As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the European economy is forecast to grow for the seventh year in a row in 2019 with expansion set to occur in every country.
Thirty years ago, on November 9, with a sense of momentous events palpable in Berlin’s famous air, East Germans began streaming through the Berlin Wall, two-stroke East German cars putt-putted past major symbols of capitalism like the KaDeWe department store, and it appeared that the Germans were the happiest people in the world.
I was there to interview eyewitnesses I had found in my dissertation research for a documentary film and gave a lecture on October 25 at East Berlin’s Humboldt University on “socially forced concessions in Nazi Germany.”
Crossing from West to East Berlin for the enormous November 4 demonstration on Alexanderplatz 10 days later, we joked, “Why not drive straight through the Brandenburg Gate without stopping?”
For 28 years, the wall split Germany like an iron curtain, into the capitalist West and the communist East. Estimated hundreds had died trying to cross that wall, and beginning in September 1989, demonstrations demanding reform were swelling quickly week by week.
The day after the Wall fell, former West German Chancellor Willi Brandt foresaw a “challenge to all of us to do a lot more in order to bring together what belongs together.”
But 30 years later, I see the divide growing between the East and West.
It brings to mind a friend and Stasi agent, who in 1988 told me that East Germany could tear down the wall and the East German people would stay. Or the East German dissident who remarked in 1993 that “Yes, West Germany has swallowed us, but soon it will be having indigestion.”
‘The wall in the head’
How is it that the disappearance of the wall separating capitalism from socialism, which East German leader Erich Honecker in 1987 likened to “fire and water,” would unite East German officials and those who had just risked their lives to protest against them?
To begin with, the leaders of East Germany’s protest movement agitated for some democratizing reforms for socialism, not a demise of the state in favor of an effort to balance democracy with capitalism in the image of the West. They encouraged the change in the protesters’ initial chants from “we want out” to “we’re staying here.” Reform was the theme in the anti-unification demonstration I witnessed in December 1989.
Many East Germans, drawn west by images from West German TV and the imagination of things the wall was forbidding, soon began to agree. Turned away by the hectic pace and competition of cold individualism in place of socialism’s boring security, many returned.
Novelist Peter Schneider had written of “the wall within the head,” independent of the physical wall, reflecting the different experiences of two generations in divided Germany.
In West Germany, the unification Chancellor Helmut Kohl led a plan to grow the two parts of Germany together through forces of capitalism, promising an Eastern “blooming landscape” of jobs, high living standards and a range of amazing consumer products. The West German system was essentially extended to encompass the East.
But entrepreneurs did not establish production sites in the East, as Kohl predicted. West German entrepreneurs preferred to increase production from Western firms, putting Eastern factories out of business rather than moving capital there to launch industry and jobs.
The West maintained that capitalist democracy would soon make West Germans of the Easterners.
Nostalgia for the East
But the 1990s revealed that Eastern Germans too young to remember socialism nevertheless identified with East Germany rather than the newly expanded Federal Republic. I have heard that East German “nostalgia” carried on as parents transmitted stories over the dinner table of a communitarian, less cutthroat life.
Embellished or not, these stories were backed by widespread perceptions in the East that they were now ruled by the West. They felt that the West had not really wanted them.
Meanwhile, according to a poll by Der Spiegel, a major German newspaper, 63% of West Germans favored accommodating East Germans in the West shortly before the Wall fell. Only 33% voiced the same opinion two months after the wall.
Resentments arose overnight. The West was apprehensive of big tax increases to pay for reunification and feared that East Germans would wreck the Germany they had built and loved. A family resettled in the West was denounced on the street as “East German swine,” in early 1990. “The kids pick up what they hear at home and then babble it about,” a high school principal in Hamburg complained.
There were essential differences in values, too. In the 1990s, Eastern Germans viciously attacked foreign refugees in the Eastern state of Brandenburg, where violent attacks were three times more common than in Western Germany. This stimulated arguments that socialism had not provided the context for East Germans to accept the West’s patterns of pluralism.
In the 1992, in cities across the West, grassroots demonstrations rose up against the image of German intolerance. In Munich, millions marched in candlelight vigils proclaiming solidarity. German politicians and the Federation of Jewish Communities alike hailed these massive grassroots demonstrations as an illustration that Germans now rejected Nazism and moreover knew how to defend democracy.
Rise of the extreme right
Over the decades, threats of neo-Nazism and the extreme right from the East have continued to surface. But only since a political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), formed in 2013 have the threats gained power.
Support in the East for the AfD has surged dramatically, especially since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s admission of well over a million refugees fleeing death and turmoil in the Middle East and Asia.
In 2017, the AfD, buoyed by strong support in the East, became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II. The party came in first in the October elections in the Eastern state of Thuringen, pushing Merkel’s party, Christian Democratic Union, into third place.
The Christian Democratic Union is now debating whether to break a longstanding taboo by forming an alliance with the AfD. A poll early this year showed that 42% of Eastern Germans, compared with 77% of those in the West, think their German democracy is the best type of government.
Like other parties and leaders across the globe who are challenging democratic systems this century, the AfD is taking to the halls of power through popular elections.
The rise of AfD fits into a global pattern of anger at democracy. The East Germans feel alienated and powerless. Almost one-half of Easterners see themselves as second-class citizens, while 63% think the differences between them and the West are greater than what they have in common.
Critically,growing economic equality has not generated growing support for Western democracy. In 2018, the average unemployment rate was 6.9% in the former East, compared with 4.8% in the West. Former East Germans earned just 86% percent of what their West German counterparts made in 2017.
Reflecting the early preferences of Western entrepreneurs, many Eastern firms belong to West German or foreign corporations. No major companies are headquartered in the East, and not a single Eastern company is on Germany’s leading stock exchange index.
In 1991, I interviewed East Germany’s last leader Egon Krenz, relating my experience, as a graduate student, among East Berliners crowding near the wall to overhear a concert nearby in West Berlin, and shouting “The wall has to go” and “Gorby, Gorby,” referring to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. The East German government should have paid more attention to the East German people, he allowed.
Is the same true for the architects of German unification? Unification is a massive undertaking and could not have happened quickly.
The 30th anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on how challenging it is for humans to really make day-to-day sacrifices for those outside their group, and what more the German government might have done to really make the East bloom like the West.
Most Europeans still cling to physical cash while nations in Asia have embraced cashless payments the most. This is the conclusion of the 2018 World Cash Report that lists different studies analyzing peoples’ habit to pay by cash or card (or even mobile).
Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that while most of the studies are so called diary studies where people log their everyday lives, they are designed differently and might yield different results. Yet, comparing the figures proves interesting to gain a general understanding of which countries are more or less prone to use cash.
Japan is one of the exception to the rule of Asian countries loving cashless payments. The government has recently revealed its “Cashless Vision” which is looking to increase cashless payments to 40 percent by 2025. Right now, only around 18 percent of payments in Japan are cashless, according to the Japanese government.
While this is comparable with rates in several European countries like Spain, Italy and Germany, regional neighbors China and South Korea have embraced cashless payments to a much larger degree.
Today is one of the International Days of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP). Initiated over 20 years ago by the World Evangelical Alliance, 100,000 congregations around the world and millions of Christians participate on this day.
“This November let us unite in prayer for our persecuted brothers and sisters,” IDOP noted in a brief video that highlights a few examples of recent persecution, including the Easter Sunday church bombings in Sri Lanka and the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Islamic groups in Nigeria and, increasingly, Burkina Faso.
Discussing this day’s significance, Vernon Brewer, the CEO and founder of World Help, a Christian humanitarian organization, wrote:
“It’s easy to go about our lives and forget that in places like Nigeria, Iran and North Korea being a Christian can often lead to death. After all, for the most part, persecution for our faith isn’t something most of us face… But I can’t forget the believers I’ve met in Iraq, China or at the North Korean border. I can’t forget their scars or their haunted eyes and horrific stories… The more I travel, the more I see that in many countries Christian persecution is worse than ever before.”
Statistics bear out this grim assertion: “4,136 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons,” noted Open Doors in its World Watch List 2019. “On average, that’s 11 Christians killed every day for their faith.” Additionally, “2,625 Christians were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced and imprisoned” and “1,266 churches or Christian buildings were attacked.”
The report further states that more than 245 million Christians around the world are currently suffering from persecution. In other words, “1 in 9 Christians experience high levels of persecution worldwide.”
Typically women fare worse: “In many places, they experience a ‘double persecution’— one for being a Christian and one for being a woman.” As for specific numbers: “At least six women every day are raped, sexually harassed or forced into marriage to a Muslim man under the threat of death for their Christian faith…”
The “Independent Review into the global persecution of Christians,” led by Rev. Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro, and published in early 2019, states:
“Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity. In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”
The bishop’s detailed report, which was commissioned by then British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, concluded that the persecution of Christians is near “genocide” levels.
Both studies make clear that most of the persecution occurs in the Muslim world. In seven of the top ten worst nations, “the primary cause of persecution is Islamic oppression,” notes Open Doors. Additionally, 38 of the 50 nations that persecute Christians the most are Muslim-majority.
The Bishop of Truro’s report gives specifics:
“The persecution of Christians is perhaps at its most virulent in the region of the birthplace of Christianity — the Middle East & North Africa.”
“Christianity now faces the possibility of being wiped-out in parts of the Middle East where its roots go back furthest. In Palestine, Christian numbers are below 1.5 percent; in Syria the Christian population has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000 and in Iraq, Christian numbers have slumped from 1.5 million before 2003 to below 120,000 today.”
“In countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia the situation of Christians and other minorities has reached an alarming stage.”
“[T]here is mass violence which regularly expresses itself through the bombing of churches, as has been the case in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia.”
“The single-greatest threat to Christians [in Nigeria] … came from Islamist militant group Boko Haram, with US intelligence reports in 2015 suggesting that 200,000 Christians were at risk of being killed… Those worst affected included Christian women and girls ‘abducted, and forced to convert, enter forced marriages, sexual abuse and torture.'”
“An intent to erase all evidence of the Christian presence [in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, north-east Nigeria and the Philippines] was made plain by the removal of crosses, the destruction of Church buildings and other Church symbols. The killing and abduction of clergy represented a direct attack on the Church’s structure and leadership.”
Outside the Muslim world, the persecution of Christians is also getting significantly worse, particularly North Korea, where “never-ending pressure and violence” is directed against Christians. In India, for the first time in modern history, Christians are experiencing “extreme persecution.”
In the end, numbers and statistics will never adequately capture the magnitude of the problem. “Too many to count, too many unknown,” states the video by International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, “All because they bear the name of Jesus.”
John Brennan amplified upon the thought, and there was yet more applause. However, that thought hadn’t been invented by McLaughlin; it instead had evolved recently in the pages of the New York Times. Perhaps the discussants had read it there. Instead of America’s ‘news’-media uncritically trumpeting what government officials assert to be facts (as they traditionally do), we now have former spooks uncritically trumpeting what a mainstream ‘news’-medium has recently concocted to be the case — about themselves. They’ve come out of the closet, about being the Deep State. However, even in that, they are lying, because they aren’t it; they are only agents for it.
In America, the Deep State ‘justifies’ itself in the ‘news’-media that it owns, and does so by falsely ‘defining’ what the “Deep State” is (which is actually the nation’s 607 billionaires, whose hired agents number in the millions). They mis-‘define’ it, as being, instead, the taxpayer-salaried career Government employees, known professionally as “the Civil Service.” (Although some Civil Servants — especially at the upper levels — are agents for America’s billionaires and retire to cushy board seats, most of them actually are not and do not. And the “revolving door” between “the public sector” and “the private sector” is where the Deep State operations become concentrated. That’s the core of the networking, by which the billionaires get served. And, of course, those former spooks at the National Press Club said nothing about it. Are they authentically so stupid that they don’t know about it, or is that just pretense from them?)
How the Deep State’s operatives perpetrate this deception about the meaning of “Deep State” was well exemplified in the nine links that were supplied on October 28th by the extraordinarily honest anonymous German intelligence analyst who blogs as “Moon of Alabama” and who condemned there (and linked to) 9 recent articles in the New York Times, as posing a threat against democracy in America.
As I intend to argue here, the 9 articles are, indeed, aimed at deceiving the American public, about what the true meaning of the phrase “the Deep State” is. He headlined “Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy”. (And that’s what the October 30th panel discussion was actually doing — endorsing the Deep State.)
However, he didn’t explain the tactic the NYT’s editors (and those former spooks) use to deceive the public about the Deep State, and this is what I aim to do here, by showing the transformation, over time, in the way that that propaganda-organization, the New York Times, has been employing the phrase “Deep State” — a remarkable transformation, which started, on 16 February 2017, by the newspaper’s denying that any Deep State exists in America but that it exists only in corrupt nations; and which gradually transitioned into an upside-down, by asserting that a Deep State does exist in the United States, and that it fights against corruption in this country. As always, only fools (such as that applauding audience on October 30th) would believe it, but propagandists depend upon fools and cannot thrive without them. In this case, the Times, in those 9 articles, was evolving quickly from a blanket denial, to an American-exceptionalist proud affirmation, that a Deep State rules this country and ought to rule it. I agree with the statement that “Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy”, but I am more concerned here to explain how that endorsement — that deceit — is being done.
The first of these NYT articles was published on 16 February 2017, and it denied that the US has any “Deep State” whatsoever.
The second, published on 6 March 2017, blamed President Trump (since the NYT represents mainly Democratic Party billionaires) for mainstreaming the phrase “the Deep State” into American political discourse, and it alleged that that phrase actually refers only to “countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders.”
The third, published on 10 March 2017, repeated this allegation, that this phrase applies only to “the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say.”
The fourth, published on 5 September 2018, was an anonymous op-ed from a Government employee who condemned Trump and “vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.” So: still the NYT’s editors were hewing to their propaganda-line, that no “Deep State” exists in America — there are just whistleblowers, here.
The fifth, on 18 December 2018, said, for example, that “Adam Lovinger, a Pentagon analyst, was one of the first to wrap himself in the deep state defense” — namely, that they consist of “people who have been targeted for political reasons.” So, the NYT’s editors were now reinforcing their new false ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” as consisting just of Government whistleblowers.
The sixth, on 6 October 2019, said, “President Trump and some of his allies have asserted without evidence that a cabal of American officials — the so-called deep state — embarked on a broad operation to thwart Mr. Trump’s campaign. The conspiracy theory remains unsubstantiated.” So: the NYT’s editors were back, again, to denying that there is any “Deep State” in America. This was a signal, from them, that they were starting to recognize that they’d need to jiggle their ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” at least a bit.
The seventh, on 20 October 2019, was by a member of the Editorial Board, and it boldly proclaimed, about “the deep state,” “Let us now praise these not-silent heroes.” The propagandists now had settled firmly upon their new (and previously merely exploratory) ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” as consisting of whistleblowers in the US Government’s Civil Services, “individuals willing to step up and protest the administration’s war on science, expertise and facts.”
The eighth, on 23 October 2019, equated “the deep state” even more boldly with the impeachment of President Trump: “Over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.”
The ninth, on 26 October 2019, which came from “a contributing opinion writer and professor of history,” alleged that the origins of “the deep state” are to be found with Teddy Roosevelt in the 1880s, when “A healthy dose of elitism drove Roosevelt’s crusade, as the spoils system had been the path to power for immigrant-driven political machines in big cities like New York. Yet the Civil Service laws he and others created marked the beginning of a shift toward a fairer, less corrupt public realm.”
In other words: the Deep State, in America, are not perpetrators of corrupt government (such as in “countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders”), but are instead courageous enemies of corrupt government; and they are instituted by the aristocracy here (today’s American billionaires), in order to reduce, if not eliminate, corruption in government (which, the Times now alleges, originates amongst, or serves, the lower classes).
The lessons about Big Brother, which were taught by George Orwell in his merely metaphorical masterpiece 1984, were apparently never learned, because even now — as his “Newspeak” is being further refined so that black is white, and good is bad, and truth is falsehood — there still are people who subscribe to the propagandists and cannot get enough of their ridiculous con-games. Though in some poor countries, a corrupt Deep State rules; a Deep State rules in America so as to reduce if not prevent corruption, the New York Times now concludes.
You can see how it’s done, in those nine NYT articles. Isn’t it simply amazing there?!
Chaos In Bolivia After President Morales Resigns, Claims He Was Victim Of A Coup
Shortly after the country’s military “urged” him to do so, Bolivian President Evo Morales resigned on Sunday to ease violence that has gripped the South American nation since a disputed election last month, but he stoked fears of further unrest in a country that has been paralyzed by weeks of protests after saying he was the victim of a “coup” and faced arrest.
Morales, who has been in power for nearly 14 years, said in televised comments that he would submit his resignation letter to help restore stability, though he aimed barbs at what he called a “civic coup” and later said police planned to arrest him.
“I resign from my position as president so that (Carlos) Mesa and (Luis Fernando) Camacho do not continue to persecute socialist leaders,” Morales said in the televised address naming the leaders of the opposition.
Morales said that he decided to leave the post in hopes that his departure would stop the spate of violent attacks against officials and indigenous people, “so that protesters do not continue burning the houses of public officials” and “kidnapping and mistreating” families of indigenous leaders.
“I am resigning, sending my letter of resignation to the Legislative Assembly,” Morales said, adding that it was his “obligation as indigenous president and president of all Bolivians to seek peace.”
Morales has received a reputation as a staunch defender of socialism and an ardent critic of US foreign policy. The country’s highest court ruled in 2018 that he could run for the fourth time.
Underscoring the ongoing tensions, Morales later said on Twitter that the police had an “illegal” warrant for his arrest and that “violent groups” had attacked his home, according to Reuters, although the local police chief later refuted there was a warrant for Morales’ arrest.
Shortly before Morales announced his resignation, Bolivian TV channels aired footage of what they say was a presidential plane departing from El Alto International airport. It was reported that the plane took Morales to his political stronghold of Chimoré in the Department of Cochabamba, 300 kilometers east of La Paz, a city where he launched his reelection bid back in May.
The resignation of Morales, a leftist icon and the last survivor of Latin America’s “pink tide” of two decades ago, has already sent shockwaves across the region at a time when left-leaning leaders have returned to power in Mexico and Argentina.
Completing a trifecta of resignations, Vice President Álvaro García Linera also resigned, as did Bolivia senate’s president, Adriana Salvatierra.
Echoing Morales, some of his leftist Latin American allies decried the turn of events as a “coup,” including Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Brazil’s Lula (who last week was released from prison) and Argentine President-elect Alberto Fernandez. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said his country would offer Morales asylum if he sought it.
While Bolivia under Morales enjoyed a period of welcome prosperity, including one of the region’s strongest economic growth rates and its poverty rate was cut in half, his determination to cling to power and seek a fourth term alienated many allies, even among indigenous communities.
* * *
Pressure had been ramping up on Morales since he was declared the winner of the Oct. 20 election. Ahead of today’s announcement, General Williams Kaliman, the head of Bolivia’s armed forces, on Sunday said the military had asked Morales to step down to help restore peace and stability after weeks of protests over the vote. Kaliman added that the military was calling on the Bolivian people to refrain from violence and disorder.
Videos from La Paz, the site of many recent anti-Morales protests, showed crowds cheering after the resignation announcement.
After the contested October elections there were rival rallies of Morales’ opponents and supporters throughout the country. While many anti-government protests remained peaceful, others have led to rioting in major cities, clashes with police, and attacks on pro-government politicians. On Saturday, protesters burned the house of Oruro city governor Víctor Hugo Vásquez, who stood by the president as tensions flared up.
Earlier on Sunday, Morales had agreed to hold new elections after a report from the Organization of American States (OAS), which conducted an audit of the Oct. 20 vote, revealed serious irregularities. The OAS report said that election should be annulled after it had found “clear manipulations” of the voting system that called into question Morales’ win, with a lead of just over 10 points over main rival Carlos Mesa.
Bolivian opposition urged Morales to resign altogether despite his promise of the new elections. While he briefly resisted such calls, branding them “unconstitutional” and an “attempted coup,” the President eventually gave in after the military joined that chorus.
Adding to the chaos resulting from weeks of protests, the resignations of Morales and his vice president meant it was not initially clear who would take the helm of the country pending the results of new elections.
According to Bolivian law, in the absence of the president and vice president, the head of the Senate would normally take over provisionally. However, as noted above, Senate President Adriana Salvatierra also stepped down late on Sunday, leaving an unprecedented power vacuum (which we are confident will be filled quick). Legislators were expected to meet to agree on an interim commission or legislator who would have temporary administrative control of the country, according to a constitutional lawyer who spoke to Reuters.
Morales, speaking at an earlier news conference, had tried to placate critics with a pledge to replace the electoral tribunal for the new vote, though his opponents – already angry that he ran in defiance of term limits – were not assuaged.
The election standoff has dented the image of Morales – who has helmed Bolivia through a period of relative stability and economic growth – and hit the landlocked nation’s economy. His “legacy will be compromised and the region will suffer another impact with consequences well beyond Bolivia,” said Juan Cruz Diaz, managing director of risk advisory Cefeidas Group, referring to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil.
Luis Fernando Camacho, a civic leader from the eastern city of Santa Cruz who has become a symbol of the opposition, said the OAS report on Sunday clearly demonstrated election fraud. He had reiterated his call for Morales to resign.
“Today we won a battle,” Camacho told a crowd of cheering supporters in the capital before Morales’ resignation, though he added more time was needed to repair the constitutional order and democracy. “Only when we can be sure that democracy is solid, then will we go back home.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had also welcomed the call for a new vote to “ensure free and fair elections.”
As the fall-out from the audit report swept across Bolivia, and as the military pulled its backing, Morales’ support crumbled on Sunday. Several of his allies resigned, including Mining Minister Cesar Navarro and Chamber of Deputies President Victor Borda, who belongs to Morales’ party. They both cited fear for the safety of their families as the reason for stepping down. Juan Carlos Huarachi, leader of the Bolivian Workers’ Center, a powerful pro-government union, said Morales should stand down if that would help end recent violence.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back is when the police forces also joined anti-government protests, while the military said it would not “confront the people” over the issue. The attorney general’s office also announced it had ordered an investigation with the aim of prosecuting the members of the electoral body and others responsible for the irregularities.
Mesa had also said Morales and his vice president should not preside over the electoral process or be candidates.
Morales, who came to power in 2006 as Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, had defended his election win but said he would adhere to the findings of the OAS audit. “The manipulations to the computer systems are of such magnitude that they must be deeply investigated by the Bolivian State to get to the bottom of and assign responsibility in this serious case,” the preliminary OAS report had said.
So just as some blame Russia when elections don’t go their way, others finds a culprit in computer system manipulations.
Voting in a new election should take place as soon as conditions are in place to guarantee it being able to go ahead, including a newly composed electoral body, the OAS said. The OAS added that it was statistically unlikely that Morales had secured the 10-percentage-point margin of victory needed to win outright.
Morales stressed that his resignation does not mean that the socialist case is defeated.
“It is no betrayal. The struggle continues. We are a people,” he said.
After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria caused turmoil in the region, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that some units formerly stationed in Syria have moved to stay in Iraq.
The country had formerly been the base of more than 5,000 U.S. troops, as our graphic shows.
Other Middle Eastern countries host many more U.S. troops.
The largest U.S. base in the Middle East is in Qatar. The country hosts around 13,000 U.S. troops, according to numbers compiled by Axios. Located southwest of Doha, Al Udeid Air Base has proven crucial in the fight against ISIS. Qatar invested $1 billion in constructing the base and it’s also home to the the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center, responsible for coordinating U.S. and allied air power across the Middle East, particularly in airspace over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The above infographic also highlights just how important Qatar, along with Kuwait, is to the U.S. presence in the Middle East.
Both countries hosts an estimated 13,000 U.S. troops.
Neighboring Bahrain is also vital to American interests in the region, home to the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a substantial military presence at Isa Air Base. 7,000 troops are based there.
For most of human history, the question of who would want to destroy the world didn’t much matter. The reason, of course, was that that no individual or group of humans could demolish civilization or cause our extinction. Our ancestors just didn’t have the tools: no amount of spears, arrows, swords, or catapults would have enabled them — even the most bloodthirsty and misanthropic — to have inflicted harm in every corner of the world.
This changed with the invention of the atomic bomb. While scholars often identify 1945 as the year that human self-annihilation became possible, a more accurate date is 1948 or 1949, since this is when the United States stockpiled enough nuclear weapons (about 100) to have initiated a hemisphere-spanning “nuclear winter.” (See this work in progress for why I’m focusing on 100 nuclear weapons as a threshold.) A nuclear winter occurs when soot from burning cities significantly reduces the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface for a period of months or years, thereby causing temperatures to plummet and famines to ensue. Quite unsettlingly, it wasn’t until the 1980s — decades after we had enough nukes to blot out the sun — that the nuclear winter phenomenon was first identified, although lingering questions remain even today.
The U.S. monopoly on world-ending power didn’t last long: by 1953, the Soviet Union had likewise expanded to 100 weapons. Now there were two nations on Earth that could obliterate civilization. But again, this didn’t last very long. The United Kingdom joined the club of potential world-enders around 1962, China around 1971, and France around 1973, with Israel, Pakistan, and India becoming members of this club in the 2010s. Hence, in less than a century, the world went from containing zero actors capable of unilaterally destroying the world to eight.
This is a scary situation. Unfortunately, it’s getting worse — much worse. The reason is that states are no longer the only players in the game. Thanks to new technologies, nonstate actors such as terrorist groups and lone wolves are getting in on the action, too, and they might be a lot more willing than national governments to push the proverbial doomsday button.
My own research suggests that the percentage of people who would push a doomsday button, if it were placed within finger’s reach, is fairly small, but the absolute number is unacceptably high. Even a quick Google search seems to affirm this. Consider the following answers, taken from different online sources, to the question of whether one would destroy the world if one could (quoting typos and all):
“Yes. It is obvious that we gain nothing from living and there is a huge amount of human suffering that I find quite unjustifiable. The complete annihilation of the human race would be the greatest act of compassion ever.” Reddit.com
“Yes. Because you all are assholes. And this is not a joke I would love to push something that ends humanity. I always thought about it and now there is the question about that topic and I am happy to say I want you all dead everyone single one of you fuckers. Please give me the chance to wipe out humanity.” Reddit.com
“My view is that Mankind is a plague… I vote to destroy mankind and let nature start over.” Debate.org
“The human animal is the only evil animal in the animal kingdom. We destroy everything… I email the president weekly and beg him to push the button and stop the madness already.” Debate.org
“In the short time we’ve been on this planet, humans have already destroyed so much. We destroy ecosystems, and kill off entire species of animals… The world would be better off without humans as a whole.” Debate.org
Of course, saying something definitely isn’t the same as doingit. Even so, can we be fully certain that not asingle person in the world would attempt to follow through on his or her annihilatory fantasies? One way to approach this question is to look for historical examples of groups or people who both expressed a desire to kill everyone and committed some terrible act or acts of violence. The combination of these two phenomena implies that such people would be willing to act on their omnicidal (meaning killing everyone) impulses and willingly, perhaps even eagerly, push a doomsday button. So are there such examples?
Unfortunately, yes. Lots of them. And they seem to fall into a handful of basic categories.
Consider the disturbing case of Eric Harris, the psychopathic mastermind behind the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. His journal is full of all sorts of genuinely horrifying, ghoulish fantasies. On several occasions, he explicitly mentions his burning desire to extinguish humanity. At one point. he writes: “If you recall your history the Nazis came up with a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. Kill them all. Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND’ no one should survive.”
Elsewhere, Harris mused, “I think I would want us to go extinct,” to which he added, “I have a goal to destroy as much as possible… I want to burn the world” and “I just wish I could actually DO this instead of just DREAM about it all.”
When Harris and Dylan Klebold, his partner in crime, perpetrated their massacre in Columbine, they were equipped with garden-variety weapons. Dangerous to be sure, but hardly capable of “burning the world.” Can there be any doubt, though, that if Harris — who was relatively intelligent and liked math and science — had had access to some of the advanced technologies of tomorrow, he would have, when committing suicide, tried to go out with a much bigger bang?
The Columbine massacre had a huge influence on later rampage shooters, some of whom also dreamt of omnicide. For example, in 2007, an 18-year-old Finnish student named Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot several people at his school, which he also tried to burn down. Like Harris, he wrote about “a final solution” as “the death of the entire human race,” and described his massacre as “an operation against humanity with the purpose of killing as many people as possible.” Yet another rampage shooter from Finland, Matti Saari, wrote in his suicide note, “I hate the human race, I hate mankind, I hate the whole world, and I want to kill as many people as possible.”
Then, of course, there was Elliot Rodger, the incel psychopath who killed seven people and injured 14 in the 2014 Isla Vista killings. In a video shot one day before the rampage, he said in no uncertain terms: “I hate all of you. Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood. And rightfully so. You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.”
School shooters and other lone wolves have idiosyncratic motives, such as a misanthropic hatred of humanity, or a desire to retaliate against women for perceived romantic and sexual slights. Together, though, they comprise a relatively cohesive category of omnicidal actors, and a relatively unpredictable one at that.
Another type of omnicidal actor comes in the form of apocalyptic terrorists who believe that to save the world, it must first be destroyed. ISIS, arguably the largest and richest terrorist group in history, is a paradigm case. While some members of ISIS probably didn’t hold apocalyptic beliefs, the leadership most certainly did — and they made strategic decisions based on these beliefs. The man who essentially founded ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed that Islam’s version of Armageddon was about to unfold around the small Syrian town of Dabiq. Hence, the name of the group’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq. After the U.S. military killed al-Zarqawi in 2006, leadership of ISIS transferred to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, a fevered apocalypticist who insisted that the Islamic end-of-days messianic figure, the “Mahdi,” was about to appear in Iraq. Like al-Zarqawi, he based his strategy on his apocalyptic belief — and it backfired. He soon met his end at the hands of Western forces.
Both of these individuals really believed that the end was nigh, and that it was their duty to use violence — catastrophic violence, to be more specific — to bring about the apocalypse. ISIS members talked about acquiring nuclear weapons, releasing deadly pathogens, and building dirty bombs. I personally haven’t spoken to a single terrorism scholar who doesn’t think that ISIS would have gleefully pushed a “destroy-the-world” button, especially if Western forces were marching toward Dabiq.
But ISIS is far from the only apocalyptic group. Famously, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo attempted to trigger Armageddon by releasing sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1995. Here in the U.S., more than a dozen hate groups subscribe to Christian Identity, an apocalyptic worldview that endorses the use of catastrophic violence as a means of triggering a “race war” that will initiate the end of the world. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, the Taiping Rebellion, involved an apocalyptic movement called the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.” This was led by a man named Hong Xiuquan, who believed that he was the brother of Jesus Christ, “commissioned by the Lord of Heaven to slay the devil-demons (Manchus) whose rule had brought ruin to China.”
A final type of omnicidal actor lingers within the outermost fringe of radical environmentalist, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite ideologies. Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, provides an example par excellence. Beginning in 1978, Kaczynski perpetrated numerous domestic terrorist attacks, killing three people and injuring 23 others. A former UC Berkeley mathematics professor and Harvard alumnus, Kaczynski didn’t wish for humanity to go extinct. Rather, he wanted to trigger a global revolution against industrial society, with the ultimate goal of causing its collapse. Kaczynski ultimately didn’t care whether his revolution would cause people to die, since in his utilitarian calculus the ends would justify the means. As Kaczynski wrote in 1995: “This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.”
In contrast, other actors in this category have explicitly embraced pro-extinction convictions. For example, the Gaia Liberation Front (GLF), an ecoterrorist group, holds as their mission “the total liberation of the Earth, which can be accomplished only through the extinction of the Humans as a species.” In advocating this, they argue that “if any Humans survive, they may start the whole thing over again. Our policy is to take no chances.”
How might they accomplish their omnicidal aims? GLF contends that bioengineering is “the specific technology for doing the job right of annihilating humanity — and it’s something that could be done by just one person with the necessary expertise and access to the necessary equipment.” They continue: “…genetically engineered viruses… have the advantage of attacking only the target species. To complicate the search for a cure or a vaccine, and as insurance against the possibility that some Humans might be immune to a particular virus, several different viruses could be released (with provision being made for the release of a second round after the generals and the politicians had come out of their shelters).”
This parallels an anonymous article in the Earth First! Journal, published in 1989, meaning that this idea has been around for a while: “Contributions are urgently solicited for scientific research on a species specific virus that will eliminate Homo shiticus from the planet. Only an absolutely species specific virus should be set loose. Otherwise it will be just another technological fix. Remember, Equal Rights for All Other Species.”
While the most radical fringe of the environmentalist movement has avoided the limelight in recent years, some experts, such as the terrorism scholar Frances Flannery, expect a resurgence as climate and biodiversity crises worsen. This poses an obvious danger in a world replete with bullets and bombs; but it poses an existential threat in a world of cheap and easy gene editing. Technologies such as gene drives, digital-to-biological converters, and CRISPR-Cas9 are making it increasingly feasible to synthesize designer pathogens that could be far more devastating than anything found in nature.
Are there any solutions to the problems posed by virus-toting omnicidal maniacs? One hard-to-avoid — and completely terrifying — answer is mass surveillance. This could take the form of what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a “panopticon,” whereby the state (perhaps run by computer programs designed specifically to govern — a form of government called “algocracy”) monitors every action of its citizens. The obvious danger is that this could collapse into tyrannical totalitarianism, which itself constitutes an existential risk.
Another possibility involves what the science fiction writer, David Brin, dubs the “transparent society.” This would make surveillance egalitarian, so to speak: everyone would be able to see what everyone else is doing all the time, thereby enabling those watched to watch the watchers. Brin doesn’t argue that this is an ideal situation, only that it’s a better situation than one in which the state has all the power. Perhaps a total loss of privacy is the cost of existential security.
Alternatively, I have previously claimed that, in order to reduce the risks posed by malicious agents like those mentioned above, society should prioritize mitigating climate change and ecological destruction. Both phenomena are threat multipliers and threat intensifiers, which means that they’ll introduce new problems while making old problems even worse. Better environmental policies would lower the threat posed by ecoterrorists, whose fundamental complaint — “Humans are stupidly destroying the biosphere” — is scientifically accurate. Such policies would also decrease the number and severity of natural disasters, which could fertilize apocalyptic fervor among religious extremists. As the terrorism scholar Mark Juergensmeyer has remarked, “radical times will breed radical religion,” a hypothesis apparently supported by the rise of ISIS during the Syrian civil war.
Moving forward, people who care about human survival need to think hard not just about the various technologies that will become available, but about the types of actors who might try to use these technologies for catastrophic ill. The future of the human race could quite literally depend on it.
Caught On Video: Hong Kong Protester Shot By Police During Morning Clashes; Hang Seng Tumbles
Hong Kong police opened fire and hit at least one protester on Monday, the SCMP reported, as chaos erupted across the city a day after officers fired tear gas to break up demonstrations that are entering their sixth month.
Police fired live rounds at protesters on the eastern side of Hong Kong island, and local Cable TV said one protester was wounded when police opened fire. Video footage showed a protester lying in a pool of blood with his eyes wide open. Police also pepper-sprayed and subdued a woman nearby as plastic crates were thrown at officers, the video shared on social media showed.
Police issued a statement saying that radical protesters had set up barricades at multiple locations across the city and warned the demonstrators to “stop their illegal acts immediately.” They did not comment immediately on the apparent shooting.
Services on some train and subway lines were alsodisrupted early on Monday, with riot police deployed near stations and shopping malls. Many universities cancelled classes on Monday and there were long traffic jams in some areas.
Monday’s violence followed a 24th straight weekend of anti-government unrest as activists blocked roads and trashed shopping malls across Hong Kong’s New Territories and Kowloon peninsula.
Today’s chaos follows the death last Friday of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology student Chow Tsz-lok, days after he fell in a car park near a police dispersal operation where tear gas had been fired.
Protesters are angry about what they see as police brutality and meddling by Beijing in the former British colony’s freedoms, guaranteed by the “one country, two systems” formula put in place when the territory returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Meanwhile, China has repeatedly warned that continued violence could be met with a ground invasion of Hong Kong, although so far Beijing has demonstrated an unwillingness to escalate.
The Hang Seng stock index tumbled more than 2% in early trading following news of the shooting.
Bank Behind World’s Largest Money Laundering Scandal Offered Russians Gold Bars To Hide Their Fortune
When we last looked at Danske Bank, the Danish lender was at the center of what has been dubbed the world’s largest, $220 billion money-laundering scandal that allegedly involved Russians transferring funds offshore in violation of European regulations (it also involved the chronically criminal Deutsche Bank). Then, two months ago, the scandal took a lethal turn when the CEO of the bank’s Estonia branch was found dead in a still-unexplained suicide. Now, we learn of yet another bizarre twist in what some have dubbed the biggest dirty money scandal of all time: the Danish lender was offering gold bars to wealthy clients to help them keep their fortunes hidden.
According to Bloomberg, the bank’s Estonian branch – whose CEO committed suicide – which was already wiring billions of client dollars to offshore accounts, told a select group of mostly Russian customers some time around 2012, that they could now also convert their money into gold bars and coins.
So for those asking the benefits of holding money in physical gold instead of fiat (or crypto), here is the answer: aside from offering a hedge against risk, Danske presented gold as a way for clients to achieve “anonymity,” according to the documents. More importantly, the bank said that using gold ensured “portability” of assets, according to an internal presentation dated June 2012.
As one would expect, the gold/money-laundering service did not come cheap: Danske charged a fee of 0.5% on larger orders, while smaller orders had a commission of as much as 4%.
This is the first time we learn that Danske offered such “services” – in the bank’s own report on its non-resident unit, the bank listed the services it provided to clients. Aside from payments, these included setting up foreign-exchange lines, as well as bond and securities trading. The bank didn’t list the sale of gold bars.
While it’s not known how much gold Danske managed to sell while the now defunct Estonian unit was still running, an internal email seen by Bloomberg revealed that at least some clients used the service. Local private banking clients were also offered the service.
Furthermore, for gold bars weighing 250 grams or more, Danske clients could obtain the precious metal without a sealed pack or paper certificates. Bloomberg adds that anti-money laundering approval was needed before customers could collect the gold, but such approvals weren’t necessary if the gold was kept in long-term storage, according to the documents.
The report goes on to note that the alleged “gold laundering” service – somewhat similar to the Turkey-Dubai-Iran PetroGold Triangle that emerged in 2012 as a means by which Iran evaded the Western blockade – was no longer offered after 2013, when the price of gold tumbled. A bank presentation dated from June 2012, when gold was trading close to an all-time high, told clients that “the product is not being advertised publicly or in the media.”
Additional documents revealed that Danske’s Estonian branch sourced its gold from two partners, depending on the size of orders. One partner handled orders that exceeded 300,000 euros, equivalent to 6 kilograms at the time, and bought the gold from the Austrian mint; the other was used for smaller orders, according to the presentation, which didn’t name the suppliers.
Some of the documents promoting gold bars are signed by Howard Wilkinson, the whistleblower who brought the Danske Bank laundering scandal into the public light. His lawyer, Stephen Kohn, didn’t immediately comment on the matter when contacted by Bloomberg.
As reported previously, Danske Bank is currently investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. In Europe, it’s the target of criminal probes by prosecutors in Denmark, Estonia and France, according to Bloomberg. The bank has also had several class-action lawsuits brought against it, and its former chief executive officer, Thomas Borgen, is under preliminary criminal investigation in Denmark, along with many other former directors at Danske.
As an aside, gold has traditionally played a special role in the “historic ties” between Russia and Estonia, which was swallowed by the Soviet Union in 1940 after it gained independence following WWI, and which communists participating in the Russian revolution used as a bridge to channel vast quantities of gold taken from the murdered family of Czar Nicholas II into the West.
In the early 1920s, about 700 tons of Czarist coins dodged a western blockade by passing through Tallinn with the knowledge of the country’s leaders, before heading for Scandinavia and the U.K. It now appears that Russian elite may have used the same path.
It remains unclear who bought the Danske gold, or where it now resides.
