Innehållsförteckning för January 11-18, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com A War by Any Other Name Juan Cole articulated exactly my feelings about the casual use of the word “war” by so many people who are supposed to be smart [“No Cause for War,” Dec. 14]. It’s a disgrace to the memory of anyone who fought and died in a real war to elevate the cutthroats in ISIS to comparable status when there is no comparison. Thank you for an excellent article. JERRY MOBLEY ST. CLOUD, FLA. Exceptionally well stated by Juan Cole, who I’ve come to believe might be the only person who really understands what’s happening. He’s quite right: These petty thugs can hardly be raised to the level of soldiers. And what state? Certainly not anything “Islamic,” nor any other form of state as we generally…

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is a landmark study of national identity. It was also a life-changing read for Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) founder Abdullah Öcalan, who encountered Anderson’s work in the prison in which Turkish authorities have held him since 1999. Öcalan, imprisoned for crimes against the state, claimed in a 2013 interview to have been converted away from “dogmatic” nationalism by Anderson’s critique of the nation-state. He now endorses a democratic, pluralist platform with greater autonomy within Turkey for Kurds. He isn’t alone. “Anderson’s argument fits Kurdistan’s case very well,” writes Mahir Aziz in The Kurds of Iraq. Sherko Kirmanj, in Kurdish Awakening, quotes from Anderson—“nations are built in the imagination before they are built on the ground”—and uses the Kurdish “imagined community” to explain in part the lasting…

The Fed has hiked interest rates to 0.5 percent, a tiny increase that will change the economy very little. Fed chair Janet Yellen merely intends to signal confidence to Wall Street that the economic recovery is going well. The Fed kept interest rates near zero to flood the economy with easy money after the financial crisis of 2008. Now, Yellen is suggesting, we’re ready to turn off the spigot. There are a number of problems with this, the first being that we haven’t really recovered: 9.9% Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, or too discouraged to look for work. This rate, called U-6, remains higher than pre-crisis levels and about double the official unemployment rate. 85% Workers whose wages are lower than before the financial crisis, according to the most recent…

THE UNITED NATIONS IS EXHAUSTED. CONFLICTS THAT might once have responded to mediation—as in Namibia in the late 1980s, El Salvador in the early 1990s, and Timor-Leste at the turn of this century—are now marked by nihilistic, sometimes genocidal brutality beyond the effective reach of UN envoys. Budgets for life-saving humanitarian relief—desperately needed in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa, where millions of refugees are on the move—are dwindling to near-bankruptcy. There are more UN peacekeepers on the ground than ever before, with 124,746 military and civilian personnel deployed in 16 operations in West and Central Africa, the Middle East, and Haiti by the summer of 2015. Yet UN troops, now working with modern weapons of war, face greater dangers, both to their own lives and to the people…

The Democratic debate in New Hampshire on December 19 provided a stark contrast to the GOP’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” spectacle a few days earlier. The Republicans dished out bombast and bigotry, while the Democratic candidates focused on policy and purpose, reminding Americans that we are strengthened when we abide by our constitutional values rather than trample them in panic. Sadly, far fewer voters watched the Democratic debate, which drew a little over 8 million viewers, as opposed to some 18 million for the GOP. This imbalance was the perverse design of Democratic National Committee head Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who knew that scheduling a debate on the Saturday night before Christmas—at the same time as an NFL game—would discourage viewers from watching. By planning only a few…

Young academics are often advised to prioritize scholarship over citizenship, meaning political involvement. But as the careers of some of our most influential scholars repeatedly demonstrate, especially in the humanities and social sciences, this is often a false and foolish distinction. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive “citizen scholar” than Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, the Anglo/Irish, China-born, California- and Ireland-raised, Cambridge- and Cornell-educated specialist in Indonesian, Philippine, and Thai politics and culture. An endowed professor at Cornell and a frequent contributor to New Left Review, Anderson died in his sleep of apparent heart failure on December 13, three days after giving a lecture on “Nationalism and Anarchism” at the University of Indonesia. He was 79. I took Anderson’s class on civil-military relations as an undergraduate more than 30 years…

It’s widely said that Donald Trump is a clown. As he sits atop the polls, I’m intrigued by the perverse power of that clowning in shaping his success. Part of his popularity seems grounded in the ritual practices of the culture wars—for Donald Trump is not just a joke, he’s the embodiment of the politically incorrect joke, for which the customary response to umbrage is: “Don’t you have a sense of humor?” If the debate goes further, it usually becomes snagged upon First Amendment absolutism, proceeding in endless circles about one’s right to speak. No doubt there’s a broad legal right to say all kinds of awful things. My concern is with silence: what we’re not saying while we’re busy defending “funny” political bullying. This is of particular concern in…

BEFORE ITS FAILED OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN, THE SOVIET UNION discovered that the country was rich in natural resources. In the 1980s, Soviet mining experts drafted maps and collected data that would lay dormant in the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul until the rise of the Taliban. These charts documented a vast amount of iron, copper, gold, cobalt, rare earth metals, and lithium. Fearing what the Taliban might do with this wealth, a tiny group of Afghan geologists hid the maps in their homes until the arrival of American forces in 2001. By 2007, the US Geological Survey had undertaken the most comprehensive study of the mineral deposits below the country’s surface. An internal Pentagon memo claimed that Afghanistan could develop into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” referring to the mineral…

Anxious Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. By Joseph LeDoux. Viking. 466 pp. $28.95. Among the inhabitants of my household is a fiveyearold pug, Alfred. After a somewhat rocky start, my relationship with Alfred has blossomed: When I return home—much less feed him or take him for a walk—he scampers around appreciatively, snarling and grunting in the manner I’ve come to associate with the expression of canine excitement. But any fondness that Alfred holds for me is far eclipsed by his relationship with my wife, with whom he has lived his entire life. When she leaves home, Alfred wanders the apartment listlessly before finally taking up a spot that affords him an unobstructed view of the front door. And there he sits, staring intently, alert to…

Sandra Bland’s mother and sisters were in federal court in Houston on December 17. The occasion was a hearing for their lawsuit against multiple defendants, including the jailers who Bland’s family says should have prevented her from dying while in custody. Among the new developments in the case were the defendants’ revelations that they had seen evidence, lifted from Bland’s cell-phone texts, that she might have been receiving counseling for mental-health issues. They argue that Bland’s death was a suicide that the jail could not have prevented (and a grand jury has declined to indict any members of the jail’s staff). The judge set the trial date for the family’s suit for January 2017. It will be a long time before legal light can be definitively shed on the question…

Already forgotten in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings is a more persistent terrorist threat to average Americans: right-wing extremists. Robert Lewis Dear, who shot and killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, has since pleaded guilty to being a “warrior for the babies.” His actions follow a long tradition of violence against abortion providers. That violence is increasing: The number of clinics reporting threats and targeted intimidation has increased from about 25 percent to more than 50 percent since 2010. Dear’s terrorism hasn’t affected the GOP’s congressional crusade against the women’s-healthcare provider, however. Immediately after the shooting, Senate Republicans said they would proceed with efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which currently receives about $500 million from the federal government. About 80 percent of Planned…

Sasha Abramsky writes this week about Proposition 13, the 1978 anti-tax measure that devastated California’s public finances. At the time, former Nation editor Carey McWilliams called the initiative an understandable, if misdirected, “revolt of the middle class.” A month later, Peter Connolly, a Democratic Senate aide, wrote an article for The Nation criticizing McWilliams and other leftists who sympathized with the impulse behind Prop 13. Actually, it was “the harbinger of a reactionary counterrevolution,” Connolly wrote. “Liberal attempts to recognize and tame the ‘positive side’ of this movement will only strengthen the Reagans, Hatches, Kemps, et al., who will be its political beneficiaries. To say this is not to say that California’s property taxes were not in need of prudent reduction. It is to say that liberals and serious radicals…

Sasha Abramsky writes regularly for The Nation and is the author, most recently, of The House of Twenty Thousand Books. NINE YEARS AGO, WHEN THE COMPUTER magnate Michael Dell was planning to buy the old Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, his tax lawyers urged him to rethink the purchase. If Dell became the sole owner of that prime beachfront property, its value would be subject to a reassessment that would significantly raise the property taxes. But if he could find a way to buy it so that no single owner could claim more than 50 percent of the property, no reassessment would take place. Dell’s team urged him to rewrite the contract. In the revised deal, an entity 99 percent owned by Dell bought 42.5 percent of the hotel; an…

Killing and Dying. By Adrian Tomine. Drawn & Quarterly. 128 pp. $22.95. Cartooning is an art of omission and suggestion. A pair of black dots can do for eyes. Make a pair of box shapes for eyeglass frames, and those dots aren’t even necessary. Put a crisscross pattern on a patch of a wall, and the mind will fill in rows of bricks. Add a few slashes of vertical lines across the picture, and there’s a rainstorm. The silliest strips on the newspaper funny pages (or what’s left of them) have always worked this way, and so have the most serious graphic books for an adult readership. Through implication and visual shorthand—a window frame, the silhouette of a car—Will Eisner summoned the Lower East Side of the early 20th century…