NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

’My Only Friend Is My Conscience’: Face to Face With El Salvador’s Cold Killer | by Jonathan Blitzer | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/07/my-only-friend-is-my-conscience-face-to-face-with-el-salvadors-cold-killer

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I was due to fly to El Salvador the next night, because I wanted to confront Ochoa about the theft. While I was packing my bags in New York, the Salvadoran police began rounding up the culprits. Within hours, four were in custody, and several others had gone into hiding. The names of the officers appeared on television sets across El Salvador, listed by rank on the local news. These were aged and haggard men, geriatric fugitives. Two of them had been arrested before, in 1991, but were released from prison after the passage of the amnesty law.

Around the time that the Jesuit priests were killed, Ochoa had retired from military service and was working as the head of the state electric company, a privileged civilian post, and his name was circulating among officials at the State Department and CIA as a possible presidential candidate. He wasn’t personally implicated in the Jesuit killings, but he was friendly with another colonel who’d been found guilty of orchestrating the murders. Several months after the assassinations, Ochoa appeared on 60 Minutes saying that his friend was acting on someone else’s orders. This was farther than even the friend was willing to go—he had known enough to stay quiet. But Ochoa, who felt unencumbered by institutional allegiances, declared that “it was all planned beforehand,” implying that a group of military and political leaders had organized the crime. This flummoxed the Salvadoran government, which had no choice but to issue a string of denials.

Soon, there was talk in political circles of sacking Ochoa and forcing him to “wallow in the assembly, where he could talk to his heart’s content,” as one US Embassy cable summarized. (It is a mark of the times that a spot in congress was considered a demotion, a posting far from the action.) Ultimately, American officials cautioned their Salvadoran counterparts against making a martyr out of Ochoa. It was a lesson that would never be fully learned. In 2012, the left-wing president of El Salvador, reacting to another of Ochoa’s typically incendiary public comments, tried to remove him from contention for congress by reactivating his military status and conscripting him back into service. Ochoa coasted to reelection.

France, Islam, & the Ramadan Affair | by Sylvain Cypel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/30/france-islam-the-ramadan-affair

#Valls may lack a political home for now, but he has signaled that he means to make identity—#Islam vs. #France —his main theme. If President Macron fails to pull the country out of its socio-economic doldrums, he will have to face a dangerously sharpened identity politics

This Poisonous Cult of Personality | by Pankaj Mishra | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/01/this-poisonous-cult-of-personality

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Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.

Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”

Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors.

Nuclear Apocalypse Now? | by Ariel Dorfman | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/22/nuclear-apocalypse-now

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But there was another, more telling aspect of Trump’s UN speech. This most thoughtless and impetuous of American presidents also called the possibility of nuclear conflict “unthinkable.” On the contrary, we must think about it. And crucial to any understanding of the moral import of the possible use of nuclear weapons is to go back to the foundational moment of this nuclear age and ask again: Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes?

We have no way of knowing what the people of North Korea would make of that question, any more than we know what their views are about their leader’s avowed willingness to order a nuclear first strike. After all, the citizens of the so-called Democratic Republic are closeted in a “dense fog” created by Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, “to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.”

We do, on the other hand, know something about what Americans think. Two years ago, a Pew Research poll found that 56 percent of American respondents regarded the bombing of Hiroshima as justified, a clear majority, though significantly down from the 85 percent who felt that way in 1945.

There is still much controversy around the issue. The traditional justification for the attack was that it was the only way to force the Japanese High Command to surrender immediately, and to avoid a long and costly invasion of island after island that would have led to countless American and Allied casualties. But subsequent historical research has revealed that Japan capitulated out of fear that the Soviet Union would land forces on the Japanese mainland and occupy half the country. The findings of historians Gar Alperovitz, Murray Sayle, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, among others, refute the conventional wisdom that the first nuclear attack in history was an absolute necessity.

Yet the myth persists. The question is: To what extent does Americans’ belief in the rightness of President Truman’s fateful decision in 1945 provide moral support for the brimstone rhetoric of nuclear conflagration that President Trump is deploying today?

The Hateful Monk
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/08/31/the-hateful-monk-venerable-w

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Schroeder, an Iranian-born Swiss filmmaker, has spent decades documenting the morally despicable. His “Trilogy of Evil” began in 1974 with General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, a character study of the Ugandan dictator. The second installment, Terror’s Advocate (2007), was on the French-Algerian defense lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose clients have included Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, the Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, and the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. Wirathu is Schroeder’s final subject, and, for him, the most terrifying. “I am afraid to call him Wirathu because even his name scares me,” he said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse. “I just call him W.”

The film charts Wirathu’s rise from provincial irrelevance in Kyaukse to nationwide rabble-rouser. It centers on the crucial moments of his budding ethno-nationalism, such as in 1997, when he says his eyes were “finally opened” to the “Muslims’ intentions” after reading a pamphlet entitled In Fear of Our Race Disappearing, which appeared in print by an unknown author; or 2003, when he delivered a chilling sermon—caught on camera—against Muslim “kalars” (kalar is the equivalent of “nigger”). “I can’t stand what they do to us,” he says to rapturous applause. “As soon as I give the signal, get ready to follow me…I need to plan the operation well, like the CIA or Mossad, for it to be effective…I will make sure they will have no place to live.” One month later, in Kyaukse, eleven Muslims were killed, and two mosques and twenty-six houses were burned to the ground. Wirathu was arrested by the military junta for inciting violence, and spent nine years in Mandalay’s Obo prison.

Hacking the Vote: Who Helped Whom?
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/19/hacking-the-vote-trump-russia-who-helped-whom

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In recent months, we have learned much about how successful the Trump campaign was in micro-targeting voters in crucial swing states. In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, especially, Trump’s data team knew exactly which voters in which states they needed to persuade on Facebook and Twitter and precisely what messages to use. The question is: How did the Russians know this, too?

Last week, it was reported that both Congressional investigators and the FBI are now exploring whether Russian operatives were guided in their efforts by Trump’s digital team, and the House Intelligence Committee has invited Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, to testify. Largely ignored in this discussion, however, is another possibility: that the Russians themselves, through their hacking of Democratic Party records, were supplying crucial information to the digital team.

According to its own account, Trump’s digital team, which was run by Parscale and overseen by Jared Kushner, used standard marketing tools, especially Facebook’s, to target voters in the rust belt states that decided the election. The team’s algorithms and models, which were developed by the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, were essential to this effort. Using data culled from its database of 5,000 bits of personal information—such as religious affiliation, gun ownership, and buying habits—on 220 million Americans, Cambridge Analytica was able to determine where Trump had the best chances to motivate people who typically didn’t vote, where Clinton’s support among legacy Democrats was weak, and where the candidate himself should show up, especially in the last days of the campaign.

Macron’s California Revolution | by Sylvain #Cypel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/05/macrons-california-revolution

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Among the many ideas put forward by Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, was to institute an annual speech to the French parliament, a sort of State of the Union à la française. It seems that he couldn’t wait more than ten days after the legislative elections to give it a try. On Monday, in a major speech in the French Parliament, Macron compared his election to a “new start” for a country that is “regaining optimism and hope”; he also introduced a raft of bold proposals for streamlining government. But even bolder than his proposals was the speech itself, and the American-style executive it seemed to usher in.

Along with the speech, there has been Macron’s quasi-official investiture of his wife, Brigitte, as a highly visible First Lady. And then there are the market-driven economic policies he has endorsed. All this has seemed—from the French point of view—emblematic of Macron’s #fascination with the United States. Or to be more exact, with the California version of the United States, where #Silicon_Valley libertarianism mixes with a general progressivism on social issues—access to education and health care, openness to immigration and minorities, support for gay marriage, efforts to control climate change, etc. Didn’t he declare, on June 15, visiting VivaTech, a technological fair, that he intends to transform #France in “a nation of #start-ups” able to “attract foreign talents”?

#Etats-Unis

The Demolition of American Education (The New York Review of Books)
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/05/trump-devos-demolition-of-american-education

Thus, we have a budget for federal education policy that swings a mighty scythe, mostly at programs that serve middle-income and low-income students. Its major innovation is a proven failure. DeVos has no ideas about helping or improving public schools. Her only idea is choice. But we already know how that will turn out.

#éducation #politique #budget #USA

There Is Still No Hard Evidence For “Russian Hacking”
▻https://medium.com/mtracey/there-is-still-no-hard-evidence-for-russian-hacking-d7e12b6429db

[A] declaration from Democrats’ new favorite pundit, former George W. Bush speechwriter and Clinton voter David Frum, has been retweeted over 3,500 times in approximately three hours. Media superstars such as John Harwood and Peter Daou joined in on the retweeting action. How many casual news consumers cursorily saw this tweet, accepted it as accurate, and then continued on with their day? Many, many tens of thousands, surely. And yet what the tweet omits, as does most every other account of the contents of the laughably anticlimactic DNI report, is that this much-anticipated document contains no new evidence corroborating the Government’s claims regarding “Russian Hacking.”

#propagande #manipulation