RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prague — The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio.

About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions.

The Czech Republic, to take one example, joined the European Union in 2004. But it has not yet adopted the euro and cannot decide whether the EU is wisely preventing wars of the past from being repeated or is recklessly strangling freedom in the manner of the old Soviet Union — or both.

In places devastated by globalization — such as southern Michigan or Roubaix, France – underemployed youth in their mid 20s often live at home in prolonged adolescence without much hope of enjoying the pre-globalized lifestyles of their parents.

Eastern Europeans are now discovering those globalized trade-offs that are so common in Western Europe, as they watch rates of marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing decline.

One half of the West — the half that lives mostly on the seacoasts of America and Western Europe — loves globalization. The highly educated and cosmopolitan “citizens of the world” have done well through international finance, insurance, investments, technology, education, and trade, as the old Western markets of 1 billion people became world markets of 6 billion consumers.

These coastal Westerners often feel more of an affinity with foreigners like themselves than with fellow countrymen who live 100 miles inland. And they are not shy in lecturing their poorer brethren to shape up and get with their globalized program.

Late-20th-century globalization — a synonym for Westernization — brought a lot of good to both poorer Western countries and the non-Western world. Czech farmers now have equipment comparable to what’s used in Iowa. Even those who live in the Amazon basin now have access to antibiotics and eyeglasses. South Koreans have built and enjoyed cars and television sets as if they invented them.

But all that said, we have never really resolved the contradictions of globalization.

Does it really bring people together into a shared world order, or does it simply offer a high-tech and often explosive veneer to non-Western cultures that are antithetical to the very West that they so borrow from and copy?

An Islamic State terrorist does not hate the United States any less because he now wears hoodies and sneakers and can text his girlfriend. More likely, Western fashion and high-tech toys only empower radical Islamic hatred of Western values.

Iran is desperate for nuclear technology originally spawned from the ‘Great Satan’ in order to better destroy the Great Satan.

So it was not a “response” to Trump’s visit to Israel, nor a sudden”lone wolf” attack, not by an “evil loser” but by a barbarian Jihadi who is part of a group that planned the attack….Wake up! rsk

Authorities tell ABC News that they found a kind of bomb-making workshop in Salman Abedi’s home and he had apparently stockpiled enough chemicals to make additional bombs.

The hunt is intensifying for what British authorities suspect is a possible “network” behind the deadly suicide blast outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on Monday, officials say.

The search stretched from the U.K. to Libya, where officials made multiple arrests in a country seen by American officials as a burgeoning new base of operations for ISIS, which has claimed Salman Abedi was a “soldier of the Caliphate.”

Counterterrorism officials fear whoever built the bomb that killed 22 people and injured more than 50 others may have built other improvised-explosive devices which could be used in further attacks.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, said in a press briefing.

According to a terrorism expert who has been briefed on the investigation, the bomb featured a sophisticated design similar to the bombs used in the attacks in Brussels in 2016.

The expert confirmed that Abedi traveled to Manchester Arena by train, likely carrying the bomb in a backpack. The device, a metal container stuffed with bolts and nails, was apparently hooked to a powerful battery and featured a remote, cell-phone detonator with built-in redundancies to ensure a blast even if a first attempt failed.

The design was sophisticated enough to bolster the theory that Abedi didn’t act alone, suggesting, according to the expert, “there’s a bomb maker on the loose.”

“It’s really suggesting that he probably did not act alone, that he probably had some help, that he certainly had some advice on how to create the bomb,” said Matt Olsen, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and an ABC News contributor.

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.

It is becoming clear that the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity. It is about suppressing strong public feeling. It’s about reducing us to a line of mourners whose only job is to weep for our fellow citizens, not ask why they died, or rage against their dying. The great fear of both officialdom and the media class in the wake of terror attacks is that the volatile masses will turn wild and hateful. This is why every attack is followed by warnings of an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ and heightened policing of speech on Twitter and gatherings in public: because what they fundamentally fear is public passion, our passion. They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.

As part of the post-terror narrative, our emotions are closely policed. Some emotions are celebrated, others demonised. Empathy – good. Grief – good. Sharing your sadness online – great. But hatred? Anger? Fury? These are bad. They are inferior forms of feeling, apparently, and must be discouraged. Because if we green-light anger about terrorism, then people will launch pogroms against Muslims, they say, or even attack Sikhs or the local Hindu-owned cornershop, because that’s how stupid and hateful we apparently are. But there is a strong justification for hate right now. Certainly for anger. For rage, in fact. Twenty-two of our fellow citizens were killed at a pop concert. I hate that, I hate the person who did it, I hate those who will apologise for it, and I hate the ideology that underpins such barbarism. I want to destroy that ideology. I don’t feel sad, I feel apoplectic. Others will feel likewise, but if they express this verboten post-terror emotion they risk being branded as architects of hate, contributors to future terrorist acts, racist, and so on. Their fury is shushed. ‘Just weep. That’s your role.’

The post-terror cultivation of passivity speaks to a profound crisis of – and fear of – the active citizen. It diminishes us as citizens to reduce us to hashtaggers and candle-holders in the wake of serious, disorientating acts of violence against our society. It decommissions the hard thinking and deep feeling citizens ought to pursue after terror attacks. Indeed, in some ways this official post-terror narrative is the unwitting cousin of the terror attack itself. Where terrorism pursues a war of attrition against our social fabric, seeking to rip away bit by bit our confidence and openness and sense of ourselves as free citizens, officialdom and the media diminish our individuality and our social role, through instructing us on what we may feel and think and say about national atrocities and discouraging us from taking responsibility for confronting these atrocities and the ideological and violent rot behind them. The terrorist seeks to weaken our resolve, the powers-that-be want to sedate our emotions, retire our anger, reduce us to wet-eyed performers in their post-terror play. It’s a dual assault on the individual and society.That the post-terror narrative is fundamentally about taming our passion and politics is clear from its sidelining of all issues of substance. We are actively warned against asking difficult questions about 21st-century society and why it has this violence in it, this nihilism in it. Question the wisdom of multiculturalism, of refusing to elevate one culture over another and instead encouraging people to live in their own cultural bubbles, and you’re racist. Wonder if the obsession with combatting ‘Islamophobia’ might have given rise to a situation where some Muslims, especially younger ones, cannot handle ridicule of their religion, and… well, you’re ‘Islamophobic’. As for immigration: this is the great unmentionable; you’re a fascist even for thinking about it. The post-terror narrative that barks ‘You must empathise!’ also says, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, ‘You mustn’t think! You mustn’t ask those questions or say that thing.’ And so in their response to terrorism, they erect an intellectual forcefield around some of the problems that might, just might, be contributing to that terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

The true culprit in Iran’s economic failure is Iran itself, whose internal barriers make a flourishing economy a pipe-dream. These include: the absence of free-market competition, due mainly to the monopoly of conglomerates affiliated with Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards over a huge sector of the country’s economy, which affects at least half of its GDP; the precariousness of the rule of law; the deterioration of human rights; and the exorbitant cost of military intervention in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, as well as the bankrolling of the Lebanon-based Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah and other regional proxies.

The clear victory on May 19 of incumbent Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over his key rival, Ebrahim Raisi — the candidate supported by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – indicated that voters were concerned above all with the economy. Raisi, an extremist and isolationist like Khamenei, was the candidate who represented hardline power politics and Middle East hegemony.

It was during Rouhani’s first term in office that the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed between Iran and six world powers. This not only led to the lifting of crippling international sanctions from the regime in Tehran, but seemed to signal an effort to renew diplomatic and commercial ties the West.

Iran initially benefited greatly from the JCPOA. From the document’s signing in July 2015 and up until early 2017, dozens of delegations from Western countries visited Iran, and hundreds of economic memoranda of understanding were reached.

Excitement could be felt within and beyond Iran’s borders. Despite his decades as a prominent member of the mullah-led regime’s security apparatus, President Rouhani was and largely still is viewed in the West as a moderate. In addition, the appetite of Iran’s 80 million-strong consumer market for Western goods was high, as was the need for Western investment and technology to rebuild Iran’s outdated infrastructure. Meanwhile, Western companies were eager to enter the potentially lucrative market, imagining post-JCPOA Iran to be like the mythical Spanish city of gold, El Dorado.