RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, also referred to as the Triple Frontier, is host to significant activity by various terrorist groups and criminal organizations. One of them is the Shia jihadist group Hezb’allah, which has used the region for fundraising and training, and as a means by which to carry out attacks in South America.

The Tri-Border Area forms at the convergence of the Iguazú and Paraná rivers. It covers an area of roughly 965 square miles and is surrounded by jungle. In includes the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu, the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este, and the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazú.

The Tri-Border Area is attractive to terrorist groups and criminal organizations for a number of reasons. In the period between 1971 and 2001, the population of the Tri-Border Area grew from 60,000 to 700,000. The construction of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant was an important driver of this growth. Such rapid population growth in the region contributed to a lack of infrastructure needed to regulate the high degree of increased commercial activity and border crossings, which has made the area significantly more difficult for law enforcement to police.

Popular protests against the policies of the Iranian regime and in some cases against the regime itself affected 70 Iranian cities between Dec. 28, 2017 and Jan. 4, 2018. Nearly 4,000 protesters were arrested and 23 killed before the demonstrations stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Although the Iranian government tried to cast blame on foreign actors, the protests surprised Western observers, as well as the various Iranian exile movements, who struggled to understand what had happened after the fact. The leadership of the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests against vote fraud in the re-election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have played no role. The events of the last days of December and the first days of January appear to have been a spontaneous outburst of popular frustration with deteriorating conditions of life. Lacking structure, organization and a political program, the eruption stopped as quickly as it began.

Because the protests had no organization or centralized leadership, they represent no threat to the Iranian regime in the near term. There is another side to this coin: spontaneous expressions of popular anger on a national scale reflects a deep malaise in Iran’s economy that cannot easily be fixed, if indeed it can be fixed at all. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the revolutionary regime has borrowed massively from Iran’s future, in economics, finance, the environment and demographics. It has allowed corruption to determine the allocation of financial resources on the scale of an African kleptocracy. And it has channeled resources into expensive foreign adventures at the expense of desperately-needed spending at home. It cannot employ its present generation of young people, who suffer an official unemployment rate of 20% and an effective unemployment rate of perhaps 35%. The next generation of young people will be much smaller due to an unprecedented decline in Iran’s birth rate.

Although genuine feminists have made strides for women’s rights in Western countries, they have helped set back the rights of young Muslim women to break free from the oppressive codes of an Islam defined and controlled by Muslim men.

It is one of the ironies of modern politics that the same word can be susceptible to more than one meaning, creating confusion for everyone.

One of the reasons for the confusion is that liberal values are generally shared by moderates on both the left and right of politics. Not by the far left — Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, and Stalinists or Britain’s Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – or by the far right – Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland, Hungary’s Jobbik, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, or Greece’s Golden Dawn.

Leftist values underpinned both the American and French revolutions, helping to create the liberal democracies that remain our chief defence against Communism at one end of the political spectrum and Fascism on the other. Most of those values are taken for granted by mainstream populations in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and much of Europe. Writing in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, Ralph Raico describes classical liberalism as

“the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism.”

One might also include civil rights; democratic institutions; equal justice under the law; separation of religion, state, judiciary and education, and international co-operation. Although there is, of course, more to liberal values than these, they are all enshrined in articles of the US Constitution and implied or stated in the constitutions and laws of other democracies.

The role of liberalism in the reformation of Europe following World War II is made clear by Oxford historian Professor Martin Conway:

Liberalism, liberal values and liberal institutions formed an integral part of that process of European consolidation. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the liberal and democratic identity of Western Europe had been reinforced on almost all sides by the definition of the West as a place of freedom. Set against the oppression in the Communist East, by the slow development of a greater understanding of the moral horror of Nazism, and by the engagement of intellectuals and others with the new states (and social and political systems) emerging in the non-European world to the south.

Conservatives have enemies to their right.

‘Democracy is in crisis,” begins the 2018 annual report from Freedom House. “For the 12th consecutive year, . . . countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains.” Indeed, the downward trend may be accelerating. This year for the first time, the number of countries registering losses of freedom — a whopping 71 in all — is more than double the number in which freedom grew.

Alarm at this trajectory, together with some other global events and trends, inspired the issuance of the Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal, officially launched at the October 2017 conference, in Prague, of the Forum 2000 Foundation, an organization founded by former Czech president Václav Havel and maintained by members of his family and close political associates. The Prague Appeal is intended as a “moral and intellectual catalyst for the revitalization of the democratic idea” and as the charter for the Coalition for Democratic Renewal, consisting of intellectuals and activists, from scores of countries, who aim to “go on the offensive against the authoritarian opponents of democracy.”

That such an initiative might draw return fire from its targets is to be expected. More surprising, however, was the broadside against it in these pages by National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan, speaking mostly through the voice of Ryszard Legutko. O’Sullivan merely glossed a polemic that Legutko had contributed to the Australian magazine Quadrant. Lengthy quotes from it made up most of O’Sullivan’s piece.

O’Sullivan introduces Legutko as a “distinguished Polish philosopher,” but one could not tell from the method of his diatribe. In the compass of a thousand words, Legutko accuses the Prague Appeal of being “bizarre,” “outrageous,” “intellectual[ly] dishonest,” “an insult to decency,” “vile,” “shameful,” and “a lie.” He attributes to the signers, many of whom have published a great deal, views in manifest contradiction to what they have written. Oddly, he elsewhere recently put his name to an appeal for “linguistic decency,” noting that “language is a delicate instrument, . . . debased when used as a bludgeon,” and that “recourse to denunciation is a sign of . . . decadence.”

What is going on here? The fuse igniting Legutko’s (and, by proxy, O’Sullivan’s) explosion is the inclusion, in the Prague Appeal, of a reference to Hungary alongside references to Venezuela, Turkey, and the Philippines. All are cited as examples of “backsliding democracies” where “illiberalism is on the rise.” Legutko, who angrily decried this as “attributing guilt by scurrilous association,” and O’Sullivan, who directs a think tank in Budapest, are evidently partial to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. More broadly, they appear to sympathize with “populist” movements that have arisen recently in Europe and the U.S.

Tuesday, February 20. It’s our first time in Prague, and – except for a couple of visits to Berlin – K.’s first time on territory that was once part of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as we’re wont to do on arrival in a new city, we passed on museums and other cultural attractions, preferring instead to walk and walk and walk – to get a sense of the place and the people and start finding our way around.

After several hours of wandering along the winding streets and across cobbled squares dominated by churches, we came back to our hotel and had a drink at the bar. After two gin and tonics, I saw that K. had tears in his eyes. I looked at him quizzically. He could hardly get the words out.

“I’m so angry at my country’s government!” he finally exploded.

The country in question being Norway.

K. explained. We had just seen a good deal of Prague, and had passed heaven knows how many thousands of people. Not once had we seen a hijab. Let alone a niqab or burka.

“In this whole big city, not one!” he cried. “And yet in that little town where we live – in the middle of nowhere! – you can’t look out of the window for a minute without seeing one.”

For us, the Islamization of Western Europe had been a constant topic of conversation for almost twenty years. We’d voiced anger, frustration, despondency, cynicism. But I’d never seen him get teary-eyed about it.

After Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent diplomatic visit to India, a farcical event in which Trudeau earned the unstinted mockery of the international press, we are left rubbing our eyes in disbelief — or, for those who know the man, total belief. This is our political version of Mr. Dressup, a man who imagines that trade talks and inter-governmental relations can be conducted with fancy dress and hip-thrusting dance. Who invites a convicted terrorist, Jaspal Atwal, a Sikh extremist who once tried to assassinate an Indian diplomat on a visit to Canada, to sit at the high table with his Indian counterparts — before blaming someone else for the blunder. A man who brings his own Indo-Canadian chef to the culinary ceremony, a snub to his hosts — before blaming some else for the gaffe. It’s no surprise that intelligent people have wondered what could ever have provoked a nation to favor such a person with a majority government.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense and a hint of political acumen knows that Justin Trudeau is an empty sherwani. Nonetheless, he enjoys considerable support among Canadians. Some are bedazzled by his dynastic star quality as the son of Canada’s most eccentric and charismatic Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (whose socialist, fiscal and immigration agenda set Canada on the downward spiral gathering momentum today). Others ignore Justin’s disastrous economic policies, which are plunging the country into generational debt, imposing a needless carbon tax, and raising taxes on farmers, doctors and small businesses — Trudeau claims that a “large percentage of small businesses are actually ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes.” As they say, go figure. This is a man who desires to further restrict the speech of ordinary Canadians, whether by criminalizing “discriminatory” speech against transgenderism or by introducing anti-Islamophobia legislation, pandering to the least democratic elements in our country. It is no accident that he wanted to regulate Facebook conversations unfavorable to his party. His approval of the Chinese Communist regime, his push for gender equalization in his cabinet regardless of merit and his pro-Islamic sympathies have endeared him to “social justice” advocates, as has his egregious comment that Canada has no core identity, though he is doing all he can to empty Canada of whatever identity it can still be said to possess. As my wife Janice Fiamengo states in the Act!forCanada newsletter, “When you elect as national leader a photogenic substitute drama teacher with a soft voice and penchant for progressive slogans, this is what you get.”

As also reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, in the past month there has been a significant increase in Chinese and Indian military deployments around the Doklam area, on the border between China and Bhutan, where last summer there was a two-month confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops. In that case, the Indians intervened because the Chinese were building a road in a disputed area between China and Bhutan, a country that has no diplomatic relations with Beijing but has a defense agreement with New Delhi.

At the same time as the article, the news appeared that the head of Indian diplomacy, Shri Vijay Gokhale, former ambassador to Beijing and fluent in Chinese, arrived in Beijing. The purpose of the mission, according to a dispatch from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, was «to build on the convergences between India and China and address differences on the basis of mutual respect and sensitivity to each other’s concerns, interests and aspirations».

On the one hand, the visit indicates a positive step forward in the midst of tensions. On the other hand, this meeting demonstrates that the level of tensions has risen to the point that there are frictions over «concerns, interests, and aspirations» of both countries.

Since the Doklam crisis, there have been significant developments in South Asia, around India. China has cemented relations with Nepal and expanded its ties with the Maldives so much as to push the archipelago, traditionally part of the Indian area of influence, to host bases for supplies for Chinese ships as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Finally, the Rohingya crisis in Burma is exacerbating social situation strains in Bangladesh, a burden also felt in neighboring India. Meanwhile, Bangladesh is increasingly attracted by the economic offers of Chinese investments.

The downfall of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa suggests that there might be a limit to tolerable corruption even in the most corrupt of polities; or perhaps it is merely the indiscretion of the corruption that makes it intolerable. The rule should be “steal what you like, but do not flaunt it.”

I’m not surprised by the extremity of Zuma’s corruption: it is, rather, what I had expected more than 20 years ago. It was a pair of shoes that gave me a clue to the future.

I had gone to South Africa in 1990, shortly after the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela, to interview Joe Slovo, one of the ANC leaders and a hard-line, pro-Soviet Communist. He had spent much of his life in various states of exile, surveillance, and imprisonment, but he was now free, and I interviewed him in his office in the Shell Building (than which nothing could have been more emblematically capitalist) in Johannesburg.

He was an amiable man, and I could not but feel sympathy for someone whose wife had been murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of parcel bomb sent to Mozambique, where she had taken refuge. He was a true believer in the Soviet route to heaven, but on his many visits to Moscow, he had failed to notice the lack of freedom and of consumer goods there (he admitted this). Either he wasn’t very clever, or he found the absence of freedom and consumer goods attractive. There is nothing like a shortage of sugar or lavatory paper, after all, for increasing the powers of political patronage—which he assumed, not totally erroneously, would shortly be his. It was his reward: he had been in the wilderness long enough.

I was briefly optimistic about South Africa’s future. Until the Soviet Union’s downfall, an event much underestimated in the peaceful evolution of South Africa, I had assumed that political violence there was inevitable; but a few experiences changed my view.

North Korea wins the gold medal for evil regimes. Its people are starved. There is almost no electricity outside the capital. There reportedly are concentration camps. Its leader threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

But who cares? Too many in the media went gaga over Dear Leader’s wicked sister — after all, at least she’s not Pence! — and they cheered on the cult-victim North Korean cheerleaders as if they had something to cheer about.

Now, it turns out, those cheerleaders are forced to have sex with party leaders. From the New York Post story:

Members of the North Korean national cheerleading squad — who have been featured gleefully rooting at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics — are systematically forced to have sex with high-ranking members of Kim Jong Un’s twisted regime, according to a disturbing report.

Behind the scenes, the troupe — dubbed the “Pleasure Squad” by insiders — are forced to perform sex acts on party leaders during their trip to the Olympics, a defector with knowledge of the sexual slavery told Bloomberg News.
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“[The] troupe came here and performed with dances and songs, and it might seem like a fancy show on the outside [but] they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services,” said defector Lee So Yeon, a military musician who fled the country in 2008, during Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” said Yeon, 42.

Those poor young women. Imagine the agony and fear they hide behind their rigidly choreographed smiles.