The crisis in America is many-sided. One aspect is to be found within the Christian Churches. At a prayer breakfast last Thursday, President Trump announced a Task Force on “anti-Christian bias” within the Federal Government, a new Commission on religious liberty and a ‘Religious Office’ in the White House. He had changed his mind about religion, he explained; God had saved him from an assassin’s bullet.
Faith seems to be rising in prominence in divided USA. But faith in what? Faith in Trump Towers growing out of the rubble of a US-controlled Gaza strip? Shortly before Trump’s announcements and with Elon Musk’s possible vast cuts to US overseas aid threatening, Catholic Vice-President J.D. Vance and Rory Stewart were debating the question “Who is my neighbour?” in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Defending the US Government’s current treatment of undocumented immigrants and the demolition of USAID, Vance cited St. Augustine of Hippo’s ‘ordo amoris’: family first, then the folks next door, and then outwards, nation and globally. But according to the eminent historian of the early Church, Peter Brown, the main criterion for selecting bishops in the late Roman Empire was that they should be ‘lovers of the poor’. You wonder what Augustine would have replied to Vance. Not only does the US Government encourage citizens to believe that there is no crisis in the USA - just necessary disruption for the greater good – but also that their actions are entirely compatible with faith and religion. Mr. Google describes gas-lighting as “a psychological manipulation technique in which a person tries to convince someone that their reality is untrue”. You can smell the gas like an old London fog. Last Thursday the Jesuit London Centre and Catholics for Labour organized a webinar for Rev. Jim Wallis who in the late 1970s in Washington DC founded the Sojourner communities, and the Sojourner magazine. Wallis’ vision reflects in many ways, the priorities of Latin America’s Basic Christian Communities and of Liberation Theology movement within the American Evangelical churches, seeking to apply the values and moral precepts of the Gospels to contemporary circumstances. By 2013 Wallis had been arrested 22 times for civil disobedience. A friend of Senator Obama, he became President Obama’s spiritual adviser in 2019. In 2021, he was appointed to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at the Jesuit Georgetown University, Washington DC. A nice denial of the opposition often perceived between two tired terms used for dismissing people: academic and activist. The long-term political significance of Jim Wallis’ work mainly derives from the cultural and political importance in the USA of the evangelical community to which he belongs. There are probably about 40 million evangelicals - figures are confusing – making up about 12% of the US population, concentrated in the ‘Bible-belt’ of south-eastern States running west to Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma. In America, differences in voting are associated with age, education, gender and ethnicity – overlapping - and in the 2024 Presidential elections, the 14 States with 30% or more of the population identifying as evangelical had thumping Republican majorities. Some 85% of White evangelicals - compared to 59% of White Catholics - voted for Trump and, ethnically, Whites still remain the majority of evangelicals. In 2007, Jim Wallis was talking to receptive audiences about an evangelical movement taking a Gospel perspective on social justice, moving away from Right-Wing Republicanism. In the last decade or so this trend reversed. The title of Jim Wallis’ The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith & Refounding Democracy”, MacMillan 2024, sums up his webinar talk last week or, at least, its background. He didn’t say that America had spawned a new Christian heresy though this book’s title could summarize the South African Council of Churches’ denunciations of apartheid religious ideology in the 1980s. Wallis takes a strong-line on the Good Samaritan parable, emphasizing how it was a Samaritan, belonging to a rival Temple cult, despised and shunned by the Judeans, who rescued the man by the roadside and paid generously for his treatment (two denarii was about two weeks’ wages). Jesus’s own actions demonstrated what this teaching might mean in practice. Wallis' message: all Christians were accountable and should heed the message of the parable’s teaching in Luke 10:25-37. This emphasis on Jesus’ teaching and relationships with strangers, and even enemies, challenges the US White, Protestant evangelical community today and indeed, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference which supports Trump. In contrast, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition has been moderately critical of Trump’s policies on Aid and immigration. But how can so many who place the Bible at the heart of their faith support such government cruelty to immigrants? How can they not be writing to their congressman or woman in droves to stop Musk’s attack on USAID with its consequences for the world’s poor? Wallis reaches beyond the Christian Churches to others who are already resisting. Encouragingly, he sees disparate forces, legal, secular, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, plus NGOs and community groups coming together to oppose this assault on shared moral values. Drawing on his experience of the Black Churches and on Catholic Social Teaching, he speaks with hope rather than optimism calling not simply for resistance but for a deeper resilience. Even on-line Wallis radiates a comforting serenity. When you are listening to him, suddenly the way transactional language is replacing moral and legal terms within discussions of political choices comes into sharp focus. The American Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) used the classical Greek concept of a Kairos moment for a time of great danger but great opportunity, demanding conversion and transformation. It is hazardous to make comparisons but The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa, signed by over 150 Church leaders in 1985, responding to the brutality of the apartheid regime’s State of Emergency, comes to mind. This today is a time of great danger for Christian leadership, both in the USA and globally, but also great opportunity to speak out strongly and to act with the authority of the Gospels. On 22 January, the Archbishop President of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, Timothy Broglio, described some of Trump’s executive orders as ‘deeply troubling’ causing harm to “the most vulnerable”. There is now much more to be said. No ethical system can justify the freeze on some $43 billion USAID annually, including over £17 billion for health and humanitarian aid purposes , 2/3rds of this for sub-Saharan Africa. Where are the values expressed in the outcry against and cruelty towards migrants to come from? The Catholic hierarchy need the unity and courage clearly to speak truth to power. It is a heavy responsibility for Christian leaders to shoulder. But as politicians struggle how to react to Trump’s new disorder who else but the US Churches are in a position to defend and advocate the values of truth, compassion, justice, human dignity and equality now threatened by the current crisis in the West? Meanwhile, if you, like me, are in search of Pope Francis’ “tangible signs of hope”, or even trying to be such a sign, try tucking in to Rev. Jim Wallis’ talks and books.
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Answers abound. But, after barely two weeks of President Trump’s executive orders, the nagging question still persists. Why and how did he win for a second time ? This isn’t idle speculation if he is to be resisted.
The most frequent explanation of Trumps’ victory is economic: the consequences of spectacular inequality, not least three super-billionaires earning as much as fifty percent of the American population combined, and Trump’s claims that he would deal with the high cost of living. After many years of stagnant salaries, inflation experienced by millions of workers led to their rejection of an urban elite and identification with those who challenged the injustice of it all. Trump’s own resentment is real coming from his past as a vulgar upstart shunned by sophisticated New York. Populist resentment stems from feeling humiliated ‘losers’ - a favorite Trump word – living lives blighted by inflation in a world of winners celebrating their wealth. As the Irish author and journalist, Fintan O’Toole, argues, promote a shared resentment, add showmanship and self-parodying humour and you have the key ingredients of Trump’s appeal. Trump’s campaign benefited from the massive multiplier effect of social media unavailable to a former entertainer, Ronald Reagan, his more amiable, avuncular Presidential prototype. In 1980, Reagan’s campaign slogan was ‘Let’s Make America Great’, he believed in conspiracies (communist not deep-state), and somehow turned ignorance into a virtue and source of authority. President Reagan, the charmer, won the Republican heart. President Trump, the con-man, stole the Republican soul. A feature of Trump’s rallies and public performances that doesn’t get much mention is his description of America’s glorious past destroyed by a criminal elite - a portrayal which summons like a genie out of a bottle a sense of victimhood. Voicing “we the people” while speaking of the richest most powerful country in the world, one that has maintained its macroeconomic success during hard times globally, he presents himself as at one with the victims he has come to save. An extraordinary elision. Trump may be ignorant but he is far from politically stupid and he shows remarkable – frightening - skills of persuasion. In his second Inauguration speech on January 20th. we got a gala performance. Some of that Inauguration speech was old Hollywood. We had the American spirit forged by the demands of the ‘Frontier’, the scenic backdrop to the ‘American dream’, the values and freedom of the big spaces, the wagons rolling West across the prairies. Older readers will remember Saturday morning pictures, the circled wagons surrounded by fierce Red Indian horsemen shot down by brave cowboys. I did vaguely notice that, close-up, the ‘Injuns’ looked rather like the cowboys with heavy makeup and bows and arrows. At the time, all good clean fun. It never occurred to me that I was watching a fictionalized version of the slaughter and expropriation of America’s indigenous population. Trump’s uplifting, manipulative nostalgia did not include the words cotton or slaves, words which might have tempered enthusiasm for one of the origins of America’s economic success. But mention of plantation slavery, lynching, disenfranchisement and discrimination would have been a sign of belonging to the urban elite, unpatriotically ‘woke’ when the glorious past for MAGA was bespoke. Since it was Martin Luther King Day, a black pastor from Detroit, Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, did speak of King’s famous dream during the Inauguration Benediction, but only some 10 black people, including Barack Obama, were visible in the Capitol Rotunda, capacity 600 - though camera angles were very controlled. Forgive the pop psychology but perhaps a sense of victimhood and fear arises from vestigial folk memories, the fear of slave rebellion and guilt at the dispossession of the First Nation. Custer’s last stand, the Great Sioux Wars, happened only 150 years ago. It was just 60 years ago black voting rights were fully honoured by legislation. The Statue of Liberty’s inscription (opened 1886) “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses…” once welcomed immigrants. When I was myself an immigrant living in New York in the late 1960s, you learned how to be American by watching TV. You were taught how to aspire to the American dream. Now the US government and many of its citizens are set on cruelty to immigrants who evaded border controls, and even to their children born there whose citizenship is protected by the Constitution. The ‘shining light on the hill’ that is America casts a long, dark shadow. Deep political divisions existed in America in the 1960s too. At a peace rally against the Vietnam War, held near Columbia University, a young Harlem resident politely asked us why we were there. I told him that as Catholics we had conscientious objections to the war. “Jews N*****s and Catholics must stick together bro”, he whispered in my ear and moved off. It was a conversation you would probably not have today. The FBI took some nice family photos. Yes, the USA was deeply divided about the Vietnam war but these were divisions akin to those over Gaza, not about the meaning and survival of democracy which not only Jo Biden thinks is now at stake. Cultural heterogeneity resulting from immigration may lie behind American anxiety but more likely deliberate disinformation - “them taking our jobs” - is to blame. In the first three years of Biden’s administration 14.3 million jobs were created, a 10.3% increase on the COVID years. But inflation is directly felt. The family next door getting a job – which might not exist but for Biden - isn’t. Old and newly fashioned voter suppression played a significant part in Trump’s victory. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a respected non-profit law and public policy institute reports that, between 2021-2024, “ States enacted a total of 79 restrictive laws” suppressing voting. According to the investigative journalist, Greg Palast, an expert on controlling corporate power, before August 2024, self-styled ‘vigilante voter hunters’ accused 316,886 people voter fraud (200,000 in the swing State of Georgia alone). An audit conducted by the State of Washington (Pacific North-West) found ballots mailed in by black voters were four times more likely than white to be rejected, and a US Civil Rights Commission study undertaken in Florida found that 14.3% of black voters appearing in person had their ballots rejected. That’s one in seven, though some would have voted for Trump. Palast reckons that without such voter suppression Kamala Harris would have won in the key marginal States of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What he calls “America’s nasty little secret” is that such election rigging has become routine. In a first past the post system the consequences can be enormous. China’s Premier, Zhou EnLai’s, “it was too early to say”, in reply to a question from Henry Kissinger about the French Revolution, is a myth: his interpreter said Zhou misunderstood and thought the question was about the student upheavals of 1968. But were Zhou alive today, he might wisely want to reserve judgement on the reasons for Trump’s second victory. Less wisely, I would highlight the years of mainly Republican-instigated vote rigging, President Biden’s damaging of Democrat chances by his delay in resigning, and the extraordinary bouquet of policies Trump offered to resentful voters who identified with, and trusted, a dangerous charlatan. See TheArticle 03/02/2025 Clandestine priests smuggled into England hunted by spies from the royal court and martyred are prominent within English Catholic memory of the 16th and early 17th century. Priest-holes, the pejorative term ‘Jesuitical’, and the exclusion of Catholics from succession to the throne, remain a minor remnant of that time. In the 20th century, Nazi Rule, Communism, and the military dictatorships of Latin America, evoke a similar memory of spies, clandestine missionaries and martyrdom. Plus ça change.
Yvonnick Denoël’s Vatican Spies:From the Second World War to Pope Francis (Hurst £25), covers the period from 1940 to 2023 . The author is a French journalist who has written books about Intelligence Services including the CIA, MOSSAD and MI6. But this new book is not just about Vatican spies as the title suggests, but also covers other newsworthy elements of recent Church history - a discreditable litany of scandals. As a historian of the Church, Denoël leaves much to be desired. We get, for example, three pages on Rwandan history and the 1994 genocide. But no mention of Pope John Paul’s repeated passionate appeals, just three days after the massacres began: “Everywhere hatred, revenge, fratricidal killing. In the name of Christ we beg you, lay down your arms”. Nothing either about the Nuncio for Rwanda in Kigali, Monsignor Giuseppe Bertello, who supported Rwandan human rights organisations and had alerted the Pope to the danger. Plenty of detail about the complicity of the local Church. But what has this got to do with the Vatican and spies? Denoël does provide many vignettes and longer, indigestible accounts of agents of Intelligence Services trying to extract information from the Vatican, Cardinals and Curial officials, bishops, priests, lay Catholics and Catholic organisations. Many of his clerical dramatis personae have dodgy friends and vulnerabilities to manipulation: ambition, sometimes homosexuality and, in certain instances, strong ideological or political sentiments. Several show considerable courage or, at least, tolerance of high levels of risk. At 434 pages, you ‘d need a spy’s training to remember all the names. Denoël expands the definition of spies to mean not only handlers and agents, and their spying, for example, bugs in the office of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Vatican Secretary of State during the War, (phones tapped also). Spying is treated in the generic sense of activities involving collection of sensitive information through cultivation of personal relationships, or picked up in the course of their work by Curial officials and Nuncios. And there is no doubt that Church officials did pass on information to Governments and, inadvertently or deliberately, to people who were Intelligence agents. Vatican Spies has no strong overarching themes beyond fear of, and reaction to, communism and money the root of all evil. Denoël justifiably points the finger at the Vatican’s management of its bank the IOR, Instituto per le Opere di Religione (the works of religion - for which, too often, read money-laundering). Alongside good works, over the years the IOR has served the Mafia, the sinister P2 Italian Masonic Lodge, and the CIA . Chronic incompetence, naivete or illicit financial benefit? All of the above. The larger than life American Monsignor, later Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, who was IOR President from 1971-1989, weathering several scandals, owed his career to the then Archbishop Montini, later Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), whose pastoral work in Milan he assisted financially. Marcinkus was also director of the Nassau, Bahamas, Banco Ambrosiano Overseas of which the IOR was the main shareholder. Its chairman was Roberto Calvi who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge (definitely not suicide) when the bank collapsed in 1982. Enough to make St. Ambrose turn in his grave. In 1969 Pope Paul VI asked the Sicilian tax lawyer and banker, Michele Sindona, another benefactor from his Milan days, to liaise with Marcinkus in investing Vatican money offshore to avoid Italian tax. Unfortunately, New York Mafia boss Gambino’s heroin profits were also handled by Sindona who died in prison of cyanide in his coffee. Only under Pope Francis have serious inroads into cleaning up this inglorious Augean stable made much progress. The glory days for undercover work in the Vatican were the nine months of Nazi occupation of Rome October 1943 to June 1944. Escaped Allied troops were found sanctuary. A former Irish boxer from Cork, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, confined in the Vatican to avoid arrest, organised an extensive rescue network supported by the British Ambassador, Francis D’Arcy Osborne. The American Cardinal Eugene Spellman acted almost openly as a CIA asset, funneling in money to help. When deportation of 1,259 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz began on 15 October 1943, Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, protested to the German Ambassador. The Vatican ordered Rome’s 100 convents and 45 monasteries to provide sanctuary; they hid 6,000 out of the capital’s 8,000 Jews, some in churches and some in the Vatican itself. Meanwhile, the Gestapo worked to infiltrate these Catholic networks. There were, of course, exceptions to this risky support for Allied forces and Jews. Some in leadership positions were pro-German. At the end of the war, Pius XII (Pope 1939-1958) appointed the rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, pro-Nazi Bishop Alois Hudal of Graz, to ensure pastoral care of Germans interned in Italy. But the care included organizing ‘ratlines’, escape routes for Nazi war criminals to Argentina. Like those O’Flaherty saved from Nazi capture, most were hidden in Church properties. The Americans weren’t bothered. By late 1944, their mistrust of the Soviet Union was becoming dominant. The key is the Vatican’s fear of, and enmity towards, Communism, a theological dimension of the Cold War. In Poland from 1945-1953, some 2,200 priests were deported, imprisoned, and some executed. (Over 1,800 had already died in Nazi concentration camps). As the Communist government established itself in China, out of the 3,000 priests in 1949 some 500 were expelled, 500 imprisoned and 200 were executed. These experiences weighed heavily on successive Popes and directed ongoing diplomatic priorities. During the Cold War, the CIA - fearing that the Italian Communist Party would win the 1948 elections and supporting Pius XII’s perennial attempts to infiltrate priests into Soviet-controlled eastern Europe - were close collaborators with the Vatican, if not acknowledged allies. James Angleton, CIA station chief in Rome during the war, brought $10 million in sacks partly for Monsignor Montini (later Paul VI) to deposit in the IOR, financing the Vatican’s contribution to a massive political campaign for the Christian Democrats organized by the Italian Church. Pope St. John XXIII’s Ostpolitik of detente, his warmth towards Khruschev’s family, was a new approach to an old problem. It worried the Americans. JFK avoided emphasizing his Catholic identity. But a Polish Pope, St. John Paul II (1958-2005), who embodied the struggle between Catholicism and Communism, offered exceptional opportunities. John Paul II did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union but he contributed towards it bravely and skillfully. In the 1980s, according to Tomas Turowski, Polish Ambassador to the Vatican: “There were more spies in the Vatican than in the James Bond films”. The Catholic Church is a global communications network. Information flows through it to journalists, NGOs and Governments, sometimes for the common good. So, in Denoël’s sense, many Catholics are spies…. and a few are spies in the usual sense. While working undercover for Swedish Government against the apartheid regime in the 1980s, I had smuggled into South Africa a debugging device for the non-violent political coalition, the United Democratic Front. It featured as ‘agricultural equipment’. Well, it equipped them to get rid of bugs. Vatican Spies puts Church leadership in a discreditable light. The book is a potential arsenal for anti-Catholicism. In the words of the Mass: “Look not on our sins but on the Faith of Your Church”. See TheArticle 24/01/2025 Now that President Trump has taken office, Jo Biden’s parting shot warning of the danger to American democracy posed by an oligarchy of the super-rich – assembled by President-Elect Trump –seems all the more timely. But it is not the only threat. The rule of law is the institutional foundation and safeguard of democracy. Once it is undermined democracy crumbles. There is now a real danger that politicization of the American legal system will weaken this vital safeguard.
During the 2016 American election campaign, Stephanie Clifford, a go-getter, not to say a hard-worker known as Stormy Daniels in what is politely known as adult entertainment, was given $130,000 to deny an affair with the future President of the United States. Michael Dean Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and fixer from 2006-2018, attended to the fraught details of paying Daniels for a non-disclosure document (NDA). Playboy model Karen McDougal had an affair with Trump at much the same time, not long after Trump’s third marriage - to Melania Knauss - and received $150,00 from another source. Not long before how to pay hush money gets onto the standard business school curriculum. Daniel’s NDA payment would prove a transaction too far in Trump’s transactional politics. In 2018 Cohen was found guilty under campaign finance laws for attempting unlawfully to influence presidential elections and was fined and sentenced to three years in a federal prison in which he served thirteen and a half months. In 2021 New York State’s Attorney General Office and the Manhattan District Attorney Office initiated a criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s business activities. In March 2023 a New York Grand Jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide the origins of the hush-money he paid via Cohen (prosecutors serve up a fraud in several parts corresponding to key documents). A week or so ago Judge Juan Merchan, despite an additional contempt of court conviction, gave Trump an unconditional discharge. Trump escaped even the $50,000 fine given Cohen. Until an appellate court finds otherwise, Donald Trump may be described as the first convicted felon to be inaugurated President of the United States. Andrew Weissmann is a former US federal prosecutor appointed by President G.W. Bush in 2004 as leader of the Enron Task Force investigating massive accounting fraud in the over $60 billion oil company bankruptcy. He was also Chief of Fraud Investigations in the Justice Department 2015-2017. Weissman said this of the unconditional discharge. “Judge Merchan made it clear that it was only because of the presidency, not Donald Trump, that he was getting this”. Weissman went on to say: "And all of that is an undermining of the rule of law. It's an undermining of who we think we are in this country, but also in the rest of the world, which I think is going to have lasting damage”. Very true. But the problem is even deeper than that. Entry into the judiciary in the American system, unlike the British, is not independent of its two major political parties. A wide variety of processes for judicial appointments exist. For example, the President nominates and the Senate confirms the appointment of Federal Supreme Court justices, Courts of Appeal judges and district (regional) courts. In 13 States, partisan elections are held to select all or most State and local judges. About half the US States hold elections for their own Supreme Courts and appellate courts. Perhaps fine in an ideal democracy. But at times of intense polarization in society this is neither in the interests of the rule of law nor the common good. Recent partisan judgements by the US Supreme Court and judiciary are worrying. The Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 by 6-3 that a US President was “entitled at a minimum to presumptive immunity from prosecution” for acts on the official and unofficial borderline committed while President. And complete immunity for official acts. In other words Trump is given almost free rein to do what might land ordinary mortals in jail. The three dissenting Judges described the ruling as making the President “a king above the law”. It is unlikely he will ever face charges connected with the mob violence at the Capitol on 6 January 2020. Rulings of the Supreme Court can have profound impacts on American society. On 29 June 2023, in a landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v University of Virginia, the justices voted 6-3 against affirmative action on the grounds that certain policies violated the equal protection clause within the Constitution’s 14th. Amendment. In the case of Harvard University, decided at the same time, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Harvard student and member of its Board of Overseers, recused herself making it a 6-2 vote. Two rulings which have the potential to strike at policies supporting diversity, equity and inclusion. Comparable to the Court’s ruling on Presidential immunity, this looks like a further consequence of the prevailing opinions of the justices appointed by Trump. Not all the Supreme Court’s consequential rulings, of course, can be attributed to the peculiarities of a particular Presidential appointment. Going back further to 2010 and thus before Trump’s appointees, the court in the case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission overruled a lower court’s prohibitions on independent expenditures (advertisements expressly for a named electoral candidate on a range of platforms) by corporations and other bodies, thus competition for office remained at least partially a financial battle between Republican and Democratic elites. Citizens United won 5-4. Justice Anthony Kennedy, deemed a moderate, voted with the conservatives owing to his fears of its effect on freedom of speech particularly its impact on newspapers, radio and TV spending. The focus was on transparency countering corrupt practice. The verdict reversed a century of restrictions blocking unlimited electoral funding, opening up a future in which corporate America could buy elections. With a President who shows sociopathic symptoms, the inherent weakness in the judicial system, its susceptibility to political influence, becomes more dangerous. Trump began his campaign to re-enter the White House facing 12 Congressional, 10 Federal criminal plus 8 State and local investigations. In four major cases during just a few months in 2023 he was indicted for criminal conduct in and after his first term of office. Perversely, he has talked a significant number of Americans into believing that this was because there is a conspiracy to stop him becoming President. Not because he has contempt for the law, the courts and constitution. Most lies, if they become widely believed, contain a grain of truth. But the alleged conspiracy is upholding the principle that in a democracy no-one, however powerful, should be above the law. The Presidential inaugural oath sworn by Trump contains the following words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States”. For many the hallowed words now sound hollow. In those few seconds on 20 January Trump may mean what he says. But, the most worrying thing may be, with vast sums of money at his disposal, he has seriously begun to believe his own lies and will continue to undermine the institutions which safeguard the world’s most powerful democracy. See TheArticle 20/01/2025 New Year’s Eve was a slow news night. You could tell because a story about Africa was the BBC lead item. It sounded a bit like Schadenfreude: the Ivory Coast and Senegal had told their longstanding French garrisons, in the nicest possible way, to pack up and go home. Both countries have important economic links with France. French troops had previously been told to leave Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali where they had been fighting jihadists. An opportunity not to be missed.
During Prime Minister John Major’s entente cordiale with President Chirac in 1995, I attended a joint meeting on Africa, not much publicized, held in Paris. Apart from the fabulous, ever more sumptuous connecting rooms, ornate Louis XV furniture, and some threatening chandeliers – the venue was the Elyseé Palace – the most notable feature was a difference between the delegations. We Brits were a motley crew of anthropologists, NGO-bodies involved in international development, civil servants from FCO and DfID (now absorbed by the Foreign Office), plus the odd intelligence officer. The French partially matched these, but, pursuing their own priorities, fielded an impressive array of military figures. The colonial Tirailleurs Sénégalais formed in 1857 who fought on the Western Front during the First World War reflect a long and deep relationship. The expulsion of the French armed forces from West Africa is an historic blow to President Macron who cherishes his role in international affairs. The expulsion of the French was also a significant sign of the times. The Russians’ arms-length mercenaries, the Wagner group, moved into the Central African Republic in 2017 where they brokered a peace agreement between the warring factions - which later fell apart. In North Africa after the fall of Gaddafi, they began operating with ‘Marshal’ Khalifa Haftar’s militia in Benghazi, Libya, in 2018. Support of West African military juntas came next beginning in 2021 with Mali in where in 2022 they contributed to the execution in the Mopti region of some 500 people by the Malian armed forces. Then in 2024 Wagner was invited into Burkina Faso and Niger. Wagner, recently renamed the Africa Corps, is now under the Russian Ministry of Defense. Africa is becoming a Syria-substitute playground for Russia and Putin. The Mali story is extraordinary. The towns of Timbuktu and Gao are on the desert-edge in the Bilad-al-Sudan (from the medieval ‘land of the blacks’) that extends east as far as Darfur in Sudan. They are major targets for jihadist Al-Qaeda and ISIS linked groups and so in turn targets for the Wagner group. In Mali’s North-East Tinzaouten province abutting the Algerian border, a separatist coalition of nomadic Tuareg has on occasion been aligned with jihadists against the junta forces. The Tuareg are known as horsemen and cattle herders whose men famously wear a face-covering. They suffer particularly from the climate induced encroachment of the Sahara. Le Monde has been reporting on Ukraine’s support for the Tuareg coalition against the Russian mercenaries. In July 2024, 84 Russians and 47 Malians were reported killed in an Tuareg attack involving light quadcopter drones supplied allegedly – Kyiv denies this – by Ukraine. Well, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. A further chapter in the Scramble for Africa has opened. This time it’s Russia and China. There is something almost fitting that the two vast militarized authoritarian giants wish to engage with more or less militarized, authoritarian regimes in Africa. From Grozny to Gao jihadism is a menace, and from Beijing to Bamako railways and infrastructure are basic to economic progress. Russia and China seek Africa’s rare minerals and metals, gold and diamonds, cashew nuts and cocoa. Gold remains a lure. It is estimated that Russia has been taking out £1 billion worth of gold each year from African countries. The Wagner mercenaries took over a gold mine in Mali only last year. Everything in the West African garden wasn’t lovely before the new arrivals (the Chinese not so new). The northern borders of these West African states are highly permeable to people, weapons and smuggled goods. Travel north west from Maroua in Cameroon, you aren’t far from Maiduguri in Nigeria, birthplace in 2009 of militant Boko Haram which forged links with ISIS and, in 2015, sought to form a Caliphate. Travel north east to the capital of Chad, N’Djamena, and you go through territory infested with militia of the Islamic State in West Africa, and the remains of Boko Haram. Go south you have miles of border with Nigeria, a smugglers paradise for vehicles and arms. And since 2018 there has been a debilitating civil war in Cameroon. Failure both to alleviate poverty and command the confidence of citizens are contributory causes of jihadism. The high-flown titles of such armed groups can give a false impression. The foot soldiers of such militias have little knowledge of Shari’a and the Qur’an. They are in the employ of better educated jihadists, given a Kalashnikov, earn a living and eventually can pay the bride-price for a wife. The corruption in African States, the siphoning off of national wealth, the absence of reward for competence and merit, is not news to their citizens. I was being driven south from Makeni to Freetown in Sierra Leone and noticed a new railway running parallel with the road …. “Where does that go”, I asked the driver. “Beijing” he replied. I could see him grinning in the rear-view mirror. Neither Russia nor China are particularly bothered by the high level of corruption in sub-Saharan Africa. Russia’s kleptocrats would find it amateurish. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index is a standard measure of public sector corrupt practice. The lower the score the higher the corruption. Denmark does best with 90. But 44 out of 49 sub-Saharan African countries score below 50. Nigeria gets 24, Cote d’Ivoire with 40. Botswana, something of a worthy exception at 60. To Russia and China diplomatic support, for example at the UN, and valuable, often scarce, commodities, are what matters from client states. In the face of the deteriorating situation in West Afrika, and economic pressures in Europe, not a great deal is currently to be expected from either the UK and the EU. It is true that since 2015, there have been British troops training the Nigerian army, and personnel advising on counter-terrorism in North-East Nigeria, the Chad Basin and Cameroon in response to the ISIS threat in the region. There has also been some police training. But both the EU and UK, by cutting spending on Aid, are simultaneously undermining their own soft power and weakening the challenge to poverty. A great deal of the UK Aid budget is now diverted from poverty reduction abroad to covering the cost of asylum seekers in UK, including hotel accommodation, or on stimulating and facilitating trade. This as climate change brings ever severer immiseration to millions. The current, declining, birth rate in Africa is 31 per 1,000 people. Though, the UN estimates, there will be 2.5 billion Africans by 2050, making up a quarter of the world’s population. There is need to focus a little creative attention and action on this great continent beyond Schadenfreude at France’s reverses. ‘Waging Peace, Fighting Disease and Building Hope’ - the Motto of the Carter Center in Atlanta, founded by the late President, would be a good start. See TheArticle 06/01/2025 A down to earth liturgical battering awaits us after Christmas. No more “Away in the Manger”. Nor sweet, and posh, little voices from King's College Chapel. The wrapping paper in the bin, we hear about a stoning (St. Stephen on 26th December) and more killings, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents ( 28th December). Both have resonances today.
In the Acts of the Apostles St. Luke describes how Stephen, a Greek-speaking deacon, is stoned to death for delivering a long and highly critical sermon attacking his “stiff-necked” fellow Jews for rejecting Christ. Today it might be censured as antisemitism. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the only Gospel to tell this story, Herod is portrayed as wanting to kill the Christ child. But all Herod has to go on is location, Bethlehem, a small village, not far from Jerusalem. So the order goes out to kill all boys in Bethlehem under two years old. Perhaps 20 would have been killed. Collateral damage in today’s terms. These days the ‘acceptable’ number can be calculated by algorithm. The scale of the Bethlehem atrocity is, of course, not the main point for Matthew who is placing Jesus within the scriptural theme of Moses’ escape as a baby from the Egyptian Pharaoh. Like today’s authoritarian rulers Herod did in fact murder potential rivals. The Gospel tells a plausible story even if scripture scholars doubt its historical accuracy. Well, you might say, such biblical stories are nothing compared with our own pre-Christmas diet of mass killings in Syria, the individual torture of Sarah Sharif, the rape, sexual abuse, and all manner of perversity offered up on Radio 4 News breakfast, lunch, tea and supper. In short, Radio 4, our premier news service, seems determined to convince us its audience of what the Catholic Catechism calls Original Sin. And how strange that the BBC campaign to protect children from harmful content on social media doesn’t appear to recognise the prevalence of harmful content on its own radio and TV channels. Should we be wondering whether round the world both individuals and groups of people are very little safer from murderous brutality today than they were two thousand years ago? Has humanity at heart not changed? Even asking the question draws a secular society close to some theological insights. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), described evil as “the loss” or “absence of good” following St. Augustine nearly eight centuries earlier who wrote that evil is the “privation of good” (the loss of something normally present). Evil has no positive existence and is the product of the “will deficient” of human beings. So far clear enough. Though this takes some absorbing. But Aquinas in Part One of his Summa Theologiae, his training manual for peripatetic Dominican preachers, lands us amongst some tricky syllogisms and the issue gets a lot more complicated. But then the idea of evil itself is complex. In a general sense, Aquinas says, goodness is God’s gift to creation, and so to us, integral to our humanity; we are each endowed with the goodness proper to our nature. Animals, each with their specific disposition, are also endowed with their particular goodness. But ours is conditioned by the additional gift of reason and the ability to act purposefully for what we understand to be our good. In other words, there is a moral law written into human nature. Evil in human beings is the absence of that goodness, an absence that causes us to be drawn away from our proper disposition and into inhumanity. It is difficult to find the right words to describe why and how we are drawn away from the good. The word traditionally used was Concupiscence. Thanks to some degree to St. Augustine’s pre-occupations, concupiscence unfortunately has tended to become a synonym of lust. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) description is the “privation of the righteousness that any man (person) ought to possess”. It suggests more widely the all-important social dimension to human goodness and evil. And for Anselm the privation is mitigated by Grace which, Catholics would say, is seen working in exemplary fashion in the lives of the saints. Hannah Arendt captures another characteristic of evil in her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics 2006. She portrayed Eichmann as a man whose horrendous crimes sprang from his not thinking. “It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity” that drew him into the Nazi project of the Holocaust. Eichmann had no special personal traits except “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement”. For Arendt, it was his apparent ordinariness, his banality, the absence of anything that would separate him from the Nazi herd, that led him into crimes against humanity and into a Jerusalem court room in 1962. In her second Reith lecture this year, Dr Gwen Adshead, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist who at Broadmoor treats perpetrators of extreme violence, addresses the common question “Aren’t They All Evil?”. That word ‘Evil’, she argued, should only be used as an adjective, never a noun. In some ways similar to Arendt, she spoke about how ‘cognitive distortions’ and ‘dysregulated emotions’ can create an ‘evil state of mind’ in otherwise ordinary people. In a profoundly Christian analysis she identifies the seven deadly sins as conditions conducive to an evil mind, placing her analysis within Aquinas’ conceptual framework, the absence or loss of the good. The perpetrators of monstrously evil deeds may be otherwise quite ordinary people. We should not be sheltered from that reality by easy accusations and easy answers. Once we blamed Adam and Eve now it is dodgy DNA. It’s hard for secular-minded people to discuss the issue because so much of the available vocabulary is religious: temptation, sin, weakness, guilt, wrong, Grace. The tabloids feel free to use evil as a headline noun. The Today programme has to make do with ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unacceptable’. Christmas inevitably reminds us of the plight of children and refugees in conflict zones and in our own society, the sixth richest country in the world, but with 4.2 million children living below the poverty line and 117,000 homeless households in temporary accommodation. Not asleep on the hay but no way for children to be living. War does not simply kill and maim children but damages psychologically those who survive. I encounter this damage working in a charity trying to help children in Maronite schools in a poor neighbourhood of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city. We see the consequences of poverty and trauma, from speech defects to severe behaviour problems. Some of the Syrians in Lebanon are taking their children back to an uncertain future in Syria. What must Christmas be like in the uncertainties of Ukraine? I remember a mural in an old Serbian Orthodox church showing two women sitting around a large cooking pot preparing a meal for the family in the manger. It had survived fire-damage from the 1990s Balkans war. My own carved wooden Malawian nativity set is as down to earth as that Serbian mural though short on sheep now. The Christmas octave reminds us that Jesus’s parents had to flee Herod’s violence with their refugee child, the child who came home to reveal the meaning of holiness. Nobody knows what awaits us as we brace for another Trump Presidency. Probably not even Trump. His “drill, baby, drill”, if heeded, threatens the future of the planet. Imposition of damaging tariffs is probable. Against China in 2018, he imposed $200 billion’s worth of tariffs creating a full-blooded trade-war. Such a trade war bodes ill for the UK, Canada and Mexico.
Both the immediate and more distant future are deeply worrying. One possible palliative for jangling nerves is People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism For An Age of Discontents, Penguin, 2019, by Joseph Stiglitz. Why bother to review a five-year old book by an American economist? Stiglitz is much published, renowned and reviewed. The clue is in the publication date. He was writing in reaction to the first Trump Presidency when policies were emerging from the chaos. He has a lot to say of relevance to Britain’s future. John Maynard Keynes, 1886-1946, believed investment, government spending and consumption raised output of goods and services, demand-side economics for short. A ‘New Keynesian’, Stiglitz diagnoses imperfect competition and a variety of market failures that require stabilisation by government’s deployment of fiscal policy, as well as nuts-and-bolts interventions, to increase growth. Think of Rachel Reeves’ budget which raised government spending by increasing borrowing and new taxes. Stiglitz served as Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1995-1997 and, for the following three years, as Chief Economist of the World Bank where he became senior Vice-President. Awarded the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2001, he became an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences from 2003-2023. He is obviously comfortable in the world of Laudato Si, 2015, and Fratelli Tutti, 2020, embodying Pope Francis’ thinking on the environmental crisis and society. As the title hints, he would be no less comfortable in a European social democrat government though MAGA-minded Americans would consider him a rampant leftist socialist. There is nothing narrowly economistic in Stiglitz’s thinking. He writes about Trump’s contemporary attacks on the US economy and political system but also links them to wider themes of society and science. “There are two pillars to the increases in our standards of living over the past 250 years: better understanding of how to organize society (checks and balances, rule of law), and better understanding of nature – the advances in science and technology. We’ve seen how Trump and his team have tried to undermine both”. Trump today is now more aware of the constraints on him restructuring society and economy to serve the wealthy 1% of the US population, which has more than 40% of the US’ wealth, and to which he belongs. Stiglitz repeatedly underlines the importance of research and innovation as the wells-springs of economic success; “That is why it is essential for there to be large public investments in research, especially basic research, and in the kind of education system that can support the advance of knowledge”. But is there enough weight and funding given to this by Starmer in his quest for growth long-term? Much of what Stiglitz writes about trade, globalisation, inequality and social justice today’s Labour Party would sign up to, even if initially facing tight, inherited financial constraints. These limitations show up most acutely in the difference between Jo Biden’s massive financial commitment demonstrated in the August 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to counter climate change, some hundreds of billions of dollars on clean energy, electric vehicles and carbon capture. During his first term, President Trump was working to sideline scientific and environmental experts while promoting industry executives and lobbyists, who were eroding the capacity of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Interior and other government agencies intended to serve the common good. He was unpicking some 125 environmental rules as Stiglitz went to press. National debt and global warming are rightly considered as matters of intergenerational justice. Stiglitz served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in a 2021 Supreme Court case on the admissibility of a lawsuit, Juliana versus the United States of America, first filed in Oregon in 2015 seeking an injunction to phase out fossil fuels. It involved 21 children aged between 8-18 and a non-profit (NGO) Our Children’s Trust specialising in what is known as Atmospheric Trust Litigation, based on the idea of the atmosphere being held in trust for future generations. Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, who gave her surname to the case, was 15 at the time. Litigation on it is still in play and such cases have been brought to court, or attempts made to get cases heard, for a quarter of a century. Here, Friends of the Earth in UK have spearheaded climate change related lawsuits with varied success. Where Stiglitz is vehement and Starmer subdued is on the significance of the global 2008 banking crisis and the failures of the financial services sector which Stiglitz sees as serving mainly themselves. The reckless greed of the bankers went unpunished in the UK and money that might have gone to public services went to bail-out those with the incredible gall of very rich who continued to award themselves with bumper bonuses. Part of the investment crisis faced by the UK government clearly comes from the perverse asocial, amoral, modus operandi of the banking sector. The problem is the market power of the bankers and the information technology giants. We need both, but regulated, as both, in practice are indifferent to our spectacular levels of inequality. The USA has the advantage of a written constitution which embodies a set of values. People, Power and Profits holds together with this scaffolding of values, the social and moral norms sustaining the human need for social cohesion and approval of The Theory of Moral Sentiments which Adam Smith published in 1759. We too need to hear and understand how core values inform our economy and democracy, social and intergenerational justice, equality of opportunity. We too need more reason, less emotion, and tolerance for those who have suffered persecution, in determining the path to a fair society. And the Labour government needs to present its policies more coherently as the outcome of its values. Yes, it’s still ‘the vision thing’. Stiglitz decries the way the American dream is more myth than reality. Labour Party dreaming seems to stop short at growth and grim pragmatism. We are lucky that our mistakes, cutting ourselves off from the European Customs Union and Common Market, isolating ourselves as a pretentious offshore island at a time of global perils, Prime Ministers who made us the laughingstock of the world, cannot compare with those of America. Despite our reduced means we do have a vision of what needs to be done about climate change. If Trump indeed dismantles all of Biden’s good work on green energy, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to describe it as a crime against humanity. When considering the forthcoming Trump Presidency we may come to hear Karl Marx’s adage “first time as tragedy, second time as farce” as words of hope. Meanwhile it’s good to know there are people like Stiglitz still around, smart, secular, surviving and offering a way forward. See TheArticle 11/12/2024 In a newly published book, Hope Never Disappoints, Pope Francis called for an investigation into whether Israel’s actions in Gaza fit the legal definition of genocide. On 19 November, an important part of Europe’s Jewish leadership responded.
The Conference of European Orthodox Rabbis Standing Committee represents an alliance of some 700 Orthodox Jewish leaders in Europe. Their statement was distributed by a Public Relations Company, ROATH. We should have some sympathy for the Rabbis being “deeply disturbed”, their phrase, by Francis’ words. Their language was significantly more measured than Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “disgraceful”. In such a passionate, polarised debate there is urgent need for shared understanding of basic facts. What the Rabbis say deserves consideration and a reply. In what follows all words inside quotation marks are from their short text, nothing I hope considered out of context. I have tried to take their points in order of importance. “Israel is committed to international humanitarian law”. This is the key issue considered by the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC). Both focus on the cutting off of Gaza’s civilian population, intentionally and knowingly, from adequate food, water, electricity and medical supplies. This, rather than the estimated 44,000 Palestinian casualties of war, is the nub of the ICJ indictment of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), and of the recent arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. Describing Israel’s actions as “defensive war”, after a brutal and criminal attack by Hamas waged against an “unprovoked, barbarous enemy”, does not ensure legality in international law. Evidence from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, describing near-siege conditions and estimating that 70% of Gazan casualties are women and children, does not support the view that Israel is observing international humanitarian law. The ICJ’s opinion is that Israel, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity of the most serious nature, with possibly genocidal intent, has a case to answer. Let’s be clear. The ICJ also accused Hamas of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. An arrest warrant for Hamas military leader, Mohammad Deif (probably dead) was also issued. Nothing can justify 1,200 Israelis killed including hundreds of women, scores of children, and many wounded. But were the atrocities of 7 October “unprovoked”? Many would argue that Israeli governments’ longstanding denial of self-determination for Palestinians, their occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and encouragement of settlers, and the shooting dead of children throwing stones at the IDF, all call in question the Rabbis’ assertion Hamas was “unprovoked”. Hamas, the statement claims, is “a terrorist army that purposefully operates from within civilian population centres”, a slightly less incendiary version of the Israeli Government’s accusation that Hamas is using the civilian population as human shields. No independent observers or unembedded journalists are allowed into Gaza so there is simply no way of verifying or disproving such allegations. But Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The land area on the eastern Mediterranean is 141 sq. miles, 3.7-7.5 miles wide and 25 miles long with a population density of 14,000 per sq. mile (Singapore has 21,500 people per sq. mile). 80% of Gaza’s 2.23 million Palestinians live in urban areas. It is practically inevitable that Hamas’ military wing would be present in “civilian population areas” and in tunnels beneath them, some of which were originally made for movement of imports and exports to sustain a rudimentary economy. This is not to say that the high concentration of civilians in Gaza doesn’t serve Hamas’ fight against a vastly more powerful enemy, and in the propaganda war that accompanies the conduct of asymmetric warfare. “Israel in its military measures to defend itself can still not be said to be engaging in genocide”, the Rabbis’ statement declares. But UN bodies, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Pope are not stating that Israel is engaging in “genocide”. The near siege of 2.23 million Palestinians in Gaza is being condemned as a war crime and a crime against humanity. This is not a matter of “singling out the Jewish State”. They are aware that any such accusation must be determined legally within the very restrictive framework of the 1948 Genocide Convention, itself an international treaty that obliges States’ adherence in international law. A much less publicised case against Myanmar’s military rulers is being pursued. There have been convictions for genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. Putin is driving his tanks, missiles, paid-for North Korean soldiers and Russian troops through international law. Now is the time to support the operation of our international courts. Israel has made itself more vulnerable to charges by the ICJ and ICC of breaking international humanitarian law by failing to adequately curtail and punish criminal military conduct. Failure to institute proceedings when military forces are under suspicion of breaching international law is a cause for the ICC, which has issued individual arrest warrants, to intervene. When it comes to litigation, the ICC’s work is seen as complementary to that of UN member States. The assertion that Netanyahu is “fighting for return of 101 hostages” taken last October is not convincing. Netanyahu knows well, as do countless Jewish protesters including hostages’ families, that the return of the hostages alive depends on a ceasefire and that continued fighting renders a final hostage deal improbable. Netanyahu also knows that an end to hostilities will very likely spell an end to his government and political career. The conclusion to the Rabbis’ statement reads “every word issued from a major leader has immense consequences” which “our lived experience, suffering from rising violent antisemitism sadly confirms”. Their anxiety is understandable. But presenting public concern for the plight of the Palestinians as a cause of antisemitism in Europe is highly questionable. It demeans the Jewish minority around the world who openly oppose the IDF’s conduct in Gaza and are afraid Israel is becoming a pariah state. The European Rabbis do not echo claims often made by representatives of the Israeli government that Israel’s accusers are asserting a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, an omission for which they deserve recognition. The role of the ICC and ICJ is to make legal judgements. When there is sufficient evidence, they make judicial decisions in international law about State and individual criminality - on both sides of a conflict. The ICC and ICJ cannot, and do not, ignore war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Hamas or Israel. The Rabbis’ loyalty to Jewish troops in combat and their fears for Israel itself are understandable. Much less understandable is uncritical loyalty to the current Israeli government beyond the suggestion “the effectiveness of Israel’s ongoing war can be debated”. The Pope’s call was motivated by compassion for those suffering in Gaza and fear for what follows if the Middle East conflict further undermines the international order. It would help to put an end to this tragedy if the European Orthodox Jewish leaders were to put their moral authority behind the quest for a ceasefire in Gaza. Upholding international law, without fear or favour, at a time when international order is crumbling, should be paramount. Last weekend, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa quoted Pope Francis having said that some international experts had declared that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", an excerpt from interviews in a book Hope Never Disappoints. "We should investigate carefully to assess whether this fits into the technical definition (of genocide) formulated by international jurists and organisations," the Pope urged.
These remarks will, without doubt, have caused distress in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world with whom the Pope has worked to have better relationships. Francis visited the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism in 2014, Auschwitz in 2016, and expressed concern about growing antisemitism on Italian television in November 2023. But tensions have been growing as the Israel-Palestine conflict escalated with religious affiliation becoming more significant. The Vatican’s attempt to achieve a balance between Islam and Judaism has become more challenging. Last December, to some degree South Africa pre-empted the Pope’s call, filing a complaint, a ‘Memorial’, in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for its actions in Gaza. The Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN in December 1948 as a response to the Holocaust. Alleging that a Jewish State needed to be prevented from committing the crime of genocide is particularly shocking. The Pope is seeking clarification on whether the Convention is applicable to the situation in Gaza. So, on what grounds did South Africa institute such legal proceedings in the ICJ? There are certain international Conventions which “all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection” and thus an obligation to intervene. The Genocide Convention, an international treaty, is one of them. This principle, erga omnes partes (directed at all parties), was endorsed by the ICJ in 2022 in a case of Gambia v Myanmar involving the plight of the Rohingya. In approaching the ICJ South Africa found legal means and precedent to express its solidarity with Palestinians. In international law the definition of the crime of genocide is highly restrictive. Nonetheless, thirteen other States, including Spain, Mexico, Ireland and Belgium, have indicated their intention of intervening on the side of South Africa at the ICJ with their own ‘Memorials’. A look at how genocide became a crime recognised in international law sheds some light on the difficulty of establishing it legally today. The Polish, Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide’ in late 1942 in the context of Axis rule in occupied Europe: a process of destruction of an oppressed group “after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals”. He struggled to define the term but was clear about its historical precedents. “Bartolomé de las Casas, Vitoria [16th century Salamanca Dominican Friars who championed rights of indigenous peoples], and humanitarian interventions, are all links in one chain leading to the proclamation of genocide as an international crime by the United Nations”, he wrote in a later unpublished essay. By the end of World War II, the crime of genocide was still not fully defined but the prosecutors in the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945-1946) did not flinch from using the term. Though none of the convicted Nazi leaders were found guilty of genocide as a specific crime. The Nuremberg indictments were for one or more crimes notably ‘war against peace’ (waging aggressive war), war crimes and crimes against humanity – which covered genocide. At the time, Lemkin was defining genocide as “the criminal intent to destroy or cripple a human group” with an added emphasis on the destruction of cultures and their loss to humanity. His focus then was on the destruction of racial and national groups citing the fate of Poles, Gypsies and Jews. In a resolution in the September 1948 session of the United Nations, the General Assembly declared that genocide was a crime that could take place in peacetime. In December 1948 the Convention defined genocide in Article II as: “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical sic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part”. Because of the imperial sensitivities of UN member States, Lemkin’s emphasis on the destruction of cultures had disappeared, nor were political groups included. On 8 October, the BBC led on an update report from the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory set up in 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had not allowed them into Gaza. The UN team of three brought considerable combined experience to a difficult task. Members were South African Navi Pillay, former President Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Miloon Kothari, a former convener of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN, and Professor Chris Sidoti, an academic expert on international human rights law and formerly Australian Human Rights Commissioner and head of the Australian Justice and Peace Commission.. Their report highlighted both Israel’s actions and those occurring during Hamas’ terrible 7 October attack when 1,200 Israelis died, 40 children killed, and hundreds were wounded. At the Nova music festival alone 136 women were slaughtered and there were incidents of sexual violence. 251 hostages were taken. The UN Human Rights Office has examined over 8,000 deaths in Gaza from the beginning of the war. Requiring three sources for each verification of death - for that reason mostly inside residential buildings - the Human Rights Office found 44% were children, 26% women and 30% men. Assuming for every direct killing four indirect deaths because of the war, The Lancet estimate some 190,000 Palestinians have died. In the words of the Austrian diplomat and High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, “unprecedented levels of killing, death, injury, starvation, illness and disease”. Overall, the figures support allegations of indiscriminate bombing and shelling and appear incompatible with Israel’s claimed policy of legitimate self-defence: ending terrorism by targeted attacks on Hamas belligerents. An action cited by Article II as genocidal in the Convention, and relevant when considering the war, is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Under Article III of the Genocide Convention, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is legally punishable whether or not it results in actual genocidal action. On 28 December 2023, in a letter to Israel’s Attorney General, a group of former Knesset members, Israeli diplomats, academics and journalists gave details of “extensive and blatant incitement to genocide’ by influential Israeli public figures and called for their prosecution. The most significant calls had come from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, who declared those who “celebrate, those who support.... they’re all terrorists and they should also be destroyed”, and from former Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant, who said Israel was fighting “human animals” and that he was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”. In a statement on 28 October 2023 on war against Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu himself urged Israelis to remember their biblical enemy Amalek citing Deuteronomy 25.17. Samuel 15.3 on the Amelekites reads: “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants...” Emotional rhetoric after the security failure and the tragic losses and hostage-taking of 7 October, or incitement and indications of intent? This is the kind of material jurists consider. Proof of specific genocidal purpose will be critical if South Africa’s case is to succeed. Genocide, like any other crime, may be committed for a variety of motives ranging from ethnic or religious hatred revenge or fear to the elimination of an enemy and acquisition of territory. But when purpose/intent is inferred from circumstances rather than directly proved, genocidal purpose must be the sole possible inference that can be drawn from the criminal actions. That would be very difficult. Restriction of medical supplies, food and water, mass displacement as well as killing of the civilian population, conditions close to siege, do not necessarily add up legally to the crime of genocide. But South Africa’s proceedings at the ICJ are looking increasingly grounded in facts. The UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry is examining Hamas’ and the Israel’s actions as possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, no less serious crimes than genocide in international law but more easily proven. All States have a common interest in fulfilling the purposes of the Genocide Convention. South Africa has taken the lead in upholding international law under threat today from so many quarters. The Pope was asking for the situation in Gaza to be clarified legally not claiming that the IDF is committing genocide. Any judgement from the ICJ will take a long time and is far from a foregone conclusion. This is an acutely difficult time for a compassionate Pope seeking ways of stopping or reducing the suffering. Difficult for Catholics horrified at the plight of Palestinians, and difficult for Jewish friends too, processing the pain and insecurity of 7 October. This is an intractable conflict. Pope Francis leads a global Church not the allies of Israel or Hamas. As in the motif of the Synod, Francis would want to open the hearts and minds of both sides to each other. But for the time being that looks impossible. Discrediting the US electoral process is the key weapon in Trump’s assault on democracy. Trump will not stop insisting that this, and the previous, Presidential election was rigged. Win or lose, narrowly or not, on Tuesday 5h November, he will persist. He has been laying the foundations for his own authoritarian rule for years. The threat of election-linked violence is part of it.
In swing (marginal) States, the harassment of State officials and electoral officers, from the declaration of Biden’s victory to the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, has continued. Radio 4’s PM programme on 25th October featured an interview with Tammy Patrick, Chief Executive Officer for Programs at the National Association of Election officials, and a recognised expert in election administration who for eleven years had served as a Federal Compliance officer for elections in Maricopa County, Arizona (population 4.2 million). She revealed how serious pressure on officials has become. The offices of electoral commissions in Arizona, and other States, have been threatened by MAGA (Make America Great Again) extremists. Now, electoral offices need guards and some have even installed bullet-proof glass. And after family members were followed some electoral officers are driving rental cars. After the 3 November 2020 election, 62 Republican lawsuits claiming widespread electoral fraud and irregularities were filed, without supporting evidence. Within the last two years, an additional 165 lawsuits have been filed, mainly by Republicans and conservative organisations attempting to ease Trump into the White House. The primary purpose of this unprecedented level of litigation is to sow doubt about the electoral process. It is impossible to keep up with Trump’s lies about the elections, which include claims that illegal, unregistered immigrants will be voting, postal votes will be stolen, and there will be widespread impersonation of registered voters. The illegal immigrant voter is a key figure in Trump’s manipulation of fears of uncontrolled immigration. After extensive enquiries, Tammy Patrick reported that Vigilant checking of signatures on postal votes made any chance of potential fraud ‘infinitesimal’ and described the incidence of voter impersonation in 2020 as zero. Stuffing ballot boxes, a resort of the worst autocratic State leaders, isn’t feasible due to the tightly controlled US procedures. How to Rig an Election: Defending Democracy from the World’s Despots by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas (second edition 2024 Yale University Press), whilst focusing on already existing autocracies and ‘counterfeit democracies’, casts a light on Trump’s threat to democracy as well as the importance of Electoral Commissions and observers. But elections can be, and are, rigged long before the main body of election observers are on the ground doing their observing. And even then, there are never enough observers to cover all the polling stations. Amongst the recent proliferation of lawsuits, there are indications that attempts to manipulate and discredit the elections has partly shifted, from the voting itself towards a focus on rigging before the ballot papers are printed or digital voting systems set up: gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation, buying votes, intimidation of electoral officials. Though both the US Parties have been guilty of some of the above in the past, they are all major features of the Trump/Republican electoral playbook. Gerrymandering goes back to 1812 and Governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry. He organised the State electoral map so that the bulk of his rival Federalists were squeezed into a handful the electoral districts. The ploy was noticed at the time. Cheeseman and Klaas describe a cartoon in the Boston Gazette depicting one such newly formed district, shaped as a salamander with a forked tongue, captioned “the Gerrymander’. It stuck. Gerry was not re-elected Governor but did end up as James Madison’s Vice-President, dying in 1814. Both US political Parties have been guilty of gerrymandering though the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University Law School think-tank, estimate that Republicans currently benefit most, gaining for them some 16 seats in the House of Representatives. In Presidential elections, the biggest effect is found in three marginal States, Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes), where at time of writing is tied at 48% each, Michigan where Harris is 0.7%% ahead (15) and North Carolina (16) where you can choose which poll to believe. Massachusetts (9) is a good example of democrat gerrymandering where in 2020, Jo Biden won a huge majority, 68.5% against 28.6% for Trump, so gerrymandering did not alter the overall result. Gerry might be smiling. Significant gaps between the two contender Parties are typical of most States. The second major form of rigging was, and is, voter suppression. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) outlawed discriminatory voting practices in the southern States, notably literacy tests, inaugurating a period of enfranchisement of black voters and minority groups. It also established a VRA formula for deciding which jurisdictions, States and localities, needed to submit changes in voting laws to the Federal Justice Department for ‘pre-clearance’. The 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County (Alabama) v Holder (Federal Attorney General), by 5-4, did away - as outdated and correspondingly unconstitutional - with the VRA formula. Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the judgement as ‘like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet’. In the following decade 23 States created new obstacles to voting largely through varied ID introducing stricter demands for voter identification. It was alleged that changes were intended to counter voter impersonation – which was non-existent. Those who could not produce a passport or a driving licence, predominantly the poor, would be turned away at the polling facility. It is estimated that in the marginal, northern State of Wisconsin 300,000 citizens lacked the required voter identification documents. Trump won the State by 30,000 votes. Nationally, voter suppression gave an advantage to the Republicans - the main reason for its implementation. Incentivising voters by offering some form of reward – for the individual or the Party - or for registering to vote, is run-of-the-mill practice on several continents, but provided the voter believes their vote is secret, is the least reliable rigging method. It is also illegal. Whether Elon Musk’s sweepstake, available only to registered voters in swing States who sign a petition ‘In favour of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms’, might also be illegal is unclear. A daily draw rewards the winner with $1 million could be interpreted as appealing to Republican sentiment against the Democrats’ desire for gun control. Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krassner, is suing Musk and his Political Action Committee which funds Trump’s campaign on the grounds of breaching election law. Illegal or not, Musk’s intervention highlights, as Tammy Patrick said in her interview, that elections should be about ‘the Will of the People not the will of the billionaires’. Trump’s election rigging gambit must be taken seriously. It works. The administration of the US 2020 Presidential elections was carried out with due auditing, caution and integrity. The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act makes it more difficult for Trump to reproduce the chaos around Presidential elections. But an astonishing number of people believe his allegation that they are rigged. The rigging that has taken place, was inherited, or planned, is not there to thwart Trump’s autocratic ambitions, but to fulfil them. See TheArticle 03/11/2024 |
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