaust, said the historian, was in the spring and early summer of 1942, when a decision was taken to kill all of the Jews in the General Government in Poland — a German-occupied zone established by Hitler after the joint invasion by the Germans and Soviets in 1939.“By that stage you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been made,” said Rees. Hungary was beautiful to the Nazis, given the number of Jews that resided there. The Jews were transported to Auschwitz between May and July of 1944, where they were murdered.

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER HANNAH ARENDT’S BANALITY OF EVIL  AND ADOLPH EICHMAN’S ROLE IN THE EXTERMINATION OF JEWS

This plan for cold-blooded murder was deviously orchestrated by Adolf Eichmann, who at the time was stationed in Budapest.  What did Hannah Arendt mean by the banality of evil? A question asked by American philosopher Hannah Arendt. Lawrence Rees disagreed with Hannah Arendt though she continued to insist that one do evil without being evil. This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realized what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘committed crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he was doing wrong’. Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterward feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’. This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer. ie Eichmann, which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

CRITICS OF HANNAH ARENDT

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet had no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension.

CONCLUSION

On October 6 1981 Islamic extremists assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, as he reviewed troops on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Sadat, who was shot four times, died two hours later. Despite Sadat’s incredible public service record for Egypt (he was instrumental in winning the nation its independence and democratizing it), his controversial peace negotiation with Israel in 1977-78, for which he and Menachem Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize, made him a target of extremists across the Middle East. Sadat had also angered many by allowing the ailing Shah of Iran to die in Egypt rather than be returned to Iran to stand trial for his crimes against the country.

 

Should Western Powers Ignore Putin’s Red Lines on Russian Security?

The West spends $150 billion on war and $60 billion on supporting poor countries.

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

March 16, 2024

 

6 mins read

 

Libyan leader Marshal Khalifa Haftar (C) was accorded a ceremonial welcome attended by Russian Defence Minister Gen. Yunus-Bek Yevkurov at a Moscow military airfield, September 26, 2023

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT ACCUSES THE US OF DEPLOYING MILITARY BASES NEAR RUSSIAN BORDER

On February 21, 2023, in a speech to the federal assembly in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of deploying military bases near the borders with Russia. He accused the West of enslaving Ukraine for a big war. Putin said: “In the modern world, there should be no division into ‘civilized’ countries and all the rest. We were ready for constructive dialogue with the West. But in response, they received a hypocritical reaction – the expansion of NATO, the missile defense system, and the deployment of military contingents. Neither side has hundreds of military bases around the world like the US does. The whole planet is covered. In December 2021, Russia sent to the West a security guarantee agreement, but all positions were refused.”

RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE

The incoming information suggested that by February, everything was ready for another punitive action in the Donbas (in Ukraine) against which Kyiv threw artillery, planes, and tanks. “They started the war, and we used force to stop it. The next target after the Donbas was an attack on Crimea and Sevastopol. They are now talking about it openly. We protect our homes, and the goal of the West is unlimited power.

The West spends $150 billion on war and $60 billion on supporting poor countries. Endless accusations against Russia were heard at the Munich Conference. The feeling that this was done so that everyone would forget what the West has been doing in recent decades. And they plunged entire regions into chaos, released gin and bottles. Trillions of dollars are at stake under the guise of democracy. In the 1930s, the West opened the way for the Nazis to power in Germany.

In our time, they made anti-Russia out of Ukraine. The project is not new. It goes back to the 19th century. It was cultivated in Austria-Hungary, Poland to tear the historical regions away from our country. The West accelerated this project by supporting the anti-state anti-constitutional coup in 2014 in Kyiv. Russophobia was planted with ideologies. The Armed Forces of Ukraine use Nazi symbols and do not hide whose heirs they are. The West doesn’t give a damn who to bet on in the fight against Russia. The main thing is to fight against us. So, you can use at least terrorists, at least neo-Nazis, at least a bald traitor. And in the 1930s and now the idea is the same: to kindle a hotbed of war in the East. The people of Ukraine have become a hostage of the occupational pro-Western regime, which has been plundering its state for decades.

Nobody cares about people. They are prepared for slaughter and turned into consumables. Sad, scary to talk about it, but true. The responsibility for the escalation lies with the West and the Kyiv regime, for which its people are strangers. The more long-range systems fall back on Ukraine, the further we will be forced to push the threat away from our borders. The elites of the West want to turn a local conflict into a global confrontation. It is about the existence of our country. But they understand that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield. Hence the information attacks, lies, distortion of historical facts, and attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church and culture.

I would like to tell the West – look at the main books of world religions. It says that the family is the union of a man and a woman. But even these sacred values are questioned. The West is trying to undermine our society. But traitors will be held accountable. We will not arrange a witch hunt for those who have abandoned their homeland. Let them live with it. The main thing is that the citizens of Russia gave them a moral assessment. We are proud that the Russians understood our actions in Donbas and supported us. This is a manifestation of patriotism, a feeling that is historically inherent in our people. I want to thank our people for their courage and determination.”

US WAS THE ONLY COUNTRY EVER TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Recalling the devastations following the Second World War, Vladimir Putin accused the US of being the only country to use nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. “They created a precedent.” He also recalled during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. “It was done ostentatiously and, he said, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate the rest of the world.”

US CARPET BOMBING OF VIETNAM AND LAOS

“The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons.” In Putin’s narrative, the US continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries, which the US cynically refers to as equals and allies. In his tirade against the US, Putin recalls that the Western elites are even shifting repentance for their historical crimes onto everyone else, demanding that the citizens of their countries and other peoples confess to things they have nothing to do with at all, for example, the period of colonial conquests.

RUDYARD KIPLING’S “WHITE MAN’S BURDEN”

“It is worth reminding the West,” Putin said, “that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed by the worldwide slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India and Africa, the wars of England and France against China, as a result of which it was forced to open its ports to the opium trade. What they did was get entire nations hooked on drugs and purposefully exterminate entire ethnic groups for the sake of grabbing land and resources, hunting people like animals. Bangladesh at that time being a part of undivided India felt the full brunt of the colonial British ‘civilizing Mission’ detailed by Rudyard Kipling in his ‘White Man’s Burden’.”

PUTIN’S GRIEVANCES OF THE US’ CONTINUED SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA

Putin’s grievances against the US continue for the US demanding more and more sanctions against Russia and the majority of European politicians “obediently” going along with it. In Putin’s narrative, the West clearly understands that by pressuring the EU to completely give up Russian energy and other resources, the United States is practically pushing Europe toward deindustrialization in a bid to get its hands on the entire European market. “The dictates of the US are backed up by crude force, on the law of the fist. Sometimes it is beautifully wrapped; sometimes there is no wrapping at all, but the gist is the same – the law of the fist as Putin’s grievances against the US continue.”

PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING US MILITARY BASES AND NATO EXPANSION

Putin reasons that the deployment and maintenance of hundreds of military bases in all corners of the world, NATO expansion, and attempts to cobble together new military alliances, such as AUKUS and the like, and the creation of the Washington-Seoul-Tokyo military-political chain, is to contain Russia and now an emerging China on the global stage. “These are the principles that underlie US and NATO military doctrines that require total domination. Western elites are presenting their neocolonialist plans with the same hypocrisy, claiming peaceful intentions and talking about some kind of deterrence. This evasive word migrates from one strategy to another but only means one thing – undermining any sovereign centers of power. They have everything in their sights, including Russia’s next-door neighbors – the CIS countries. In launching the sanctions blitzkrieg against Russia, for example, reasons Putin that the whole world would follow the Western command. As it turns out, however, such a bright prospect does not excite everyone – other than complete political masochists and admirers of other unconventional forms of international relations. Most states refuse to ‘snap a salute’ and instead choose the sensible path of cooperation with Russia.”

MULTIPOLARITY DEFEATS PUTIN’S ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE US

“The problem with Putin’s reasoning is that the world has now become multipolar, and the US has to take along other freedom-loving countries to reach a consensus on any global problem. Such self-confidence is a direct product not only of the concept of exceptionalism first mentioned by the French nobleman Marquis de Lafayette, who had a close relationship with George Washington during the American War of Independence. Vladimir Putin’s reasons for the lack of Western press’s enthusiasm for US enmity towards Russia and now China are like Goebbels’s ocean of myths, illusions, and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda. ‘The more unbelievable the lie, the quicker people will believe it – that is how they operate,’ according to this principle. They point back at Russia and say: ‘That is the source of all your troubles.’ Russian President wants to make special note of the fact that there is every reason to believe that the Western elites are not going to look for constructive ways out of the global food and energy crisis that they and they alone are to blame for, as a result of their long-term policy, dating back long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They have no intention of solving the problems of injustice and inequality.”

CONCLUSION

Vladimir Putin reasons that the West would rather use other formulas they are more comfortable with. “And here it is important to recall that the West bailed itself out of its early 20th-century challenges with World War I. Profits from World War II helped the United States finally overcome the Great Depression and become the largest economy in the world, and to impose on the planet the power of the dollar as a global reserve currency. And the 1980s crisis – things came to a head in the 1980s again – the West emerged from it unscathed largely by appropriating the inheritance and resources of the collapsed and defunct Soviet Union. Now, to free itself from the latest web of challenges, the Western countries need to dismantle Russia as well as other states that ‘choose a sovereign path of development, at all costs, to be able to further plunder other nations’ wealth and use it to patch their holes’.