To the uninitiated, the sight of a motley bunch of around three dozen odd foreigners — men, women and children — piling on to a train in Zurich might not have appeared extraordinary. But there was a crowd on the platform.

Mahir Ali

Someone within the train waved a red banner from one of the windows as the train pulled out. The key passenger was a man little known outside strictly socialist circles in Europe.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov had vociferously opposed the war ever since it broke out, accurately perceiving it as essentially an imperialist conflagration between powers competing for colonial conquest. He was bitterly disappointed when all too many components of the Second International, the main European repository of Marxism, responded to the conflict with retrograde patriotic zeal.

The man best known even then as Lenin was not only disinclined to make the same mistake, but saw the potential for “revolutionary defeatism” — in other words, exploiting military setbacks to spark a transformation of society.

News of the February Revolution in 1917 had struck Lenin as a thunderbolt. After the events of 1905, he hated the idea of being away from his homeland once more during a transformational upsurge. What’s more, the relatively liberal successor regime that had replaced the tsar was determined to persist with the war, in which Russia was allied with Britain and France against the Germans.

‘Land, peace and bread’ were what the Russians aspired to.

A former comrade called Alexander Helphand, once known to his radical associates as Parvus, had established himself as a wheeling-dealing capitalist in Germany, and by 1917 had been striving for a couple of years with the Berlin authorities to facilitate Lenin’s return home as a means of thwarting the Russian war effort.

Lenin did not want to have anything to do with Parvus anymore, but he was desperate to get to the Russian capital, Petrograd (previously, as now, known as St Petersburg, but named Leningrad after Ulyanov’s premature demise). He did not have too many qualms about supping with the devil to achieve his objective, not least because he was convinced, correctly, that Germany would anyhow lose the war — and, what’s more, that the kaiser would be overthrown by a proletarian revolution.

Although the kaiser was indeed unseated by an uprising following the armistice in November 1918, a socialist revolution was ultimately thwarted, with its leading lights, Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Liebknecht, slain early in the following year. An alternative outcome in Germany may well indeed have transformed the future of Europe — and would almost certainly not have led to the re-run of the world war that transpired two decades hence.

Just before leaving Zurich, Lenin had declared at a meeting that the prospects of socialism in Russia were dim for the time being. After all, according to Marxist orthodoxy, bourgeois rule and capitalist development were an essential precondition to a dictatorship of the proletariat. But during the tedious journey that took him and his comrades through Ger¬many, Sweden and Finland, Lenin cha¬nged his mind.

His April Theses, published almost immediately upon his arrival in Petrograd 100 years ago last Sunday — to a surprisingly tumultuous welcome from representatives of soldiers and workers — argued that the circumstances were ripe for the bourgeois phase to be transcended. “All power to the soviets” (in which the Bolsheviks at that point constituted a tiny minority) was the key slogan, alongside “land, peace and bread” — everything that the bulk of Russians aspired to at that moment in history.

Many of his comrades among the intelligentsia, including most Bolsheviks, thought Lenin was deranged, or at least had spent too long in exile to be sufficiently familiar with the prevailing conditions. But if the Bolshevik leadership — not least Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, two of Lenin’s closest allies abroad, as well as Josef Stalin, at the time a relative nonentity — disagreed, many among the party’s rank-and-file proletariat membership shared his impatience.

Whatever one may think in retrospect of the latter event, most historians agree that February would not have led to October but for Lenin’s presence at the coalface. It could be argued, although many would disagree, that he kept his head while others were losing theirs and blaming it on him. Sure, it’s broadly circumstances rather than individuals that make history. But there are times when someone has got to seize the moment — and, in anglophone parlance, be a bit more bolshie than everyone else.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Early last month, there was a glimmer of hope in Hungary. Implored to vote in a referendum intended to effectively sanctify the nation’s brutal hostility to refugees from the Middle East, a majority of the eligible electorate opted to disengage from the process, rendering it invalid.

Mahir Ali

It’s not hard to imagine comparable arguments being deployed back in the 1940s, when Hungary, under the regency of Miklos Horthy, not only joined the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany but eagerly colluded in the Holocaust by dispatching huge numbers of Jews to a near-certain death at Auschwitz and elsewhere.

The Horthy regime’s declaration of war coincided with Germany’s Operation Barba¬rossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, and close to half of Hungary’s army was sacrificed on the Eastern Front. It was not until 1944 that the Nazis felt obliged to directly occupy Hungary, once the tide had begun to turn and the authorities in Budapest deemed it opportune to make overtures to the Allied powers.

Most voters stayed away from the referendum on refugees.

Immediately following its exit from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, Hungary had lost large chunks of its territory to neighbours such as Czechoslovakia and Romania. Before Horthy took power in 1919, it had already experimented with social democracy and experienced a brief bout of communism. It regained much of the terrain under the aegis of the Nazis, but lost most of it again after the Second World War.

The repression did not end there, though, and the egregious excesses of the communist regime under Matyas Rakosi led to the landmark events of 60 years ago. A student revolt caught the popular imagination, exacerbating ructions within the ruling communist party and bringing back to power the reformist Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the party, alongside the likes of Janos Kadar, who had faced torture and imprisonment under Rakosi, and the noted philosopher and theoretician Georg Lukacs.

The October revolution of 1956 was not, by and large, intended as a revolt against socialist ideals, and it may well have accounted for coining the idea of “socialism with a human face”, which is to say minus the depredations and deprivations associated with Stalinism. Josef Stalin had been dead for three years by then, and Nikita Khrushchev had already stirred the pot earlier that year by denouncing his ruthless predecessor in no uncertain terms.

Moscow hesitated in the face of the Hungarian rebellion. Troops stationed in Hungary, which had joined the Warsaw Pact the previous year, initially withdrew from the nation in the face of obvious popular hostility. There was a brief glimmer of hope that the Soviets would grudgingly accept the course on which Hungary had embarked. It was not to be, though.

On Nov 4, 1956, Soviet troops returned in force to crush Hungarian aspirations, after Nagy had declared his nation’s intention to pull out of the Warsaw Pact, and had appealed to the United Nations for assistance. Tens of thousands were killed, including Nagy — whose hugely attended reburial in 1989 effectively announced the beginning of a new phase in Hungarian history. Kadar was ensconced in power, and he remained in charge for more than 30 years.

At the same time, thousands went into exile while the borders were briefly open, and were generally welcomed by a West that had broadly failed to respond to what was going on in Hungary, not least because it was simultaneously embroiled in the Suez Crisis, the consequence of an Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy to militarily overturn Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal.

A number of those who went into exile as children or young adults have lately been particularly virulent in their critiques of Budapest, which has gone out of its way to malign and maltreat refugees from Syria, Iraq and other Muslim countries. Hardly any of them were keen to ensconce themselves in Hungary, yet the authorities deemed it suitable to make their transit as inconvenient and humiliating as possible.

Back in 1956, the Soviet Union was deplorably determined not to allow Hungary to become a role model for its communist neighbours; it was 12 years before Czechoslovakia suffered the same fate, and 30 years before the Soviets found themselves being led by a reformer.

Today, Hungary under Viktor Orban — with the leading opposition party, Jobbik, even more closely aligned with the fascist past — is a role model for the most retrograde forces in European politics. Let’s hope it does not take Europe’s diminishing progressives to face up to the challenge.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn November 2nd, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It was at least partly a case of unfortunate timing: had the referendum on the Colombian government’s peace deal with Latin America’s most resilient guerrilla force been held shortly after President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week, its outcome may well have been different.

Mahir Ali

That is partially a fair assessment: no one was openly arguing in favour of prolonging the conflict, even though the negative campaign routinely resorted to extravagant lies about Colombia’s prospects in the event of a positive outcome. The trouble is, the Santos government, fully expecting a positive outcome, had no Plan B.

Hostilities in Colombia have claimed some 260,000 lives.

The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionares de Colombia (FARC) has indicated its reluctance to revisit the terms of the agreement signed this past summer. The ceasefire currently in place expires at the end of this month, but neither side is keen to return to the hostilities that have claimed an estimated 260,000 lives.

The ‘no’ campaign in the referendum, spearheaded by the far-right former president Alvaro Uribe, sought to create the impression that the deal is far too lenient to “terrorists and narco-traffickers”, alongside wilder insinuations that it would usher in “atheistic communism” and other such nonsense.

It is a given that any agreement between belligerents entails compromises. What are the chances FARC would have been willing to pursue negotiations had the other side unequivocally insisted on an unconditional surrender? Whereas previous initiatives towards a settlement had floundered, the guerrillas recognised that the Santos government was serious about a settlement, not least because it was willing to involve military personnel in the negotiations.

The 297-page agreement between the two sides contains provisions for the rehabilitation of former combatants and a political role, including parliamentary representation, for FARC. It also proposes truth-and-reconciliation tribunals, with relatively mild penalties for those willing to come clean about their transgressions, but makes a distinction between political actions and purely criminal activities, with the latter potentially subject to more stringent punishments.

This does not quite add up to the impunity alleged by the ‘no’ campaign. At the same time, it’s vital to remember that there are at least two sides in any war. FARC can certainly be held responsible for human rights violations, but egregious excesses were also committed by state forces, from the military and police to ruthless right-wing death squads, often with CIA assistance. It is more than likely that powerful elements of the Uribe-led opposition to the peace agreement particularly resent its apparent acknowledgement that accountability is a two-way street.

FARC was founded in 1964 by Manuel Marulanda, who remained at its helm for decades and died just eight years ago. Speaking at the United Nations the same year, Ernesto Che Guevara referred mockingly to a Colombia where “the oligarchy has attained what we might call the peak of democracy”, with the liberal and conservative parties, representing more or less the same vested interests, alternating in power.

The peasantry that neither of these parties represented had been the primary victim of a vicious political rivalry during a period known as La Violencia in the 1940s-50s, which accou¬nted for 200,000 deaths. Short-lived autonomous communist ‘republics’ sprang up in the countryside. The oligarchy ultimately pre¬vailed but, as thr¬o¬ugh much of Latin America, the root causes of rural restiveness — vast latifundia for a few, virtual serfdom for most others — rema¬i¬ned unredressed.

This inevitably created political space for groups such as FARC and Ejercito de Liberacion (ELN), among others. Disunity among the left was crucial in thwarting its progress, as has all too often been the case in so many parts of the world. The communist party adopted FARC, while the ELN had Fidelista inclinations; the latter even had a martyr of its own — Camillo Torres — who for a while almost matched Che Guevara as a source of posthumous inspiration.

Although overshadowed by FARC in recent decades, the ELN still exists. So do monumental disparities in land ownership. The peace deal makes an effort to address them: it incorporates some commitments to land reforms and greater social justice, alongside vows of cooperative endeavours towards eradicating coca fields.

FARC has drifted far from its revolutionary origins, but the Colombian state remains fundamentally the same. The agreement between the two should usher in peace but may also adjust the national trajectory in other significant ways. It must be hoped that the Nobel Prize will help to prevent it from being consigned to history’s dustbin.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn October 12th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Many of the far-right political parties in Europe that are riding a wave of misguided anti-refugee sentiment are inclined to view Australia as a role model. They look across the sea and fawn upon a nation whose navy turns back rickety vessels overflowing with desperate asylum-seekers. They see a nation that has decreed that no one who reaches its shores by boat will ever find refuge in a country whose national anthem declares: “For those who’ve come across the seas/ We’ve boundless plains to share.”

Mahir Ali

Since then it has absorbed a great many immigrants of various origins. The first to be described as boat people were probably the Vietnamese fleeing the communist-led reunification of their country in the 1970s. In recent decades, Islam has replaced communism as a major concern for many. Yet beleaguered asylum-seekers from Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq tend to be frowned upon as if they were invaders rather than refugees.

It isn’t just Islamophobia at work, though, in the wake of the disastrous ‘war on terror’. Tamils from Sri Lanka, for instance, have routinely been delivered back into the clutches of the regime in Colombo. Their subsequent fate does not register on the national radar.

Lately, though, the focus has been on about 1,300 asylum-seekers, mainly from Muslim countries, incarcerated at Australia’s behest on Nauru and Manus Island. The latter belongs to Papua New Guinea, a former Australian colony whose highest court has decreed the detention centre to be illegal and unconstitutional.

Many Australians are troubled by the moves to deter asylum-seekers.

It is to be shut down, but the fate of its 854 inmates remains unclear. They are all men, 98 per cent of whom have been assessed as legitimate refugees. The Australian gove¬rnment has arbitrarily decreed that they can never be resettled in that country, notwiths¬tanding its obligations under international law. Even more bloody-mindedly, it closed off avenues of resettlement in New Zealand or Canada, both of which have offered to take in substantial proportions of the asylum-seekers.

The argument is that if eventual asylum in New Zealand or Canada were to be seen as a viable option, the people-smuggling operations would once more go into overdrive. In other words, resettlement is a viable option only in unattractive places.

Several experts have meanwhile dismissed this argument as fatuous even on practical grounds, given the Australian navy has for years been turning back boats, notably to Indonesia and Malaysia, the most common conduits for refugees. On a moral plane, the idea of indefinite incarceration as a deterrent is even more repellent.

In the past few weeks, a debate has been raging in Australia, following the leak last month of more than 2,000 incident reports from Nauru detailing innumerable appalling instances of sexual assault, child abuse, self-harm and mental illness among the 466 people (more than two-thirds of whom have been determined to have legitimate claims to asylum), including children and women, confined to that benighted island.

Impecunious Nauru is happy enough with an arrangement that brings it a steady income — back in the 1970s, thanks to its phosphate deposits, it had a per capita GDP second only to that of Saudi Arabia, but that bounty was squandered long ago — and eager to collaborate with Canberra in kee¬p¬¬ing away unwel-come intruders.

The 1,300 peo¬ple who risked death in their quest for a haven are effectively hostages, pawns in a sordid poli¬tical drama. The conservative government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, returned to power in July with a one-seat majority in the lower house of parliament and a minority in the upper house — is clearly disinclined to change its policy. The opposition Labour Party was responsible for reinstituting the absurd practice of ‘offshore processing’ in 2012, and has shown few signs of shifting its position.

Despite the gormlessness of the mainstream political leadership, substantial segments of Australian society are deeply troubled by their nation’s determination to heap punishment on a few hundred innocents who could easily be accommodated in Australia at a fraction of the cost entailed in maintaining them in atrocious conditions on Pacific islands where they are, by and large, unwelcome.

There is a growing acknowledgment that Australia can, and must, do better. Its present policies and their consequences are ugly and unconscionable, which is why they appeal to neo-Nazis. How soon the injustice it is perpetrating can be redressed remains an open question, though.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn September 7th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

As I sat down to write this yesterday morning, there was breaking news of a mass killing at a residential facility for the disabled not far from Tokyo. The perpetrator was apparently a 26-year-old former employee of the care home who subsequently handed himself over to the police after murdering 19 people and injuring dozens of others.

Mahir Ali

It was even easier to jump to this conclusion in the wake of last week’s killing spree by a teenager in Munich. After all, David Ali Sonboly was a German of Iranian heritage. That sufficed, for all too many people, to assume that he was driven by religious fanaticism.

Europe’s far-right is effectively the other side of the IS coin.

According to the evidence that has surfaced so far, however, it appears that Sonboly was obsessed with mass shootings, especially at schools, and timed his assault to coincide with the anniversary of the Norwegian massacre five years earlier by Anders Breivik, who also went out of his way to target young people.

Breivik was ideologically driven, but not by Islamism. There is plenty of evidence, meanwhile, that Sonboly, who committed suicide after murdering nine people, was psychologically unstable.

Yet the likelihood that his psychopathic tendencies did not originate in a particularly sordid interpretation of his ancestral faith does not necessarily set him too far apart from those who assume that the tenets of their faith oblige them to more or less randomly slaughter those whom they perceive to be unbelievers.

Among some shades of opinion, the tendency to investigate the psychological make-up of a killer is a variety of denialism, a studied refusal to condemn religion as the guiding force behind mass murder. This attitude in turn feeds into perpetuating the notion that all Muslims are potential terrorists.

It should not be particularly surprising that the latter assumption ideally suits the purposes of the militant Islamic State group. The fact that Germany has lately allowed in hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim refugees militates mightily against the notion of a West implacably hostile to Islam. If even a couple of refugees can be persuaded to perpetrate acts of indiscriminate violence, the hostility towards them can reasonably be expected to spread well beyond extremist outfits such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The axe attack on a train in Würzberg by a teenage Afghan refugee (some news outlets claimed he was actually a Pakistani) on July 18 and, in the wake of Sonboly’s outrage, a pair of attacks by Syrian refugees — one of them killed a woman with a machete and injured five other people, while the other detonated a suicide vest near a music festival and, thankfully, succeeded in killing only himself — appeared, insofar as they may have been guided by IS operatives, to be directed towards propelling AfD’s agenda.

Much the same could be said about the singularly appalling attack in Nice on Bastille Day by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a French resident from Tunisia, who ploughed his massive truck through crowds celebrating the national holiday, leaving more than 80 people — a third of them Muslims — dead and injuring many more.

Unlike last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which tended to unite the French more in sorrow than in anger, the Nice outrage, amid a state of emergency, has more directly prompted an upsurge in antagonism towards the government of François Hollande, who responded crassly to the massacre by decreeing a more concerted military assault on IS redoubts in Iraq and Syria.

Should Marine Le Pen win the next French presidential election, a substantial proportion of the blame could be ladled on to IS, but Hollande won’t get away unscathed.

Europe’s far-right forces are effectively the other side of the IS coin. They may have divergent motivations, but the essential idea is to perpetuate the belief that there is little or no space for Muslims in Europe. The neo-Nazis are determined that there should be no place for Muslims in Europe. IS is bent upon ensuring that Europe is no place for Muslims, unless it is subsumed into the fantasy of a caliphate — whose territorial reach in Iraq and Syria is slowly diminishing.

There are also reasonable grounds, meanwhile, for questioning the dichotomy between extremism and psychological dysfunction. The latter can, obviously, operate independently of the former, and the vast majority of people who diverge from what is assumed to be the norm in that sphere are obviously harmless, in the same way as are most Muslims. But can murderous fanaticism be distinguished from a psychotic disorder?

Such a conclusion may complicate the task of dedicated anti-terrorists, but it’s not one they can afford to ignore.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

AGITATED markets, a tumbling pound-sterling, a downgraded credit rating: none of these should have been an unexpected outcome of the British electorate’s decision last weekend to opt out of the European Union.

As for leadership turmoil in the main parties, it was more or less a given that David Cameron’s days as prime minister were numbered if his arguments for remaining in the EU were defeated by the popular verdict. But the concerted move by members of his own shadow cabinet to expel Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition Labour Party was greeted with surprise.

Mahir Ali

It shouldn’t have been. The Daily Telegraph reported 10 days before the vote that “Labour rebels believe they can topple Jeremy Corbyn after the EU referendum in a 24-hour blitz”. The result of the referendum was unclear at the time, and it is reasonably clear that the “24-hour blitz” would have occurred even if the popular verdict had gone the other way.

The bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party was extremely disconcerted by Corbyn’s landslide victory some nine months ago in a leadership contest that, under new rules, for the first time gave each party member an equal say. Corbyn was a backbench maverick in the PLP who frequently voted against New Labour when it was in power under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and his triumph was anathema to the bulk of MPs who saw power primarily as a means of consolidating the Thatcherite agenda that Blair, with minor variations, had so blatantly pursued.

A clear majority of Labour members thought otherwise, though, and Corbyn’s ascendancy drew back into the party a substantial number of those who had abandoned it because they considered it too right-wing.

The PLP’s assault against Corbyn — led, somewhat ironically, by former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, whose dad, Tony Benn, a close comrade-in-arms of Corbyn was for decades the most coherent and consistent Labour opponent of the EU on the utterly plausible grounds of its depletion of national sovereignty — has ostensibly been based on the Labour leader’s lackadaisical approach to the ‘remain’ argument ahead of the referendum.

In fact, Corbyn, perhaps against his better judgment, campaigned extensively, if not always enthusiastically, in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. Sure, he was disinclined to rave like Boris (Johnson) and Dave. But that’s not his style. And, more importantly, he had qualms about the EU that his intrinsic honesty prevented him from disregarding.

Yesterday, as Cameron headed for a meeting where he would be obliged to face his EU counterparts, Corbyn faced a PLP vote of no-confidence that was expected to overwhelmingly go against him. Whether his position would remain tenable beyond that is open to question, but there is a fair chance that he could rely on a second leadership vote to retain his post. Where would that leave the conspirators, who until the time of writing had failed to come up with either an alternative candidate or a distinct set of policies?

The move to expel Corbyn was greeted with surprise.
Amid the inevitable turmoil among the Conservatives, commonplace logic pointed to Labour unity behind a democratically elected leader on the basis of a platform that challenged from the left the consequences of a Tory catfight between a pair of more or less equally contemptible former Eton classmates.

Labour’s MPs — and many of Corbyn’s most vociferous opponents belong to constituencies that voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, but are unwilling to accept responsibility for that outcome — were, until the weekend, in a position to make their party electable in the probable event of a snap election. They have now squandered that chance. Were Labour to win power under a re-elected Corbyn, which is not an impossible dream, it would be despite Hilary Benn & co, caterers to the despondent elites.

Meanwhile, Cameron, who has decided to leave activation of Article 50 — which formally begins the process of UK withdrawal from the EU — to his successor, does not intend to step down until October. Not all of Europe empathises with that approach. France, in particular, wants the exit strategy to be put into action right away, whereas Germany has shown signs of greater patience.

Some constitutional lawyers — of whom there is no dearth in Britain, despite its lack of a formal constitution — have indicated that the nation’s parliament is under no obligation to abide by the referendum verdict, so the UK could remain part of the EU. Direct democracy has also come in for some flak — as, more appropriately, have younger voters who largely opposed a Brexit but did not turn out in sufficient numbers to produce a different verdict.

Amid a sharp rise in instances of racism and profound uncertainty in every sphere, including the UK’s integrity, the only thing Britons are clearly blessed with is the ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

There was the incredible Ali Shuffle in the 1960s when a restless young athlete danced around his opponents in the boxing ring, delivering potent blows but taking few in return, the heavyweight champion of the whole world, as he frequently liked to put it.

`The Greatest`, as Cassius Clay dubbed himself even before he had unexpectedly defeated the notionally unbeatable Sonny Liston to claim the crown.

Then, a couple of decades later, there was the Ali shuffle, when the physical faculties of the man who could once `float like a butterfly, sting like a bee` had been depleted to the point where his gift of the gab was largely a thing of the past, and his growing lack of dexterity was manifested in the way he appeared in public.

His dignity was never at risk, though. It wasn`t just retained; if anything, it was enhanced during the years when Parkinson`s disease took its unfortunate toll. The incredible outpouring of grief when Muhammad Ali shuf fled of f the mortal coil last week testified to his status as a global folk hero.

He acquired it initially by standing up to the government of the United States 50 years ago, by his refusal to participate in the obnoxious war against Vietnam. `No Vietcong ever called me a nigger` is how he is believed to have justified his refusal to answer the call to arms.

It is vital to remember that this came before the antiwar movement in general, and draft resistance in particular, had picked up pace. It wasn`t until a year later, in 1967, that Martin Luther King Jr plucked up the courage to explicitly denounce the Vietnam War and his nation`s status as the primary purveyor of violence in the world, citing Muhammad Ali`s resistance in the process.

Ali was promptly stripped of his title and the right to pursue his profession anywhere in the US. This unprecedented vindictiveness transformed him instantly into an international figurehead of resistance against American imperialism.

It is seldom mentioned that Ali`s conviction that his African American compatriots had far better cause to be engaged with the battles that needed to be fought at home almost exactly echoed the stance Paul Robeson had taken while addressing a 1949 peace conferenceinParis.

Like Ali, Robeson too was consequently deprived of the right to earn a living in his homeland. The pioneering athlete, actor and, above all, exquisitely powerful singer was at the time the best known African American globally. He, too, was a fighter and eventually regained his rights after a decade, but it was too late to arrest the deterioration of his intellectual well-being. Robesonspent his last dozen years in seclusion and was effectively written out of history.

Ali, of course, staged a tremendous comeback. Cut down in his prime, he was never again quite the same fighter. His unexpected victory in 1974`s Rumble in the Jungle was more than an athletic triumph, though.

Regaining the heavyweight crown also represented a vindication of his political stance.

Like millions of others, I can clearly recall arising at an unearthly hour to watch the live transmission of the fight from Kinshasa, and the tension as All miraculously absorbed the blows from his formidable opponent, and then, in a transcendent moment, floored George Foreman with a flurry of devastating blows.

In comparison, his third crown, retrieve d from Leon Spinl(s, was something of an anticlimax. He ought to have retired before then. Ali himself designated his experience during the torturous Thrilla in Manila against Joe Frazier as the closest thing todying. By the time of the ill-advised bouts against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in 1980-81, the signs of Parkinson`s were already clearly visible.

If it`s a tragedy that Muhammad All found his place in the world via a brutal sport, it is perhaps equally unfor-tunate that his politicisation owed a great deal to his membership of an organisation that called itself the Nation of Islam (NoI) and that he chose the wrong side in relinquishing his friendship with Malcolm X, opting instead for the cult of Elijah Muhammad.

This led him to expound some obnoxious views over the years: during an interview with Playboy published in 1975, the interviewer appropriately remonstrated, `You`re beginning to sound like a carbon copy of a white racist.

To his credit, though, Ali eventually recanted some of his earlier views and, more broadly, transcended them with his inspirational humanitarian impulses. His lapses were already but a memory by the time he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics. The fact that erstwhile foes were willing to embrace him didn`t mean he had changed, so much as it was a tacit acknowledgement of his role in changing the world. Ultimately, it indeed turned out that `the elements` were `so mix`d in him that Nature might stand up/ And say to all the world, `This was a man!“

m mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

After Uruguay`s former president José Mujica last week declared that Nicolás Maduro was `mad as a goat`, the latter chose to wear the insult as a badge of honour, announcing at a rally: `Yes, I`m as mad as a goat, it`s true. I`m mad with love for Venezuela, for the Bolivarian revolution, for Chavez and his example.

In other words, he pretty much bore out Mujica`s diagnosis. With most Venezuelans embroiled in a daily struggle to obtain commonplace necessities, amid dire shortages and a rate of inflation purportedly in the vicinity of 500pc (by any measure the highest in the world), whatever remains of the Bolivarian revolution clearly isn`t delivering the goods. And the example of Hugo Chavez, notwithstanding his various flaws, can only be sullied by association with the unsustainable state of affairs in Venezuela today.

Small wonder, then, that even long-standing Chavistas are expressing their disenchantment with Maduro in increasing numbers. As one of them told a foreign correspondent earlier this month, `We voted for Maduro because of a promise we made Chavez, but that promise has expired. Either they solve this problem, or we`re going to have to take to the streets.

A little more than three years af ter Chavez sadly succumbed to cancer, there can be little question that his designated successor`s administration has been an unmitigated disaster. This may not purely be a consequence of poor governance, but the latter has undoubted contributed considerably to the current disarray.

Among oil-producing nations, Venezuela has been worst hit by the precipitous decline in the international price of the commodity.

The failure to diversify is a key culprit here: it was never wise to assume that oil prices would remain high. The energy sector has also been hit by a particularly grievous drought, leading to increasingly common power blackouts and pleas from Maduro that women should relinquish hairdryers for the time being.

A 60-day emergency the president instituted at the start of the year remains in place.

The working week for many government servants has been cut down to two days. There were, meanwhile, huge military exercises last week, amid hints from Maduro that the army would be deployed to maintain law and order.

There has thus far been no indication of military disloyalty despite overtures from the opposition which won a decisive majority in last December`s parliamentary elections amid spiralling popular dismay over the government`s spectacularineffectiveness-butthere can be no guarantee this won`t change, especially if Maduro proves to be stupid enough to contemplate a direct blow against democracy.

He has hinted that parliament can be overridden, amid an opposition effort to curtailMaduro`s six-year term by instituting a recall referendum. Chavez, too, faced such a move, and was able to emerge triumphant from a popular vote. His successor is presumably well aware that he would fail to pull off a similar victory, and his administration apparently is keen to put off a vote until next year, past the halfway mark of Maduro`s presidency, when defeat would merely lead to his replacement by his deputy whereas his loss in a recall referendum this year would automatically lead to a fresh presidential election.

Maduro is doing his ostensible side of polltics no favours by clinging on to power, though. That`s not to suggest that the opposition is a desirable alternative. Many of its components represent forces that resisted Chavez`s policies precisely because they were progressive: they saw nothing advantageous in initiatives to abolish illiteracy or to bring healthcare, with large-scale Cuban assistance, to the favelas where many families had never before encountered a doctor. Theydetested the social programmes that kept Chavez afloat: the beneficiaries of his government`s reforms were sufficiently numerous to guarantee anunprecedented string of electoral successes.

Last December`s result wasn`t so much an anomaly as an indication that something had gone very wrong. And almost everything Maduro has attempted since then merely reinforces that impression. Were he to face up forthwith to a recall referendum and promptly bow out thereafter, the seeds sown during the heyday of Chavismo may well survive to bear fruit in the aftermath of the next inevitable failure of neoliberalism.

Anti-democratic measures, on the other hand, would merely serve to bury whatever remains of the so-called Bolivarian revolution.

The comment by Mujica cited at the outset came in the context of a spat between Maduro and the secretary general of the Organisation of American States, Luis Almagro, Mujica`s formerforeignminister,whomtheVenezuelan leader derided as a traitor and a CIA agent after he warned Maduro against dictatorial tendencies.

The CIA was, no doubt, once keen to depose Chavez and would be delighted to see the back of his successor. And it may well be taking a keen interest in the current goings-on in Caracas, but the fact is that the Maduro administration has effectively dug its own grave.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

In a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, the Israeli army`s deputy chief of staff offered his compatriots an uncomfortable reminder.

`If there`s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance,` Maj-Gen Yair Golan noted, `it`s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then 70, 80 and 90 years ago and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.

He added: `There is nothing easier than hating the stranger, nothing easier than to stir fears and intimidate. There is nothing easier than to behave like an animal and to act sanctimoniously.` Golan`s intervention stirred a predictable response in Israel: there was some support for his words, but it was almost drowned out by vituperative, and occasionally hysterical, condemnation. Inevitably, some have demanded his dismissal.

For all that, drawing parallels between the European mindset that facilitated the Holocaust and current trends in Israeli society is a somewhat less fraught enterprise in Israel today than it is across much of Europe; more than one commentator has noted, for instance, that had Golan been a member of the British Labour Party, his comments would have warranted his immediate suspension.

It is not just Israel, though, that should be alert to the echoes of the 1920s-30s. The political processes unfolding in Europe a combination of economic despair and a rising tide of xenophobia ought to be ringing far more alarm bells than has thus far been the case.

The series of profoundly worrying developments continued last month with the far-right Austrian Freedom Party`s Norbert Hofer taking the lead in the first round of his country`s presidential election. The sense of impending crisis was exacerbated on Monday by the unexpected resignation of the country`s social democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann.

Post-war Austria has hitherto elected only mainstream conservative or social democratic presidents. For the first time, neither of those parties is in contention: on May 22, Hofer faces a run-off against Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green running as an independent. The presidency is a largely ceremonial post, but with potential political powers that Hofer has vowed to exercise.

In Germany, meanwhile, the relatively new Alternative fur Deutschland party, which demonstrated its growing popular appeal in three state elections in March, has adopted an explicitly anti-Muslim platform. Its leader, Frauke Petry, has in the past suggested that German border guards should be permitted to shoot refugees. It is complemented by the Pegida movement, which tends to demonstrate its power on the streets.

A refusal to perceive in these phenomena echoes of the Nazi past would require a remarkable blindness to recent history. To their credit, plenty of Germans seem to be well aware of this, and mobilisations by the far right frequently attract counter-demonstrators in far larger numbers. That rarely occurs to the east of Germany, however, and much of the greatest cause for alarm emanates from nations where the extreme right is either already in power or thrives on state backing.

The administration of Viktor Orban in Hungary offers perhaps the worst instance of neo-fascist tendencies, and it thrives on the support of the racist Jobbik party, which won more than 20pc of the vote in the 2014 general election. Orban shares the view of his Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, Europe must defend its `Christian heritage`. Fico is ostensibly a social democrat, but on crucial issues his views coincide with those of Marian Kotleba, the leader of People`s Party-Our Slovalcia, who until recently paraded about in a Nazi-era uniform.

In Poland, authoritarian tendencies are on the rise under the ruling Law and Justice Party, whose leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has accused refugees of bringing `cholera to the Greek islands, dysentery to Vienna`. Similar rhetoric is increasingly common throughout the continent. From France to Russia, there is hardly a country in Europe that does not register growing support for organised right-wing extremism, all too often with mainstream conservative and social democratic parties not least François Hollande’s Socialists and hitherto progressive parties across Scandinavia shamelessly pandering to xenophobia and other deleterious tendencies.

Last year`s massive refugee influx is obviously a key factor behind this trend, as are the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris, not to mention the appalling criminal assaults in Cologne on New Year`s Eve. Let`s not forget, though, that extremist tendencies manifested themselves much earlier in 21st-century Europe: the Austrian Freedom Party entered government as a coalition partner at the turn of the century.

Although many of the far-right parties include a distaste for the European Union in their smorgasbord of pet hates, which feature the Roma people, Jews, Muslims and especially Muslim refugees, no coherent response can be expected from Brussels.

Continued failure to learn from its history may well condemn Europe to repeating it in the years ahead.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It is wise of Angela Merkel not to have panicked in the wake of setbacks for her Christian Democrats (CDU) in Sunday`s three regional elections. The German chancellor acknowledged the blow, but discounted the likelihood of abrupt changes to her government`s policy on refugees.

That very policy has accounted for a surge in support for the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a recently formed party with links to the far-right Pegida movement. But that is only part of the picture.

Whereas the AfD`s seats in regional assemblies are based to a large extent on the backing of Germans who previously did not bother to vote, a fairly substantial number of CDU appear to have drif ted to the Green party and the Social-Democrats, notably in situations where CDU candidates sought to distance themselves from Merkel`s generosity.

In Baden-Württemburg, for instance, 30pc of the voters who switched from the CDU to the Greens said their decision was based on the refugee issue. The state`s Green premier has been quoted as saying that he was `praying ever day` for Merkel`s well-being.

Germany`s divisions on this issue were inevitably exacerbated after the appalling sexual assaults and coercive thef ts in Cologne on New Year`s Eve, even though only a tiny proportion of the assailants turned out to be components of the latest wave of refugees that brought more than a million people to Germany last year.

Merkel`s open-borders policy has been held responsible for precipitating a Europewide crisis, with those who are able to make their way from Turkey to Greece and beyond opting for relatively welcoming countries such as Germany. The alternative, though, was to deny entry to Europe to the clearly desperate victims of the strife in Syria in particular.

In some ways, that scenario has lately come to pass, with Macedonia seeking to seal its border with Greece and all too many of its neighbours pursuing similar policies in blatant disregard of the international rules put in place in the wake of the Second World War. Back then, it was Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied territories who suffered the consequences of reactionary bigotry.

Not many European countries other than Germany have flung open their doors to the wretched of the earth, with some letting in refugees from Syria and Iraq but refusing access to others from various African countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. That may seem fair enough in some respects, given Europe cannot be expected to accommodate the all too many economic refugees that international capitalism has spawned.

Levels of desperation are hard to judge, though.Greece`s fear, meanwhile, of turning into what its prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has poetically characterised as a `warehouse of souls` is perfectly legitimate. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkey keep on turning up In Greece, with no intention of remaining there, but find their pathway to elsewhere in Europe blocked.

The European Union, meanwhile, has reached an agreement with Turkey whereby all refugees who make it to Greek shores will be returned to Turkish soil, but Europe will accommodate one Turkey-based Syrian for each one sent back. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and various other human rights organisations have pointed out that such a policy would violate international law.

Whether the agreement will bear fruit remains to be seen. Europe`s handling of the unprecedented crisis thus far has provided plenty of cause for consternation. And former members of the Soviet bloc have been by far the least inclined to adopt a humanitarian approach.The Russian president, meanwhile, has been accused of actively striving to whip up tensions in Europe by funding the anti-immigrant backlash. It`s hard to tell, though, whether that is indeed the case, given thatthe charge has been made by a Latvian official associated with Nato who has an axe to grind vis-à-vis Russia.

That doesn`t necessarily mean he is lying,although Vladimir Putin`s announcement on Monday that most Russian forces will be pulled out of Syria militates against the notion that his intervention was intended primarily to exacerbate Europe`s refugee woes.

Not much hope was held out for the talks on Syria`s future taking place in Europe this week, but it would be folly to completely write off the prospect of some sort of agreement. After all, the ceasefire put in place three weeks or so ago has largely held, contrary to expectations.

It would be unduly optimistic, though, to read into that an indication that the awful conflict in Syria is approaching its conclusion. It would be amazing if that were indeed the case. In the interim, though, the `warehouse of souls` remains in place, and it could very well return to haunt Europe for decades hence unless Merkel`s plea for a Europe-wide humanitarian solution finds at least a few more takers.

m mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

In one of his books, Mohamed Heikal, the Egyptian journalist who died last month at the age of 92, records an extraordinary encounter in 1964 between Gamal Abdel Nasser and Nikita Khrushchev.

The Soviet leader was visiting Egypt to attend ceremonies marking the completion of the first phase of the Aswan High Dam project, which Moscow had helped to build after the Americans withdrew an offer to fund it. For years, a bone of contention in relations between the two leaders had been the tendency of Arab nationalist leaders to suppress local communists, notably in Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

When the subject came up yet again one morning, Nasser, evoking Khrushchev`s excoriating critique of Josef Stalin six years earlier, noted: `When you tell us that we cannot attack communists, how is it that you yourself attack Stalin? We attack bad communists and Stalin is a good example of a bad communist.

`I can attack Stalin,` retorted a livid Khrushchev, `but you cannot attack Stalin! You have no right to attack him! According to Heikal, the `heated row` went on for six hours, and the Soviet leader emerged from it with a better understanding of the forces driving Arab nationalism.

It was 60 years ago last week that Khrushchev delivered his `secret speech` at a special late-night closed session tagged on to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His acknowledgement of Stalin`s crimes and sharp critique of the Stalinist personality cult was a watershed in more than one respect.

He made it clear at the outset that, three years after the dictator`s demise, he had come to bury Stalin, not to praise him, because there had been no dearth of panegyrics in the preceding decades. He mockingly pointed out the absurd levels to which Stalin-worship had been taken and declared that the trend had been personally dictated by the deceased leader.

Khrushchev took no issue with the `political-ideological` struggle against `the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc` and the `Bukharinites` in the 1920s, but noted that the mass repressions of the early 1930s were inaugurated after that battle had decisively been won. He hinted strongly that the Kremlin had a hand in the 1934 murder of Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov, which served as an excuse for the state terror that followed, claiming the lives of a substantial majority of those elected to the central committee at the 17th party congress earlier that year.

At least equally devastating was the line of attack whereby Khrushchev blamed Stalin for the disarray sparked off by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Adolf Hitler`s hordes were able to advance to the gates of Moscow because, despite any number of unheeded warnings, the Soviets were caught unprepared, while all too many of the Red Army`s most competent officers had fallen victim to Stalin`s paranoia.

Furthermore, Stalin personally was petrified by the German violation of the NaziSoviet pact, and initially assumed it was all over for his nation. It was two years before the tide began to turn, largely despite Stalin`s leadership rather than because of it.

The demolition of Stalin`s record as a war leader may have come as the greatest shock to Khrushchev`s audience. The script of his speech, which wasn’t officially reproduced in its entirety until 1989, records moments of `animation` and indignation among the apparatchiks, but not the fact that several people had to be carried or assisted out of the auditorium. Heart attacks are believed to have accounted for some of the attrition.

Among the communist movement internationally, Khrushchev`s speech was well received in some spheres (Italy, for instance) and viewed with extreme consternation in others, notably in China and Albania.

Domestically, its contents were communicated to party members throughout the length and breadth of the USSR. Among those entrusted with its dissemination in the Stavropol region was a Komsomol activist, freshly graduated from Moscow University, by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Khrushchev was ousted shortly after the aforementioned clash with Nasser and reassessments of Stalin stalled during the extended period of economic and ideological stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev and co., but there was no return to the level of repression witnessed in the 1934-53 period. Many of the architects of the Prague Spring in 1968 and, almost two decades later, Soviet perestroika and glasnost cited the wasted window of opportunity under Khrushchev as an inspiration.

For all their flaws, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to look upon Khrushchev (who died in obscurity in 1971) and Gorbachev (who turns 85 today) as noble failures. A reminder of grievous shortfalls in exorcising the spirit of Stalin came just last month when activists putting up plaques in Moscow to commemorate some of the tyrant`s innumerable victims encountered sporadic resistance from those who simply didn`t want to know in some cases no doubt because it clashes with their hopelessly inaccurate image of a Stalinist golden era.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan