RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his latest RTRS interview (Bosnian-Serb Republic public TV service), Srdja Trifkovic talks about Russia’s complex political and economic power structure, which is mostly at odds with the image of an authoritarian Kremlin monolith presented in the Western media.
[Video here—Trifkovic segment starts at 6 minutes. Excerpts, verbatim translation from Serbian.]

Q: Professor Trifkovic, you’ve just come back from Moscow where you attended the Economic Forum, but it was also a political forum?

ST: The Moscow Economic Forum is a major annual gathering of economists and experts who advocate a change in the macroeconomic policy of the Russian government. They act from the standpoint of what one may call “patriotic opposition.” They argue that the country’s economy and financial structures are still unduly dominated by the upholders of the Washington Consensus, and by the oligarchs who continue to control the flows of money through their ownership of many private commercial banks.

Q: Are you trying to say that the Russian government is pro-American?

ST: No, but within her economic and financial structures there are officials—like Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Central Bank of Russia—who reject dedollarization, which is advocated by the “patriotic” wing of the government, as embodied in the deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry . . .

Q: You mean Rogozin?

An article by Rachel Aviv titled ‘The Trauma of Facing Deportation’ describes an unusual disorder known as ‘uppgivenhetssyndrom’ or ‘resignation syndrome’ that only exists in Sweden and is specific to the children of immigrants. Published in the April 3, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, Aviv describes how refugee children suffering from resignation syndrome fall into a coma-like state after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country. The Swedish refer to the condition as ‘apathy’ and the children as ‘de apatiska’, the apathetic. There have been several hundred cases of resignation syndrome in the past decade. The symptoms are very severe and typically begin with depression followed by a gradual withdrawal into an unconscious state that requires tube feeding. The children are unable to move, eat, drink or respond even to painful stimuli and are in this state for months sometimes years. The only known cure is for their families to receive residency permits to stay in Sweden.

A simple objective cultural explanation for resignation syndrome is that it is another manifestation of honor violence. However, studies that suggested the family was staging the illness were labeled xenophobic while research that theorized the migratory process precipitated the condition became the basis for government policy. Hence, a 2013 guide for treating apathy published by the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare advised “A permanent residency permit is considered by far the most effective ‘treatment,’ and that a patient will not recover until his family has permission to live in Sweden.” In brief, political correctness tainted the studies because it was more politically expedient to grant residency to all families with children suffering from the syndrome than to acknowledge that this could be another manifestation of honor violence where cultural traditions allow parents to abuse their own children. If honor violence is proven to be the reason for the syndrome than Sweden’s immigration policy is the cause of the illness not the cure.

Honor violence is a form of domestic violence that is committed by family members against other family members to either prevent the family from being dishonored or restore the families damaged honor. Victims of honor violence typically internalize the values of their family or community and feel guilty and responsible for the perceived offense against honor. Honor violence is typically attributed to assaults and murders of women who have refused arranged marriages or defiled the family’s honor by not following traditions. Honor violence is not always punitive for alleged violations of cultural traditions. Anything that preserves the family honor is permitted including forcing children into slavery or child marriage to settle a debt. Being deported back to a country where the family status and honor would be diminished could be motivation for shaming a child into staging resignation syndrome. The New Yorker article did not mention that the majority of mothers of the apathetic refugee children had been subjected to physical and/or sexual abuse and were described as severely traumatized. One study suggested a Munchausen by proxy scenario proposing the idea that the mother staged the illness as a method to cope with her own trauma. The theory characterized the syndrome as ‘lethal mothering’, a behavior that is consistent with honor violence. In honor based tribal cultures men can justifiably subject their wives to physical and sexual abuse and mothers can willingly harm their own children to preserve the family honor. A 2016 study claimed that almost all children with resignation syndrome suffered traumatization from physical abuse, harassment or by witnessing violence and abuse in the close family. Intrafamily violence is also consistent with honor crimes.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Russian authorities identified a 22-year-old man from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan as the suicide bomber who caused a deadly subway-train blast in Russia’s second-largest city on Monday, underscoring Moscow’s concerns about radicalization in Central Asia.

In a statement Tuesday, Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the attacker as Akbarjon Jalilov.

The explosion occurred Monday on a train between Sennaya Ploshchad, a busy downtown subway intersection, and Technological Institute station.

According to the statement, forensic experts found genetic traces of Mr. Jalilov on a bag containing an explosive device that was found and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya, another subway station not far from the site of Monday’s explosion. Investigators also drew their conclusions based on surveillance-camera footage, the statement said.

Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said Tuesday morning that 14 people had been killed and 49 remained in hospital.

Earlier Tuesday, the Investigative Committee said that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man whose fragmented remains were found in the third carriage of the subway train.

Rakhat Sulaimanov, the official representative of the Kyrgyz security agency, said the person responsible was likely a native of Kyrgyzstan who then became a Russian citizen. Mr. Sulaimanov said Kyrgyz security services were in contact with Russian authorities over the matter, but declined to provide further details.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. It occurred during a visit to the city by Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising official concerns that the attack was timed to his stay. CONTINUE AT SITE

I think one of the most astounding, arguably dense articles to be published anywhere on the issue of censorship vs. freedom of speech was published in one of the most unlikely quarters of the world, New Zealand. A correspondent sent me the text and link to an article titled: “Want equality? Curtail free speech.” It was written for “Stuff” by a fellow by the name of Jacob Van De Visser. “Stuff” was described by the correspondent, Lindsay Perigo, as IslmoMarxist.

Freedom of Speech? Stuff and nonsense! It’s a short article, so, instead of beginning with my own comments, I’ve reproduced the article here so you can guffaw or be astonished as you will. Mr. Perigo, in his own remarks, wondered if the piece was tongue-in-cheek satire because it is so blatantly irrational and hostile to freedom of speech

I’m not certain of its sincerity, either, but given the avalanche of anti-speech articles and the ubiquity of actions that have taken place before and after Donald Trump’s election (see the Gatestone column here about American campuses opposing or shutting down speech, except that which doesn’t violate student “safe spaces”) in November 2016, together with the tone and content of Stuff’s other articles, it is wholly consistent with the irrationality of what is occurring in the West.

It’s time for New Zealand to criminalize Islamophobia!

On March 23, New Zealand awoke to the horrific news of yet another terrorist attack, this time in London.

A deranged individual ploughed a car into innocent pedestrians and brutally stabbed a police officer to death before being shot. Five people died, including the attacker. [Italics mine]

The Twittersphere was soon abuzz with conjecture and accusation. Who was to blame? What were the motives?

I felt sick as I read comments saying “Islam is to blame” and “it must be another Muslim”.

The fact that the attacker was a Muslim is irrelevant. The issue is that Islamophobia was the first response.

If you are a Muslim, you continually have to defend your faith against people who accuse it of being a dangerous and violent set of ideas. Islam is the religion of peace; anyone who understands this knows it has no part in the ideology of ISIS.

Life is a constant fight for other minorities, too.

If you are a member of the LGBTQAA+ community, you must battle for your rights. You are forced to choose from just two bathroom choices when often you don’t fit either. Workplaces often fail to be inclusive to this community, refusing them places in the boardroom.

No political observer in his right mind would have expected at the beginning of 2016 a Brexit vote in Britain in June, the resignation of David Cameron, a dogfight between the two main Brexit supporters and propagandists within the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and eventually the rise of Theresa May. Nor would he have foreseen, for that matter, the election of Donald Trump in the United States on November 8.

Something similar is happening in France now — on a much larger and trickier scale. A few months ago, it was taken for granted that François Hollande’s ineffectual socialist administration would be succeeded after the 2017 election — on April 23 and May 7 — by a conservative government led either by former president Nicolas Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé: a simple matter of the swing of the pendulum, as is the rule among democracies. What the French are facing now, however, is an unprecedented upsurge of the National Front, the elimination of a generation of political leaders on almost all sides, and the collapse or near collapse of classic Left and Right parties. While many voters welcome the change, others are just in a state of shock. On March 18 — one month or so ahead of the first ballot — 34 per cent of the electorate and 43 per cent of voters under 35 had still not decided whether to vote or not.

On March 20, the five most prominent candidates debated for three and a half hours on TV. About 10 million people watched intently. It was indeed a great show — and probably a defining moment in the campaign.

All five candidates are rebels. Marine Le Pen, 48, the National Front leader, is a rebel by definition. She has managed to upgrade in many ways the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, to purge it of many unsavoury elements, to trim its formerly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (including Holocaust denial) and to switch from Vichy nostalgia to a near-Gaullist statism. In fact, she has even been increasingly reluctant to use the name National Front, and has floated alternative labels, such as Rassemblement Bleu Marine (“Navy Blue Rally”, a play on words with her first name which means “Navy” in French).

For all that, she is still sticking to a binary, undemocratic and utterly revolutionary view of the world, positing a bitter fight between what she calls “the System” (the political and cultural elite, of both Right and Left, the “lobbies”, globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, the European Union, the euro) and “the people” (the ordinary Frenchmen) whom she claims to represent exclusively. The implication is that either you side with the people and her against the System, and opt for a fully sovereign and autarkic France under her guidance, or you are, willingly or not, an enemy of the people. Interestingly enough, she used this logic against her own father, as he resisted the revamping and defascisation of the National Front, and did not flinch from expelling him from the party at the age of 86.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 65, a former minister of vocational education, rebelled against the Socialist party in 2008 to found the more hardline Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and then the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in association with a diminutive Communist Party. He eventually started a new movement in 2016, France Insoumise (Indomitable France).

This year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF) opened last Thursday at the Lomonosov State University under the slogan A New Strategy for Russia. The panelists—prominent academics, businessmen and senior managers—were brutally blunt in their diagnosis of the causes of Russia’s economic woes, and especially critical of the country’s Central Bank for continuing to follow a neoliberal strategy. There is a general consensus that Russia’s economic and financial problems are systemic, and only in small part due to Western sanctions.

Ruslan Grinberg, head of the Institute of Economics and the Forum’s moderator, noted that in the 1990’s everyone was intoxicated by the dogma of the free market: you should privatize, deregulate and stabilize. The results were disastrous, but Russia’s economic decision-making community is still not free of neoliberal blinkers. This applies not only to the Central Bank, but also to the economic departments of the Medvedev government. According to Grinberg, “market fundamentalism is dead, but its cause still lives on in key segments of Russia’s ruling elite.”

Economist Vladislav Zhukovsky noted that the economy is supposedly growing, but the country’s human potential has declined. Current spending on education is only 4.1%, instead of 7% of GDP, and health care accounts for under 5%. The overall state of the Russian economy can be described as degradation and compression. It is accompanied by bureaucratization, monopolization, and dollarization. On the other hand, says Zhukovsky, “our officials have discovered a new art form—ever more sophisticated forms of statistical manipulation to draw a beautiful reality in contrast to the deteriorating crisis situation.” According to the latest revised data, in 2015 the downturn officially amounted to only 2.8%, and to a mere 0.2% in 2016, while the real economy was actually growing. Zhukovsky is adamant that this is “statistical alchemy,” and that all key macroeconomic indicators were overrated. In reality, he says, Russia has experienced 26 months of continuous fall of real incomes, by about 17.5% overall.

In an earlier interview Zhukovsky complained that this year’s MEF would be the voice of the entrepreneurial community crying in the desert: “It is clear that none of those who determine macroeconomic policy, and distribute annually a trillion rubles of public procurement, are interested in it. Today we see a strange situation that the windfall in oil and gas complex, metallurgy, raw materials, natural monopolies, in the production of various kinds of fertilizers, technical complex, which has grown over the last 2.5 years, more than 55% in ruble terms, all to no positive effect in the economy. The growth of corporate profits did not affect the growth of investment and wages . . . There is no general strategy.”

Professor James K. Galbraith, author of the seminal 2012 study Inequality and Instability, noted that rising inequality happens in clusters of countries. Extreme polarization occurred between 1990 and 2000 in Russia and other ex-communist countries. There has been considerable stabilization after 2000, however, as many of those countries abandoned the extreme neoliberal model. In recent years Russia has experienced the fact that when currencies weaken, those who sell abroad do better than those who sell at home. Russia’s fundamental problem is the dollar-based global financial regime. Galbraith added that the new U.S. administration does not have an effective economic strategy to preserve and expand a stable and diverse middle class: “We still suffer, and we will continue to suffer, from private affluence and public squalor.”

British prime minister Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on Wednesday, beginning the two-year process in which the U.K. must negotiate an agreement for its withdrawal from the European Union. During this process, the U.K. government must decide the most efficient way to keep, repeal, or amend the thousands of EU regulations on the books.

One day after May triggered Article 50, the U.K. announced its intent to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972, which grants supremacy to EU law over U.K. law, and introduce a Great Repeal Bill that will incorporate EU law into U.K. law. Having imported the whole kit and caboodle, the British Parliament will begin the arduous task of scrapping any statutes it considers superfluous.

Iain Murray, co-author of “Cutting the Gordian Knot” and the vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), argues that the “Great Repeal Bill will begin what may prove to be the greatest deregulatory endeavor undertaken by any modern government.” But that deregulatory effort will be successful only if Parliament chooses to cut these overbearing regulations; otherwise, these same laws will simply be enforced by legislators in Westminster rather than EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Here, the “how?” is as important as the “what?” Asking Parliament to vote to keep, repeal, or amend each law separately would be impractical and could take years. In practice, such an approach would likely lead to few laws’ being repealed. In consequence, Murray and his colleague Rory Broomfield argue that the British government should establish a Royal Commission on Regulatory Reduction and assign it the daunting job of deregulation. The committee would be chaired by a current or former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and members would represent both the governing and opposition parties.

The commission “would essentially depoliticize the process of regulatory reduction,” Murray tells National Review. Each year, it would provide regulatory revisions to be voted on by Parliament — and, to keep the process efficient, members of Parliament would be prohibited from amending the commission’s proposal.

If such a commission is formed — and if, as Murray hopes, it ends up successfully repealing a quarter of the regulations imported from the EU — the U.K. economy would save between £33 billion ($43 billion) and £140 billion ($182 billion) annually.

There is a lot of work to do before Britain reaches that point. The U.K. “won’t be able to cut the rules until they are formally out of the EU,” Murray says. Thus, as the U.K. moves toward a deal that restores sovereignty to the British people, U.K. leaders such as Theresa May must decide sooner rather than later how they expect Brexit will impact the economy, the environment, trade negotiations, and more.

A sterile Europe apparently thought that civil liberties could be bargained away in exchange for a temporary peace. Everything became negotiable.

As British author Douglas Murray has asked, why were workers not brought in from European countries suffering high unemployment, such as Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain?

A clear-eyed U.S. Congressman, Rep. Steve King, correctly said recently that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He instantly drew that white-hot fire reserved for people who tell truths that threaten treasured fantasies (think Giordano Bruno or Galileo).

The new data released by Italy’s National Institute for Statistics for 2016 sounds again like a death knell. There has been a new negative record of births: 474,000 compared to 486,000 for 2015, which had already fallen to historic lows. There were 608,000 deaths in 2016. In one year, Italy lost 134,000 people — the equivalent of a city of the size of Ferrara or Salerno.

The demographic “illusion” is kept only by the influx of immigration (135,000). If one needs an idea of what Italy would be without immigrants, look at Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most populated and affluent regions: in 2035 it will have 20% fewer residents.

Italy is sometimes thought of Europe’s guinea pig: wherever Italy goes, much of Europe follows it, especially in the central and southern countries. In 1995, Antonio Golini, a professor at La Sapienza University and a former president of the National Institute of Statistics, was contacted by the director-general of Plasmon, Italy’s largest producer of baby food. Looking at the declining birth rates, the firm asked him if something could be done to prevent the company from going out of business. Plasmon started to make dietary products for adults.

A year ago, European geographers went in search of “the most desolate place in Europe”. They discovered it not in northern and cold Lapland, but in sunny Spain, specifically in the area of Molina de Aragon, two hours from Madrid. Depopulation has not been the consequence of the climate, as in the Russian steppe or northern forests, but of a demographic crisis.

A report by the National Statistical Institute of Spain explained how the Iberian peninsula has become the sick man of Europe: Spain loses 72 inhabitants every day; 20% fewer children are born there than two decades ago. Demographers draw a line where Spain has no future and 30% of the population will be over the age of 65. In some Spanish regions, the fertility rate barely reaches one child per woman. Deaths already exceed births. Even the newspaper El Pais asked, “Are the Spanish people in danger of extinction?”. The Spanish government just appointed a “sex czar” to try to figure out how to sustain the shrinking population.