RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lebanon-hyperinflates/

Yesterday will go down as a dark day in Lebanon’s history. That is when Lebanon was entered into the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table. When I measured Lebanon’s inflation rate yesterday, it was a sizzling 52.6 percent per month. That was the 30th consecutive day in which Lebanon’s monthly inflation rate exceeded 50 percent. So, on July 22, 2020, Lebanon entered the record books with the dubious distinction of recording the world’s 62nd episode of hyperinflation — the only episode to ever occur in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Now there are two ongoing hyperinflations: Lebanon’s, where the annual inflation rate is 462 percent, and Venezuela’s, where the annual rate soars at 2,219 percent.

Just how has Lebanon found itself in such an inglorious position? For years, the Lebanese government, the central bank (Banque du Liban), and savers played a game. The government spent more than it collected in taxes and financed its resulting deficits by paying sky-high interest rates on the debt it issued. The central bank bought some of the debt and kept the official pound-U.S. dollar exchange rate pegged at 1,500. The peg was designed so that those who purchased the government’s debt would have confidence that it would retain its purchasing power in U.S. dollar terms when it matured. Banks offered relatively “high” interest rates to depositors and were also part of the game. For a surprisingly long period of time, the money poured in from domestic savers, the Lebanese diaspora, and other foreign investors. They were all chasing yield and blind to the nature of the game.

Eventually, though, it became apparent that the government’s mountain of debt had become so large that the dollar-denominated portion could not be repaid in full. It also became clear that the government could not even repay the Lebanese pound-denominated portion in full unless the pound was officially devalued. At that point, the government faced an investors’ strike and was forced to default on a maturing foreign bond on March 9. The default triggered a sharp depreciation of the pound in the black market and a surge in inflation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-escape-to-america-shows-the-price-of-dissent-in-south-sudan-11595545759?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

I arrived safely in Washington Thursday after a harrowing journey from Nairobi, Kenya. I was forced into hiding after receiving word several weeks ago from senior government officials in South Sudan that President Salva Kiir had ordered the National Security Service, led by Gen. Akol Koor Kuc, either to abduct me from Kenya or murder me.

I knew this was no idle threat. Previously, I had been a political prisoner in South Sudan, convicted in a show trial for “disturbing the peace” and sentenced to two years in prison. My real offense: daring to criticize Mr. Kiir’s failed leadership. In January 2017, two other dissidents were abducted from Nairobi and murdered, leading the U.S. to impose sanctions on six South Sudanese officials.

I’m grateful to President Trump and the U.S. for providing refuge to me, my wife, and our three young children. While the South Sudanese government has always claimed it works within the bounds of the law, I disagree. My story is only one example of Mr. Kiir’s cruelty. He has never had to face the voters of independent South Sudan, working instead to build a powerful and repressive security apparatus with one mission—to keep him in power. The U.S., which has engaged in concerted diplomacy and invested more than $12 billion in humanitarian assistance since the country’s independence in 2011, must insist on free elections. South Sudanese should vote no later than December 2021, with appropriate precautions for Covid-19 and monitoring to ensure that the vote is fair and transparent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-retreats-from-modernity-11595545661?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

This Friday marks the end of Turkey’s experiment with secular modernity. That’s when regular Islamic religious services begin at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. The 1,500-year-old structure had served as a museum and symbol of Turkish tolerance until President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decreed the change earlier this month.

The Hagia Sophia has a dizzying history. It originally was built in 537 as the central cathedral of what would become Greek Orthodox Christianity. Ottoman Turkish Muslims conquered the Greek-speaking Christian Byzantine Empire and converted it into a mosque in 1453. But in 1934 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of modern Turkey, decreed Hagia Sophia would become a secular museum.

The symbolic meaning of the recent reconversion cannot be overestimated. Atatürk sought to substitute a secular, West-facing identity for Turkey’s traditional Islamic religious roots, which he saw as backward. A big part of that program was turning Hagia Sophia—for centuries a visual metaphor of Muslim triumphalism—into a museum. This had encouraged tourism and facilitated research by Western and Westernized scholars.

But Atatürk’s ambitious nationalism also created a Muslim monoculture. Millions of Greek Orthodox Christians and Armenian Christians had lived in Ottoman Turkey at the start of the 20th century. Genocide before and during World War I forced “population transfers” during Atatürk’s early presidency, and overt discrimination since then has reduced Turkey’s Armenian population to about 60,000. Only some 2,000 Greeks remain.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/the-central-european-kulturkampf/

It is my good fortune that I currently live on the Buda side of the Danube in Pasarét, a name that supposedly combines the Serbian word paša and the Hungarian rét (meadow). The nomenclature Pasarét was actually “invented” in 1847 when many names of city regions were Magyarised. The folk etymology suggests a reference to Abdurrahmán Abdi Arnaut, the last pasha of Buda, who died in the reconquest of the city by the Habsburg armies in 1686. It is (in retrospect only, of course) rather a romantic notion that the rotund Turkish pasha would have taken his summer ease here in the former royal hunting grounds, no doubt enjoying the twelve delicious varieties of Hungarian pear so rhapsodically described by the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi. Some four hundred years later, the pasha’s meadow has become a pleasant and elegant residential district of the capital.

It has been a lovely spring here and lockdown has enabled one to enjoy Pasarét’s leafy avenues lined with what Yeats called the “great blossomer” (flowering chestnut), ash, sycamore, black poplars shedding their white pollen, sprays of white hawthorn and the acacia that produces Hungary’s wonderfully aromatic honey. The adjacent gardens of pre-First World War villas have been a riot of colour provided by wisteria, Japanese cherry, elderflower, blushing almond trees and magnolia. The birds are back and our family of red squirrels has been emboldened to resume death-defying circus runs along the telephone wires. With few exceptions May has been idyllically warm and sunny, often with a refreshing light breeze, but the streets have been surrealistically empty of humankind.

However, like Coleridge, I have been imprisoned in my lime-tree bower. Not, of course, because Hungary is the all-but-prison Left-liberals would have us believe, but due to the coronavirus lockdown. The country is beginning to emerge from the outbreak—at the time of writing (late May) there have been over 3600 cases and more than 473 deaths. The fatality rate (12.9 per cent) looks high, but there has been little testing, so it is reasonable to assume that the number of infections is actually very much higher. About 50 per cent of deaths have been persons over eighty years of age, almost all with “underlying health problems” (a medical euphemism for the assumption that many would have died rather soon in the natural course of events). Neighbouring Austria, a country with a similar population but four times the reported cases, currently has a fatality rate of only 3.9 per cent. Independent monitors have nevertheless accepted the Hungarian Health Minister’s statement that overall the country is in the bottom third sector in terms of coronavirus impact. This relatively good outcome (Poland seems to be another case in point) is insufficient to attract media attention, which has instead focused with venom on the decision passed through Parliament to allow the government emergency powers to act by decree.