DanielKronlid's Open Salon Blog

Why Europe's left is bouncing back

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:04:01 -0400

A few hours ago, the French Socialist candidate Francois Hollande declared victory in the first round of France's presidential election. We're now about to witness his showdown with incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

A year ago, Sarkozy would have won. However, something has changed in Europe since the Greek financial tragedy last year. This "something" can be described with the words "We want something new".

That conclusion sounds a little strange, considering the fact that the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande doesn't represent anything new at all. In fact, he doesn't seem to represent anything at all, except for a vintage socialism that will shock the markets the day he becomes the President of France.

However, most Europeans are today governed by right-wing governments and when people want something new, they can either go to the extreme right or to the left, where the socialists are waiting for them. Since most Europeans wouldn't vote for the extreme right unless they had a gun to their heads, the left is about to benefit. In France, this political logic will most likely give Francois Hollande a job he probably didn't even dream about just a few weeks ago.

It's important to point out that in most of Europe, the left has done almost
nothing to renew itself. For instance, there is no New Labour in France that can be compared with Tony Blair's achievements. This inability has in large parts of Europe kept the left out of power for so long that many leftist politicians have forgotten how to run a country, region or city.

But now, that won't matter that much, because the left is about to bounce back, not because of something its politicians have done, but because of something that could be described as "right fatigue". It's not that we Europeans care about ideology that much anymore, we just want something new. And now, new is spelled left.

Daniel Kronlid,
Sweden

P.S. Don't miss my Sarah Palin killed my conservatism and In Europe, a new left is emerging

In Europe, a new left is emerging

Sat, 3 Mar 2012 16:03:16 -0500

"What if Karl Marx had been a woman? What would Karen Marx have written?"

I looked at the young woman walking by my side in the cold December night. For the first time since 1999, I had been approached by one of my international fans. Considering that my fan base probably include no more than a dozen people, the winter night walk was a truly awesome experience to me.

Several months earlier she read my articles "Sarah Palin killed my conservatism" and "Socialism 2.0 can be done", and as luck would have it, a friend of a friend of a relative, or something like that, happened to be in Umeå in northern Sweden where I live. Fast forward a few months and suddenly we were walking in Umeå while she kept repeating that question:

"What if Karl Marx had been a woman? What would Karen Marx have written?"

I had no idea, but I knew I should have had something to say, since I wrote the article "Socialism 2.0 can be done." Instead I felt like an idiot. How come I had missed that question?

She told me her story. She was a socialist who turned eighteen right after the financial crisis of 2008 hit Spain. Her socialist pedigree seemed actually quite impressive. She spent considerable time talking about her relatives who fought in the Spanish Civil War and that professor who met both Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx.

I had to ask, "So you're not satisfied with what Karl Marx wrote?"

She fired back, "Marxism is for angry men who can't get laid without sounding like glorified thieves."

I needed a few seconds to realize that I had just heard someone say that.

"Are you a feminist?" I asked.

"How could I possibly be a feminist? We're the victims of feminism."

She told me about her mother, a small town Spanish socialist politician who wasted my fan's teens by being absent. The story she told me is the same story I've read on numerous blogs over the years, a story I discovered when I freelanced as a journalist during the 90s as well. Obviously, her mother fought for abstract hate based feminist causes at the expense of her loving daughter. It only takes one sentence to explain that feminist failure.

Her mother isn't exactly the only one and the result is both staggering and saddening. What many older feminists here in Europe wrongfully call a backlash is a neglected generation of girls and young women who won't repeat their mothers' feminist mistakes. "I'm not a feminist," she wrapped up. "Absolutely not. Never. Over my dead body. I'm an equalitist."

I had no idea what she meant and didn't ask. I was too busy thinking about that question:

"What if Karl Marx had been a woman? What would Karen Marx have written?"

I told her to start writing. She looked at me like I was an idiot. "What do you think we've been doing since 2008?"

I asked her what they wrote. She didn't know. They just wrote on blogs and on Facebook. Chatted a little. Emailed thoughts to each other. That didn't exactly sound impressive until she said, "It's better than ideologies. It's more like a social contract with ourselves. Like structuring our minds and our values. Making every day count. You see, our parents threw a party. They called it solidarity and sent us the bill. I will be poor for the rest of my life because of my parents' generation, but if we in our generation get our act together, our children might prosper."

In Europe, a new Marxism and feminism free left is emerging thanks to young women like her. And it doesn't matter what Karen Marx would have written, because these women will change the world in a way that will make contemporary ideologies appear to be just as irrelevant and pathetic as they are. What these women are about to create won't even be called "left", even though that's the best expression for it today.

Right now, a new generation of women is growing up without the Cold War and its ideologies. Instead, they have the internet and future politicians such as that young Spanish socialist who has no need to sound like a glorified thief. After growing up with Marxism and feminism, all she wants from politics is accountability, equality and responsibility.

At first I laughed when she said that. I sounded rather patronizing when I told her that the four words "politics", "accountability", "equality" and "responsibility" don't belong in the same sentence.

She didn't answer. She didn't defend her position. She just waited for me to understand that she was right.

And yeah, I bet you guessed it, now I'm her fan.

Daniel Kronlid,
Sweden

A Norwegian rampage killer setting a new standard

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:07:03 -0400

In a few hours, Norway will wake up to a new reality. A Norwegian post-9/11 Timothy McVeigh has surfaced. Heartbreaking funerals are waiting. A public trial will follow. A country known for the Nobel Peace Prize, tranquil fjords and a rock solid currency will no longer feel peaceful, tranquil or rock solid.

What happened?

A murderer decided to set a new standard, just like Charles Whitman did on August 1, 1966, when he killed 16 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the University of Texas at Austin's campus.

When I'm writing this, 2.52 am local time in Sweden, the murderer is probably asleep, somewhere in downtown Oslo. The parents of the children he killed are not. A quick look at murderer's Facebook page doesn't tell us much about why he did it.

The problem is that there are many men like Anders Behring Breivik out there. In Northern Ireland, some of them are organizing again. In Scotland too. In Mexico, tens of thousands of them are well organized and sometimes better equipped than most SWAT teams. I could give you at least twenty more examples without mentioning Muslims or Islam.

In less than two months, we'll remember 9/11 2001 in a very special way. On September 11, 2011, it will be ten years since that horrifying day. And while we worry about the next Osama bin Laden, we must not forget that the fight against al-Qaeda only to some extent is a fight against a dangerous blend of religion and politics. Terrorists such as Ayman al Zawahiri and Hakimullah Mehsud have more in common with Timothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik than with Sufis such as Abul Hasan al-Shadhili and Bayazid Bastami.

The enemy is still out there. Sometimes he or she is a Muslim. Sometimes the enemy is a Christian entrepreneur who likes to watch The Shield, listens to classical music and plays World of Warcraft with friends.

An enemy setting a new standard for terrorists.

Daniel Kronlid

Sweden

Learn more

Timothy McVeigh

Charles Whitman

Anders Behring Breivik

Ayman al-Zawahiri

Hakimullah Mehsud

Abul Hasan al-Shadhili

Bayazid Bastami

List of rampage killers

Politics. Is there a better way?

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 07:03:24 -0500

I used to pay attention to American and Swedish politics.

Lately, I've lost interest in both.

In the Swedish case, I got sick and tired of the ruthlessness of leftists defending their political parties against imaginary neocons and racists.

These people ruin relationships and friendships in an alarming rate, leaving so much pain behind in their struggle for ideological purity.

Their leftist friends are the ones taking the hardest punches, not the neocons or the racists. These Swedish leftists are killing the left in their quest for relevance in a political environment they don't understand anymore.

In the American case, I got sick and tired of watching a great country hit the iceberg, just like the Titanic, and of the same reasons too.

Today, a Swedish Facebook friend wrote something on his wall that made me reply the following:

"The more I listen to the debate between the left and the right [in the Social Democratic Party], the more I wonder if the left is looking for becoming a think tank and the right is trying to become a lobbying firm."

Which makes me wonder: Is the political party as a platform for change now obsolete?

We have parliaments, so we have to elect politicians, but is there a better way?

And is the ruthlessness of contemporary politics a result of inadequate organizational structures that create frustrations and unnecessary conflicts?

Politics shouldn't be like this.

Too many ruined relationships.

Too little difference being made.

Is there a better way?

Daniel Kronlid, Sweden

P.S. I began to think about this when I wrote "Sarah Palin killed my Conservatism".

"Iraq's Real Weapons Threat" by Rolf Ekeus

Mon, 3 Jan 2011 20:01:10 -0500

Foreword

Eight years ago, Iraq was still a ruthless dictatorship. The Adolf Hitler of our time administered Hell on Earth. Friends of mine, now living in western democracies, were denied basic human rights together with millions of others. Then came the liberation of Iraq, something we should be proud of.

And still, after all these years, I keep hearing people referring to the liberation of Iraq as a despicable act instead of a justified necessity. I've never met anyone from Iraq who has complained. Instead, the whiners are those who were born free.

Below, you'll find the story about Iraq's real weapons threat and why setting the Iraqis free was the right thing to do.

Enjoy :)

Daniel Kronlid, Sweden

-----

Background: Rolf Ekeus was Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. A former Swedish ambassador to the United States, he is now chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This article, first published June 29, 2003, in The Washington Post, is in the public domain, no republication restrictions.

Iraq's Real Weapons Threat By Rolf Ekeus

With no weapons of mass destruction as yet found in Iraq, the political criticism directed against President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is mounting. Before the war, the two leaders publicly declared that the Iraqi regime had not only procured and produced such weapons but still retained them with the intention to use them. This was considered a good reason for a military operation against Iraq -- an outright casus belli.

A United Nations inspection team, before the war, and the U.S. military, after the war, have been searching Iraq and have not come up with anything that can remotely be called weapons of mass destruction. Is it now time to join the game of blaming Bush and Blair for an illegitimate or illegal war? Let us first consider some facts in a complicated picture.

Chemical weapons were used by Iraq in its war against Iran (1980-88). Arguably that use had a decisive effect on the outcome: It saved Iraq from being overwhelmed by a much larger Iranian army. Furthermore, Iraq made use of chemical bombs in air raids against the Kurdish civilian population in northern Iraq. Nerve gases, such as sarin, and mustard gas immediately and painfully killed many thousands of civilians. More than 100,000 later died or were crippled by the aftereffects.

These reminders illustrate that Iraq's acquisition and use of chemical weapons were carried out in pursuit of two strategic goals, namely to halt Iran's possible expansion of its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf region and to suppress internal opposition. The war started by Iraq in 1980 was directed against its historical enemy, Iran. In strategic terms and over generations, Iraq/Mesopotamia had been positioned as a gatekeeper of the Arab nation against repeated Persian expansion westward, a threat that had become acute with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. All the emirates and states in the gulf region, ruled by Arabs of traditionalist Sunni Muslim orientation, considered Persian nationalism and expansionism a constant problem, especially after Iran's Shiite revolution.

For Saddam Hussein, the self-styled, self-promoted defender of the Arab nation, "the Iranian beasts," to quote Tariq Aziz in a conversation with me -- not the United States or Israel -- were the eternal enemy of Iraq. With its population of more than 64 million, Iran constituted a challenge that Iraq, with its 24 million inhabitants, could not match with conventional military means. By using chemical weapons to gas and kill the "human waves" of young, poorly protected Iranian attack forces, the Iraqi army repeatedly saved itself from being overwhelmed. And thus it became conventional wisdom, nourished by the Iraqi leadership, that only nonconventional weapons could guarantee that Iraq would prevail in an armed conflict with Iran.

Regarding biological weapons, the U.N. inspection team, UNSCOM, managed after four years of investigation to confirm the existence in Iraq of a major secret biological weapons program. This led in August 1995 to the defection from Iraq of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, director of Iraq's WMD programs. During UNSCOM's debriefings in Iraq after the defection, Iraqi biological weapons scientists, able to speak slightly more openly than normally, explained that their secret work mainly was on assignments to find means for warfare against the Iranians.

Regarding the nuclear weapons projects, the Iraqi authorities defended their systematic violation of Iraq's obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the proposition that Iran, likewise a party to the treaty, was active in developing its own nuclear weapons. Iraq's obsession with Iran was illustrated by its air attack in 1983 on the Iranian nuclear reactors at Busher.

Even the quite remarkable missile developments in Iraq were related to Iran. Iraq succeeded in modifying and re-engineering many hundreds of the more than 800 Scud missiles bought from the Soviet Union -- increasing their range of 200-300 kilometers to 500-600 kilometers, sufficient to reach Tehran.

In sum, all four components of Iraq's prohibited and secret WMD program were motivated and inspired by its structural enmity and rivalry with Iran. Thus, during the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq did not use its readily available chemical weapons, stored in considerable quantities in southern Iraq, against the U.S.-led forces. The Iraqi leadership made clear to me that there would have been no military sense in using chemical weapons on such a fast-developing battlefield, where the enemy was highly mobile, well trained and well equipped for chemical warfare. In addition, the Iraqi willingness to use chemical weapons had been tempered by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's promise to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that such a contingency would change the U.S. war aim from the liberation of Kuwait to regime change in Iraq.

The fact that Iraq in the recent war did not counter the coalition forces, now even better trained and equipped than last time, with chemical weapons should not have come as a surprise. The chemical weapons, like the other WMD, had been developed with another enemy in mind. But a big question remains about the puzzling absence of chemical weapons in Iraq. Detractors of Bush and Blair have tried to make political capital of the presumed discrepancy between the top-level assurances about Iraq's possession of chemical weapons (and other WMD) and the inability of invading forces to find such stocks. The criticism is a distortion and trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security.

During its war against Iran, Iraq found that chemical warfare agents, especially nerve agents such as sarin, soman, tabun and later VX, deteriorated after just a couple of weeks' storage in drums or in filled chemical warfare munitions. The reason was that the Iraqi chemists, lacking access to high-quality laboratory and production equipment, were unable to make the agents pure enough. (UNSCOM found in 1991 that the large quantities of nerve agents discovered in storage in Iraq had lost most of their lethal property and were not suitable for warfare.)

Thus the Iraqi policy after the Gulf War was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus on design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production and shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefield in the event of war. Many hundreds of chemical engineers and production and process engineers worked to develop nerve agents, especially VX, with the primary task being to stabilize the warfare agents in order to optimize a lasting lethal property. Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, e.g., for agricultural purposes, where batches of nerve agents could be produced during short interruptions of the production of ordinary chemicals.

This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq's chemical threat -- its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism.

The real chemical warfare threat from Iraq has had two components. One has been the capability to bring potent chemical agents to the battlefield to be used against a poorly equipped and poorly trained enemy. The other is the chance that Iraqi chemical weapons specialists would sign up with terrorist networks such as al Qaeda -- with which they are likely to have far more affinity than do the unemployed Russian scientists the United States worries about.

In this context the remnants of Iraq's biological weapons program, and specifically its now-unemployed specialists, constitute a potential threat of much the same magnitude. While biological weapons are not easily adapted for battlefield use, they are potentially the more devastating as a means for massive terrorist onslaught on civilian targets.

As with chemical weapons, Iraq's policy on biological weapons was to develop and improve the quality of the warfare agents. It is possible that Iraq, in spite of its denials, retained some anthrax in storage. But it could be more problematic and dangerous if Iraq secretly maintained a research and development capability, as well as a production capability, run by the biologists involved in its earlier programs. Again, such a complete program would in itself constitute a more important biological weapon than some stored agents of doubtful quality.

It is understandable that the U.N. inspectors and even more, the military search teams, have had difficulty penetrating the sophisticated, well-rehearsed and protected WMD program in Iraq. The task was made infinitely more challenging by the fact that Iraq was, and indeed still is, a "republic of fear." Through my indirect contact with some senior Iraqi weapons scientists, I have been given to understand that the reign of terror is still in place.

Outsiders who have not dealt with Iraq cannot easily understand the extent to which the terror of the Hussein years has penetrated that unhappy nation. As long as Hussein and his sons are not apprehended or proven dead, few if any of those involved in the weapons program will provide information on their activities. The risk of terrible revenge against oneself or one's family is simply too great. The first point on a WMD agenda must be to create a safe environment free from the remnants of terror.

The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq's own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel.

The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities.

The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East.

This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative -- letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability -- would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world's energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people.

Source: http://www.usembassy.it/file2003_07/alia/A3070202.htm