WhirledView

Russia’s Brain Drain, Putin’s Brainwashing & the Lame-Brained U.S. Immigration Apparatus

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Putin’s approval rating has jumped from a not-so-bad 77% to a much better 83% according to a recent “state-backed” opinion poll. So says the Wall Street Journal, while noting that “experts have cautioned against taking current Russian polls on face value, given that Russian authorities have pursued a crackdown against dissent, including a media blackout of any reports contrary to the Kremlin’s narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine.” Anyone calling the war a war or impugning the military is liable to receive harsh punishment. The muzzling has been so effective that Russians are refusing to believe first hand accounts of death and devastation from their own relatives and friends in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported the results of a recent Gallup poll: 20% of the Russian population are eager to leave the country. This tranche of unhappy Russians skews young, male, educated and urban, which suggests an ingenious way for the West to undermine the Putin regime. Lure the dissatisfied element to the U.S. and the E.U. by making immigrant visas easy to obtain. Think of it! Russia could lose a generation of its best and brightest!

Unfortunately for that bright idea, multitudes of desperate people are waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration act together, some with deservedly high priority, particularly the thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. throughout America’s military adventure in Afghanistan.   Also already in line for adjudication are the long-suffering refugees from violence, corruption and climate change  in Central America.  Although Ukrainian refugees belong on the list of worthy immigrants, most of them seem to prefer accommodation in Europe, to make it easier to return home as soon as they can.  [Update:  Still thousands are at the border.  Even as we do our best to help them regain all of their country, we need to give them temporary shelter.]

Deceptively promising for would-be immigrants to the U.S. is the nationwide labor shortage that has been pushing wages and salaries to higher levels.  Employers are desperate for employees in nearly all categories.  Without workers, the economy is in danger of tanking.  Yet the immigration pipeline is clogged with able and willing foreign workers who can’t get a hearing.   Such being the sad case, what's the possibility in the near future of anything like a comprehensive immigration reform bill being drafted, let alone passed, by stalemated U.S. legislators?  Zilch.

All of which raises another question: given the sorry state of U.S governance and the frightening odds of a much worse future, why should anyone want to emigrate to the U.S. anymore?

 

 

Trump's Optics: What the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Photo Says

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

If ever you needed proof of Donald Trump’s cluelessness vis-à-vis Moscow, examine this photo of him with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey I. Kislyak. In the foreground grinning gleefully: the Russian pair. In the background—the background!—our supposedly media-savvy American President looking more than a little baffled. I once saw an exhibit of Kewpie dolls. Trump’s expression belongs in that collection.

This photo appeared above the fold on page one of the Thursday, May 11, New York Times, less than a day after Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey for not quashing an investigation into all the circumstances surrounding the undoubted Russian intervention in the U.S. presidential election. Comey axed! No wonder the Russians are so happy. (Yes, after trying out a number of other explanations, an ego-driven, defiant Trump has finally settled on the one motive that could—and should—put him in serious legal trouble.) Meanwhile, in tiny print below the damning photo, was a strange credit line: the Russian Foreign Ministry. Another photo used by the NYT was credited to the Russian news agency Tass.

Americans Nyet

Evidently Trump refused to allow American news photographers into the room when he met with the Russians. Reason? He doesn’t trust the American press to ceaselessly burnish his often tarnished image. Worse, and truly inexplicable, the President neglected to ensure the presence of an official White House photographer. And–get this!—the Russians had promised not to make their photos public.

Now why would photo suppression appeal to Trump? Quite possibly as a way of making less newsworthy his hobnobbing with the enemy less than a day after he’d fired a too honest Comey, who always looks to me like an overgrown puppy. Clumsy, but well intentioned.

As an ex-diplomat, I know that presidents and other officials have to meet with unsavory people and even do deals with them, but as an ex-U.S.I.A. officer, I also know the importance of controlling optics and imagery, especially in such sensitive situations.

Surprise! Surprise!

So sorry, Mr. President.  But it wasn’t too bright to expect the Russians to lowkey a triumphal encounter.

Back to that photo. Lavrov is clearly not an exceptionally tall man, but the angle makes him look taller than (and thus dominant over) Trump. What’s more, Trump’s form is partly blocked by Kislyak’s, and his head is tiny in comparison. Thus, ever so subtly, the Russians have diminished the stature of the President, who is also revealed to have a bald spot and thinning hair that looks decidedly white. Not the preferred Trump image.  But hey!  He who has the camera controls the image.

Finally, study the flanking manoeuver: Trump in the photo is boxed in by the Russians.  This bumptiously over-confident Russian photo hints strongly at precisely what the FBI is investigating (and what so many Americans fear): the current U.S. President really is in the pocket of these men who hover like guards about to cuff a convict.

“He’s our guy!” That’s what the photo proclaims. 

Could an American news photographer make Trump look more pathetic?  I doubt it.

The Long View?

And what’s Trump going to gain from obsequiously cultivating the Russians, assuming he’s cleared of colluding to skew the 2016 election toward himself? A hotel in Vladivostok? A golf club in the Crimea? A shop for Ivanka on Moscow’s Arbat?

Sad.

Which reminds me, where are those Trump tax returns? Not a vague letter from a loyal accountant/lawyer. The real thing.

Donald Trump's Trust Deficit

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

With the possible exception of Russia, the whole world heaved a sigh of relief when Mike Flynn ceased to be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, although the manner of his going hardly inspires confidence. First of all, the President didn’t act immediately on the Justice Department’s incontrovertible evidence of Flynn’s dicey contacts with Russian operatives .  He didn't act our intrepid free press got hold of the story and, thank heaven! forced his hand. Second, Trump did a lot of waffling in accounting for his firing of Flynn, none of it suggesting serious impropriety by his man or by the Russians.

So the bromance continues—though mostly on Trump’s side, evidently, given rumors that Vladimir Putin is ready to bail on the egotistical exhibitionist.

Elusive Job Candidates

Meanwhile, Trump found it amazingly difficult to fill a post any number of smart people would normally be ready to kill for, so to speak. Prestigious! Powerful! Visible! What a way to cap a career! But first choice Vice Admiral Robert Harwood turned it down. And so did the disgraced General David H. Petraeus, who could have used the title to burnish his still tarnished reputation—remember: he handed highly classified info to his mistress, so she could plump up a hagiography of her lover. And so did yet another entirely competent military man, before Trump found a willing candidate in Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster.

Oddly enough, Trump seems to gravitate toward filling all national security posts with men from the uniformed services, despite the fact that the American system provides for civilian control of the military. Perhaps, as Commander in Chief, he expects these guys to salute like serfs and bark, “Yes, sir” to anything he orders them to do, no questions asked, no alternatives delivered, no cautions issued, no upholding of any tradition of professional honor, no hint of disloyalty to an unprincipled czar.

Constraints on the Chain of Command

This misreading of the American military mind is not likely to serve him well. Like Trump himself, these well-regarded officers (“my generals,” as he would put it, possessively) have sworn allegiance to the Constitution and the laws of the land, not to the person of the president. These distinguished military men also know that true loyalty is earned, not automatically conferred by rank or wealth. Good soldiers don’t put their lives on the line because they’re ordered to. They do it out of respect and comradeship. Furthermore, I wonder if Donald Trump has noted that the U.S. military follows a code of conduct that condones disobedience when faced with non-lawful orders. Torture, for instance, offends international law as well as the U. S. military code of conduct. This is why the C.I.A. , abetted by some sadistic civilian “psychologists,” were put in charge of the Bush-Cheney torture program. During his electoral campaign Trump indicated that he is pretty squishy when it comes to torture, but Defense Secretary retired General James Mattis has already declared, “Not on my watch.”

Meanwhile, what did all those highly competent military men who said “no” to Trump share? Like Donald Trump, who picked his own Vice President, they wanted control over their own staff. However, instead of trusting his own nominees, Donald Trump expected to a play a card from the deck of Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin. In the words of a Russia-savvy friend of Whirleview, "Both Harward and Patraeus...indicated through the dance of press veils that they required final say over staffing. This makes sense to any military mind. Your staff is supposed to be working for your objectives, and your objectives reflect your honest attempts to please your boss. The conspiracy mindset which seems to haunt the Trump Presidency may be expressed by planting loyalists to Trump's inner circle in subordinate positions much as Soviet political officers were planted within Soviet military commands. Any honest military man is going to object to that. Highest on the suspect list of who would author this policy? Bannon."

Out with the Political Commissars

And who is this Steve Bannon? He’s the the alt-right/ white nationalist ideologue who seems to be Trump’s primary intellectual mentor. To put it another way, he’s the guy who feeds red meat to the base while Trump himself feeds economic and financial goodies to his billionaire buddies. Another Trump loyalist planted on the National Security Council is K.T. McFarland. Neither Bannon nor McFarland has any respect for the fact-based intelligence gathering and analysis a modern head of state needs. Both should be detached from the NSC and given more appropriate duties. Supposedly Trump has seen the light and granted McMaster control of his own staff. Unless Bannon and McFarland are out, and soon, I can only believe that some sort of unholy bargain has been made.

Why is Trump so afraid that people won’t be loyal to him?. Why does he admire Bashar al Assad and Kim Jong Un and—of course!—Vladimir Putin? Why, as President, does he have to rely so heavily on his immediate family? Why does he need those minders to ensure that his appointees fly straight?

My answer would be this: because that’s all he knows. Having inherited wealth derived from the notoriously cutthroat New York real estate world, Donald Trump has never had to work for anyone else, which means he has no personal experience that might lead him to have empathy for subordinates or the less fortunate. What’s more, his business model contains two assumptions: you get things done by ordering comparatively powerless minions around and/or by throwing money at problems, buying people as well as advantages, as in settling law suits so you never have to plead guilty.  No one says no to Donald Trump. They’re afraid—or they’re bought. Trump knows little of real teamwork either.  So far as I know, he’s never been part of a team of equals based on mutual respect.  And so, quite naturally, he trusts no one to do anything out of a sense of duty,  honor, mutual regard, fair play, justice or principle. For him it’s all deals. Make ‘em—and, when it serves you, break ‘em. Promise anything. Deliver what’s convenient. In short, Donald Trump, who imagines everyone else is just as untrustworthy as he himself is, can only inspire grudging (and probably conditional) compliance or obedience.

A President Isn't Above Scrutiny

Think about it. Is this a guy that good people (with choices) are going to want to work for?  Is this a guy who’s going to have much respect for the rule of law? Is this guy's business model appropriate for conducting the foreign or domestic affairs of a  democracy?  No. No.  No.  This is a guy who bears watching (and fact checking), by all of us, all the time. No wonder subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post are soaring.

The Tyranny of the Minority Trumps Again: Elections 2016

By Patricia H Kushlis

The Electoral College versus the Popular Vote

For the second time in 16 years and the fifth time since the founding of the Republic, the Electoral College vote will trump – pun intended - the popular vote for president of the USA.  An archaic institution designed for the late 18^th century is soon destined to turn the popular vote on its head by handing the presidency to an incompetent clown and accused sex offender likely floating on a mountain of debt topped by a summit of law suits.  Meanwhile, the majority of American voters who did not vote for him is told to grin (or grit their teeth) and bear it – that this is how democracy functions:  this is how power is meant to shift peacefully from one administration to another.  That mantra is from what I can figure out, likely courtesy of the GOP.

Nonsense

Unfortunately the transfer of power at the top is based on the will of the Electoral College, a group of 538 individuals selected by the states composed mostly of individuals no one has ever heard of.  On December 19 their decision will permit rural and rust belt states to determine the fate not only of the US but also the world over the next four to eight years. 

What ever happened to one person, one vote?  Forget it. Today’s Electoral College makes a mockery of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which was passed at the height of the nationwide non-violent Civil Rights movement which rocked the country during the early – mid 1960s.  The Act negated the previously widespread suppression of the black vote in former states of the Confederacy.    

Today, not only has voter suppression returned with a vengeance as a result of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2013 that gutted the contents of the Voting Rights Act but even excluding that Supreme Court decision, the popular will of the voters is upended because of the way in which the Electoral College functions.

A voter who lives in Montana, the least populous state, has, for instance, almost four times (actually 362 times) the weight of a California voter in the selection of the president. That’s not democracy:  that’s the tyranny of the rural minority over the urban majority.  As America continues to urbanize this tyranny will continue to worsen:  unless something is done to change it.

This is 2016, for heaven’s sake:  over the centuries since the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789, its contents have been interpreted and reinterpreted to meet the changing times as the franchise has gradually widened from indirect vote restricted to white male property owners to all US citizens regardless of race, color, creed, property ownership, gender or sexual orientation.

Yet since 2008 with the election of President Obama the widening of the franchise has been challenged through rear guard actions by the Republican Party, the country’s minority party which simultaneously gained control of a majority of state governments and which has used stealth tactics to regain – and then to keep - the country’s political control in its own hands through the inherited weakness of with the Electoral College combined with massive voter suppression in critical states.

The latter has consisted most notably of restrictions of Early Voting locations and their accessibly which are particularly important to the working poor, rollbacks of laws allowing people to register and vote at the same time, and new photo-ID laws that placed strict limits on the types of identification are to be accepted at polls (in Texas gun permits held primarily by whites are acceptable, but not state school or employee IDs) according to The New York Times in 2015.  

Coupling Today in America: Who’s Making It (with Whom)

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Lu marries Tham, but Chen marries Healy. Flannagan marries Kennedy, but Roberts marries Maheshwari.

So the U.S. is still a melting pot, ethnically.

But wait: birds of a feather—East Asian as well as Irish—are definitely flocking together.

Both, obviously, are true, from the evidence of the matrimonial announcements published on May 15th in the New York Times. Actually there were only 20 items, but they tell a powerful story about who’s making it—and who’s not, colorfully confirming more abstract analyses.

First the photos: remember the time not so long ago when you did a double take at the first couples photos? Portraits of bride and groom in mufti, that is, instead of a generic Barbie doll topped with a veil, as if a wedding were a solo performance. And then something else happened: a same sex marriage was celebrated pictorially in the newspaper of record. Imagine the editorial discussions preceding the breaking of this barrier a few years ago, especially since there are still some bakers, professedly Christian, who balk at making a wedding cake for a non-heterosexual couple? Two brides on top. Awesome! Anyone who finds love is to be congratulated—and envied.  This batch of matrimonials includes same sex partnerships of the male and female ilk as well as traditional couples.

So who performed the marriages that got announced on May 15th—and where did the couples choose to get married? Once again, it looks as if diversity thrives. Rabbis. Episcopal officiants (one of them a woman). A Greek Orthodox priest. A Lutheran minister and a pastor from the United Church of Christ. A Hindu priest. A judge. Several Universal Life ministers, which seems to be a frequent recourse for secular people with a spiritual nature and a taste for ritual—or perhaps with warring families of different faiths. Conclusion: freedom of (and from) religion is alive and well in America, despite the absence of Muslims in this sample, which I’d be inclined to attribute, not to snobbery or bigotry, but to the distribution of wealth and the related Times subscription base, about which more below.

The where of the weddings is roughly predictable from the affiliation of the officiants. Churches, including a cathedral. Synagogues. Resort and event venues. A judge’s chambers. A couple of country clubs, including the not so countrified and suddenly salient Mar-a-Lago.

Some brides kept their names, others didn’t, at a ratio of somewhat less than two of the former to one of the latter. Women who kept their own names looked to be very successful professionally, but among those who chose the Mrs. degree, there wasn’t a single bride who seemed to be a candidate for traditionally dependent housewifery. Also interesting: last names gave no clue as to who’d be changing and who’d be keeping her name.

So, well established professionals are marrying professionals, which tends to boost household income well into the six figures of comfortable, upper middle class life. What’s more, most of the parents of this cohort of the newly married , that's mothers as well as fathers, also appear to be successful managers or professionals, which makes for strong class continuity even as ethnicity fades in importance. If successful men these days are universally marrying their female peers, an important upward mobility ladder for disadvantaged young women has vanished. And so these apparently innocent matrimonials confirm a trend: the U.S. is becoming an ever more sharply differentiated class society, with an increasing income gap between upper and lower classes.

Meaning: our story darkens. The people who wished to publicize their happiness in the NYT belong to a financially privileged class, some of whom may even be able to buy those multi million dollar condos advertised every Sunday, which may be one reason why, during my occasional perusing of Times matrimonials, I’ve never encountered a Muslim marriage (which doesn't mean there haven't been any). It’s said that Muslims have been more fully assimilated in the U.S. than in other Western countries, but their visible presence at high income, leadership levels remains minuscule. In some such cases, of course, photos of the bride would be taboo, which isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. Most but not all NYT announcements are accompanied by pictures—and surely it would be possible to accommodate a photo of groom only, if it came to that.

What’s more, and far more distressing, as some readers may already have discerned, there were no Latinos or Black Americans (not couples, not even one side of a partnership) among the matrimonial announcements on May 15th. Given U.S. demographics, these absences testify to the lack of educational and economic opportunity faced by a huge proportion of the current U.S. population. The massively disadvantaged don’t have anything to crow about in the pages of the NYT.

All in all, then, here’s the good news from Sunday May 15th: Women have a solid toehold on the professional world, and they aren’t giving it up. Ethnicity is of indifferent importance when it comes to personal happiness. A wildly variegated freedom of religion thrives. But there’s truly bad news, too. It’s conveyed by omission. Blacks, Latinos and Muslims aren’t making it.

And, at last! here’s the dope you unhappy singles have been slavering for: where the lovers met. I found a mix of the old and the new. Several couples found one another through OKCupid.com or Match.com. But more were brought together by friends or met in college. And two pairs of future spouses met in a bar.

There is, evidently, no one path to true love.

 

Microaggression: Let’s Pull Together

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The following comes from a Danish reader’s letter to the editors of The Economist: “As one of the octogenarians who ‘fiddles with my hearing aid and takes afternoon naps,’ I wonder what the age limit is in order to avoid being ridiculed by your young reporters?”

So black people aren’t the only ones who are deeply hurt by careless speech that insults and belittles—verbal shrapnel, essentially. But we can be grateful to the young African-Americans at Yale for calling the phenomenon to our attention—and for demanding an end to it.

Microagression: it’s a term that hasn’t had wide circulation until recently. But it’s a good one, and it’s often a sign of ageism or sexism as well as racism.

I’ve felt the first two—and just imagine the double whammy of being an older woman! Imperfect body a constant butt of jokes to say nothing of revulsion. Every search for le mot juste or for car keys becomes a “senior moment,” symptom of imminent Alzheimers. I’m pretty sick of it. (I even wrote a story called “Senior Moments.” It’s in my book Driving under the Influence. Just click on the title in the “Our Books” list.)

So what I’m suggesting here and now is that we incessantly insulted segments of the population should make common cause instead of competing for first prize in the angry victimhood contest. Whenever we feel the painful stab of microaggression, as the Yale students suggest, we shouldn’t shrug it off. We should call attention to the insult, the cruelty, the insufferability.

“Don’t be so sensitive!” We’ll get that from a lot of perpetrators, but the smartest retort is simple: “Don’t be so insensitive.”

Meanwhile, we ourselves need to be sensitive to the fact that what seems like microaggression may not, in all cases, be consciously intended as such. First of all, some people come across as offensive because they are clumsily inarticulate in all situations. They need help with both social and language skills. Others are mentally inert clones of a passé culture. They’ve inherited attitudes they’ve never felt free to examine or even, in many cases, been conscious of. These people need to be liberated intellectually or by positive personal experience, not ultimata.

Others are the victims of language itself.

The thing is that language has evolved over centuries, picking up some good stuff and some bad stuff along the way. Society also changes over time. But social and linguistic change aren’t always in sync, and cleaning out the linguistic attic isn’t a chore that most people have ever seen as a necessary task. Encouraged to become conscious of the hateful cliches they spout, the dismissive labels, the ridicule masquerading as a joke, they may discover that this frozen language doesn’t reflect their own thoughts and experience. Do they really think that Blacks are intellectually inferior? Do they really think women are nothing but sex objects? Do they really think that old people are overly expensive, useless drags on the economy? Maybe not, when they come to actually think about it. They need help to get beyond myth and stereotyping.

What I’m trying to suggest is that not all offensive language is evidence of determined, irredeemable bigotry. Not every thoughtless comment is evidence of crypto-racism. Making offenders face the import and impact of what they have said will change the nature of discourse more effectively than reciprocal insult. This is not to say that repetition and more repetition may not be needed. But water erodes the hardest rock.

As for me, I am deep down furious when people treat me condescendingly, as if aging has made me into an idiot, but I am also reminded of a distinction that Buddhists make. Intentionality is the key. If no harm is consciously intended, the offense may be unfortunate, but forgivable. Cultivating greater awareness is the cure.   As my Grandmother said, "Think before you speak." But if the harm was by intent, it is something that has to be taken very seriously indeed. In that case, how best to counteract the bigotry?

Which brings me to this: will we focus on chewing out the people who insult us or can we join hands to build a better society? The former is almost irresistible, of course, but the latter is the best way to win. Instead of dwelling on personal pain, here are the big undone things we can achieve only by supporting one another in the effort. Truly equal voting rights. Equal pay for equal work. Shame-free security in old age. All good for everyone of us.

Even after trying to be as understanding as possible of as many people as possible I have to admit that there are some hard core bigots who will never see the light, but it doesn't help to behave like them.

Look at it this way: no one likes ants, but if the picnic is really really good, it’s fairly easy to brush off a few ants.

 

Sri Lanka and the Scars of War: A Review Article

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Today’s Sri Lanka is the ancient land of Serendip, which gave rise to the modern English word serendipity. Sri Lanka is still a stunningly beautiful island surrounded by white sand beaches that rise up through tropical forests into blue mountains famous for their delicate tea. (When I moved to Moscow from Colombo, I think the true source of my popularity was the tea I brought with me.)

But who thinks of Sri Lanka in those idyllic terms anymore? The battle ravaged landscape in the Tamil north as well as the ethnically-mixed East is still disfigured by the debris of war, and the emotional wounds are far from healing, as Samanth Subramanian reports in his new book This Divided Island: Life, Death and the Sri Lankan War. His account is based almost entirely on interviews with those who survived. The fact that Subramanian is a Delhi-based journalist whose family name reveals his roots in India’s state of Tamilnadu both helped and hindered his research. He speaks Tamil fluently, yet everywhere he was instantly recognized as hailing from the big meddler next door, which is to say, India. But I don’t think his heritage unduly biases his book

The seeds of war in Sri Lanka were sown by British officials who used census categories to divide and rule their colony of Ceylon. The more immediate cause was the post-colonial Sinhala Only Act of 1959, which purposely omitted recognition of Tamil as a second official language. As a result, young Tamils found it hard to pass university exams and obtain government jobs. By 1976 Velupillai Prabakaran had founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militia that innovated some now standard terrorist tactics. Assassination via suicide bomb, for example. In 1983 a Tiger ambush of an army convoy triggered anti-Tamil riots extensive enough to transform into a civil war. That war ended in 2009, with a protracted siege that culminated in a battle that may be classified as a war crime. Did the Tamils use civilians as shields for their last stand? Did the Army disregard the tens of thousands of trapped civilians in the way of their bombardment? (Or both, as I believe?) Subramanian visited Sri Lanka in 2011, when nothing like genuine reconstruction was well under way, a process he found to be badly contaminated by an officially-sanctioned “erasure” of all evidence of the Tamils’ millenia-long occupation of the island. (This Divided Island provides a very useful, far more detailed time line.)

When I arrived in Sri Lanka to serve as Information Officer at the U.S.I.S. post in Colombo in the mid 1980s, the alienation of Tamils from Sinhalese was already well advanced. Anti-Tamil riots had been so violent that Tamils, included the secretary to our Public Information Officer, had been herded into concentration camps for their own protection. Back home, back in the office, she was still in a state of shock. How could this be happening? My own secretary, who belonged to the Sinhalese majority, was just as distressed. She’d gone to school with Tamil girls. They’d become friends for life, they'd thought, but gradually, among the Sinhalese, it had become suspect for anyone to have Tamil friends. The two communities, once interwoven, were being wrenched apart.

I’d thought when I was assigned to Colombo that I’d be able to study Buddhism with some deeply respected dharma teachers. As it happened, I couldn’t. For one thing, I didn’t see how I could do my job if I gave the appearance of partiality. Worse, I was shocked by the fact that monks, in a frenzy of Sinhalese nationalism, had contorted ancient texts in order to take up arms. As Subramanian puts it: “It was an odd twist of the Buddhist principle of renunciation—not a renunciation of violence for the larger good of the soul, but a renunciation of non-violence for the larger good of the Buddhist nation.” In some of the most interesting sections of This Divided Island Subramanian shows how a foundational Buddhist text known as the Mahavamsa provided justification for an all but genocidal war against Sri Lanka’s Tamils, whose presence historically and in our time was construed to threaten the very survival of Buddhism. Does this contradict the contention that Tamils had no ancient presence on the island? You’d think so, but fanatics often have a hard time with logic.

After I left Sri Lanka, the situation got worse and worse. Where, earlier, Tamils had clamored for equal access to educational and economic opportunities, the Tigers demanded that the entire Tamil population support an increasingly bloody campaign for a separate Tamil state in the North and East. Civil War was the inevitable result, and once again the Tigers were in the terrorist vanguard. They governed the territories under their control with all the finesse of today’s I.S.I.S. “Far from being consummately beloved by their people,” Subramanian writes, “the Tigers started to inspire...fear and revulsion.” As one of his interviewees put it: “The heart weakens without democracy, and there was no democracy within the Tigers. They antagonized their brothers by killing them.” And all the while they were singing “the siren song of the tyrant,” which is: “what we’re doing is for the greater good.” Thus, according to Subramanian, many Tamils learned “a useful life lesson: anybody who asked you to trust them despite ‘minor’ infractions was not to be trusted at all.”

Arriving in Colombo two years after the end of the war, Samanth Subramanian set about making friends, establishing trust and interviewing people. His method in This Divided Island is to allow us to see the Civil War and its aftermath through the eyes and memories of people who had, in so many different ways, been caught up in the savagery. “Underneath it all [the horror of war] there were Sri Lankans trying to live regular lives: earning a living, sending their children to school, writing novels, playing cricket, making lunch....A regular day came to involve keeping your children from being conscripted by the Tigers or being wary about buses that might have bombs planted within them....I went to Sri Lanka to discover what became of life before, during and after the [three] decades of war, and to find out what the conflict had done to the country’s soul.” He succeeds brilliantly at this task.

Subramanian also wanted to “see if any embers remained to ignite the blaze all over again.” What he found , unfortunately, was a vengeful mood among Singhalese and resentment still simmering among Tamils. Although the vainglorious war President Mahinda Rajapaksa has since failed to win reelection and his successor is, reputedly, a more moderate member of the same party, the process of rapprochement between the Singhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority (to say nothing of the also victimized Christians and Muslims) remains far from complete. When the wounds of the savage American Civil War are not fully healed, how could anyone expect the mood of the island to be cheery and forgiving?

The Refugee Crisis and the Drop in the Bucket Fallacy

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Greek island of Kos can’t accommodate all the refugees who land on its shores.  Nor can Greece alone deal with all those who turn up on its sea-washed territories.

Though incessantly berated for hard-heartedness, Europe, collectively, can’t absorb all the desperate, destitute refugees from the Middle East and Africa who wash ashore as regularly as the tides rise and fall.

Even the U.S. hasn’t enough money or space to rehabilitate all who flee impossibly dire, humanly intolerable situations.  

Emotional pleas and sermons on the virtues of charity are soul-wrenching, but they can’t alter the fact that there are upper limits to the absorptive ability of the comparatively wealthy, industrial countries of the world, none of which have completely recovered from the recent great recession. When balloons are filled with too much air, they burst. Countries ditto, when it comes to an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Why People Flee

What’s propelling people to leave well-loved homes in waves that represent a human catastrophe?  Wars, for one thing, including those waged through terrorism as well as by conventional means. Civil war.  Sectarian war.  Inter-religious war.  Ethnic war.  To say nothing of naked power ploys and land grabs, many leading to brutal ethnic-cleansing, as in Myanmar. 

And don’t forget political and economic injustice.  Police state persecutions.  Pervasive, kleptocratic corruption.  Concentrations of economic power resting on mass impoverishment.  Under these conditions, too, people eventually vote with their feet.   

Meanwhile, on TV or via snail mail, we the more fortunate are confronted with heart-wrenching appeals for contributions to alleviate the suffering of millions of refugees from war and injustice.  So many innocents are hungry, homeless, suffering.  Give. Give. Give.  Give more.  

But the giving is never sufficient.  Give more.

It is tragic.  Who but Bill Gates and George Soros and the rest of the 5% can give more than a mite compared to the massive need?  And how are we to triage among those in need of that mite when so many hands are reaching out to us?  The complexity is all but paralyzing.

Other People in Trouble

But wait.  Don’t donate yet.  There are many more claimants to our largesse, so to speak. Planet earth is a capricious mother with no concern for the welfare of her human children. Earthquakes.  Tsunamis.  Floods and drought.  Tornados and typhoons.  Wildfires. Houses are blown down or washed out to sea.   Farmlands are ruined.  Villages are buried.  Thousands of acres of forest and grassland are burnt, along with towns and homes.  And so the appeals begin.  Give.  Give.  Give.

But there’s never enough to give.  Especially since there are other claims on our  supposed “surplus.”  Cultural institutions need money.  Parks need upkeep.  Hurt animals need rescue.  Dreadful diseases need cures.  Give.  Give.  Give.   And so it goes, although the income of 80% of the U.S. population has been stagnant or declining for a couple of decades, and the American Dream is all but dead and buried.      

Oh, I almost forgot the cost of “democracy” in the U.S.  If middle class citizens can’t scrape up enough in campaign contributions to back candidates who, if elected, will represent them, the 1% will buy elections, own politicians and produce policy for their benefit alone.  And then what?  When the American 99% are thoroughly  impoverished, helpless and hopeless, where will we go, in a world already overwhelmed with refugees?

That may read like a joke, but it is no laughing matter.  

Buckets and Bandaids Won't Do

Yes, the richer countries can easily alleviate isolated pockets of misery.  They can absorb a good number of refugees, the exact number depending on the size of the receiving country, the state of its economy and the fragility of its political culture.  But the only practical and durable solution to the current flood of refugees from all directions does not lie with Europe or with the U.S. It requires thoroughgoing political and economic reform in Africa (supported by equally determined aid vehicle overhaul) as well as a resolution to the internal wars of religion and culture that are ravaging the Muslim world.  When these septic sores are healed,  humanity will easily be able to respond to the urgencies created by natural disasters, including climate change, and the normal duties of responsible and charitable citizenship.   

In the interim, to meet at least some of the costs incurred by the current refugee crisis, how about calling upon the billions (or trillions) stashed away in tax havens by corrupt rulers, bureaucrats and their business cronies?  Isn’t it time to delegitimate, totally and forever, the practice of offering secret bank accounts.  Tell the fat and happy enablers of global misery, those suave Swiss bank officials (and their colleagues in the Caymans, on the Channel Islands, on remote Pacific atolls and elsewhere, all of them screaming"unfair!") it's time for them to find a more honest, more constructive line of work. 

Meanwhile, the greedy kleptocrats and conscience-free tyrants of the world must be laughing 24/7 at the rest of us, so easily guilt-mongered into giving, giving, giving, to support powerless, desperate people whom their erstwhile leaders are happy to get rid of.  No, I don’t want people to go hungry and die of exposure, but it’s time to make it impossible for corrupt leaders to enrich themselves through the immiseration of others.  No loopholes.  No exceptions.  No secrecy.  Ever.  (And confiscate their London mansions, their NYC condos and their villas on the Riviera, too.)

And as for the religious war mongers, no pious exceptions for them either.  Murder is murder. Rape is rape.  Guys with guns who slaughter and enslave in the name of any god are criminals, not prophets.  It’s time for tolerant majorities of all creeds to reach across borders to one another,  leaving no room anywhere for murderous machos profaning any religion.  Christians believe that God is mercy and Muslims affirm their faith in Allah the Merciful.  Let them so act.  Together.   Lest we all end up in the merciless hands of self-annointed religious dictators.

Up to a point, it’s easy to toss a few dollars into this bucket, a few dollars into that one,  much easier than demanding and embarking on major systemic reform.  Goodness knows, the buckets are everywhere. But charity, individual and/or institutional, is clearly unable to cope  with a convergence of disasters on the scale of what’s happening today.  Band aids are fine for paper cuts: they won’t do when major surgery is required.   

Are my recommendations silly or insufficient?  Maybe.  But secret bank accounts are a blight of use only to those who have something to hide--and there's something to be said for not befriending international players who victimizing their people (no matter how tempting such alliances may be from other angles).  And if they are silly, then what?  Guilt-tripping ordinary people isn't working.

Jonathan Powell’s Terrorists at the Table - Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

I was skeptical about the durability of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement when I first saw the news of its signing.  It seemed to be too good to be true. The bitter civil war between the Ulster government and the IRA that had engulfed Northern Ireland for twenty years appeared endless – one of those never ending intractable sectarian and destabilizing conflicts.  Yet a friend of mine who knew the negotiations intimately told me that he was optimistic that the peace would hold.  That both sides were exhausted, a reasonable deal had been reached and that, in fact, the US mediation efforts under George Mitchell had primarily provided a cover for a peace accord in the making.  He was right.

Jonathan Powell was then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and his point person on those difficult negotiations.  Powell’s latest book Terrorists at the Table:  Why Negotiating is The Only Way to Peace to be released in the US June 30, 2015, tells the Northern Ireland story from the position of one of the major negotiators.  But he does much more. He uses it as a vehicle, an example of lessons learned (and too often forgotten), to argue that there are times when governments need to talk with an opposition that uses violence to fight for its goals because, he argues, violence is not an end in itself but a means to an end and that end is foremost political and access to the state’s scarce resources.       

Powell is a practitioner, not an academic theorist.  

He writes from real world experience – his own as well as those of other experienced international mediators and negotiators.  He draws, however, on selected scholarly work as needed but in particular highlights Nelson Mandela’s role in leading the ANC and Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari’s experiences as an international mediator in helping nudge various seemingly endless conflicts to closure.      

Powell makes most of his points using examples from lengthy real world conflicts including the ANC and South Africa, ETA in Spain, the FARC in Colombia, the Aceh rebellion in Indonesia, the Bangsamoro (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) in the southern Philippines as well as, of course, Northern Ireland.  In all such conflicts the disputes have involved significant parts of a country’s population whose leaders have turned to violent “solutions” for economic and political redress from which they were blocked through nonviolent means.

In essence, these were civil wars that occurred within national boundaries although many had international dimensions as well. Their resolution often involved devolution of authority from a central government, demobilization of the armed group and increased minority rights for the affected regions.  

Such disputes may take years and any number of failed attempts to resolve – but, Powell argues, even failed attempts can build a path to future peacemaking.   A natural disaster – as happened in Aceh or a generational change in leaders – may turn the tide.  Other disputes remain frozen in amber like the Cyprus impasse or the Arab-Israeli dispute but roadmaps are there waiting for political leadership on both sides to put reconciliation and peace beyond short term political goals.      

Powell’s chapter on the Art of Negotiation (and in my experience he’s right – negotiation is an art learned through experience under the tutelage of skilled mentors) is particularly noteworthy for negotiators, mediators and would be negotiators or, for that matter, anyone interested in understanding how government negotiations and negotiators function – including the importance of secrecy before a deal is done. 

Moving parts and trade offs

If nothing more, negotiations involve far too many moving parts and trade-offs that have to be worked out far from the media’s eye.  This is particularly true of multinational negotiations but even the simplest and most straightforward bilateral ones are unlikely to survive public scrutiny simply because of conflicting vested interests prior to their conclusion.

Terrorists are not likely to hang out shingles

Powell emphasizes that the most demanding challenge is the negotiations that take place within a government or an armed group.  It seems to me that the very practical problem of just locating and engaging the group’s leaders come a close second and Powell addresses the problem well.  That is, unless the leader is in jail – as is the case of PKK head Ocalan who was imprisoned in 1999 and has subsequently been in talks with Turkish authorities or Nelson Mandela – just finding the leader or leaders is often difficult.  After all, groups using terrorism are unlikely to hang out shingles that publicly identify their whereabouts.  Powell also argues that both sides need to possess the motivation to settle and that both need to realize that neither has the ability to prevail. 

Perhaps most importantly, Powell concludes that it is possible to learn from experience, that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict but that conflicts won’t be resolved if people sit around waiting for them  “to  ripen” or “the forces of history to resolve” them.   In short, this is an excellent and readable book which I would highly recommend to students and practitioners of international affairs and negotiations.  Academics and journalists could and should learn a lot from it as well. 

Jonathan Powell, Terrorists at the Table:  Why Negotiation is the Only Way to Peace, Palgrave-MacMillan, June 30, 2015, pp 301.