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’.

 

Israel's Menachem Begin, US' Jimmy Carter and Egypt's Anwar Sadat at Camp David. US govt. archives, Wikipedia Commons.

Responsibility Of The Muslim World On Israeli Actions In Gaza? – OpEd

 March 15, 2024  0 Comments

By Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

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? 

Laurence 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. 

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. The Jews were transported to Auschwitz between May and July of 1944, where they were murdered. 

Banality Of Evil?

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 German-American historian and philosopher. Laurence Rees disagreed with Hannah Arendt though she continued to insist that one can do evil without being evil. This was the puzzling question that 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 was 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 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.

 

Pakistani Saga Continues Unabated

In Pakistan, the Army Establishment's firm grip on the nation undeniably confirms the presence of a Deep State in its governance.

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

March 5, 2024

 

4 mins read

 

Pakistani army vehicles take part in a military parade to mark Pakistan's National Day in Islamabad, Pakistan on March 25, 2021. [Photo by Muhammed Semih Uğurlu/Anadolu Agency.]

Pakistani saga continues unabated. Imran Khan and his political Party Pakistan Tehrik of Insaf, once favored by the army establishment, are banned from participating in the elections. Imran Khan is now serving fourteen years on corruption charges. In a letter to the famous British Journal, The Economist Imran Khan called the election a farce. His “ fault” was reading out to the National Assembly a coded telegram the Pakistani ambassador in the US had sent home. He is also accused of selling jewelry he and his wife received from places they visited which according to rules should have been deposited in government-maintained treasury. The Army Establishment has been in control of Pakistani politics either through martial law or through controlling the country from behind.

ARMY’S STRANGLEHOLD ON PAKISTAN CONTINUES

Except for a brief period of civilian rule after independence from British rule in 1947 the Army establishment has been in control of the country. The latest tally announced by the Election Commission on 13th February this year shows that the election of the leader of the house, or prime minister must win a simple majority – 169 of the 336 seats. There can be multiple candidates for prime minister. If no candidate secures a majority in the first round, a second vote is held between the top two candidates. Voting will continue till one person can secure a majority. Negotiations for a coalition government are taking place between former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party, with 75 seats. The party of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the son of a former President and assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto whose father was also a former Prime Minister but was assassinated by the army establishment,  with 54 seats, as well as other smaller parties. Independent candidates backed by jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan won the most seats – 93 – and they are also jostling for allies to form government. Candidates were vying for 264 seats out of the assembly’s 336 total number of seats.

DEEP STATE AND PAKISTAN ARMY

This stranglehold by the Army Establishment on Pakistani politics brings in the question of the Deep State which scholars have variously defined. The Economist has observed that American pundits have often used “deep state” interchangeably with the bureaucracies of the military and spy agencies, especially those bits that leak against the government. President Donald   Trump’s relations with his spies have been tense since the intelligence community determined that Russia had tried to influence the election in his favor. He had publicly challenged their assessments of his team’s ties with Russia, chastised them for past intelligence failures, and compared leaks against him to practices in Nazi Germany. His supporters cite “deep-state” leaks embarrassing to Trump’s administration as evidence of a shadowy network of unelected government officials undermining the president. (The president has not publicly used the term.) But the deep state started life as something else entirely. Citizens in Turkey, where the term originated, have long worried about the derin devlet (“deep state”), which refers to a network of individuals in different branches of government, with links to retired generals and organized crime, that existed without the knowledge of high-ranking military officers and politicians. Its goal was purportedly to preserve secularism and destroy communism by any means necessary, outside the regular chain of command. Starting in the 1950s Turkey’s deep state-sponsored killings, engineered riots, colluded with drug traffickers, staged “false flag” attacks, and organized massacres of trade unionists. Thousands died in the chaos it fomented. In its present avatar, “deep state” seems set to go the way of “fake news” in American discourse, a once-useful term rendered meaningless by promiscuous repetition, often about quite different things. Turkey is a pioneer here too. After a handful of city councils in Germany recently canceled rallies in support of Erdogan, Turkey’s foreign minister offered a simple explanation: “This is a systematic move of the German deep state”.

WARNING BY PRESIDENT EISENHOWER TO HIS SUCCESSORS

Coming back to the US one could refer to the farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower in which he warned future presidents to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”. Following the tumultuous 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump and his supporters suggested that certain unnamed executive branch officials and intelligence officers were secretly operating as a deep state to block his policies and legislative agenda by leaking information considered critical of him. President Trump,

STEVE BANON AND DEEP STATE ATTACK ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, along with ultra-conservative news outlets like Breitbart News claimed that Former President Obama was orchestrating a deep state attack against the Trump administration. The allegation grew out of Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Obama had ordered the wiretapping of his telephone during the 2016 election campaign.

CONCLUSION

Current and former intelligence officials remain divided on the question of the existence of a deep state secretly working to derail the Trump administration.  In an article published in The Hill Magazine, retired veteran CIA field operations agent Gene Coyle stated that while he doubted the existence of “hordes of government officials” operating as an anti-Trump deep state, he did believe the Trump administration was justified in complaining about the number of leaks being reported by news organizations. “If you are that appalled at the actions of an administration, you should quit, hold a press conference, and publicly state your objections,” said Coyle. “You can’t run an executive branch if more and more people think, ‘I don’t like the policies of this President therefore I will leak information to make him look bad.’” Other intelligence experts argued that individuals or small groups of individuals leaking information critical of a presidential administration lack the organizational coordination and depth of deep states such as those that existed in Turkey or the former Soviet Union. Coming back to Pakistan one has to admit that the Army Establishment’s stranglehold on the country proves beyond doubt the existence of Deep State in the formulation and conduct of the country.

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How much Longer will Pakistan Army Play the Role of Judge and Jury?

By Kazi Anwarul Masud

Issue:  Net Edition    | Date : 26 Feb , 2024

HOW LONG PAKISTAN ARMY ESTABLISHMENT MAINTAIN ITS ‘FARCICAL ELECTION”

Can the Pakistan Army Establishment play the role of empire with Imran Khan and his PTI party in opposition? The latest election results (February 15,2024) reveal that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-affiliated independents won 93 seats, the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PMLN) won 73 seats, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) won 54 seats, according to official results. Imran Khan’s PTI-backed candidates would join the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen party, which won one parliamentary seat, and he ruled out any possibility of joining the PMLN-PPP coalition. Members of the Sharif brother’s led alliance are “mandate thieves,” Imran Khan said, adding that such a coalition lacks “credibility.”

The last time the PMLN and PPP aligned was in April 2022, when they ousted Imran Khan from power via a no-confidence vote. At that time, the PMLN placed Nawaz Sharif’s brother Shehbaz Sharif in power, where he ruled for 14 months until being replaced by a caretaker government. Coalition officials once again nominated Shehbaz on Tuesday to be their candidate for prime minister. Shehbaz’s first tenure was widely unpopular, with many Pakistanis accusing him of being easily manipulated by Nawaz and the country’s military. Pakistan’s armed forces backed the PMLN in the latest vote count. Imran Khan has claimed that widespread vote-rigging prevented a greater win for PTI-backed candidates.

VOTE RIGGING AND DEEP STATE GAME

On the day of the election, Pakistani authorities temporarily shut down mobile internet access, citing security concerns, and threw out PTI-connected representatives meant to oversee vote counting. “I warn against the misadventure of forming a government with stolen votes,” Khan said. “Such daylight robbery will not only be a disrespect to the citizens but will also push the country’s economy further into a downward spiral.” That the Pakistan Army Establishment is playing the Deep State game is evident. Albeit both the US government and the Pakistan Army Establishment have denied collusion in ousting Imran Khan’s government it is difficult to accept a proposition that the Pakistan Army Establishment used to rule the country for decades would sit idle letting Imran Khan play a Pied Piper’s tune not liked by the Army Establishment. Michael Kugelman of South Asia Brief in Foreign Policy Magazine (February 14th, 2024) wrote that electorally speaking, the PTI party was left for dead ahead of the country’s vote last week. The Party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan was targeted by a monthsthat hollowed out its leadership and limited its capacity to mobilize, penalized by the court ruling that required it to field candidates as independents and was on the outs with a powerful military that has long shaped the political environment to serve its interests. Yet independents backed by PTI won nearly 100 parliamentary seats on Feburary 8—more than any other party but not enough for a majority. (It could have been even more: The party has produced evidence indicating that many official results contradict earlier figures from polling stations.) But this stunning electoral success won’t catapult PTI to power. Imran Khan’s main rivals announced that they had reached a deal to form the next coalition government. Nonetheless, PTI seems to have broken the military’s stranglehold on political control, giving cause for some optimism about the future of Pakistan’s democracy. A few factors drove PTI’s performance, but one was defiance—an unwillingness to let the powerful military dictate the outcome of an election that it wanted PTI to lose. A shift in the military’s approach likely fanned the flames.

DEEP STATE AND PAKISTAN ARMY ESTABLISHMENT

It may be relevant to introduce the concept of Deep State as it relates to the Pakistan Army Establishment. N.S. Gill a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin wrote on November 16, 2019, that The phrase Pyrrhic victory originates from King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who in B.C.E 281 suffered the original Pyrrhic victory. King Pyrrhus landed on the southern Italian shore (in Tarentum of Magna Graecia) with 20 elephants and 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers ready to defend their fellow Greek speakers against advancing Roman domination. Pyrrhus won the first two battles at Heraclea in B.C.E 280 and at Asculum in B.C.E 279. However, throughout those two battles, he lost a very high number of soldiers. With numbers cut drastically, King Pyrrhus’s army became too thin to last and they eventually ended up losing the war. In both of his victories over the Romans, the Roman side suffered more casualties than Pyrrhus’ side did. But the Romans also had a much larger army to work with — thus, their casualties meant less to them than Pyrrhus did to his side. The term “Pyrrhic victory” comes from these devastating battles.

Greek historian Plutarch described King Pyrrhus’s victory over the Romans in his “Life of Pyrrhus:” “The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one other such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.”

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER’S WARNING TO HIS SUCCESSORS OF “MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX”

It would be relevant to recall the warning given by President Dwight Eisenhower to his successors to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, along with ultra-conservative news outlets like Breitbart News claimed that Former President Obama was orchestrating a deep state attack against the Trump administration. The allegation grew out of Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Obama had ordered the wiretapping of his telephone during the 2016 election campaign.

CONCLUSION

It is doubtful if Pakistan will ever be free of the clutches of the Army Establishment. As it appears the Days of Imran Khan’s defiance of the Army rulers are over regardless of the period of detention determined by the Army. Pakistan has to cow down to the dictates of the Army as the country has done for decades. In the larger scenario, the US needs Pakistan in its quarrel with China which has to be controlled in any case though China would remain a friend of Pakistan if for no other reason than the India-China fight which flares up on occasion.

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Is Vladimir Putin Planning to Put Nuclear Weapons in Space?

By Sri Lanka Guardian•February 27, 2024•Defence  Essays  feature  Kazi Anwarul Masud  Sri Lanka Guardian Essays  Vladimir Putin•Comments : 0

Elsewhere around the region, people gathered to watch, expecting to see a small burst of light, maybe something like a shooting star.

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

THE RISK OF PUTTING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SPACE

Incredible yet frightening at the same time that according to US intelligence President Vladimir Putin is planning to put nuclear weapons in space. But then it was not the first time. In 1962 the US had done it in the tiny Johnstone Atoll in the middle of the Pacific.      

Elsewhere around the region, people gathered to watch, expecting to see a small burst of light, maybe something like a shooting star. Instead, the entire sky lit up, bringing daylight to the middle of the night.  A giant ball of plasma erupted above them, particles of radiation raining down on the atmosphere. ‘It looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly, but long enough to set the sky on fire,’ said one account in the Hilo Tribune-Herald. The bomb was launched from Johnston Atoll in the South Pacific. This was Starfish Prime, a 1.4 megaton bomb, 500 times as powerful as Hiroshima. It aimed to examine how a nuclear bomb in space would affect Earth’s atmosphere.

Credit: iStock/@3DSculptor

One could compare the decision of US President Harry Truman to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, albeit no evidence is still available that though the main enemy of World War II was Germany, Truman decided to bomb Japanese cities, which were not the main theater of the War. Decidedly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the destruction that followed forced President Franklin Roosevelt to declare war on Japan. One could construct a scenario that Japan was destroyed because it was an Asian country and not a part of Europe when Churchill, Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt were engaged in the Yalta Conference busy dividing the defeated Germany and constructing the edifice of the Nuremberg Trial.

YALTA CONFERENCE AND THE DIVISION OF GERMANY

The participants had no qualms about Stalin’s demand to cede East Germany as a part of the Soviet Union.  The world has changed as has science. It is now believed that “space is already radioactive. Astronauts, animals, and plants in space are all subjected to cosmic radiation. This could come from distant stars or weird phenomena like quasars, but the biggest, most dangerous source, is the Sun. However, the protective cocoon of the atmosphere – specifically the magnetosphere – stops this radiation from reaching life on Earth. Instead, the radiation jiggles molecules in the atmosphere and creates one of nature’s most awesome spectacles, aurora – seen as the Northern Lights across Europe, Russia, and the US. But even if the radiation could not reach Earth’s surface, nuclear bombs in space could still have catastrophic consequences on the ground.

The assumed aim of a Russian nuclear weapon is to destroy satellites. How this may be achieved is not known. The bomb could target one particular satellite and consider its mission accomplished.  However, the damage from a nuclear bomb is not easy to contain. The US wanted to nuke during the height of the Cold War, but also the space race, the US and the Soviet Union were locked in a fierce battle of one-upmanship. Thankfully, both were shelved on account of the risks outweighing the benefits, especially in the case of a failed launch.    Russia is a vital part of the ISS program, and agreed to stay in the partnership until at least 2028, suggesting Russian cosmonauts will also remain on board, and should expect their country to keep the spacecraft safe. There is one more potential issue from a nuclear weapon in space, a global one.  The most powerful blasts of solar radiation can knock out communications on Earth.

Could a nuke do the same? In 1859, Earth was hit by the biggest solar storm ever recorded. Known as the Carrington Event, it was so powerful it gave telegraph operators electric shocks. Technology has moved on a fair bit since then, so it isn’t hard to imagine the damage that could be done by a similar-sized or even bigger blast of radiation.   The most powerful blasts of solar radiation can knock out communications on Earth. Could a nuke do the same?

In 1859, Earth was hit by the biggest solar storm ever recorded. Technology has moved on a fair bit since then, so it isn’t hard to imagine the damage that could be done by a similar-sized or even bigger blast of radiation. And like the radiation cloud crippling passing satellites, communications blackouts caused by nuclear fallout in the atmosphere would be impossible to contain or target. Whoever set off the bomb could end up in the dark too.

DONALD TRUMP’S THREAT OF A NUCLEAR ARMS DEBATE

Donald Trump’s threats spark a new nuclear arms debate in Germany.  Two years after its about-turn on defense policy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany is starting to rethink another national taboo: nuclear weapons. Previously reluctant to engage in foreign military commitments following World War Two, Germany changed course after Russia’s 2022 invasion, becoming one of the biggest contributors of weapons to Ukraine.

Now German officials are openly raising the question of nuclear weapons, prompted by recent comments about NATO from Donald Trump, a likely contender in this year’s US presidential vote. Trump’s suggestion that the United States should abandon any NATO ally that did not meet the alliance’s defense spending target has shaken officials in Berlin, which has long looked to Washington for protection. Already, the war in Ukraine has pushed others towards reconsidering the need for Germany to have a nuclear deterrent — even an indirect one.”

CONCLUSION

On 14th February 2024 Deputy Secretary General at the European Parliament spoke of NATO-EU partnership being crucial to European security. He underlined the importance of NATO-EU cooperation to address the security situation in the Black Sea, Western Balkans, and Eastern Europe, and tackle other shared challenges like disinformation, cyber security, and military issues. He said that said that the outcome of the war in Ukraine would shape the future of European security for decades to come.

Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO has implemented the largest reinforcement of its collective defense in a generation, including by strengthening its deterrence and defense, increasing defense spending, and supporting the defense industry. NATO has enhanced its partnerships, alongside the EU, with Georgia and Moldova, which face unrelenting pressure from Russia. NATO also works closely with the EU on the ground in the Western Balkans   in Kosovo and by supporting the EU-led operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to maintain a safe and secure environment for all. In short no one will gain from playing the nuclear game. The stakes are too high and the world has become too complicated.  

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a retired Bangladeshi diplomat. During his tenure, he worked in several countries as the ambassador of Bangladesh including Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Germany