Antigua’s Chinese Enclave: What it Means

ANTIGUA: TOURIST PARADISE:

A mere 264 miles from US shores lies the sovereign Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, a tourist’s paradise blessed with stable, year round temperatures; several hundred pristine beaches; lush lagoons; and hideaway natural harbors. It has mountains, too, offering scenic views of a vast mangrove forest. 80% of Antigua’s GDP derives from tourism.

But Antigua, like other island nations, faces immense challenges in the maelstrom of climate change: increase in hurricane intensity and frequency, rising sea levels, erosion, salt water intrusion, and ground water depletion.

2017 saw Antigua devastated by Category 5 Irma, destroying 97% of
Barbuda’s infrastructure, rendering it nearly uninhabitable.

Often dubbed “the Switzerland of the Caribbean,” Antigua finds itself lacking the financial resources to sustain its economic viability in the context of climate change and yielded to Chinese overtures: a 2 percent interest loan, with a 5-year moratorium on repayment.

Antigua’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, views China as a friend: “I see China, though, as a country that stands on truth, and a country that, you know, at least has some level of empathy for small states, and generally for poor and dispossessed persons globally” (Newsweek. May 5, 2024).

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS POSED BY CHINA IN ANTIGUA:

Newsweek’s recent study of leaked documents indicates 1000 acres of forest will be razed to accommodate a Chinese Economic Free Zone juggernaut, ultimately consuming 2000 acres for housing and businesses. It includes an airport, up to seven resorts, a shipping port, and Antigua’s first four lane highway. Construction has begun.

Bearing all the earmarks of a Chinese enclave, the completed project confers independent immigration and customs formalities for the enclave and a license to issue passports. It will not pay income taxes, unlike native Antiguans, sales taxes, or import duties. Anyone investing $400,000 or more will be eligible for Antiguan citizenship

Browne touts his Chinese venture as an investment in the future, creating hundreds of jobs.

Browne sweetens the deal by promising environmentalists a 70 acre mangrove reserve and a 60 acre nursery for growing 100,000 trees.

This hasn’t pacified the island’s environmentalists, however, who contend the free zone transverses the island’s largest marine reserve, under legal protection since 2005, and destroys most of its mangrove forests, a haven for migrating birds.

They point out the area’s “nesting ground for critically endangered sea turtles, the threatened West Indian whistling duck and the Antiguan racer, once dubbed the world’s rarest snake, brought back from the brink of extinction by efforts from local environmentalists” (Newsweek).

Browne angrily brands his critics “ecoterrorists.”

AIR AND WATER POLLUTION:

China has a history of contributing to pollution through industrial production and waste processing. Enforcement of environmental protections is often ignored when it comes to garbage, water, atmospheric, and excrement pollution, undermining economic development and investment.

Opponents insist the Antiguan government adequately address these issues, which could have deleterious effects on soil ecology, agricultural production, and water supply.

Antigua’s first environmental report by the government’s environmental management authority, issued in 1992, proved alarming in terms of pollution, waste disposal, deforestation, and entrepreneurial nonchalance.

As for the accommodation sector, the study noted that the water supply for the bankrupt Grand Royal Hotel was found inadequate, singling out Chinese businesses for dumping.

OVERFISHING AND MARINE ECOSYSTEM DEGRADATION:

Chinese nationals also have a legacy of illegal and unregulated logging of parrotfish in the coral reefs, which are important to the marine environment of Antigua’s Marina Bay. As such, not only are the food chain and the environment in peril as acres of mangroves fall to chainsaws, but its fisheries as well

China’s relentless pursuit of high-quality fish (apex predators in the ocean communities), and the destruction of the ecosystems that consistently produce these creatures, have been implicated as the main culprits in extensive ecosystem degradation when applied at galactic scales to Africa, the American Pacific coast, and now the Eastern Caribbean.

Buying seafood from China, which will be allowed to operate a fish farm, has negative consequences for both the environment and Antiguan fishers. Chinese vessel owners profit greatly from buying or leasing fishing rights from over 60 countries, including Antigua and Barbuda. While this provides a trillion meals per year, it causes damage to the ocean.

HISTORY OF CHINESE CARIBBEAN INVESTMENT:

The major Chinese enterprises in Antigua mainly involve construction, infrastructure, real estate, and hotels. The total value of China’s FDI in the seven countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was estimated at almost 300 million US at the end of 2011. Chinese financing came in the form of concessional loans. In the Eastern Caribbean, it funded the construction of the national stadium, the American University of Antigua, and the Lyndhurst Road Development Project. China has also engaged in a number of technical cooperation projects in capacity building and training and granted subsidies to the Tropical Storm Grant Program.

The bottom line is that China’s growing influence on Antigua’s politics and economy comes at a cost, primarily to the environment and the United States. Air and water pollution in Antigua are predominantly caused by Chinese firms.

The challenges deriving from air pollution and inadequate addressing of such concerns leave open the question of whether a distinction should be made in Antigua between government policies attracting investment contributing to the economy while exacerbating the country’s environmental problems and those policies that mitigate polluting.

Antigua’s economic growth in the last decade has been due to investments and loans from China, which reflect China’s strategic objective in the Caribbean. Smaller island nations have been overly enthusiastic in embracing China’s support since they have been relegated, as well as stigmatized, by powerful global financial institutions in times of crisis. The Chinese have presented their assistance with no condition of policy or regime change, thus undermining the frequent dictates of the Washington Consensus.

China has been exploiting the vulnerability of developing nations. If Beijing can increase its investments in countries that are dependent on tourism and other single export industries, it can anticipate predictable returns. Focusing on countries that rely on imports, not on natural resources, China is now the second largest trading partner with some Caribbean countries.

POTENTIAL FOR ESPIONAGE AND CYBERSECURITY RISK:

Given its proximity to US shores, Antigua obviously has strategic significance.

On August 17th, 2020, former Trump administration Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney warned that China’s post-crisis economic policy, including investment in impoverished Caribbean nations like Antigua and Barbuda, jeopardizes US security.

Historically, the Monroe Doctrine (1823), was strictly enforced to keep foreign interests from interference in the Americas. Among its provisions, further colonizations in the Americas would be viewed as threatening US interests.

In 1861, France attempted creating an empire in Mexico, encountering protest.

In 1962, Russian missile intrusion in Cuba nearly launched WWIII.

In 1983, President Reagan committed troops to expel Cuban military from pro-Soviet Union Granada.

Will Antigua become an espionage base like Cuba?

While the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has issued concerns about China’s growing presence in Antigua and the Caribbean region, the Biden administration has been silent.

–rj

Dr. Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death


Am reading Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. Marsh is a retired brain surgeon, who recently was diagnosed (2021) with advanced prostate cancer, presently in remission, but with a 75% chance of reoccurrence.

His previous books include Do No Harm and Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon, both well received. Professionally, he has published 179 papers in peer reviewed journals and performed 50,000 surgeries over a 40-year span.

In his fulsome writing, Marsh reminds me of the late neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks, gifted in eloquence, humble, and unfailingly compassionate.

Perhaps I’m stereotyping, but he’s unlike many in the medical sciences, consumed by professional interests and profit motive, insensitive or ignorant of the arts and, professionally, objectifying their patients rather than seeing them as individuals, each with gradients of need and longing.

One of his cherished accomplishments is the creation of two balcony gardens for neurological patients at St. George’s hospital

Impressively, he’s been working pro bonum with colleagues in Ukraine since 1992. Neither cancer nor the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine has deterred the good doctor visiting the country regularly to consult and advise colleagues.

At home, Marsh is an assisted dying activist.

Of his previous Do No Harm, now translated into 37 languages, The Economist wrote that it’s “so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell.”

Marsh reads widely, owns several thousand books, keeps a garden, raises bees, and enjoys woodcrafting.

I’m early in my reading of And Finally, so I’ll delay full commentary for another post when fully read. But let me share a passage I read this morning that amplifies Marsh’s writing talent infused with observation and an affinity for nature, under assault by climate change:

The {COVID} lockdown coincided with perfect spring weather – so fine, prolonged and warm that it spoke of climate change. The bushes in the little paradise of my back garden almost all burst into flower all at once, and the trees went from being bare winter skeletons to towers of spreading green leaves in a matter of days. The bees came rushing out of their hive in front of my workshop and shot up into the sunlight, rejoicing in vertical zigzags. And the lockdown brought complete peace and quiet. The air felt as fresh as if you were in the countryside and the sky was a clear and deep blue. The only sounds were of birds singing, children playing and the wind in the trees. And at night, at first there was a full moon, looking down kindly on the suddenly silent city, and you could see the stars. It was a vision of heaven, here in London, SW19. Time had stopped. Eternity is not the infinite prolongation of time but instead its abolition.

The silence and clear air, and the return of birdsong, reminded us of what we have already lost with cars, pollution and the changing climate, and the unnaturally fine weather told us that Nature is out of joint, and that there is much, much worse to come.

I feel it in my bones. This is going to be a great read.

—rj

 

Opening Paragraphs Matter

The opening paragraph is among literature’s most important gestures, or like the fly fisher’s fly line and crafted lure, imperative to netting her catch, in this case, the reader.

Exemplars of this refined craft are many: the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Orwell’s 1984, and not least, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, spring to mind. I’m sure you have your own favorite.

Surprisingly, my favorite opening comes from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a non-fiction classic latent in its prelapsarian beauty, resonance and relevance, an America of pristine promise in its unspoiled abundance. She caught me in her cast:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. 

If I were still teaching a college composition course, I’d likely point out the opening’s rich, visual detail. When it comes to description, abstractions won’t suffice. Good writers, ever mindful of their readers, seek to gain their readers’ attention, employing the sensory, i.e., taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing. Take, for instance, Carson’s choice of “checkerboard,” to achieve concreteness and economy.

Good writing, action-centered, selects its verbs adroitly for the sensory and kinetic (movement): clouds drift, “oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered,” “foxes barked” and “deer silently crossed the fields.”

Among still other things, I’d emphasize the paragraph’s unity and varied sentence structure, lending ambience.

Superb openings like this don’t just happen. They are wrought through multiple revision.

Carson’s opening paragraph, prescient in its parabolic foreboding of a lost Eden, initiated a lasting awareness in me of nature’s frailty amidst human assault. It changed the way I live my life, to do no hurt to Nature that gave me birth and sustains me.

—rj

Amazon: Anatomy of a Behemoth

Despite its humble beginnings in a Seattle two car garage in 1994 and web presence in 1995 as a purveyor of books, Amazon has subsequently grown into a behemoth, becoming the world’s largest online retailer with a current market cap of $1.61 trillion.

Founder Jeff Bezos, ever the visionary and e-commerce pioneer, observing that the internet was growing at a rate of 2300% a year, quit his job at a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle, hoping his venture world payoff in the best and largest online mall.

He initially dubbed his new company Cadabra, Inc, but after his lawyers misheard it as cadaver, he decided on a change. Browsing through a dictionary, the word Amazon for the world’s largest river caught his eye.

It wasn’t long before Amazon moved beyond its foothold of selling books to diversifying in 1999 into selling and auctioning toys, electronics, tools and hardware, and kitchenware.

Sales took off and Amazon hired 20,000 seasonal employees to meet demand.

Today, Amazon continues to be the global leader in e-commerce, providing a refined marketplace which connects buyers with sellers, boasting the largest fulfillment network in the world, and promoting a vibrant culture of innovation and emerging technologies.

The Seattle based company employs more than 90,000 people in the state of Washington, with the actual number of employees exceeding 380,000 worldwide, making Amazon one of the biggest job creators in the last decade. These jobs consist of anything from corporate engineers and marketers to hourly warehouse and customer service representatives. The company operates at a scale unequaled in contemporary business and technology.

Unfortunately, it’s become “a bloody beast,” says one of its critics, swallowing up independent brick and mortar enterprises, commencing with its purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, a $13.7 billion deal.

Now a multifaceted eCommerce platform, it earns its income through arrangements of retail, third-party sellers, subscriptions and,more recently, in servers and other forms of employee data storage.

Innovation has been the hallmark of Amazon’s continuing success. Kindle, for example, proved one of its best, changing the way the public buys its books to the chagrin of physical bookstores.

Currently, Amazon has been investing in drone delivery, which would revolutionize how packages are sent and received worldwide.

Despite Amazon’s critics, the public’s response has been very favorable, with Amazon delivery trucks now a daily sight in residential neighborhoods .

Amazon’s adoption of public reviews of its many goods is a stroke of genius. Readers can see what others think before making a purchase.

Then there’s the convenience of not having to climb into your car, consuming time and gas. The fallout, of course, is huge for local retail.

Amazon is also consumer friendly, offering fast delivery, easy return of goods, and speedy refunds. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Amazon is the #1 company in the US for customer satisfaction. Over 100 million paid subscribers globally have signed up for Amazon Prime, which allows for two day delivery on more than 100 million items, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, along with a million songs.

Recently, it purchased audio.books.

Critics have too often ignored its progressive hiring policies. Amazon has ranked in the top three for new job creation in the United States. Its employee headcount has grown from 31,000 in 2008 to 382,400 in 2017, and it is expected to continue growing. Amazon is known for creating jobs that are not temporary or seasonal.

A study done by eHealth found that Amazon ranks first as the most Military Spouse Friendly Employer in the list of the top 50. Additionally, Amazon has fulfilled its pledge to hire 25,000 Veterans and Military Spouses by 2021. Amazon is committed to training and hiring Veterans for the Career Choice Program, which is exclusively for active duty service members and spouses. The program educates and prepares them for job placement at Amazon or any other company. This exclusive program is a win for Veterans who are searching for a new career, as they receive training for a job that is guaranteed to them.

Moreover, Amazon is dedicated to hiring people with disabilities and provides accommodations for over 120 roles. They have expedited the hiring process to as little as 48 hours for those who apply.

Amazon is one of the front runners in hiring ex-offenders and individuals who were recently incarcerated. With the Ban the Box movement gaining momentum, many companies are removing criminal offense questions from their initial job applications.

Amazon has also approached the United States and Canadian Governments for vital roles in public sectors and special clearance jobs that help fund public projects. An example of this is Amazon’s creation of a second headquarters (HQ2), in Arlington, VA, which is expected to create an estimated 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investments over the next 10-15 years.

Amazon is focused on long-term employment and has been implementing various initiatives to improve job quality and employee benefits. An example of this is the large recruiting and hiring efforts in the state of Wisconsin.

But there remain negative aspects that merit attention; namely with regard to warehouse employees, pressured to take on physically demanding tasks, skip bathroom breaks to maximize targets, penalized for taking sick days or time off, resulting in high turnover.

The extent of Amazon surveillance has led to numerous complaints as workers feel their privacy is being compromised and that they’re being treated like robots. In 2018, warehouse workers reported they were being monitored by GPS tags, with exact details of their location and any rest breaks they take.

Alongside surveillance, there are strict productivity quotas involving a completion rate of tasks within a certain time frame. Failure to do so can lead to warnings and in worse cases, termination of employment.

When it comes to stock units paid to new employees in their third or fourth year, many aren’t around to receive them.

Stress is inherent with any Amazon hire, whether in a warehouse, office, or delivery. Amazon ranks employees against each other and eliminates the bottom 6% annually.

Meanwhile, Amazon has maintained a tough stance against unions, hiring the firm Complete Solution Staffing to inform its employees of the problems with unions.

Amazon has recently been subjected to controversy over its tax policies and their implications. Over the past few years, the corporation has paid very little or no taxes to the government. Contrary to most U.S. based corporations, Amazon paid no federal taxes for the year 2017 and 2018, despite the fact it was a highly profitable company.

Despite this, the company has contributed state taxes that total almost $1.2 billion dollars and has created many jobs that have in turn, increased tax revenue. Amazon defended their tax payment policy in a statement to Business Insider: “Amazon pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate, including paying $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years.”

Critics cite Amazon’s dynamic growth as a detriment to retail business, under selling them and driving them out of existence. Former Amazon chief financial officer Warren Jenson commented that if your business makes a profit, Amazon sees you as the competition and will be coming for you. Currently, it seeks to imitate highly successful Trader Joe’s.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently sued Amazon for being an illegal monopoly, where 40% of online shopping occurs on Amazon.com, creating higher prices for consumers. 

Amazon vigorously disputes the FTC assertion and continues to seek expansion.

—rj

Biden plays politics: The Gaza fiasco


On one hand, President Biden urges a ceasefire in the nearly six month Gaza conflict; on the other, he has stealthily authorized a potent new military aid package to Israel that includes jets, 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs.

Although 2000 pound bombs are capable of taking out whole city blocks and have been abandoned by most Western militaries for employment in urban locales, they have dominated Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, with the death toll currently estimated at 33,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Anonymous Pentagon sources disclose the armament transfer includes transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines at a cost of 2.5 billion.
Biden isn’t mandated to disclose any of this to lawmakers since Congress had approved the transfer in 2008, presently unfulfilled.

Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, receiving on average $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid annually.

Such aid incentivizes documented Israeli violations of Palestinian rights by humane organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They have included ongoing abusive detention practices (including the torture of prisoners), restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, the targeting of medical personnel and facilities, and severe damage to infrastructure such as water and electricity to Palestinian civilians prior to Israel’s current Gaza incursion.

It does not move the needle to a two state solution.

All of this comes even as Biden expresses concern over a pending Israeli assault on the alleged remaining Hamas stronghold of Rafah along the Egyptian border and UN warnings of incipient mass starvation. 1.2 million Gaza refugees have sought refuge in this enclave.

Jewish pressure weighs heavily on the Biden administration in an election year with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee donating millions to unseat Democrats deemed unfriendly to Israel. A recent Pew Research survey indicates 80% of American Jews regard aid to Israel as essential.

Those constituencies calling for suspension of aid to Israel are branded as anti-Semite, with surging efforts to pass legislation abridging their First Amendment right to free speech.

Republicans, even more than Democrat leaning Jews, have vigorously supported aid to Israel, though increasingly resistant to approving aid to a besieged Ukraine.

Biden would do well to mind an increasingly assertive Muslim-American electorate that threatens to boycott him in November.

Meanwhile, any full scale attack on densely populated Rafah, gateway for food convoys, would conceivably result in thousands, not hundreds, of killed and maimed.

The morally compromised Biden administration has been complicit in Israel’s blitzkrieg that includes mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps, abetted by American armaments.

For this, the U.S. proves deserving of world condemnation.

The elephant in the room is Biden; but then again, endeavors to dislodge him by voting for his Republican adversary are surely non sequitur.

Conversely, efforts to encourage divestiture at home and abroad of Israel merit encouragement. They brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime.

America must do what is right, not what is easy.

–rj

David Copperfield: An Enduring Nexus

Those of us who read fiction do so for many reasons, the majority perhaps to relieve the tedium of a long flight or empty minutes in the lobby of a doctor’s office, or as a verbal nightcap absolving the tensions of a frenetic day of undulating joy and sorrow, nuanced by disappointment or regret.

As a child, I read to escape into a fantasy world remote from the quotidian squalor of waterfront Philly and the domestic insecurity of a single parent home suffused with alcoholic addiction. In these maturer years, I read fiction mostly for connection and inspiration that my strivings have mattered, despite my myriad blunderings, providing solace and meaning—and best, that I am not alone.

Of the books I’ve read, David Copperfield resonates most by way of nexus: a childhood annulled by environment, a sensitive child seeking emancipation, a failed marriage and, at last, a soulmate found. It was Dicken’s “favorite child” among his fourteen completed novels over a brief twenty years.

In many ways, David Copperfield navigates the journey of its protagonist for sovereignty over life’s intemperate intrusions, impeding one’s happiness; the fissuring of expectation and event; in Tom Wolfian parlance, the looming challenge of having the “right stuff” to break through.

Observing the mythic triad of separation, trial, and restoration, David’s journey becomes our own.

I first came upon David Copperfield when in the eighth grade in Massachusetts at age thirteen. How wonderful the schools were then. Instantly, the book became a first love, an affection that has endured.

This novel differs from Dickens’ earlier ones, its early chapters autobiographical and penned in first person. A novel of memories and reflections, it plays down his usual melodrama.

As for its teeming, colorful characters—a Dickensian constant—latent behind their public personae lies a good deal of dissonance, the incongruity loved by Shakespeare between appearance and reality:

Micawber, outwardly jovial, masking an inner angst and volatile moods as debtor prison looms ever closer.

The narcissist Steerforth, whose duplicity manipulates David, but
achieves a lesson learned.

Mr. Dick, whose labored utterances suggest mental illness, sympathetically drawn.

I know David Copperfield ends in fairytale recompension, resilence rewarded, injustice vanquished—if only life were like that. Still, we need to dream that life may sometimes prove compensatory, a lotus land dulling life’s transgressions.

There’s so much in David Copperfield that revives dormant memory of my own childhood and early adulthood, its idealism and reality’s harshness; not least, growth paradoxically through failure.

It works the same way for many others as well. I think of a couple that nightly reads five pages of the novel to each other before turning in.

I understand that. As said, I also read to connect.

–rj

Jack Kerouac: Soulful Wanderer

Jack Kerouac turned 102 a week ago. The fierceness of his writing overwhelms, lyrical, sensory, harnessing human moods, a fiery warmth beneath a canopy of gazing stars on cold stellar nights:

“Fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea shroud towers out of the cove, the bingbang cove with its seas booming inside caves and slapping out, the cities of seaweed floating up and down you can even see their dark leer in the phosphorescent seabeach nightlight.”

—Big Sur

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhoo 0d, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

—The Portable Jack Kerouac

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

—The Portable Kerouac

I miss you, Jack. You left us all too soon.

—rj

Democracy’s Failure

While democracy has been widely touted as the best form of government, it’s had many detractors in Britain and America, who fearing a working class majority of the uninformed, intellectually unprepared, politically manipulated by partisan interests, proposed education in the liberal arts as a safeguard for assuring an informed, discriminating electorate.

One thinks of Matthew Arnold’s classic Culture and Anarchy and John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University as examples. The truth is it hasn’t worked to salvage democracy. As Costica Bradatan comments in his insightful book, In Praise of Failure, “Populism and authoritarianism are flourishing today in places with remarkably high educational levels. For all the self-flattering talk about civic-mindedness and political engagement, the citizenry in the West is in no better shape than it was one hundred years ago. And we seem resigned to the situation.”

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, comments in his Universities in the Marketplace that the arts and sciences faculties “display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education.”

Viewing our current political milieu, I see only the debris of a once heralded idea to make government truly feasible in the best interests of our nation. Alas, not since the Civil War, has America been so fractured in its allegiances.

Alexander Hamilton, suspicious of public sovereignty, supported the idea of the Electoral College. That certainly hasn’t worked.

Back in England, John Stuart Mill proposed a plutocracy of the educated allowed multiple votes. Fortunately, it wasn’t well-received.

As for the prototype Athenian democracy, women couldn’t vote, nor foreigners and slaves.

I confess I don’t know the answer, except to offer that democracy, for all its liabilities, surpasses those protocols previously attempted.

—rj

Oh, my god! The Political Morass Confronting Americans

Oh, my god! We’re all in trouble. Here we are, facing a presidential election, caught in a catch-22 situation, the choice between a president clearly showing incipient symptoms of mental decline, and an ex-President promising revenge and demagoguery. Biden’s lapses have been widely reported in the press for some time: tumbling on aircraft steps, lingering pauses in speech delivery, mix-up in identifying political leaders, befuddled recall of events.

Now comes the President’s frantically called press gathering, just 23 minutes warning in the aftermath of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s devastating findings on Biden’s alleged national security lapses: storage of top secret files in his Delaware home and sharing of classified information with the ghostwriter of his memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer.

Hur’s office considered charging Zwoniker, who has been cooperative, but the ghostwriter had previously destroyed the interview tapes with Biden when he learned of the special counsel probe, resulting in the improbability of a conviction for lack of evidence.

Hur found the president’s recall of how the classified documents ended-up in his basement as “hazy.” He had said he found them in his then rented house in Virginia.

What really instigated Biden’s frenetic press appearance was probably Hur’s reporting the President’s inability to recall when his son Beau died of brain cancer: “I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” the President angrily retorted.-

Biden couldn’t even recall the dates he’d been vice-president.

The reality is that his combative press conference only seems to lend credence to Hur’s allegations of a President of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

About to leave the room, Biden returned to the lectern to respond to a reporter’s belated question on the Gaza crisis. Committing yet another gaffe of mistaken identity, piling up in recent days to the chagrin of his staff, Biden confused Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”

Several days earlier in Nevada, he confused deceased French president Francois Mitterand with current French president Emmanuel Macron. Mitterand died in 2015.

This past Wednesday, Biden said he had interviewed Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021. Kohl died in 2017.

I think of Ronald Reagan in his second term, then America’s oldest president, falling asleep in cabinet meetings. A few years later, 1994, Reagan announced his Alzheimer diagnosis. The signs, however, of its progression had already been evident while in office.

I wish our President well, but I fear the fallout of mental facility in a nuclear age, the challenge of climate warming, the looming threat of a Russia-China-Iran alliance, and still more, to nightmare my sleep.

Hiding presidential infirmity has a long history, embracing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. We’ve mustered through so far, but why take the risk?

Faulting Republican Robert Hur constitutes its own partisanship.

As Democratic strategist James Carville candidly put it, “I don’t know how you get out of this.”

–rj

Martyr’s Day: Gandhi’s Vanishing Legacy

Today marks Martyr’s Day in India. On this day, January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, father of a free India, visiting New Delhi to address an evening Hindu prayer meeting, was gunned down by nationalist Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who fired three bullets into his chest, killing him. Godse believed Gandhi was overly conciliatory to Muslims.

Falling to the ground, Gandhi reputedly moved his hand to his forehead in the Hindu sign of forgiveness, his final words, “He Ram, He Ram” (“Oh God, Oh God”).

This happened a mere five months after India had won independence from British rule.

Committed to the Tolstoy principle of non-violence, Gandhi would be appalled at the changes sweeping across today’s India in the wake of a Hindu fundamentalism of tsunami proportions not adverse to employing violence against those perceived as threatening its interests, augmented by a Modi government keen to buttress its hegemony by supporting religious bias.

A few days ago, January 22, saw the dedication of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, said to be Ram’s birthplace. Ram is the seventh avatar of the god, Vishnu, and regarded as deity.

_=Ram Temple, Inauguration Day

Modi had promised the temple in his initial run for prime minister and was present to inaugurate the temple: “Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” said Modi.

Built on a 70-acre site previously occupied by the four century old Babri Mosque, torn down in 1992 by a frenzied Hindu mob, thousands died in the sectarian violence that followed. None of the perpetrators were sentenced.

Not that any of this mattered to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi, entrenched in power since 2014. The Ram Temple symbolizes the supremacy of both the BJP and a Hindu culture that discourages pluralism.

In contrast, India’s founding fathers, recognizing the myriad religious diversity of India—Muslims, Buddhists Christians, and Jains—eschewed pandering to any faction.

Ironically, India seems to be following in the steps of Pakistan, deliberately created as a Muslim state.

Chillingly, there’s the legacy of Hindu nationalist M. S. Golwalkar, advocating that “minorities in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”

Modi deemed Golwalkar one of his primary influences in his 2008 book, Jyotipunj (Beams of Light).

Today’s Hindu dominated India, 80% of its population, increasingly imposes Golwalkar’s dictum of a monolithic culture impervious to those it views as interlopers, deserving of restriction and possibly extinction.

In the first eight months of 2023, 525 attacks on Christians occurred. In the state of Manipur, 642 churches were torched by Hindu arsonists “receiving support from people in power,” said the United Christian Forum (UCF).

Notorious was the killing of Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines in 1999, along with his two sons, Philip (aged 10) and Timothy (aged 6), burnt to death by a Hindu Nationalist group named Bajrang Dal. Stains, a medical doctor, had come to India several years earlier to treat lepers and minister to the poor. He was accused of “forced conversions,” a common rumored charge among Hindu nationalists.

As is, Christians comprise a mere 2.3 % of India’s teeming population.

Indian Muslims, comprising the third largest Muslim population in the world, have likewise been continuously assaulted, often accused of cattle rustling.

2020 saw the Delhi riots, killing 53 people, 40 of them Muslim. In its aftermath, Modi denied his government discriminates against Muslims, despite the BJP’s legislating the Citizen’s Act, restricting citizen eligibility of undocumented immigrants, largely Muslim, and prohibiting proselytizing by Muslims and Christians.

An investigation of the Delhi riots by the independent Delhi Minorities Commission found the violence “planned and targeted” and several police actively participating in attacking Muslims. A subsequent video confirmed several policemen beating five seriously injured Muslim men lying on the street and forcing them to sing the Indian national anthem to prove their patriotism.

I won’t go into persecution of the Sikh population, increasingly viewed as disloyal citizenry, seeking establishment of an independent state. Canadian and American intelligence agencies have uncovered assassination plots, one of them succeeding in Canada, against Sikh diaspora leadership.

Meanwhile, President Biden went all out for the state visit of Prime Minister Midi, hosting a vegetarian dinner on June 21, 2023, despite protestors among Democrats and the urgings of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that he confront Modi on the matter of human rights in India. The President would later say he did so in private conversation with Modi, but if so, any details were excluded from his public closing summation.

India, which held so much promise for an enlightened democracy upon its emergence as a free nation, has altered its raison d’être over the last decade, increasingly disenfranchising its minorities and critics.

I have wondered how my friends are faring in Kerala, where the apostle Thomas ministered to the natives 2000 years ago. Its Christian community is India’s largest . Unfortunately, the Catholic leadership has cozied up to the BJP in return for its support of a good price for Kerala rubber. I find it a dubious Faustian exchange, prioritizing profit over the welfare of Christians elsewhere in the nation.

I think back to my privileged visit years ago to Gandhi’s simple bed, cup, and walking stick. I had read about him at age ten, which began my lifetime devotion to this great man, advocate of non-violence, charity to the poor, abolishing caste, proponent of women’s emancipation and, of course, India’s freedom. His impact on Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement is fully acknowledged.

It’s Martyr’s Day as I said at the outset. Is it conceivable Gandhi’s leading India’s into the promise land of sovereignty has transpired into a new tyranny of oppression, imposed not by a foreign entity, but by an Indian government weaponizing nationalism for its own ends?

Sadly, Modi and the BJP enjoy widespread favorability in today’s India, assuring long term oppression of India’s religious and political minorities, usurping the enlightened legacy of Gandhi and Nehru with their targeted bigotry.

–rj