The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them. 

That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions, and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions, and values than at a university? 

Apparently, Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, does not share my view. Last week she prostrated herself before House Republicans, promising that she would discipline professors and students for protesting the ongoing slaughter in Gaza in which some 34,000 people have died, most of them women and children. 

The following day she summoned the New York City Police Department to arrest more than 100 students who were engaging in a peaceful protest against it. 

Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate. 

Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked — stirred, unsettled, goaded — even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks. 

Israel’s war on Hamas is horrifying. The atrocities committed by both sides illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity and show the vile consequences of hate. For these reasons, it presents an opportunity for students to reexamine their preconceptions and learn from one another. 

If Columbia, Yale, or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of discussion and debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations, accepted; argument, invited; differences, examined and probed. 

The mission of a university is to coach students how to learn, not tell them what to think. It is to invite debate, not suppress it. Truth is a process and method — more verb than noun. 

I love it when my students take issue with something that I or another student has said, starting with “I disagree!” and then explaining why. Disagreeing is not being disagreeable. Disagreement engenders thought and discussion. It challenges students to reconsider their positions and probe more deeply.

Which is why universities should encourage it. Why they should protect unpopular views. Why they should invite and welcome speakers with views that rile many students. To be riled up is to be attentive, open to new ideas. 

And why peaceful demonstrations should be encouraged, not shut down. It is never appropriate to call in armed police to arrest peaceful student demonstrators.

Finally, it’s why universities should go out of their way to tolerate expression that may make some people uncomfortable. To tar all offensive speech “hate speech” and ban it removes a central pillar of education. Of course it’s offensive. It is designed to offend. 

There is a limit, of course. Expression that targets specific students, “doxes” them, or otherwise aims to hurt them as individuals doesn’t invite learning. It is a form of intimidation. It should not be allowed. 

I’m old enough, and have been a professor long enough, to have seen campuses explode in rage — at bigots like George Wallace when he ran for president, at the horrors of the Vietnam War, at university investments in South Africa, and at efforts to prevent free speech. 

Some of these protests were loud. Some caused inconvenience. Some protesters took over university buildings. But most were not violent. Nor did they seek to harm or intimidate individual students. 

Whenever university presidents have brought in the police, and students have been arrested and suspended, all learning has stopped. 

Which brings me to the central role of university faculties in protecting free expression on campus. 

This role is especially critical now, when the jobs of university presidents and trustees have degenerated mainly into fundraising — often from wealthy alumni who have their own myopic views about what sorts of speech should be allowed and what should be barred. 

The faculty of Columbia University has every right — and, in my view a duty — to protect peaceful free expression at Columbia with a vote of no confidence in Shafik’s leadership, and seek to end her presidency. 

The Columbia faculty along with those of Yale, NYU, and other campuses now engulfed in protests against what is occurring in Gaza should do everything in their power to use the resulting provocations, inconveniences, and discomforts as occasions for learning rather than repression.

This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack

By Fernando Heller

(EurActiv) — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE/S&D), announced Wednesday (24 April) evening that he has cancelled his entire public schedule for the next few days to reflect on whether or not to resign as prime minister, following an accusation against his wife, Begoña Gómez, of an alleged case of corruption.

Sánchez announced in a letter published on X that he will communicate his decision – if he resigns from office – in a public appearance next Monday, 29 April, Euractiv’s partner EFE reported.

Being one of the last Socialist heavyweights as EU head of government, Sánchez’s resignation would be a bad omen for the Party of European Socialists (PES), especially following Portugal’s Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s resignation after a corruption case hit him in November, which led to opposition party centre-right PS (EPP) entering government.

With the Socialists expected to score the European Council presidency after June’s EU elections, Sánchez would be a top pick were he to resign.

A judge in Madrid has opened an investigation against Begoña Gómez, for possible offences of influence peddling and corruption in her private business dealings.

The proceedings stem from a complaint filed by the Manos Limpias (‘clean hands’) group, an organisation that has been previously accused of extorsion.

In the complaint, Manos Limpias claims that Gómez had a relationship with an influential businessman, who received contracts from the Spanish public administration with the help of Sánchez’s wife.

The businessman named in the complaint is Carlos Barrabés, whose consultancy firm – in temporary union with another company – won contracts in 2020 and 2021 from the public entity Red.es, part of the Ministry of Economy.

Barrabés, as stated in the complaint, allegedly had the express support of Gómez, who in a letter gave her endorsement to the company, as reported exclusively by El Confidencial.

In his X message, Sánchez laments the “unprecedented” attack on his wife, by the right and far-right in relation to the case, and wonders whether it is worth continuing to endure this situation.

“It is urgent for me to answer the question as to whether it is worthwhile (to remain in office), despite the mire into which the right and the far right are trying to turn politics. Whether I should continue as the head of the government or renounce this high honour,” added Sánchez.

By Lili Rutai

(RFE/RL) — On a hill overlooking Varpalota, a former mining town a 90-minute car ride from Budapest, sits a newly refurbished museum with a single and equivocal message: Hungary was — and is — a victim.

With interactive screens, speakers blasting out the sounds of gunfire, the rattle of train tracks and protesting crowds, and an escape room in the making, the Trianon Museum commemorates the 1920 Trianon Treaty, a post-World War I agreement in which Hungary lost around two-thirds of its territory. In the museum, there is a gift shop selling anti-Trianon merchandise and irredentist board games.

The state-funded museum is part of a broad campaign by the right-wing Fidesz government of Viktor Orban to foster national unity and a sense of injustice by elevating the Trianon issue among ordinary Hungarians. Yet despite increased state funding and state-issued textbooks, Hungarians still don’t know very much about the treaty — and the things they do know are often grounded in misinformation or conspiracy theories.

‘We Will Never Forget’

After taking in the exhibitions, visitors are encouraged to visit the Greater Hungary Park, some 15 kilometers from the museum, which boasts a flowerbed in the shape of Greater Hungary, a We Will Never Forget bar, and the Carpathia Restaurant and Hotel, whose rooms are named after Hungarian cities signed away by the Allied Forces in the Trianon Palace at Versailles.

The museum is well-funded, with the Trianon Museum Foundation, which oversees the museum and the park, receiving over 750 million forints ($2.1 million) from the Hungarian government between 2014 and 2020.

The museum secured a further 350 million forints ($960,000) from taxpayers’ money and 582 million forints ($1.89 million) in EU funds for refurbishment, which, according to local media, was completed in 2023.

For many Hungarians, Orban’s campaign is pushing on an open door. “The misery of Hungary stems from Trianon,” said Botond Zsolt Batar, repeating a phrase his history teacher mother always used to say.

Seventy-seven years old, Batar, a historian with a full head of white hair and thick glasses, is on a tour to promote his latest work, a 736-page hardcover book titled Why The Trianon Peace Diktat Is Unfair.

On the front cover of Batar’s book, there is a map of all the territories that belonged to Hungary before they were ceded to neighboring states and are now in Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

“It was a political decision and a selfish one, instead of a smart one,” Batar said in conversation with RFE/RL ahead of his book talk.

Hungary’s prime minister agrees. “The diktat saw two-thirds of the country’s territory and 63 percent of its population shorn from us. Thus, one in three Hungarians found themselves outside our borders. The verdict was obviously a death sentence,” Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on June 4, 2020, the centenary of the treaty, which he declared a national holiday on his first day in office in 2010. On that day, Budapest’s public transport stopped for a minute, and politicians around the country unveiled statues, memorials, and museums.

World War I Defeat

Hungary was on the losing side in World War I and the victorious Allies enforced strict conditions, dividing Hungary along with German, Austrian, and Ottoman territory. Hungary’s suggestion to hold referendums in areas under consideration was rejected during the negotiations, and the country had virtually no influence on the outcome.

In Trianon, Orban has discovered a valuable tool for fighting present-day political and ideological battles. In his speeches, he often portrays Hungary as a victim of Western powers — in the past, it was Trianon; in the present, it is the European Union. “Brussels is not the first to have its eye on Hungary,” he said on March 15, a national holiday.

A few months earlier, Laszlo Kover, the speaker of the National Assembly, Hungary’s unicameral parliament, and a close ally of Orban, drew a comparison between the pre-Trianon government and the European Commission at the opening of the Trianon Museum. Comparing the population transfer of Trianon to the European Union’s migrant crisis, Kover said that there was recently a “planned population exchange disguised as illegal migration.”

“[In 1920], we Hungarians were attacked by European powers and interest groups outside the Carpathian Basin. But, nowadays, [foreign] powers and interest groups outside the continent are attacking and destroying Europe…. What is this, if it’s not Europe marching toward its own Trianon?” he said.

There are approximately 2 million ethnic Hungarians living in countries surrounding Hungary, mostly in Serbia’s autonomous province of Vojvodina; Romania’s Transylvania region; and Transcarpathia in western Ukraine. Since coming to power in 2010, Orban has advocated for the political and cultural rights of those ethnic Hungarians. In 2011, he gave ethnic Hungarians living in the former Hungarian territories citizenship, voting rights in 2012, and free rail passes in 2024.

Relations With The Neighbors

The populist prime minister’s actions have sometimes angered Hungary’s neighbors. When Orban wore a scarf with a picture of Greater Hungary to a soccer match in 2022, both Ukraine and Romania voiced their outrage, while Slovakia’s then-Prime Minister Eduard Heger presented his Hungarian counterpart with a new shawl.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in Orban has perhaps his strongest ally in the European Union, alluded to Hungarian irredentism in his February interview with U.S. presenter Tucker Carlson. In March, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region appeared to be part of Hungary on a map shown by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Most Hungary watchers are agreed, though, that it’s unlikely that Orban is interested in any serious notions of retaking those lands. Despite the rhetoric, Hungary does not have any territorial claims against its neighbors.

Instead of irredentism, the government has used the specter of Trianon and the issue of ethnic Hungarians abroad as political leverage. Orban has spoken out against Ukraine joining the European Union, citing the rights of the approximately 90,000 ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine’s western Transcarpathia region. And the Hungarian prime minister initially opposed the EU’s 50 billion euros ($54 billion) support package for Ukraine and voiced his support for the plan of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president and the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee, to cut financial aid for Kyiv.

It is a position, most analysts agree, that is not rooted in ideology but rather political expediency. With Brussels needing unanimous support for Ukraine, Hungary has used its vote as a lever to gain concessions on a more pressing issue: the EU withholding billions of euros earmarked for Hungary because of concerns about democratic backsliding.

Educating The Young

Historian Batar’s book publicity tour took him to the House of Belonging Together, a community center in Csepel, a southern borough of the capital, known for its family-friendly surroundings and right-wing voter base.

On the eve of his book talk in February, the attendees in the one-story house, which is surrounded by a little garden and Soviet-era apartment blocks, are mostly local pensioners attending a Trianon-themed exhibition.

“It’s the only permanent exhibition [on the treaty] in the capital,” Ildiko Bondor-Varga, the director of the community center, said proudly.

Artifacts from the 20th century, such as mirrors and embroidery, stories about the people who used to live there, as well as the history of the conflict that preceded the treaty are all on display at the Budapest exhibition. “I believe in one God, I believe in one nation,” reads one embroidered tablecloth. “I believe in the resurrection of Hungary. Amen.”

The exhibition is geared toward students, who visit in classes, led by Bondor-Varga. “[Our] intention is to provide visitors with knowledge [of the treaty]. And we want to emphasize that, despite some Hungarians living outside the borders, we have unity.”

Owned by the district administration, the exhibition remains apolitical, Bondor-Varga said. “Personally, my opinion is that this topic is politicized, although it shouldn’t be,” she said.

Knowledge Gap

While many Hungarians feel strongly about Trianon, many of them don’t seem to know much about it. According to a 2020 poll, conducted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and independent pollster Soreco Research Kft on the centenary of the treaty, the vast majority of Hungarians (94 percent) said they thought the treaty was unfair, and 77 percent believed that the country is not ready to move on. Yet only 43 percent recalled the year of the treaty correctly and 27 percent the exact day (June 4).

According to the poll, over half of the participants overestimated the size of the territories and population Hungary lost, while many entertained conspiracy theories, including the role of freemasons.

While the treaty is commemorated across Hungary, the details are often glossed over. According to Istvan Kopcsik, a 69-year-old historian and retired history teacher living in rural Hungary, the state-issued history books, mandatory in public schools, touch on Trianon twice over the course of a 12-year education and don’t provide enough context about what led to the signing of the treaty.

“At least the ethnic background of the 19th century and [Hungary’s] participation in World War I should be featured in the textbooks and the teachers’ guides more prominently,” Kopcsik says. There is plenty of false information, which is “very popular with students and teachers alike,” according to Kopcsik, even in the textbooks.

There’s even a “Bad Trianon Maps” community on Reddit, the social media platform popular among young Hungarians. Csongor Horvath, a 20-year-old Budapest-based university student, moderates the community, where he posts about maps portraying Greater Hungary that are “stylized, mismatched, mis-sized, or simply catastrophic.”

“There’s a map in the [state textbooks] that is supposedly based on the 2010 census,” Horvath told RFE/RL. “But it’s exaggerated even compared to the 1910 census in terms of the number of Hungarians, which is misleading for those who only hear about Trianon in school.”

Horvath said he thinks that, apart from a few right-wing people, his generation doesn’t really think much about Trianon. Being truthful, however, is essential, he added.

“The demand for [taking] these territories [back] is completely unfeasible and has been for a long time,” Horvath said. According to the centenary poll, over 50 percent of Hungarians don’t discuss the Treaty of Trianon with family or friends. Only 5 percent said they talk about the treaty often.

“Trianon is one of [our] biggest historical traumas, and political regimes often abuse that,” retired history teacher Kopcsik said. “We have to teach the mistakes and resolve the trauma. And most importantly, prepare students for the future.”

• Lili Rutai is a freelance journalist based in London and Budapest. She has previously reported for Vice, The Calvert Journal, and Atlatszo.hu about social issues, culture, and politics in Hungary.

By Janette Alywyn

In Myanmar, Facebook is the window to reality. In the early days of the 2021 coup, the Ministry of Transport and Communications imposed blocking orders on Facebook and WhatsApp. Most independent media have been extinguished amid financial and physical threats. Any disruption to Facebook access, relied upon by over half of Myanmar’s populationas the country’s Internet, could be fatal to their freedom of speech. 

But Facebook has also attracted criticism for facilitating the spread of information that violates human rights in the country. Despite their attempts to ban Facebook, the junta weaponizes itby propagating divisive rhetoric to attract military recruits and funding. In the wake of the February 2024 forced conscription law, a user reported that ‘all the information on Facebook right now is about how to escape [the] country’. In times of crisis, people may be especially susceptible to misinformation disseminated by military supporters.

The need for reliable news is as urgent as ever. This could be achieved if Facebook was more willing to embrace the principles of responsible platform design and remediation.

In 2021, a video of the detained former Yangon region chief minister, Phyo Min Thein, accusing opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of corruption went viral. The video has been accused of being a deepfake or being filmed under duress. In an under-resourced nation with a limited public understanding of technological manipulation, algorithms should not be optimised only for engagement. In cases where timely fact-checking may be challenging, Facebook should ensure the availability of counter-narratives to combat bias and misinformation.

Information diversity requires an understanding of how algorithms prioritise and de-prioritise content. Notwithstanding internal misinformation policies and a promise to remove ‘advocacy of violence by Myanmar security forces’, Facebook’s page-recommendation algorithm has been accused of promoting pro-military content. As articulated in the Christchurch Call, algorithms should redirect users away from extremist content or promote credible counter-narratives.

To better recognise and encourage credible content, Facebook could develop a more specific version of its universal Community Standards in the form of ethical guidelines for political content in Myanmar. This requires actively engaging the myriad stakeholders — ethnic communities, experts, youth and diaspora — to develop a nuanced understanding of what is newsworthy, credible or harmful.

With a more tailored framework to bump up desirable — albeit less engaging — news, algorithms might be able to better prioritise diverse content and provenance over pure sensationalism. This goes a long way in helping people see the platform as a mere provider of information, rather than the peddler of truth.

Facebook should step up efforts to proactively verify the accounts of political parties and affiliated entities. Despite Facebook’s takedown policy against recidivists who post harmful content, detection may not be effective because the junta has thousands of soldiers spreading misinformation via fake accounts. Facebook should invest more resources in working at a grassroots level, such as with defectors already privy to the military’s information warfare tactics, to improve its detection mechanisms.

Due process mechanisms also contribute to transparency. Content takedowns are a double-edged sword that can chill extremist speech as well as lead to the over-removal of non-harmful posts. All users deserve the right to appeal restricted content and access mechanisms that reverse erroneous decisions. In light of the limited digital literacy rate of certain user populations and over a hundred spoken languages in Myanmar, Facebook should devote more resources to training both human and automated moderators that are sensitive to linguistic and cultural nuances.

Platforms should be held accountable when improper content management leads to grave consequences. The Rohingya conflict exposed this need in 2021 when Facebook rejected a proposal for victim remediation on the basis that ‘Facebook does not directly engage in “philanthropic activities”’. In response, Ireland’s National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct called for Facebook to amend its human rights policy and an Oversight Board mandate to provide rehabilitation or compensation when Facebook is found to have contributed to human rights violations.

Given the gravity of misinformation amidst an ongoing civil war, social media platforms have no reason to shirk from providing rehabilitation after the fact or even resources to educate and empower its users.

One suggestion is for Facebook to divest some profits, particularly those obtained from military-affiliated extremist content over the years, to fund urgent humanitarian efforts that provide digital services and education. Additionally, in response to complaints from victims of doxing, especially women under threat of violence, Facebook could offer heightened account security and monitor disclosures of victims’ personal information across the platform for a period of time. Beyond philanthropy, these gestures could represent Facebook taking accountability for entrenching strife and recognising its power to mitigate harms.

Despite Facebook’s missteps in Myanmar, it is an essential tool in keeping the people in touch with one another and the outside world. This only serves to underline its responsibility to protect the safety of its users.

• This article was published by East Asia Forum

By Zerin Osho and Eoin Jackson

The Arctic region is rapidly becoming a focal point of global geopolitics, propelled by the melting of sea ice due to climate change, which presents both opportunities and challenges. As the Arctic ice recedes, previously inaccessible resources such as oil, gas, and minerals become available, tempting major powers like the United States (US) and Russia, to exploit them. However, this exploitation comes at a cost—accelerated climate change due to increased greenhouse gas emissions. The long-term consequences of losing the protection offered by the Arctic sea ice would mean that the Earth would experience catastrophic global warming.

Analysing the dynamic of the Arctic from a strategic decision-making perspective underscores the imperative of maintaining the balance between cooperative efforts to safeguard the Arctic from the impacts of climate change and the individual pursuit of new resource opportunities arising from the melting sea ice. Rationality dictates that for the global commons to survive, all states should converge towards collective action for the long-term preservation of the Arctic.

To understand the dynamic, we must identify the key Arctic players. Firstly, there are the members of the Arctic Council—the primary intergovernmental forum on the Arctic, consisting of the US, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, and Iceland. Then, there are the emerging Arctic states—members of the Global South who have taken an increased interest in Arctic policy. These are China, which is interested in gaining access to the Arctic’s resources and has declared itself to be a “near-Arctic” state, and India, which is concerned about the scientifically-established connection between the loss of the Arctic sea ice and the increasing instability of India’s monsoons.

Currently, much of the Arctic Council’s work has been suspended as a result of the Western boycott of Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine. This divide is further exacerbated by the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, creating a “West and the rest” dynamic at the Arctic Council. All Arctic Council members have a rational interest in avoiding a further escalation of Arctic tensions to avoid spillover from the Ukraine conflict.

For Russia, pouring troops and resources into accessing Arctic bases and minerals creates a new flank that needs to be defended against NATO. Militarising an already volatile region, which in turn accelerates the loss of sea ice, will compromise Russia’s ability to conduct the war in Ukraine, given it is already under pressure to break the grinding stalemate. Russia also lacks the capacity to access the Arctic’s resources by itself, having been forced to turn to China and India for assistance in obtaining icebreakers to open shipping lanes in the Northern Sea Route. Creating a scramble for resources in the Arctic will, therefore, place Russia at a competitive disadvantage to its Arctic peers who are not facing extensive trade sanctions and can acquire Arctic equipment without problems. On the other hand, working to protect the Arctic, even in a limited capacity, restores some of Russia’s legitimacy on the world stage. While it cannot offset continued aggression in Ukraine, it would provide a rational foundation for Russia to be seen once again as a partner in Arctic governance.

For the remaining Arctic states, cooperation on Arctic climate protection diffuses tension in the region caused by the Ukraine war, which mitigates the current lack of defence capacity the US and NATO has in the Arctic. Cooperation also opens up new opportunities to work with emerging Arctic states like India, through the development of new initiatives on Arctic science. This is seen as strengthening the West’s connection to India and towards opening new avenues for partnership to help counter Chinese influence. More selfishly, the loss of Arctic permafrost due to climate change caused by human activity will release vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. This would force the Global North to escalate its reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as require further compensation to the Global South for loss and damage caused by the worsening impact of climate change.

Protecting the Arctic slows down the rate at which the Western members of the Arctic Council would need to make the necessary cuts in emissions, buying them more time to phase out fossil fuels. There may be some concerns about cooperating with Russia even in a limited scientific capacity. However, the cooperation between the US and Russia during the Cold War on space science in the 1970s shows that there is precedent for big powers coming together in the common interest of humanity even amidst a wider context of divided geopolitics. This scientific cooperation was crucial to the later development of the International Space Station. The same form of cooperation today would be in the self-interest of Western Arctic states who can expand their Arctic scientific capacities while retaining their wider detachment from Russia.

We must also consider the possibilities from the perspective of emerging Arctic states such as China and India. For China, accessing resources in the Arctic as part of its “Polar Silk Road” initiative will increase existing tensions within the West regarding the disproportionate influence China is exerting on the global economy. On the other hand, working with current Arctic states would demonstrate China to be a credible leader in climate mitigation, without it having a major impact on China’s economy. China can also strengthen and enhance its research capabilities in the Arctic by cooperating with Arctic states on science, which can open new sustainable opportunities for it within Arctic governance and policy. Arctic cooperation would therefore enhance China’s claim to be a “near-Arctic” state.

For India, the rational interest in Arctic climate protection is even more clear-cut. Working with Arctic states on Arctic climate measures bolsters India’s claim as the leader of the Global South, while also granting it a new role in Arctic governance. More directly, it prevents further damage to the monsoons from the teleconnection to the loss of sea ice. The stability of the monsoons is critical to preserving India’s agricultural sector, which ensures that it  stays on track to become the third-largest economy in the worldby 2030. India also has first-class expertise in Arctic science and technology, having recently launched its first Arctic winter expedition in 2023. Using this expertise in climate research and monitoring would further strengthen India’s role in the Arctic.

Ultimately, the outcome hinges on collective action to preserve the Arctic sea ice. While resource exploitation may offer short-term gains, the long-term consequences for the planet and each state’s rational self-interest outweigh them. Therefore, prioritizing science-led cooperation to monitor and protect Arctic sea ice is paramount for ensuring a sustainable future for the region and the planet as a whole.

In conclusion, Arctic geopolitics necessitates collective climate action. A unified approach to climate protection can enable Arctic stakeholders to navigate these complexities and secure a sustainable future for the region and the planet.

About the authors:

• Zerin Osho is the Director of the IGSD India Program, focusing on fast mitigation strategies and sustainable development in climate-vulnerable states. 
• Eoin Jackson is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and a former Legal Fellow at IGSD.

Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation

By Jonathan Power

Former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would never have agreed with her French counterpart, the late President Francois Mitterrand, who said “Nationalism is war”. To her, nationalism was necessary and good and she felt much as Mitterrand’s predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, who said of the French nation, “it comprises a past, a present and a future that are indissoluble.”

But the nationalism that Thatcher fought for was a largely negative force. It antagonized the other members of the European Union. She did not believe her country could learn from them how to carry out economic reform without severe social disruption. She went to war with Argentina without trying to enlist the US as a mediator because it lent towards Argentina’s side.

One can date European nationalism from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which effectively put an end to religious identity being the defining reason for both social cohesion and war. This was the start of the great powers of Europe, the foundation for the US and the Latin American nations, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars across Europe and the “nation-making” of the nineteenth century which led to the carnage of the First World War.

“National self-determination”

At war’s end there was the Treaty of Versailles which reorganised Europe according to the principle of “national self-determination”. It became a major cause of the Second World War since the European map remained mixed up and illogical. Versailles was unable to create coherent nations, as when it reconstituted a Poland containing a population of two million Germans.

The post Second World War decolonisation by the European powers created new nations that were as nationalistic as Europe. Post-colonialist nationalism has led to many serious conflicts—as between India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, Rwanda and Congo, Cambodia and Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore and, not least, Israel and the Arab world and Russia and Ukraine.

Religion has played a part with India and Pakistan, and Israel and the Arab countries, but even here nationalism is today the predominant driving force.

David Cannadine writes in his book, “The Undivided Past” that nationalism only thrives when the people are beholden to “selective myths, the sanitized memories, and the carefully edited narratives that galvanize collective resolve and sustain national solidarities over time.”

Nation-state made war and war made the nation state

As the great historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, getting history wrong is part of being a nation. We can go further and argue that over time the nation-state made war and war made the nation state. This is certainly the lesson of World War 1. Millions
volunteered to fight out of a shared sense of national loyalty and identity. Very few historians argue that the First World War was necessary or justified. Most but not all- the great AJP Taylor is one of the exceptions—argue that, given Hitler’s proclivities, the Second World War was unavoidable. Again, millions volunteered for battle. Dying in battle for one’s country was the highest national calling.

The creation of the European Union was conceived as project to ensure that the madness of European war was never repeated again. Europe over the ages has been the site of more wars than any other comparatively sized or populated region in the world. But one of the two most important European nations in both world wars, Britain, today has a powerful minority within the ruling Conservative party who long fought—successfully—to take Britain out of Europe. These parliamentarians say they are out and out Thatcherites. They seem not to remember the bloody record of nationalism.

“To See Further”

Sylvie Goulard and Mario Monti, the current Italian prime minister, in their book, “To See Further”, write that European nations are modern-—and mostly artificial- constructions, in whose name millions have been murdered. If they had not already been created, they would not have been created today. They are unsuited to our era. Nationalism is a virus and needs to be contained rather than celebrated- and this goes or the rest of the world too.

They argue that the EU’s members have not been ambitious enough. What is needed to salvage the union from today’s Euro-zone crisis is another institutional redesign, a democratic revolution and a bold leap forward into the future. The genius of the union is that its 450 million people can focus on the next generation rather than the next election.

Much of the union’s inspiration is drawn from the Federalist Papers written when the union of the USA was in its early stages. Back in the 18th century its authors argued the case for a federal state. Today, Europe needs to resurrect the task of emulating the USA, and other federal states like India.

More economic and political union is needed in Europe, not less. The European parliament must become more democratic, independent, free of overriding American influence (except on the issue of federalism), and able to initiate legislation and raise taxes to serve its own priorities.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, said Samuel Johnson. Thatcherites exist all over the world. They must be defeated.

• Note: For 17 years, Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune.

The contradictions and embarrassing antics of the fascist war-mongering United States appear with stark clarity when viewed from an outside perspective. Especially from within China, where peace is international policy.

In recent days the United States has once again shown itself to be a rogue state and a fake democracy which is firmly under the control of its oligarchic class. Elected representatives are their tools and the people are indoctrinated into thinking that the duopoly partners in crime are actually different from one another, even as they work in concert.

This columnist joined a delegation in China and from that distance observed a $91 billion giveaway by members of Congress, including $61 billion to the military-industrial complex for the Ukraine proxy war which has already been lost to Russia. The apartheid state of Israel was also a recipient of $26 billion in largesse, and $8 billion was allocated to antagonize China over Taiwan, an island that the U.S. officially acknowledges as being part of China.

The cynicism of the U.S. political class was on full display, as the same Democratic Party which regularly excoriates Donald Trump and his supporters as fascist insurrectionists, suddenly began working in earnest with the people they usually vilify. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was effusive in his praise. “Traditional conservatives led by Mike Johnson have risen to the occasion.”

Speaker Mike Johnson had balked at continuing any aid for Ukraine and for a good reason. His members wanted to stop the endless flow of money. But all that changed when the ruling class, the oligarchs, or the one-percent, call them what you will, began to call the shots. Donald Trump threw Johnson a lifeline by publicly showing support and silencing the more restive Republican members. Senator Lindsey Graham said out loud what astute observers had already figured out. “This would not have passed without President Trump. I want to thank the House Speaker [Mike Johnson] and [Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries for working together in a bipartisan fashion to give weapons to Ukraine to fight a fight that matters to us.” If democrats and republicans are thanking each other, the people have gotten the shaft. What is the purpose of having different political parties if they work together against the interests of the people they claim to represent?

After the political sausage had been made, the corporate media joined in the scam. Speaker Johnson had been portrayed as a hapless loser but overnight became a hero because he opposed what his caucus and his voters wanted. “By passing Ukraine aid, the accidental speaker became an unlikely Churchill,” according to CNN anyway. Winston Churchill was a vile man, an imperialist who among other things allowed millions of people in India to starve to death, but when his name is mentioned the implication is usually a positive one. The fix was in from the white house to congress to the media. They were all of one accord and the people be damned.

It was a surreal experience watching the Washington clown show from China. Somehow the distance brought all the ugliness into high relief. While members of congress stupidly referred to the right-wing post-Soviet leader Vladimir Putin as a “Communist KGB thug ” and a “murderous, Marxist, dictator ”, China counseled peace. German Chancellor Olof Scholz met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who repeated that peace talks are the only reasonable solution to the Ukraine crisis. China has offered its services in an effort to end the bloodshed ever since the proxy war began but it has been rebuffed at every turn. Nations like Germany are firmly under Washington’s grip and dare not act as the independent nations they claim to be.

While Xi expressed common sense, members of the House of Representatives waved Ukrainian flags and patted themselves on the back for ensuring more Ukrainian deaths, an endless windfall for the warmakers, and a theft of public resources. Not one member of the Democratic Party voted against the Ukraine cash flow. Progressives, the Squad, and every single democrat were on the same page with Donald Trump.

The celebration of foolishness was almost always expressed as a sign of American leadership that the entire world wants. Yet neither China or the other global south nations that make up the majority of the world’s population want what Washington is offering. China’s population of 1.4 billion people comprises 18% of the world’s population , yet is dismissed as an irrelevance. If China is mentioned at all it is referred to as a dictatorship where people are oppressed every minute of the day.

Our delegation witnessed a country that continues to plan and to grow its economy. The constant U.S. war propaganda is proof that China is an economic rival and therefore a diplomatic rival too. China feeds its large population, launches satellites, expands a network of high-speed rail, and positions itself as a world leader while the U.S. only knows how to obstruct and steal.

We are told that China is a dystopian, authoritarian hellscape where the people lack all freedoms that Americans allegedly enjoy. But the congressional grand theft also included provisions to end the presence of the TikTok social media platform in the U.S. and to steal its operations because it is said to be controlled by the Chinese government when everyone knows that assertion is simply untrue. Now TikTok may be silenced because Zionists want to end one source of information that can defy their narratives and possibly put funding to Israel at risk.

Joe Biden also reauthorized the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which allows for warrantless searches of U.S. citizens. Again Mike Johnson changed his own position, opposed his caucus, and did what the deep surveillance state wanted.  Apparently China isn’t the only authoritarian state in the world.

We have been told that Trump presents an existential threat and that voting for Biden is of the utmost importance. Yet he agrees with Trump on aid to Ukraine and on the futile effort to end China’s economic prowess. Just like Trump, Biden is proposing increasing tariffs on China’s steel and aluminum, and just like Trump, he will be unable to stop this powerhouse from thriving.

The truth is that fascism is here whether Trump or Biden is in the White House and whether Mike Johnson or Hakeem Jeffries is the House Speaker. Fascism demands acquiescence to corporate interests, to the surveillance state, and to the war makers. All of those interests can be confident of getting what they want. People in the United States can also be confident that getting their needs met will be a rarity. So it is in their “democratic” nation.

The good news is the United States is calling for diplomacy in the Middle East. The bad news it is because it was bested by Yemen’s rebel Houthis.

U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen, Tim Lenderking, bowed to the obvious and admitted, “We favor a diplomatic solution, we know there is no military solution.” Lenderking was channeling Britain’s former prime minister Winston Churchill who opined, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”

The U.S. sent its navy to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in December 2023 in response to the Houthi attack on merchant ships the group claimed were connected to Israel. The Houthis claimed they were attacking maritime commerce in the area until Israel declared a cease fire in Gaza and allowed more aid to enter the enclave.

The Red Sea and Suez Canal see the transit of 30% of the world’s container traffic, so the attacks caused traffic to be rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope adding two weeks and significant expense to the journey.

The Houthis claim to have launched over 520 missiles and drones, a mix of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned surface vessels, and unmanned underwater vessels, at more than 50 ships, most with no connection to Israel, and killed three merchant seamen.

The U.S. Navy suffered three deaths when two Navy SEAL commandos drowned in the Arabian Sea during a mission to interdict Iranian weapons shipments to Yemen, and a sailor went overboard in unknown circumstances and was declared lost. Houthi casualties numbered 37 dead and 30 wounded according to the rebels after 424 airstrikes by U.S. and UK forces

The Red Sea also hosts several fiber optic cables and four were reported damaged in early March. The cause was first feared to be the Houthis, but was likely the sinking merchantman Rubymar, damaged by Houthi anti-ship missiles, dragging its anchor across the cables.

And that’s where we stood until early April when Mr. Lenderking admitted there was no military solution and suggested the U.S. would lift the group’s terrorist designation if it stopped attacking merchant shipping.

OK, but the Houthis already announced their terms: they will stop when there is a ceasefire in Gaza and aid deliveries resume, and Lenderking acknowledged this.

Though the media is full of stories that U.S. president Joe Biden is angry at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for excess civilian deaths in Gaza shipments of arms to Israel have not slowed, so the “angry Joe” stuff is likely for the benefit of Muslim voters in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The U.S. asked China to intervene with the Houthi’s patron, Iran, to get the Houthis to down tools. Nice, but what’s in it for China and Iran?

Though the Houthis have disrupted the maritime trade critical to the world economy, the U.S. Navy is probably secretly thrilled as it hasn’t seen any real action in decades. One Navy leaderadmitted, “I think you’d have to go back to World War II where you have [U.S. Navy] ships engaged in combat.”

The envoy’s admission that force has failed is a black eye for the U.S. and its allies that failed to subdue the Houthis, an outfit with less tonnage than the Cajun Navy.

But the U.S. is not alone. Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in the Yemen civil war in 2015 but, despite 24,000 air raids, in 2022 they announced a cessation of hostilities and entered Oman-mediated peace talks. In the interest of a quiet neighborhood, the Saudis closed air, sea and land access to Yemen, but later allowed humanitarian flights to resume.

The U.S. military is also under increasing financial pressure as it is firing $2 million-dollarinterceptor missiles at drones that cost $2,000. The non-stop operations of ships and aircraft will require intensive, costly maintenance when they return to port and may encourage many sailors to leave the Navy at a time when the service is chronically failing to meet its recruiting goals.

The Houthi tactics will be studied by America’s foes and refined as low-cost/low-tech methods to frustrate U.S. forces and, after, seeing the Americans bested first by the low-tech Taliban in Afghanistan and now the Houthis, others may be tempted to take a crack at the Americans.

Recent reports that Houthis are running out of weapons and Yemeni citizens lost access to remittances due to U.S. and European sanctions may be true, but the U.S. retreat to diplomacy will give Yemenis some breathing room. The Houthis may have suffered from the U.S. and UK bombing, but they persevered until the attackers changed course.

Any it wasn’t just U.S. and UK forces that underperformed.

In February, a German navy warship in the Red Sea opened fire on a U.S. drone that it misidentified as a Houthi drone and in April the German frigate Hessen has departed the Red Sea and no replacement will arrive until August.

Denmark dismissed its defense chief after a Danish navy ship demonstrated flaws in its air defense and ammunition systems. A French warship left the Red Sea after it ran out of ammunition countering Houthi attacks, and its commander confessed the “uninhibited violence…was quite surprising.”

The Houthi attacks are a tax on the rest of the world, and so is the reluctance of the U.S. to force a cease-fire in Gaza. With the 2024 presidential election looming, and with Black and Hispanicvoters more favorable to Donald Trump and the Republicans, Biden won’t promote a cease fire as he needs to keep the Jews onside.

Egypt is losing Suez Canal revenue – down almost 50% – and will press the U.S. to get serious about a reconciliation that’s good for Yemenis, even if some people in Washington, D.C. are grumpy.

And Cairo won’t want to use military force in Yemen as Cairo remembers how its 70,000 troops got bogged down in the 1962-1968 North Yemen Civil War. Cairo will be reluctant to aid U.S. efforts to relieve the pressure in Gaza unless the Americans reopen the Red Sea to cargo traffic.

The Houthis have probably intentionally painted themselves into a corner with the demand for a cease fire. If the U.S. would test the Houthis with a cease fire and they kept up the attacks on shipping, it could publicly expose them as frauds.

Of course, if the Houthis keep their word it will raise their stature as having brought the Americans to heel, though Washington’s belated discovery of diplomacy may have accomplished that goal.

For reasons of bureaucratic organization, congressional oversight prerogatives, and ethnic politics, most U.S. foreign policy issues are managed in separate silos. Thus, it is not possible to take from Silo A to give to Silo B, but that’s what the Houthis demand.

So, what can the U.S. do?

Force a Gaza cease fire?

The Americans won’t do that with an election looming, and the only way to force a cease fire would be to stop providing weapons and intelligence information to Israel, a no-go with U.S. congressmen and their defense industry supporters, and especially after the Iranian counterattack on Israel.

Focus on the peace process in Yemen?

The Yemen peace process is on life support and an all-hands effort at reconciliation, led by the Arab League or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, is needed for a successful reconciliation, which means a Houthi role in the unity government. U.S. voters won’t care, but will American officials and politicians push back at “rewarding terrorism?”

Probably, though that wasn’t a problem with Ireland or South Africa. On the other hand, Yemen’s neighbors will welcome a peaceful outcome and may stand aside so Washington can be the public face of a failed peace effort (and Al-Jazeera and other Middle East media will give non-stop coverage to Americans’ perfidy.)

In 2021, newly-elected President Joe Biden promised an era of “relentless diplomacy” but the Biden administration has continued the traditional American military-first approach to political challenges.

If Washington sticks to the script future American officials had better get used to encounters like this one between the U.S. and North Vietnam military:

“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,’ said the American colonel.

The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. “That may be so,” he replied, “but it is also irrelevant.”

The post-World War II free trading system was underwritten by American sea power, so the failure of the maritime expedition in the Red Sea is a bad look after the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Navy looks like it lost – or didn’t win – the first real maritime scuffle in decades at a time when the fleet is too small to meet America’s worldwide commitments.

So, Washington must consider rebalancing between warfare + sanctions and trade + diplomacy, then, consider the challenge of American navalist Seth Cropsey who asked, “What is a global navy for?”

• This article was published by Defense.Info

By Connor O’Keeffe

Over the weekend, the House of Representatives passed four foreign aid bills that will allocate a combined $95 billion to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and other “national security priorities.” House Republicans followed Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) lead and joined with Democrats to deliver all the foreign aid President Joe Biden wanted without requiring much of anything in return.

The passage came after House Republicans had handed the president similar victories with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reauthorization and government spending.

New York Times columnists celebrated Speaker Johnson for, in their words, “finally (showing) a spine.” Columnist Bret Stephens went as far as to call Johnson’s decision to roll over an act of courage:

Nothing is more difficult these days in American politics than going against your own ideological tribe. And nothing is more admirable than politicians who are willing to challenge their base and gamble their office for the sake of a great cause. I wasn’t much of a fan of Johnson when he became speaker of the House, but what he’s done is a profile in courage.

Speaker Johnson took a similar tone, framing himself as a courageous and selfless public servant willing to “do the right thing,” regardless of the personal consequences.

But Johnson didn’t do the right thing. And he certainly didn’t do the courageous thing.

America is a global empire that’s spread too thin. Washington could have used its unipolar moment following the fall of the Soviet Union to relax the totalitarian military bureaucracy built up during the Cold War. Instead, the United States government launched multiple unnecessary wars in the Middle East, needlessly expanded the anti-Russian military alliance in Europe, and helped militarize the waters and neighboring governments that surround China’s coast.

The US’s meddling in the Middle East inadvertently swung the balance of power way in Iran’s favor. In Europe, NATO’s eastward expansion turned the Russian regime back into an enemy and eventually provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. All the while China has maneuvered and worked to gain control of its own near-abroad and to build up military forces strong enough to back that effort up.

Officials in Washington have decided that they are the ones who should be in charge of the entire Middle East, all of Eastern Europe, and the East Pacific. The American people have already been forced to pay trillions of dollars and to sacrifice thousands of their sons, daughters, and siblings for this project. And Washington exerts even less control over those three regions than it did three decades ago.

But money and lives are not the only things Americans have been forced to give up. In the name of fending off the foreign enemies that they helped create, US officials have trampled on privacy rights here at home. Thanks to courageous journalists and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, we know that the government uses the existence of foreign adversaries to sidestep the right to due process and violate the rights of Americans.

At home, the federal government spends trillions of dollars every year, either taxed directly out of our pockets or less directly through borrowing and money printing. That spending fuels interventions in the economy that nearly anyone who has taken an introductory economics class could tell you have bad consequences. But those bad consequences are used to justify more interventions, which themselves have bad consequences that are then used to justify more interventions. It’s an interventionist death spiral. Life becomes less affordable, important goods become harder to acquire, and the government has to tax, borrow, and print more and more every year to fund it all.

These are all serious and significant problems. But they’re also not insurmountable.

Government spending needs to be cut substantially. Not only to ease the burden of high federal taxes and the permanent price inflation that accompanies permanent money printing but also to put an end to all the destruction that spending has wrought.

From its beginning, the federal government has used its ability to protect our rights to justify its very existence. As long as the political class keeps up that story, it’s reasonable to demand that they stop violating our rights themselves with intrusive and unconstitutional programs like warrantless surveillance.

And the political establishment’s fantasy about controlling every inch of the globe needs to be put to rest, especially while parts of this country remain so unsafe and the situation at the border grows even more chaotic. Washington’s imperial ambitions cost a lot of money and create unnecessary enemies.

It’s clear many Republican voters understand, at least at a high level, what needs to happen. Every Republican candidate claims to support spending cuts. And recently, Republicans have had to navigate their base growing more skeptical of Washington’s hyperactive foreign policy. And when FISA was due to be renewed, numerous Republicans worked to implement restrictions on warrantless surveillance.

To their credit, some Republicans were serious enough to try to use their small House majority to make as big a dent in the above problems as possible. They kicked out a Speaker for not sticking with an agreed-upon change to the government spending appropriations process, tried to impose FISA restrictions, and froze funding for Washington’s foreign interventions for months. For that, they were disparaged daily in the establishment-friendly media.

But in the end, Mike Johnson and the so-called moderate Republicans gave in on all three fronts. They greenlit another increase in government spending, reauthorized warrantless surveillance, and agreed to force Americans to fork over another $95 billion for foreign interventions. For that, Johnson and his Republican allies are celebrated in the New York Times and other “respectable” outlets.

There are policy changes that can solve many of the biggest problems facing Americans. But the changes won’t be easy or pleasant for the politicians who enact them. They must stop kicking the can down the road and face the economic destruction brought on by past interventions—not to cover up, delay, and amplify the reckoning. And they require politicians with the courage and wherewithal to stay committed, even when New York Times columnists and MSNBC hosts say mean things about them. Speaker Mike Johnson and his Republican allies are clearly not those politicians.

• About the author: Connor O’Keeffe (@ConnorMOKeeffe) produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a master’s in economics and a bachelor’s in geology.
• Source: This article was published by Mises Institute

They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor. The rest of the text is perfunctory. The headline is the takeaway, and the part designed to demoralize, deconstruct, and disorient. 

A few weeks ago, the New York Times told us that “As It Turns Out, the Deep State Is Pretty Awesome.” These are the same people who claim that Trump is trying to get rid of democracy. The Deep State is the opposite of democracy, unelected and unaccountable in every way, impervious to elections and the will of the people. Now we have the NYT celebrating this. 

And the latest bears notice too: “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe.” The authors are classic Deep Staters associated with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. They assure us that having an Orwellian state is good for us. You can trust them, promise. The rest of the content of the article doesn’t matter much. The message is in the headline. 

Amazing isn’t it? You have to check your memory and your sanity. These are the people who have rightly warned about government infringements on privacy and free speech for many decades dating way back.

And now we have aggressive and open advocacy of exactly that, mainly because the Biden administration is in charge and has only months to put the final touches on the revolution in law and liberty that has come to America. They want to make it all permanent and are working furiously to make it so. 

Along with routine warrantless surveillance, not only of possible bad guys but everyone, comes of course censorship. A few years ago, this seemed to be intermittent, like the biased and arbitrary actions of rogue executives. We objected and denounced but generally assumed that it was aberrant and going away over time. 

Back then, we had no idea of the scale and the ambition of the censors. The more information that is coming out, the more the full goal is coming into view. The power elite want the Internet to operate like the controlled media of the 1970s. Any opinion that runs contrary to regime priorities will be blocked. Websites that distribute alternative outlooks will be lucky to survive at all. 

To understand what’s going on, see the White House document called Declaration on the Future of the Internet. Freedom is barely a footnote, and free speech is not part of it. Instead it is to be a “rules-based digital economy” governed “through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” 

This whole document is an Orwellian replacement of the Declaration of Internet Freedom from 2012, which was signed by Amnesty International, the ACLU, and major corporations and banks. The first principle of this Declaration was free speech: don’t censor the Internet. That was 12 years ago and the principle is long forgotten. Even the original website has been dead since 2018. It is now replaced with one word: “Forbidden.”

Yes, that’s chilling but it is also perfectly descriptive. In all mainline Internet venues, from search to shopping to social, freedom is no longer the practice. Censorship has been normalized. And it is taking place with the direct involvement of the federal government and third-party organizations and research centers paid for by tax dollars. This is very clearly a violation of the First Amendment but the new orthodoxy in elite circles is that the First Amendment simply does not apply to the Internet. 

This issue is making its way through litigation. There was a time when the decision would not be in question. No more. Several or more Supreme Court Justices do not seem to understand even the meaning of free speech. 

The Prime Minister of Australia made the new view clear in his statement in defense of fining Elon Musk. He said that social media has a “social responsibility.” In today’s parlance, this means they must obey the government, which is the only proper interpreter of the public interest. In this view, you simply cannot allow people to post and say things that are contrary to regime priorities. 

If the regime cannot manage public culture, and manipulate the public mind, what’s it there for? If it cannot control the Internet, its managers believe, it will lose control of the whole of society. 

The crackdown is intensifying by the day. Representative Thomas Massie shot a video after the Ukraine vote for a total foreign aid package of an astonishing $95 billion. Vast numbers of Democrats on the House floor waved Ukrainian flags, which you might suppose smacks of treason. The Sergeant-at-Arms wrote Massey directly to tell him to take down the video or get a $500 fine. 

True, the rules say you cannot film in a way that “impairs decorum,” but he simply took out his phone. The decorum was disturbed by masses of lawmakers waving a foreign flag. So Massie refused. After all, the entire disgraceful scene was on C-SPAN but the presumption is that no one watches that but everyone reads X, which is probably true. 

Clearly, GOP speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want his perfidy this well-advertised. After all, it was he who shepherded the authorization of spying on the American people using Section 702 of FISA, which 99 percent of GOP voters opposed. Just who do these people think they are there to represent? 

It’s actually astonishing to do a conjectural history in which Elon did not buy Twitter. The regime monopoly on social media today would be 99.5 percent. Then the handful of alternative venues could be shut down one by one, just as with Parler a few years ago. Under this scenario, closing the social end of the Internet would not be that difficult. The domains are another matter but those could be banned gradually over time. 

But with X rising in a meteoric way since Elon’s takeover, that is now far more difficult. He has made it his mission to remind the world of core principles. This is why he told the boycotting advertisers to jump in a lake and why he refused to comply with every dictate by the despotic head of the Brazilian Supreme Court. Daily he is showing what it means to stand up for principle in extremely hard times. 

Glenn Beck puts it well: “What Elon Musk is doing in both Brazil and Australia is this: He is simply standing where the Free world used to stand. They have moved, not him. They are the radicals not him. HAVE THE COURAGE to remain standing, unmovable in the truth that can never change and you will be targeted and eventually change the world.”

Censorship is not an end unto itself. The purpose is control of the people. That is also the purpose of surveillance. It is not, rather obviously, to protect the public. It is to protect the state and its industrial partners against the people. Of course, just as in every dystopian film, they always pretend otherwise. 

Somehow – call me naive – I just didn’t expect the New York Times to be all-in on the immediate establishment of the surveillance state and universal censorship by the “awesome” Deep State. But think of this. If the NYT can be fully captured by this ideology, and probably captured by the money that goes with it, so can any other institution. You have probably noticed a similar editorial line being pushed by Wired, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Salon, Slate, and other venues, including the entire suite of publications owned by Conde Nast including Vogue and GQ magazine. 

“Don’t bother me with your crazed conspiracy theory, Tucker.”

I get the point. What is your explanation?

• Source: This article was published by Brownstone Institute

The Biden administration is breathing a sigh of relief that it has so far avoided a wider regional war between Israel and Iran. But that self-congratulation should be tempered with realization that it was a close call and that the incentives for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition to provoke one are still present.

The Biden administration’s rhetorical outrage at Iran’s forewarned and well-choreographed symbolic missile and drone attacks on Israeli territory conflicts was absurd, as was its crowing that Israel, with U.S. and allied help, had already “won” by knocking down almost all the sequenced projectiles. American policy has long been so “in the bag” for its Israeli ally, no matter what its behavior, that such silly kabuki has been normalized.

Despite the U.S. declaration of victory, designed to dissuade Israel from a strong escalatory response to the Iranian strike, the Israeli leader came close to ordering a much larger “retaliatory” strike than the limited one the Israelis executed, according to The New York Times.

Although Hamas started the Gaza conflict with its heinous terrorist attack on Israel, Israel’s purposefully reckless attack on Iran’s embassy compound in Syria on April 1, 2024—which killed seven Iranian military personnel, including three top Iranian generals—threatened to widen and escalate the conflict into a direct Israel-Iran war that easily could have dragged in the United States.

Internationally, overseas embassies are regarded as being the soil of the home country; thus, Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria was the same as an attack on Iran itself. As a result, Iran retaliated with the symbolic missile and drone attack against Israeli territory.

Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition have blatantly rejected a two-state solution that would go a long way toward diminishing conflict in the region and enhancing Israel’s long-term security. Even before this pugnacious government took office, Israel has long desired to push the United States into a war with its Iranian rival to ensure Israeli regional dominance by severely diminishing Iran’s military capabilities.

This hidden agenda was clearly demonstrated by the Israeli government’s virulent opposition to the U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran, which would have blocked pathways for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. One would have thought that Israel would have been wildly excited about an agreement that would have severely restrained Iran’s program. Yet, Israel knew that a reduction of tensions between Iran and the United States that the agreement, if it had been fully carried out, would have put any severely debilitating U.S. military attack on Iran’s conventional military capabilities and nuclear program in the deep freeze.

Fortunately, for the hawks in Israel, when President Donald Trump became president, he unilaterally terminated the nuclear deal, again raising the possibility that the United States might do the dirty work of militarily taking on Israel’s archrival.

Given that Netanyahu has foolishly worn a partisan preference for Trump and the Republicans on his sleeve, dragging President Biden, despite appearances, into war with Iran has been difficult.

Yet now may be Netanyahu’s golden opportunity. An even wider war, which includes direct U.S. military conflict with Iran, would help an unpopular, indicted prime minister who may need to stay in power to keep himself out of jail and divert attention from his wildly disproportionate military response and potential bog in Gaza.

America’s alliances and partnerships with other countries are only of value if they advance what should be the end goal—enhancing U.S. security. One issue—in addition to the free rider problem in which the dominant power (always the United States) bears the greater cost burden—is that smaller countries like Israel can have an incentive to be more aggressive with their neighbors when under the protective umbrella of the larger power.

Although intense U.S. and allied pressure on Israel to limit its “retaliatory” strike on Iran has, for the moment, prevented a wider regional war, Netanyahu’s political survival may depend on such escalation, especially if he needs to take the Israeli public’s attention away from the likely quagmire that poorly planned Gaza aftermath will likely bring forth—similar to the continuing counterinsurgency slog after an initial “win” by the United States in Iraq.

Netanyahu has already seen his low poll numbers go up during his dust-up with Iran after his reckless attack on the Iranian embassy. So why not a massive first strike on the Iranian-supported Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border to get the escalation ball rolling? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that one of his “scarier discussions with an Israeli official recently was his advocacy of a first strike on Hezbollah, and a poll found that 53 percent of Israeli Jews favor such an attack on Hezbollah.”

A lesson of history learned by the American founding generation that was forgotten by U.S. policymakers in their rush to acquire a Pax Americana after World War II: permanent and entangling alliances can commit a country to needless and costly faraway wars—especially a country like the United States that has the intrinsic security advantage of being far away from the world’s centers of conflict. The great powers of Europe also forgot the downside of alliances when those pacts dragged them into a cataclysmic war that none of them wanted: World War I.

To avoid being enmeshed in a wider war in the Middle East, Biden should threaten to cut off or reduce the billions of dollars in annual U.S. military aid to Israel if it does not stop its overheated actions in Gaza and its blatant attempts to widen the war to include Iran. Instead, the United States is in the process of vastly increasing the amount of that aid, further rewarding Israel for its irresponsible behavior.

This article was also published in Responsible Statecraft 

By Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock

(ProPublica and The Frontier) — It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.

On a Sunday evening in late November 2022, a blue Toyota Corolla sped down a dirt-and-gravel road in the twilight, passing hay meadows and columns of giant wind turbines spinning on the horizon. The Corolla braked and turned, headlights sweeping across prairie grass, and entered the driveway of a 10-acre compound filled with circular huts and row after row of greenhouses. Past a ranch house, the sedan stopped outside a large detached garage.

The driver, Chen Wu, burst out of the car with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. Balding and muscular, he had worked at the farm and invested in the illegal marijuana operation.

Charging into the garage, Wu confronted the five men and one woman working inside. Like him, they were immigrants from China. Piles of marijuana leaves cluttered the brightly lit room, covering a table and stuffed into plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

Wu aimed his gun at He Qiang Chen, a 56-year-old ex-convict known at the farm as “the Boss.” Chen had a temper; he was awaiting trial in the beating and shooting of a man two years earlier at a Chinese community center in Oklahoma City.

Before Chen could make a move, Wu shot him in the right knee. The boss fell to the floor, writhing in pain. 

Wu held the others at gunpoint. He said Chen owed him $300,000 and told his hostages they had half an hour to get him the money. 

If they didn’t, he said, he would kill them all.

Both the shooter and his victim were from Fujian, a coastal province known for mafias, immigration and corruption. They had come to America and joined a wave of new players rushing into the nation’s billion-dollar marijuana boom: Chinese mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting drugs and cash and overwhelming law enforcement with their resources and elusiveness.

Now, their itinerant odysseys had collided in this remote outpost in the heartland. The clash left four people dead and unveiled an international underworld of dangerous dimensions. 

Wild West

The bloodshed in Kingfisher County made national headlines, highlighting Oklahoma’s role as the latest and wildest frontier in the marijuana underworld.

From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.

Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview.

Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.

The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state.

In 2018, the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The law did not limit the number of dispensaries or growing operations – known in the industry simply as “grows.” It requires marijuana businesses to have majority owners who have lived in the state for two years, and it bars shipping the product across state lines. But limited enforcement enabled out-of-state investors to recruit illegal “straw owners” and to traffic weed clandestinely across the country. And land was cheap. In this wide-open atmosphere, the industry grew at breakneck speed and, regulators say, is now second only to the oil and gas industry in the state.

Since Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana for personal use in 2012, a patchwork of marijuana-related legislation has developed across the country. State authorities generally require licenses and put limits on cultivation, and federal law prohibits interstate sales. But steep taxes on legal products and gaps and differences in laws across states have created the conditions for a massive black market to thrive.

Oklahoma has quickly become a top supplier of illicit weed. Although street prices fluctuate and calculating the value of a black market is complex, officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana grown in the state at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year. State investigators have found links between foreign mafias and over 3,000 illegal grows — and they say that more than 80% of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.

The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S. Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.

“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im.

“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Aimed to Make Cops a Gateway to Rehab, Not Jail. State Leaders Failed to Make It Work.

U.S. law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources dedicated to Chinese organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.

And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all. As ProPublica has reported, the authoritarian regime and the mafias allegedly maintain an alliance that benefits both sides. In exchange for government protection, Chinese mobsters deliver services such as illegally moving money overseas for the Communist Party elite and helping to spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities, according to Western national security officials, case files, Chinese dissidents and human rights groups.

Because China has emerged as the top geopolitical rival of the United States, carrying out brazen espionage and influence activities in this country, the spread of Chinese mafias in Oklahoma and elsewhere also poses a potential national security threat, state and federal officials say.

Leaders of Chinese cultural associations in Oklahoma and other states are allegedly connected to both the illegal marijuana trade and to Chinese government officials, ProPublica and The Frontier have found. A number of influential leaders have been charged with or convicted of crimes ranging from drug offenses to witness intimidation. (A second part of this series further explores that issue.)

“You’d be very naive to sit and say the Chinese state doesn’t know what Chinese organized crime is doing in the U.S.,” Anderson said, “or that there is not a connection between the Chinese state and organized crime.”

In February, 50 U.S. legislators wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garlandexpressing concern that Chinese nationals, “including those with potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” are “reportedly operating thousands of illicit marijuana farms across the country.”

The bipartisan group of lawmakers, who included all but two members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, asked whether federal authorities are investigating CCP connections to the marijuana underworld and how much illicit revenue returns to China.

The Department of Justice plans to respond to the questions raised by the legislators, a department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“The Department is working on developing a marijuana enforcement policy that will be consistent” with federal guidance related to state legalization initiatives, said the spokesperson, Peter Carr. “Among the federal enforcement priorities under that policy is preventing the revenue from the illegal distribution of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels.”

The department declined to comment about other issues raised in this story.

In response to a list of questions, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said in an emailed statement that he was “not aware of the specifics” related to Chinese organized crime in the marijuana industry. But the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said China wages a determined fight against drugs, the “common enemy of mankind.”

“We always ask our fellow citizens to observe local laws and regulations and refrain from engaging in any illegal or criminal activities while they are abroad,” Liu said in the written statement. “The Chinese government is steadfast on fighting drug crimes, playing an active part in international anti-drug cooperation, and resolving the drug issue with other countries including the US in an active and responsible attitude.”

ProPublica and The Frontier interviewed more than three dozen current and former law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas, as well as academic experts, defense lawyers, farmworkers, Chinese dissidents, Chinese-American leaders, human rights advocates and others. Some sources were granted anonymity to protect their safety or because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of court files, government reports, news reports and social media posts in English, Chinese and other languages.

California Dreams

He Qiang Chen came to New York about 30 years ago from the Changle district outside Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian.

Chen and his older brother opened a restaurant and a laundry in the Bronx and became legal U.S. residents. By the early 2000s, they had moved to North Carolina, where they also ran restaurants, according to public records and law enforcement officials. They shuttled back and forth to New York, buying properties in and around Flushing, which has a vibrant Chinese business district. The area has also developed a reputation as a bastion of Chinese crime bosses with nationwide reach, leading to a refrain in law enforcement: “All roads lead to Flushing.”

Until about five years ago, public records indicate that Chen’s encounters with the justice system consisted of repeated tickets for speeding and reckless driving.

In 2017, though, the brothers launched into the marijuana racket at a level that would make investigators think they’d been involved in crime for a while. They went to California, where Chen paid $825,000 for a four-bedroom house behind a wrought-iron gate in the San Joaquin Valley about 35 miles from Sacramento.

The semirural lot was near a winery and an equestrian center. But Chen wasn’t interested in genteel pastimes. Along with his romantic companion, a 43-year-old woman from San Francisco named Fang Hui Lee, Chen and his brother got to work converting the spacious barn into a cannabis plantation.

Several associates also established themselves in the Sacramento area. A 39-year-old fellow transplant from North Carolina, Yifei Lin, bought a suburban house and set up a clandestine indoor grow, court records show.

The cross-country move was part of a migration of criminal groups into the marijuana industry. Other destinations included Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. California law limited cannabis for personal use to six plants and required commercial growers to get a license. With criminal penalties diminishing, the goals of legalization were to establish regulation, generate tax revenue and eliminate organized crime from the picture.

Instead, the low risk and fast money set off a feeding frenzy. The players who established clandestine grows included Mexican cartels, Cuban immigrant gangs and longtime locals. But the Chinese crews were the biggest and best organized. They smuggled their product by car, truck and plane to the East Coast, where profit margins were stratospheric.

In this rapacious subculture, mobsters went into subdivisions and snapped up a half dozen homes at a time. In San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, a federal court convicted a real estate agent in 2020 for a typical tactic: paying “ghost owners” to fly in from China posing as buyers, sign paperwork and go home, according to case files and interviews.

The bosses brought in recent Chinese immigrants to tend indoor crops, often stealing industrial quantities of water and power from public utility systems for their operations. Grow houses created a nefarious mix of risks: toxic fumes from banned pesticides, deadly fires from makeshift electrical bypasses, volatile chemicals and flammable equipment. The presence of drugs, cash and weapons was a magnet for crime, and the blighted homes hurt property values.

In November 2018, Sgt. George Negrete, a detective for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, got a tip about Chen’s illegal grow.

Doing surveillance on foot from an adjacent water treatment facility, Negrete saw telltale signs, such as spray foam filling the seams of the barn walls to mask heat, light and odor. Utility records showed that the electric bill had spiked from $170 a month to more than $2,000 per month after Chen bought the property, indicating sustained use of air conditioning and high-intensity lights.

On Dec. 13, deputies served a search warrant. They found 3,835 plants and arrested the Chen brothers, Lee and two other men, court documents say. Chen claimed he didn’t speak English. But he admitted he was in charge. He told Negrete that someone had advised him marijuana was a good business.

“They weren’t scared or afraid,” Negrete said in an interview. “It was like regular business for them.”

The crew had slept on mattresses on the floor. Lee apparently supervised the day-to-day work. And deputies found two .40-caliber pistols, court documents say. Firearms were unusual at Chinese-run grows that Negrete had raided.

“It made me think they were at a higher scale in an organization,” the detective said.

Cash and Discipline

The arrests of the Chens and their associates happened during a state-federal crackdown in the Sacramento area known as Operation Lights Out.

On the day of the raid on Chen’s house, federal prosecutors indicted a Sacramento real estate broker, accusing her and other suspects of teaming with financiers in Fujian who wired millions of dollars to acquire houses for indoor grows through fraudulent maneuvers, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities also seized more than 100 houses.

The elaborate and brazen nature of the alleged conspiracy led investigators to believe it involved the triads, according to three former federal officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Suspects used banks in China to wire money to the U.S. defendants in suspicious and obvious increments, according to the criminal complaint and former federal officials. Yet there was no interference from the most powerful police state in the world. Although hard proof was elusive, two former senior U.S. officials told ProPublica they suspected Chinese officials protected the scheme and may have benefited from it financially.

“There was no question in my mind that there was at least Chinese government awareness of this,” a former senior Department of Justice official said. “There was no way they didn’t see the movement of the money going to the same people in the United States. But could we prove it? We suspected Chinese officials were complicit.”

Although the prosecution had a big impact by combining the might of the FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland Security Investigations, it was one of the few federal offensives against Chinese networks involved in marijuana.

Still, DEA financial investigations around the country revealed that the emerging marijuana empire intersected with the networks laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug lords. Some of the funds from the laundering returned to China, but a lot was reinvested into new U.S. marijuana ventures, current and former officials said.

The marijuana proceeds were “another massive bucket of money” with which high-level Chinese crime bosses funded interconnected rackets such as the money laundering and migrant smuggling, said former senior DEA official Christopher Urben, who is now a managing partner at the global investigations firm Nardello & Co.

Agents marveled at the scope of the enterprise and the lack of turf wars. Around 2019, the DEA learned that triad bosses had traveled from China to sit-downs in New York, where they issued directives and kept the peace nationwide, according to Urben and other current and former officials. New York had become the command hub for marijuana as well as money laundering.

“The discipline involved is incredible,” Urben said. “How are we having thousands of workers moved into the country and among states? How are all these groups doing this without more conflict or violence? How do you ensure that all these mid-level managers get along, with all this money, all this marijuana? The only way you can do it is with an organized crime apparatus.”

In the federal prosecution in Sacramento, a defendant pleaded guilty this Feb. 27. The real estate broker and two others are still awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, Chen and his associates pleaded no contest to misdemeanors in state courts, which sentenced them to probation. Wasting no time, the crew headed for Oklahoma in 2020.

In contrast to California, Oklahoma did not limit the size of grows. As long as the operations had a nominal local owner and a medical marijuana license, they could spread dozens of greenhouses capable of holding tens of thousands of plants over a cheap parcel of farmland.

Some Chinese groups redeployed by air, according to officials and case files. Federal agents began detecting flights of private planes from California to rural airfields in Oklahoma. Couriers aboard the aircraft carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to buy farmland, sometimes for twice or three times its value. To dodge federal interdiction teams, some pilots filed flight plans for one airstrip, then diverted to another.

And money poured in from China. Around 2020, one group crowdfunded Oklahoma marijuana ventures through an invitation to investors on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. U.S. investigations show that WeChat, although heavily monitored by Chinese security forces, is often a forum for discussions of criminal activity.

Oklahoma’s marijuana industry surged to “an astronomical level,” said Ray Padilla, a Denver-based DEA agent. He estimated that 90% of Colorado’s illicit producers moved to the neighboring state. 

Oklahoma was the new frontier, Padilla said. And it was “absolute insanity.” 

Gunplay at the Association

A statue of a panda bear sits like a chunky sentry atop a pillar on Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City’s Asian District.

Mixing a longtime Vietnamese community with a more recent Chinese one, the boulevard is lined with stores, restaurants, massage parlors, nail salons and, block after block, marijuana dispensaries. 

Behind the panda, a ground-floor suite in a corner mini-mall houses the local chapter of the American Fujian Association.

Shortly before dusk on Dec. 8, 2020, a black Mercedes SUV carrying Chen and Lin pulled up at the mini-mall accompanied by two other cars. The crew had driven an hour from their new farm in Kingfisher County. They were looking for Jintao Liu, who had also relocated from Sacramento after his marijuana site got busted, court documents show. Liu and Chen had been feuding since Chen had failed to pay him for organizing a delivery from California.

When Liu had asked him to pay the $2,000 debt, Chen had become infuriated and began to terrorize Liu and his wife with threatening phone calls and texts showing photos of guns. Chen squared off with Liu at a gathering and punched him in the jaw. Later, Chen threatened to kill his wife and three children, court records say.

The reasons for the rage remain somewhat murky. Asked during a court hearing why Chen was so angry if he owed the money, not the other way around, Liu answered, “He did not want to pay. He was this kind of a person.”

On the afternoon that Chen and his crew appeared outside the Fujianese association, Liu was inside watching a friend play cards, according to court testimony. Liu and several other men came out. A brawl ensued.

“Shoot him,” Chen told Lin, according to witnesses.

Lin pulled a gun and fired, the bullet fracturing Liu’s hipbone, according to court documents.

Police soon arrested Chen and Lin. A search of Chen’s house in suburban Edmond turned up three pistols, 27.5 pounds of marijuana, $97,000 in cash and eight vials of ketamine, the party drug of choice in the Chinese underworld, court records say.

Prosecutors charged Chen and Lin with assault and battery with a deadly weapon and drug offenses. The men made bail and went right back to the grow. (Lin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer declined to comment.)

Their farm was about 13 miles from Hennessey, population 2,000. Lin had bought the 10-acre spread for $280,000, court documents say. To evade a state residency law, he paid cash to a local man named Richard Ignacio to pose as the 75% owner of the medical marijuana business and obtain a license, court documents allege. Ignacio had allegedly been drafted as a straw owner by an Oklahoma City accountant, a 20-time felon named Kevin Pham, who has been charged in connection with the Kingfisher farm and other grows, court documents say. Ignacio told investigators that he “earned significant income” acting as a hired front man.

Ignacio pleaded guilty last year to being a straw owner for the Kingfisher farm. He and Pham have pleaded not guilty to other charges and are awaiting trial. They could not be reached for comment.

Lin lived at and managed the place for Chen, according to court records and interviews. For equipment, three companies in China shipped about 440,000 pounds of greenhouse parts. Even among the vast marijuana farms in Oklahoma, the spread was unusually large: it contained over 100 greenhouses and several indoor grow houses, interviews and satellite images show.

The closest neighbor, Gary Hawk, lived about a mile away. He had grown up at the place next door when it was a dairy farm owned by his parents. There was tension with the newcomers from the start. After a neighboring farmer used a plane for crop dusting, men at Chen’s farm threatened to shoot it out of the sky, Hawk said in an interview.

“The mail carrier would go by and she would stop to deliver mail there,” he said. “They would come out of the house and one guy would come out with a machete and one guy would come out with an AR-15. That was just to pick up the mail. ”

The farm employed an armed security officer stationed in a guard hut and as many as two dozen laborers, according to law enforcement officials and others who spent time there. Workers slept in trailers, the garage or the cluttered main house, where meals were prepared throughout the day and there was only one bathroom. During an inspection by fire marshals that found multiple safety violations in 2021, most of the employees presented Chinese identification and U.S. immigration documents.

Neighbors complained about uncollected trash blowing into nearby pastures and endangering cattle, said Sgt. Michael Shults of the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department.

“We’ve been out there several times explaining to them you need to put trash up,” Shults said in an interview. “Cattle get into plastics that are blowing around, you know, cattle will eat almost anything.”

Deputies soon became convinced that Chen’s crew, like many others, was trafficking its product on the black market in other states. In April 2021, Shults and other deputies intercepted a vehicle carrying 46.8 pounds of marijuana and arrested the driver, who was from Texas and did not have an Oklahoma cannabis transport license. Surveillance showed that she was one of two suspected couriers who had picked up bales at the farm that day, according to Shults and court documents.

Awash in Weed

By 2021, a mysterious investor had joined the crew at the Kingfisher farm.

Chen Wu (also known as Wu Chen, but not related to the brothers) was in his mid-40s and from Fujian, according to officials and Chinese media reports. There are gaps in his past that investigators are still trying to fill. What they do know suggests he was a heavyweight: He had ties to Chinese criminal networks involved in money laundering, drug trafficking and migrant smuggling across the country and overseas, according to officials and court records.

As a young man, Wu lived illegally in Spain, whose Chinese population has grown rapidly in the past two decades. In 2000, police on the resort island of Mallorca arrested him for entering the country illegally, Spanish law enforcement officials said.

As often happens, though, he managed to stay. He sought work authorization in 2003 and gave an address in a gritty neighborhood of Madrid. Five years later, he got in trouble for using someone else’s identity, officials said, and Spanish police issued an arrest warrant for him in 2010.

But he had already moved on. Wu spent time in the Caribbean, including Cuba. Arriving in the United States around 2016, he bounced around the country pursuing illicit schemes, officials said. In Minnesota, he married the owner of a restaurant and got legal status. During his divorce in 2020, Wu claimed in legal filings to have only about $18,000 to his name, records show.

Yet he moved to Oklahoma and invested in Chen’s farm. After months working there, he argued with his partners over money and left. 

By then, the state was awash in weed.

The number of licensed marijuana grows in Oklahoma peaked at nearly 10,000 at the end of 2021. Authorities suspected most of them of trafficking on the black market. One Chinese criminal group oversaw at least 400 grows. Another outfit smuggled truckloads to the East Coast every week, selling each for over $20 million, before investigators dismantled it.

Whether bosses or grunts, most of the newcomers were from New York, where a mob hierarchy oversees the illicit marijuana trade in Oklahoma and swoops in to collect the profits, according to law enforcement officials and court files.

“You have many different levels,” said Anderson, the state anti-drug director. “Some overseeing grows. Then another upper echelon that controls money. … They’re never around except to collect money.”

The boom caused prices to crater, hurting the legal industry. And it brought a generalized surge of crime. At airports, wary-looking Chinese immigrant laborers with backpacks became a familiar sight to law enforcement officers. So did human traffickers accompanying flashily dressed prostitutes to brothels set up for overseers of the marijuana farms. Illegal casinos appeared, seizures of ketamine soared, and robberies and violence plagued grows, dispensaries and stash houses, according to court cases and law enforcement officials.

There was complex criminality as well. In a case investigated by the FBI, a Chinese ring based in New York and Oklahoma allegedly used a cryptocurrency scheme to steal over $10 million from banks and other financial institutions. One defendant, who is now awaiting trial, was involved in a marijuana grow with an associate of Chen’s Kingfisher County crew, according to law enforcement officials and public records.

The victims of another scam were law-abiding Asian Americans. Cybercriminals manipulated the computer system of the Texas Department of Public Safety to obtain thousands of driver’s licenses destined for Asian Americans, tricking authorities into mailing the licenses to marijuana farms in neighboring Oklahoma. The suspects used the licenses for fraudulent purchases or sold them on the underground market. Police arrested the accused mastermind in New York and extradited him to Texas last April to stand trial.

Before marijuana legalization, Oklahoma was “a pretty quiet state,” said Tony Lie, president of the Oklahoma Chinese Association. “We didn’t have any Chinese criminal gangs coming here.”

Lie has lived in Oklahoma for more than 30 years. Members of his longtime organization come from several regions in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast, most of the newcomers are Fujianese. Lie said the ills of the marijuana industry have hurt the image of Chinese Americans in the state.

“We don’t want people to come to Oklahoma to do something bad for the Chinese community,” Lie said.

The shooting at the Fujianese association in 2020 had opened a window into a fast-evolving underworld. 

But it turned out to be just a prelude. 

Pitch-Black Night

Shortly before 8 p.m. on Nov. 20, 2022, Kingfisher County Sheriff Dennis Banther alerted his deputies to a hostage incident at a farm near Hennessey. 

“Everybody go 10-8,” the text message said: Go in service and rush to the scene.

Shults was the third to arrive. Four gunshot victims lay dead in the garage, and the shooter was on the loose. Deputies feared he was hiding in the sprawl of agricultural buildings known as hoop-houses.

“It was pitch black,” Shults said. “When you’re out there in the pitch dark, in the black night, and you’ve got four people down, been executed, and you don’t know if the shooter’s still on scene or not … it’s find the shooter. Survival.”

The sergeant came upon a wounded man lying in a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was Lin, the farm manager who had been the accused gunman at the Fujianese association, according to court documents.

A second survivor emerged from the darkness. A deputy struggled to ask the farmworker urgent questions using Google Translate on his phone. Deputies found another worker who had recorded part of the incident on a cellphone, leaving it near the garage with the camera on before fleeing, according to court documents and interviews.

The survivors said the killer was Wu, who had worked at the farm until about a year earlier. He had arrived in his Toyota Corolla and shot Chen and a dog that was in the garage. Wu then told his hostages he would kill them if they didn’t hand over $300,000 in half an hour.

“The Boss told his girlfriend, who was inside the garage at the time, to call her brother to get the money,” a witness told police. 

As minutes passed, Wu became increasingly agitated. The hostages tried to stop Chen’s bleeding by wrapping a long-sleeved shirt around his knee as a makeshift tourniquet. 

But Chen “was not doing very well,” the witness said. In a grim exchange, the wounded boss told the gunman “to finish him off.”

Wu pumped two bullets into Chen’s chest. Then, two hostages rushed at the gunman, who let loose a barrage that killed Chen’s brother, Chen’s girlfriend Lee and a newly hired employee. The wounded Lin ran outside and took refuge in the truck.

Although the phone video didn’t capture the actual shooting, it recorded the sound of gunshots and showed the gunman leaving the garage. 

Emergency personnel swarmed the scene. A helicopter evacuated the wounded man. Deputies spent all night doing a sweep of the grounds, finding another terrified worker hiding in a barn.

At one point, a sedan with New York plates pulled up to the farm. An Asian man rolled down the window, startling deputies, and said he “was sent” to pick up the workers remaining onsite, a deputy said.

“You need to back him off,” a sheriff’s lieutenant yelled to his deputies. Afterward, they would wonder who had sent him so quickly.

In one area of the dark compound, deputies thought they were trudging through mud. After sunrise, they realized it was human excrement — a sign of the conditions in which the farmworkers lived.

Meanwhile, the gunman sped east toward Florida. From the road, he called people in Florida, including a Chinese organized crime figure suspected of involvement in drugs and human trafficking, according to court records and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

Investigators believe Wu wanted help from smugglers to flee the country, possibly to Cuba, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., court records say. One affidavit for search warrants for Wu’s phones and online accounts seeks evidence “relating to the planning, preparation and actions taken to facilitate human smuggling.”

Soon after Wu got to Miami Beach, however, a license plate reader detected his car. Police arrested him two days after the murders. During an extradition hearing, Wu told the judge his life was in danger.

“If I go back to Oklahoma, I’ll be killed in the prison or jail,” he said through an interpreter. “I’m afraid I will be killed because these people are mafiosos.”

Aftermath

It seemed ironic: a mass murderer begging the court for protection. But a strange story told by a deputy who brought him back suggests that his fears may have been well founded.

Kingfisher County sheriff’s Lt. Ken Thompson had 25 years of experience transporting prisoners. He and another deputy drove nonstop to Florida in a marked Chevrolet Tahoe. In Miami, they checked into a motel near the airport in the evening, planning to sleep a few hours before picking up Wu from the Miami-Dade County jail, Thompson said in an interview.

They changed their minds, Thompson said, because “a weird deal happened.”

Looking out of the window of his motel room, Thompson said, he saw a car pull up next to his marked police vehicle in the parking lot. Another car appeared, then a third. The three cars drove around the motel as if doing surveillance, he said.

The deputies concluded that they “didn’t really feel comfortable sitting in this place,” Thompson said. They decided to take custody of Wu and hit the road. 

After the deputies left the jail with Wu in the back seat, the three cars from the motel reappeared, Thompson said, and shadowed the Tahoe on the highway. 

Thompson said he did evasive maneuvers to lose them, exiting abruptly and returning to the highway miles later.

“It’s just a feeling, a gut feeling that you get, and the fact that they all just kind of just paced right around us,” he said. “I mean, they flew right up on us, but then they just locked down to our speed. So it was a weird deal.”

Thompson suspects that people in organized crime somehow located the deputies in Miami. He said he did not know if their goal was to harm Wu, to free him or simply to monitor a case that was causing a commotion.

The prisoner was polite and obedient during the cross-country ride, getting out for bathroom breaks and accepting a McDonald’s breakfast burrito that the deputies offered him. After they crossed the Oklahoma state line, though, his demeanor changed, the lieutenant said.

“You couldn’t pry him out of that car,” Thompson said. “Once he reached Oklahoma, he wouldn’t get out of the car.”

On Feb. 9, Wu pleaded guilty to the four murders and assault and battery. The judge sentenced him to life without possibility of parole. (He declined an interview request.)

The quadruple murder made international headlines and set off a flurry of investigative activity and political attention. A state crackdown has reduced the number of growing operations by almost half, officials say.

Chinese immigrants involved in the marijuana industry say law enforcement has been excessively harsh on them since late 2022. Qiu (Tina) He, who operated a marijuana-related consulting firm that is under investigation, said in an interview that many Asian investors have become disillusioned by what she called discriminatory treatment and the risks of the business. She denied wrongdoing in her case and predicted the state will suffer from the loss of tax revenue if Asian investors leave.

“We are funding Oklahoma,” she said. “Oklahoma City will be like a ghost town if we leave.”

The crime in Kingfisher County was a relatively unusual eruption of violence in the Chinese underworld. Law enforcement experts say the frontier atmosphere in Oklahoma is likely a result of the sheer amount of money generated by the cannabis trade and the number of criminals it has attracted. The growing wealth and power of Chinese organized crime is causing clashes elsewhere in the country as well, experts said.

“Maybe it’s more like the Wild West as these groups keep spreading,” said Urben, the former DEA official. “You are going to have violence even if someone is controlling from above. I think there would be even more conflict if the triads were not so involved.”

About the authors:

• Sebastian Rotella is a reporter at ProPublica. An award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, Sebastian’s coverage includes terrorism, intelligence and organized crime.
• Kirsten Berg is a research reporter with ProPublica.
• Garrett Yalch writes for The Frontier
• Clifton Adcock writes for The Frontier

Source: This article was published by ProPublica and The Frontier

By Jon Miltimore

As I make my way through Paul Kengor’s wonderful book The Devil and Karl Marx, numerous things stand out about the father of communism. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s hard to imagine a more wretched human being than Karl Marx.

It was almost as if all of the worst traits of humanity were bundled into this one spiteful man, who then constructed a philosophy based on his own bitterness and self-loathing.

He was lazy but greedy, always begging for money from family and friends who feared for his happiness and sanity. Marx didn’t seem to notice or care. They were simply a means to an end for him. He was so self-centered one wonders if he was on the spectrum. His lechery and drunkenness are well chronicled. But what really struck me is that Marx was a total slob.

Here is how he was described in a Prussian police report circa 1850: “Washing, grooming, and changing his linens are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk…He has no fixed times for going to sleep or waking up….everything is broken down… . In a word, everything is topsy-turvy. To sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business.“

As someone of German ancestry, I can attest that this type of slovenliness is not a typical trait of Germans, then or now. Germans tend to pride themselves on their cleanliness.

Not Marx. And like his home, which was filthy, disordered, and disheveled, so was Marx’s corporeal body. He stunk badly and suffered from boils head to toe, including on his genitals. (The historian Paul Johnson offers a vivid description in his magnificent book The Intellectuals, but I’ll spare you that.)

At one point, Marx joked to his partner Friedrich Engels that he had become “the object of plagues just like Job, though I am not as God-fearing as he was.”

I bring all this up for a reason.

Marx was devising a system for living that had universal ambition. His manifesto demanded “a massive change” in human nature in its quest to achieve the secular righteous goal of “establish[ing] the truth of this world.” (One can old wonder if such lines were what Marx’s father had in mind when he chided his son, who “every week or two discovers a new system.”)

But for all his grand words, and all his grandiose visions for humankind, Marx could not even manage his own home. His own health. His own life.

I don’t wish to minimize these tasks.

Managing one’s own life is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes it feels as if there are a 1,000 hurdles in front of us that prevent us from living the life we want, and twice as many pitfalls. But jumping those hurdles, and learning how to avoid the pitfalls, is the path to individual growth. And that is the path to a better world.

Twenty-five hundred years before Marx was born, the Greek philosopher Plato offered better advice than the communist philosopher: fix yourself first.

Jordan Peterson has expounded on this idea more recently, advising that if someone wants to improve his own life—and the world—he should start by cleaning his room.

“If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” Peterson asks.

It’s advice Karl Marx would have benefited from. But I don’t think he would have been capable of heeding it.

One of the things I notice in Kengor’s book is that Marx received a lot of good advice from people who loved him, and worried about him. His father wrote a touching (and prophetic) letter to his son telling him he worried about his ability to find happiness.

“Will you ever—and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart—be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?” Heinrich Marx asked his son.

Karl’s response was to ask his father for more money.

About the author: Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Source: This article was published by FEE

President Biden showed his bigoted side on April 23 when he spoke in Tampa, Florida about the glory of abortion. It wasn’t abortion, per se, that got him going—it was those whom he identified as pro-life that set him off. 

To be specific, he railed against Donald Trump’s pro-life stance, saying the former president made “a political deal” with “the evangelical base of the Republican Party to look past his moral and character flaws.”

Fifty percent of all the money raised by the Democrats comes from Jews. Yet no one is going to say that Biden made a “political deal” with “the Jewish base of the Democratic Party to look past his cognitive flaws.”

Biden refuses to condemn the anti-Jewish rhetoric stemming from Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan. Yet no one is going to say that he made a “political deal” with “the Muslim base of the Democratic Party to look past his cognitive flaws.” 

Notice that Biden’s comment in Tampa wasn’t about Protestants in general. He focused exclusively on evangelicals, and that is because to take a swipe at all Protestants would be to slam the mainline denominations; they are mostly in the pro-abortion camp. He chose a subset of Protestants who are known for their pro-life convictions.

Biden intentionally red-flagged evangelicals, knowing it would appeal to his bigoted base (survey data also show that Democrats do not think highly of Catholics, either). This was a classic example of religious baiting, and it should be condemned by everyone.

As the election year progresses, look for Biden to continue with this demagogic strategy. The “devout Catholic” has no problem manipulating religion to serve his militantly secular agenda.

In 1991, an agreement concerning the “Prevention of Airspace Violations” was duly signed between Pakistan and India, stipulating mutual notification regarding inadvertent airspace violations through a hotline between their respective high military commands. Article 1 of the aforementioned agreement articulates: 

“Henceforth, both sides will take adequate measures to ensure, that air violations of each other’s airspace do not take place. However, if any inadvertent violation does take place, the incident will be promptly investigated and the Headquarters (HQ) of the other Air Force informed of the results without delay, through diplomatic channels.“

Despite having such agreements signed between the two nuclear-armed hostile neighbours where the chances of miscalculations are higher due to the trust deficit, still India chooses to remain silent. It put into question India’s malign intentions behind the BrahMos episode. 

The incident occurred at 6:43 pm on March 9, 2022, when an Indian BrahMos Missile, known for its high speed, nuclear capability, and supersonic capabilities, breached Pakistan’s airspace and landed near Mian Channu at 6:50 pm. The cautious silence maintained by India subsequent to the firing underscores potential hidden motives. The Indian Air Force, in revealing the cause of the misfire incident, cited its potential impact on the relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors as it could lead to nuclear escalation threatening the strategic stability of the region. However, despite being aware of this, India chose to maintain a cautious silence until Pakistan raised concerns about India’s hostile and aggressive actions. 

On March 11, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally summoned the Indian Ambassador to register a solemn protest against what Pakistan perceived as a flagrant transgression of its territorial integrity and sovereignty. This protest was prompted by India’s assertion that an accidental fire was responsible for an incident that Pakistan deemed as a violation. Furthermore, the United States-based Arms Control Association highlighted that the BrahMos missile possesses a range of 300 to 500 kilometers, thereby encompassing the capability to target Islamabad. Such a circumstance harbored the potential to escalate into a precarious and highly undesirable situation endangering the peace and stability of South Asian region. 

For the first time, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has elaborated on the events that took place on March 9, 2022, revealing a critical oversight in its statement to the high court. According to the IAF, the combat team, fully cognizant that the missile’s combat connectors were linked to the junction box, did not take action to prevent the Mobile Autonomous Launcher Commander from initiating a hazardous move—the firing of a Combat Missile. This error led to a missile being launched into an adjacent country, posing a real threat to entities in the air or on the ground including possibility of nuclear escalation.  

According to investigation committee, the essence of this incident was identified as the failure of an Indian commander to disconnect combat connectors before activation. In a decisive move, India applied the “President’s Pleasure” clause to scapegoat three officers of Indian Air Force by terminating their service, for the portrayal of the military’s stringent stance on such infractions. However, the three accused filed case Delhi High Court against their conviction. Moreover, the approach of Indian government raises questions about the efficacy of attributing fault to specific individuals as a means to obscure systemic issues or deliberate actions. By targeting a few individuals, there’s a risk that India might simplify a complex situation, potentially ignoring wider systemic failures in missile operations and management or concealing intentional maneuvers.

This raises doubts about the reliability of the IAF’s account of the missile launch. The incident highlights a comprehensive failure within the frameworks meant to ensure missile operation safety. The central issue was the omission to detach combat connectors from the junction box, indicating serious oversights in both physical safety measures and electronic locking mechanisms. Indian government has to explain that why such an advanced missile does only depends upon one single connecter to be launched. Isn’t it indicates either upon the irresponsible command and control mechanism or the web of lies constructed by India for eyewash?

The role of physical safety devices, such as manual pins or switches, in preventing unauthorized missile launches is critical. Their lack of use suggests either a disregard for procedure or a conscious bypassing of safety protocols. Moreover, the possibility that electronic locks, which are supposed to require specific codes to arm the missile, could be bypassed or not correctly integrated with the missile’s control systems, presents a significant security flaw.

Strategically, this incident has significant implications. It highlights the precarious balance of military readiness and the imperative of rigorous safety protocols to prevent accidental escalations. In a region marked by delicate geo-political tensions, especially between Pakistan and India, such incidents can rapidly escalate into major confrontations, undermining efforts towards regional stability and peace. The revelation calls for an introspective look into military protocols and systems to ensure such lapses are addressed and prevented, reinforcing the need for robust mechanisms to safeguard against accidental or unauthorized use of lethal military technologies.

Furthermore, the handling of the missile incident showcased a discernible bias from Western entities, aligning conspicuously with India’s narrative. The strategic blunder committed by India was seemingly overlooked by the United States, ostensibly in consideration of broader geopolitical imperatives, particularly in relation to its dynamic with China. Contrastingly, in a parallel scenario occurring in November of the same year, when a missile landed in Poland near the Russia-Ukraine border, Poland hastily attributed blame to Russia without substantive evidence. This precipitated an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) to deliberate on the situation in Poland. Subsequent investigations, however, conclusively determined that the missile had been launched from within Ukrainian territory. This episode underscores the disparate treatment meted out to similar incidents based on geostrategic interests, revealing a disconcerting asymmetry in the international community’s response. The United States continued to overlook strategic blunders by India that infringed upon the territorial integrity of other states. 

Under the Modi regime, India is continuously involved in violating international laws, cross-border terrorism, and extra-judicial executions within and outside Indian Territory. However, when caught the Indian government blames so called “rouge elements,” within Indian institutions. Such lame excuse indicates upon the vulnerabilities of Indian command and control of critical and strategic assets, making India an irresponsible state actor. 

About the authors:

• Syeda Tahreem Bukhari is a Research Officer at CISS AJK. She holds M Phil in Peace and Conflict Studies from National Defence University, Islamabad. She posts @Tehmii_Syed.
• Nimra Javed is an Associate Research Officer at CISS AJK. She holds M Phil in Strategic Studies from National Defence University, Islamabad. She posts @NimrahJaved_

Opening Remarks at the Thirteenth IMF-Japan High-Level Tax Conference for Asian Countries, Tokyo, Japan

Good morning. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the thirteenth IMF-Japan High-Level Tax Conference for Asian Countries. 

I would like to thank the Ministry of Finance for co-hosting this event and the government of Japan for their generous support. 

I am also grateful to my colleagues in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department and the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific for their help organizing this event. 

This is the first year since the COVID-19 pandemic that we have held the conference fully in person. 

Since then, the global economy has shown surprising resilience to successive shocks. As you have seen in our latest World Economic Outlook, we expect global growth to reach 3.2 percent this year.

Asia remains the engine of growth—on track to deliver 60 percent of global growth this year.

And it is ahead of the curve on taming inflation. Most countries in Asia are expected to reach central bank targets in 2024. 

But challenges remain. Providing extraordinary support in response to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine has left governments with fewer resources amid high debt and rising debt servicing costs. 

At the same time, demand for public spending is growing, including in Asia—which faces aging populations and climate change. 

And the lowest medium-term global growth prospects in decades mean less tax revenues to pay for it all. 

In this difficult environment for government budgets, mobilizing domestic revenues is essential to meet growing spending demands and build resilience against future shocks.

Good, fair, and competitive taxation remains a key element to achieve this. 

Emerging markets and developing economies can tap into their tax potential and boost their tax-to-GDP ratios by up to 9 percentage points on average. 

How? By building tax capacity. 

To do this, a holistic and institution-based approach is needed. 

That means broadening the tax base. Rationalizing tax expenditures—which are estimated to cost between 2 and 5 percent of GDP on average—can help achieve this.

It also means improving the design and administration of core domestic taxes. This includes value-added taxes (VAT), excises, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes. 

Evasion with VAT is estimated to reduce revenue by between 2 and 4 percent of GDP. Better access to third-party information and digitalized revenue administrations can go a long way to improve this.

Digitalization can also help improve tax institutions by strengthening compliance. With sufficient staffing, professionalized services, and greater transparency, these measures can help demonstrate the gains of tax reform and show policy implementation progress.

The broader institutional context also matters. Carefully prioritizing and coordinating reforms across government agencies can create a virtuous cycle—enhanced institutions improve state capacity, which in turn increases the quality and broader acceptance of tax design.

Taken together, these steps to build greater tax capacity can help the public sector mobilize revenue to meet large spending needs—from the climate transition to achieving the sustainable development goals.

But it is not enough for taxation to be stronger—it must also be fairer. Rising inequality is a global challenge that can weaken trust in public institutions and undermine democratic governance. Progressive taxes and effective enforcement can help reduce income and wealth inequality.   

As our members navigate this challenging environment, the IMF is here to support you. 

Through our policy advice and capacity development, we are helping our members improve tax policies, public spending, and revenue administration—all critical to rebuild buffers and invest in your futures. 

Right here in Asia, we offer hands-on support through our regional centers in Fiji, Thailand, India, China, and Singapore. And of course, right here in Tokyo, we have the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, which helps promote peer-to-peer learning in the region by organizing events such as this one.

With strong financial support from donors, we delivered capacity development support to 30 of our members in the region last year—helping countries analyze tax expenditures, design and implement international taxation, digitalize revenue administration, and fight tax evasion. 

Coming together—including in conferences like this one—offers the opportunity to share insights and experiences that can help us rise to the challenges ahead. Working together, we can build a brighter future for Asia and the world.Thank you.

There’s an urgent need for courts to nip ‘ambush’ litigation and the media to curb cheap sensationalism.

When the Delhi High Court, recently imposed Rs 75,000 in costs while dismissing a public interest litigation filed by a law student seeking “extraordinary interim bail” for Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, currently in judicial custody related to a money laundering case stemming from an alleged excise scam, it was an apt case but, as usual, reported obliquely by select quarters of the media providing skewed and predictably limited interpretations of the issue.

A bench led by Acting Chief Justice Manmohan deemed the petition “totally misconceived,” asserting that the court cannot grant “extraordinary interim bail” to an individual holding a high office. The court highlighted the lack of basis in the petitioner’s claim of being the custodian of the people and emphasised that the petitioner has no authority to furnish any personal bond on behalf of Kejriwal. The issue was, in limited capacity, of locus standi and that the petitioner, also a law student, had none too to boot, went against him. 

Furthermore, the court questioned the petitioner’s commitment to legal principles, doubting whether they attend college classes. When it emphasised that Kejriwal has the means to pursue legal remedies and that the petitioner lacked the authority to make submissions on his behalf, again an issue of locus standi, it brought to fore yet another widely pertinent issue – that of the trend of students of law filing writs and PILs when they lack authority, locus standi, are bad in law or, simply, politically motivated.

The court underscored the principles of equality and the Rule of Law enshrined in the Constitution, noting that Kejriwal’s judicial custody was pursuant to unchallenged judicial orders. Consequently, it dismissed the writ petition and imposed costs of Rs 75,000 to the petitioner.

Of pertinence and reported loosely, even given the miss by most media, was the fact that senior advocate Rahul Mehra, representing Kejriwal, labeled the PIL as ‘ambush’ litigation, arguing that the petitioner lacked standing. The petitioner had sought “extraordinary interim bail” for Kejriwal, citing concerns for his safety due to being confined with hardcore criminals, and claiming that his physical presence was necessary to fulfill his duties as chief minister.

Identifying himself as “We, the people of India,” the petitioner, a law student, asserted that they sought no personal gain from the matter, only to serve the public interest.

“It is common knowledge that strategically initiated Public Interest Litigations (PILs), termed as “ambush PILs,” are deliberately filed with the aim of securing dismissal and obstructing legitimate litigants from accessing the Court. In 2021, the Supreme Court had underscored the need to safeguard against the loss of significant public interest issues when determining the applicability of the doctrine of ‘res judicata’ under the provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908. It emphasised that mere initial filing and dismissal of a petition without substantial adjudication on merits should not lead to the neglect of grave public interest matters.“

Section 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, encapsulates the principles of ‘res judicata,’ prohibiting the court from revisiting issues already addressed in earlier proceedings between the same parties or parties claiming under the same title, and that have been conclusively settled.

A bench comprising Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and B.V. Nagarathna had then highlighted the concerning trend of hastily-drafted public interest litigations filed shortly after media disclosures, with the explicit intention of securing dismissal and preventing genuine litigants from accessing the Court for public interest matters.

It stressed the necessity for the Court to remain cognizant of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘ambush Public Interest Litigations’ and interpret the principles of res judicata or constructive res judicata in a manner that upholds access to justice. The jurisdiction under Article 32 is deemed a fundamental right in itself.

These observations were made by the apex court while rejecting the Centre’s argument that an NGO’s plea challenging the proposed disinvestment of the government’s shares in Hindustan Zinc Ltd should not be entertained due to a previous dismissal of a similar plea in 2012.

In this instance, the bench noted that the previous dismissal by a three-judge Bench of the Court of the petition filed by Maton Mines Mazdoor Sangh (2012) lacked substantive adjudication on the merits of their claim, thus concluding that the present writ petition is not barred by res judicata.

“Locus standi, a Latin term meaning “standing,” holds profound importance in the realm of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) before the Supreme Court of India. It serves as the threshold through which individuals or groups can access the judicial system to address issues of public concern. Locus standi serves as the gateway to justice, ensuring that only those directly affected or possessing a genuine interest can initiate legal proceedings. It acts as a safeguard against frivolous litigation, preserving judicial resources and upholding the sanctity of the legal process.“

In S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981) popularly known as the ‘Judges’ Transfer Case,’ the Supreme Court emphasised the expansive interpretation of locus standi in PILs. The petitioners, including lawyers and journalists, challenged the government’s power to transfer High Court judges. Despite lacking personal grievances, the court allowed their standing, recognising the public interest involved.

M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (1987), popularly known as the Oleum Gas Leak case, exemplifies the pivotal role of locus standi in environmental PILs. Advocate M.C. Mehta, acting on behalf of the citizens affected by the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, petitioned the court seeking relief and accountability. The court acknowledged his locus standi, underscoring the need for environmental protection. 

The Common Cause v. Union of India (2017) highlights the evolving jurisprudence surrounding locus standi in PILs. Common Cause, a non-governmental organisation, challenged the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme, asserting violations of privacy rights. The court upheld the petitioner’s standing, recognising the broader public interest in safeguarding individual privacy and constitutional rights.

Locus standi remains a cornerstone of the Indian judicial system, balancing access to justice with the need for judicial restraint. While empowering citizens to champion public causes, it also necessitates a judicious approach to prevent abuse and maintain the integrity of the legal process. Through judicious application and evolving jurisprudence, locus standi continues to shape the landscape of public interest litigation, ensuring accountability, transparency, and justice for all.

The Supreme Court of India has also turned down Public Interest Litigations (PILs) due to lack of locus standi:

In S.P. Anand v. H.D. Deve Gowda (1996) case, the petitioner filed a PIL challenging the appointment of H.D. Deve Gowda as the Prime Minister of India, alleging corruption and misuse of power. The Supreme Court dismissed the petition, stating that the petitioner lacked locus standi as they failed to demonstrate any direct or substantial interest in the matter. 

In 2014, Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma filed a PIL seeking the cancellation of coal block allocations, alleging irregularities and corruption. The Supreme Court rejected the petition, citing lack of locus standi on the part of the petitioner, as they failed to establish any personal stake or genuine interest in the matter.

And, in Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (2002), the petitioner challenged the appointment of the Director of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, alleging violations of statutory rules and nepotism. The Supreme Court refused to entertain the PIL, emphasising the petitioner’s lack of locus standi, as they failed to demonstrate any direct injury or substantial interest resulting from the appointment.

“These instances underscore the Supreme Court’s adherence to the principle of locus standi in PILs, ensuring that only those with a genuine interest or direct stake in the matter can access judicial remedies, thereby preventing the misuse of PILs for personal or frivolous motives.“

In the case of Manohar Lal Sharma v. Union of India (2014), Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma initiated a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) before the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, advocating for the annulment of coal block allocations. His plea was underpinned by allegations of systemic irregularities and entrenched corruption within the allocation process. However, despite the gravity of the accusations, the apex court summarily dismissed the petition, citing the glaring absence of locus standi on the part of the petitioner.

The Supreme Court’s ruling rested upon a foundational principle of jurisprudence, namely, the requirement of a tangible and substantial interest on the part of the petitioner. 

In this instance, Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma failed to furnish compelling evidence or demonstrate any direct personal stake in the controversy surrounding the coal block allocations. His advocacy, though ostensibly in the public interest, lacked the necessary nexus to establish a genuine locus standi before the court. 

By rejecting the petition, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its commitment to upholding the sanctity of the legal process, safeguarding against the misuse or abuse of PILs for extraneous purposes. It underscored the imperative of ensuring that petitioners possess a bona fide interest in the subject matter, thereby preventing the dilution of judicial resources and the proliferation of frivolous litigation.

This precedent serves as a beacon of clarity, elucidating the stringent standards imposed upon PILs within the Indian legal framework. It delineates the boundaries within which public interest litigation operates, emphasising the need for petitioners to furnish substantive evidence of their standing and genuine involvement in the issues they seek to address. 

“Through its discerning judgment, the Supreme Court fortifies the integrity of the judicial system, ensuring that justice is dispensed judiciously and in accordance with the principles of fairness and equity.“

In the annals of Indian jurisprudence, the case of Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India (2016) stands as a testament to the Supreme Court’s unwavering commitment to uphold the sanctity of the legal process and preserve the integrity of Public Interest Litigations (PILs). 

Renowned for his litigious activism and penchant for headline-grabbing legal battles, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent public figure, sought judicial intervention through a PIL, ostensibly to address concerns of religious encroachment upon a historical monument.

However, beneath the veneer of public interest advocacy lay a calculated agenda of sensationalism and self-promotion. The Supreme Court, renowned for its discerning scrutiny, meticulously examined the petitioner’s motives and intent. Through judicious analysis, it unraveled the petitioner’s underlying pursuit of personal aggrandisement and media spotlight, rather than a genuine commitment to the welfare of society. The court’s discernment served as a bulwark against the erosion of judicial integrity and the distortion of PILs into mere publicity stunts. 

By dismissing the PIL, the Supreme Court delivered a resounding admonition, cautioning against the insidious misuse of the judicial forum for self-serving agendas. It reaffirmed the principle that PILs are sacrosanct instruments intended to redress systemic injustices and advance the collective welfare, rather than platforms for individual grandstanding or sensationalism.

In rendering its verdict, the Supreme Court upheld the noble ethos of the judiciary, ensuring that justice remains blind to the allure of publicity and vigilant in safeguarding the public interest. The case of Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India serves as a seminal precedent, reminding litigants and advocates alike of the profound responsibility inherent in wielding the power of PILs and the imperative of genuine commitment to the pursuit of justice for the betterment of society.

‘Political’ Interest Litigations (PILs) represent a vexing challenge within the Indian legal landscape, often wielded as tools of political maneuvering rather than genuine advocacy for public welfare. These litigations, cloaked in the guise of Public Interest Litigations, seek to further partisan agendas, settle political scores, or garner media attention under the pretext of addressing public interest concerns. 

However, the Supreme Court of India has consistently demonstrated a steadfast refusal to entertain such politically motivated litigations, resolutely upholding the integrity of the judicial process and safeguarding against the erosion of the judiciary’s independence.

“In numerous instances, PILs have been employed as weapons in the arsenal of political vendetta, with litigants leveraging the judicial forum to settle scores or target political adversaries. These litigations often lack genuine public interest concerns and instead serve as conduits for advancing partisan agendas or tarnishing the reputation of opponents through legal means.“

The Supreme Court, cognizant of the dangers posed by ‘Political’ Interest Litigations, exercises meticulous scrutiny to discern the true intent behind such petitions. Through rigorous examination, the court seeks to ascertain whether the petitioner’s motives are driven by genuine concerns for public welfare or by political expediency and ulterior motives.

Upon uncovering the political underpinnings of purported PILs, the Supreme Court remains steadfast in its refusal to entertain such litigations. It emphasises the paramount importance of preserving the sanctity of PILs as instruments of justice and societal welfare, free from partisan influences and political manipulation.

By safeguarding the judiciary from undue political interference and ensuring the integrity of the legal process, the court reinforces its role as the guardian of constitutional principles and the rule of law.

The Supreme Court also plays a pivotal role in educating the public about the dangers posed by ‘politically-motivated litigations’ disguised as PILs. Through its judgments and pronouncements, the court raises awareness about the need to preserve the integrity of PILs and guard against their exploitation for political ends.

In 2019, a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sought to have political parties registered under section 29A of the Representation of People Act, 1951 declared as ‘public authority’ under the Right to Information Act, 2005.

This PIL aimed to bring political parties under the purview of the RTI Act, thereby increasing transparency in their functioning. However, it’s important to note that the PIL was filed by an individual associated with the BJP, and not the party itself.

The PIL was significant because it highlighted the need for greater transparency and accountability in the functioning of political parties. By seeking to bring them under the RTI Act, Upadhyay aimed to ensure that political parties were subject to the same level of scrutiny and transparency as other public authorities. This was seen as a crucial step towards curbing corruption and promoting good governance in the country.

By safeguarding the integrity of the judicial process and upholding the principles of impartiality and justice, the Supreme Court reinforces its role as the guardian of constitutional values and democratic principles within the Indian legal system.

Yet, the media, in its limited understanding and compounded by their overwhelming bias, again and again fails to report objectively on issues of pivotal importance in modern-day litigation. Failures include, among others, the failure to call the bluff of speedily-filed public interest litigations filed almost instantaneously after disclosures in ‘select’ media; the failure to call out attempts to misuse res judicata only to prevent genuine litigants from accessing Court; the failure to correctly analyse judicious interpretations of locus standi by the Apex Court; and the failure in maintaining objectivity even in the face of overwhelming and ‘subjective’ public sentiments. The media must never succumb to the temptation to grab eyeballs, read, ‘hits’ and ‘likes’ by hook or by crook. That, must strictly lie in the domain of influencers.

Hans J. Morgenthau, the father of realism in international relations, in the collection of his essays Truth and Power called the 21^st century the ‘Asian century’ envisioning China’s rise and the consequent Sino-US rivalry (Sempa). The East Asian and Southeast Asian states have long maintained the status quo in the region, preserving the balance of power.

However, with the changing dynamics such as Chinese increasing aggressiveness and Russian revisionist designs, the region is most likely to experience turbulence in the status quo, leading to shifts in the balance of power. For this very reason, Southeast Asian and East Asian actors such as Japan and South Korea are looking to acquire weapons and armaments and revise their self-defense strategies to protect their interests and ensure their survival, the key assumptions of Morgenthau’s realism theory. 

In classic realism, Morgenthau asserts that politics is rooted in selfish human nature, interests are defined in terms of power, and ethics have little role to play in international politics where states are the rational, unitary actors struggling for power (Cristol 239). Under such assumptions, Morgenthau explains that “the aspiration of power on the part of several nations, each trying to maintain or overthrow the status quo, leads to necessity, to a configuration that is called the balance of power and to policies that aim at preserving it” (Schweller 2). 

As Morgenthau predicted, although the United States acquired supreme naval and air power, the Chinese are predominant on the land in the Asian region (Sempa). However, in its ‘rising power’ trajectory, China has significantly added to its land and naval power so much so that the South China Sea dispute can be defined in terms of both a land and maritime conflict. Chinese claims over the South China Sea under its historic nine-dash line theory overlap with the exclusive economic zones of Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan, and also Indonesia given the increasing tensions in the North Natuna Sea. While all these other parties govern their maritime policies by the United Nations Convention on the Laws of Sea (UNCLOS), China is not a signatory to UNCLOS and so, justifies its building of artificial islands, hydrocarbon exploration, and naval exercises (Rubiolo 117). 

China aims to reshape the balance of power in Southeast Asia and the wider East Asian region to override the American hegemonial position in Asia and present itself as a regional power. To protect their interests, the Southeast Asian states are allying with each other and with the U.S. to preserve the status quo and prevent a military conflict in the region (Mastro). 

Similarly, in the wider East Asian region, the historic foes – South Korea, Japan, and Russia – are becoming prominent actors in geopolitics. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions have built up on the Korean Peninsula with North Korea launching new missiles and weapons every other day. Under such intense circumstances, South Korea is looking to increase its military potential through internal balancing as well as shoring up its alliances with external actors, even Japan (Kaplan). South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently asserted that if the North Korean threat continues to grow, South Korea might build its nuclear weapons or ask the United States to redeploy troops and weapons in the Korean Peninsula (Sang-Hun). While the Ukraine war is a major driving force, increasing Chinese belligerence is also a strong motivating factor behind this stance. 

On the other hand, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has marked Japan’s return to geopolitics as Japan seeks to revisit its pacifist constitution. In early 2023, Japan has revised significant parts of its post-1945 security posture and aims to implement a more lean and forward security policy that allows Japan to rely less on the United States and enhance its power based on its economic capabilities, strategic regional position, and military capacity (Hornung). In addition to a new self-defense approach adopted by South Korea and Japan in the wake of increasing Russian revisionism and Chinese assertiveness, both countries also attended the 2022 NATO summit as “Asia-Pacific partners” (Gubin). Moreover, the recent visit of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to Japan further asserted closer NATO-Japan relations as Stoltenberg affirmed, “No NATO partner is closer or more capable than Japan” (NATO).

The current Southeast Asian and East Asian powerplay confers Morgenthau’s realist assumptions of power struggle and survival in the Asian century. While Morgenthau well predicted the rise of China as a strong opposing force to the U.S. in the Asian region, Russian revisionism and North Korean nuclear aggression however are added contributing factors to the current balance of power dynamics in the region. While the claimants in the South China Sea dispute are struggling for their maritime rights against Chinese assertiveness, Japan and South Korea in East Asia are struggling to protect their sovereignty and increase their self-defense capabilities against threats posed by Russia, China, and North Korea. 

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

References

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• Gubin, Andrey. “The East Expands into NATO: Japan’s and South Korea’s New Approaches to Security.” Russian International Affairs Council, 11 Aug. 2022, russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/the-east-expands-into-nato-japan-s-and-south-korea-s-new-approaches-to-security/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
• Hornung, Jeffrey W. “Japan’s Long-Awaited Return to Geopolitics.” Foreign Policy, 6 Feb. 2023, foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/06/japan-china-taiwan-russia-geopolitics-defense-security-strategy/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
• Kaplan, Fred. “Why Japan and South Korea Are Arming Up.” SLATE, 31 Jan. 2023, slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/japan-south-korea-remilitarization-biden-russia-ukraine.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
• Mastro, Oriana S. Military Confrontation in the South China Sea. Council on Foreign Relations, 2020. www.cfr.org/report/military-confrontation-south-china-sea. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
• NATO. “Secretary General at Keio University: NATO-Japan partnership is growing stronger.” 1 Feb. 2023, www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_211389.htm#:~:text=In%20a%20speech%20at%20Keio,%2C%E2%80%9D%20said%20Mr.%20Stoltenberg. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
• Rubiolo, M. F. “The South China Sea Dispute: A Reflection of Southeast Asia’s Economic and Strategic Dilemmas (2009-2018).” Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad, vol. 15, no. 2, 2020.
• Sang-Hun, Choe. “In a First, South Korea Declares Nuclear Weapons a Policy Option.” The New York Times, 12 Jan. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/world/asia/south-korea-nuclear-weapons.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
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Gilgit Baltistan (GB) stands out as an unparalleled natural beauty that has great geostrategic importance. It is situated in the northern area of Pakistan and bordering with China and Afghanistan. Its strategic location makes it a main gateway to Central Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia. It is an important crossroads for trade routes connecting South Asia, Central Asia, and China. The Karakoram Highway (KKH) passes through the region to connect Pakistan with China’s Xinjiang province. The region also serves as a gateway for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), enhancing trade and connectivity between the two countries, and is considered a hub for trade and economic activities.

Historically, Gilgit Baltistan was ruled by various dynasties in ancient times.  In the early 19th century, it was a part of the Sikh Empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh but later fell under British control following the empire’s decline. In 1846, the Treaty of Amritsar ceded Gilgit to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu and Kashmir, where it remained under Dogra rule for a century. However, in 1947, amidst India and Pakistan’s independence from British rule, Gilgit-Baltistan became embroiled in conflict. A rebellion by the Gilgit Scouts led to the region’s incorporation into Pakistan, though it lacked full constitutional status and was controlled by the federal government.

Over time, the region saw various administrative changes, including limited autonomy granted in 1970 and administrative reforms introduced by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974. In 2009, it was renamed Gilgit Baltistan and granted provincial status, albeit with significant power vested in the Gilgit Baltistan Council. Therefore, efforts for further autonomy continued, with the 2018 Gilgit Baltistan Executive Order transferring powers from the council to the Gilgit Baltistan Assembly. Despite promises of provincial status, no clear constitutional status has been granted, leading to concerns among locals about their rights and representation. These concerns were exacerbated by Pakistan’s introduction of a new tax regime in 2022, reinforcing the perception of uncertainty regarding Gilgit Baltistan’s constitutional status.

Gilgit Baltistan also holds significant importance for India due to its strategic location as it shares a border with the Indian-administered region of Jammu and Kashmir. The region’s proximity to China and its connection to the Karakoram Highway make it an area of interest for India’s security and geopolitical considerations. Additionally, its significance is heightened by serving as the gateway to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), along with its broader geostrategic and economic importance. India claims Gilgit Baltistan as part of its territory due to its geostrategic importance. India believes that Gilgit Baltistan, along with the rest of Jammu and Kashmir, is an integral part of India and it is illegally controlled by Pakistan and should be returned to Indian control. Moreover, India maintains a keen interest in gaining authority over the Gilgit Baltistan region to facilitate connectivity with Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics.

Furthermore, India is alleged to be backing certain sub-nationalist factions, with the purported aim of inciting local youth against Pakistan by leveraging the region’s constitutional status. Several security concerns are relevant to the region. These include cross-border infiltration, terrorism, and separatist movements supported by India. Therefore, the rugged terrain and porous borders make it challenging to maintain strict control over the area. Moreover, the geopolitical dynamics and territorial disputes in the region contribute to the security challenges. Despite these obstacles, the Pakistani government is striving to address these concerns diligently to safeguard the safety and stability of Gilgit Baltistan.

Likewise, Pakistan has implemented a various measure to counter extremism in Gilgit Baltistan including security strengthening through the deployment of security forces to maintain law and order and prevent extremist activities. Additionally, Pakistan has focused on promoting education to foster critical thinking and awareness among youth. Dialogue and engagement are emphasized to address grievances and resolve conflicts peacefully, alongside development initiatives aimed at the socio-economic uplift of people. Community participation and engagement are encouraged to discourage radical ideologies and promote peace. These efforts collectively aim to create a peaceful and inclusive environment in Gilgit Baltistan.

In recent years, Gilgit Baltistan has witnessed significant development projects aimed at improving infrastructure, connectivity, and living standards. Notable initiatives include the expansion of the Karakoram Highway, the construction of the Diamer-Bhasha Dam, and the implementation of a tourism development plan. Additionally, efforts have been made to enhance healthcare and education facilities, construct roads and bridges, and promote economic growth. These projects seek to boost socio-economic development, enhance quality of life, and capitalize on tourism and economic opportunities in the region.

In a nutshell, to ensure the security of Gilgit Baltistan, the Pakistan government should take several proactive steps. This includes strengthening law enforcement by providing resources and training, improving intelligence sharing and coordination among security agencies, engaging with local communities to foster a sense of ownership in maintaining security and enhancing border management to prevent illegal activities. Furthermore, counterterrorism measures, socio-economic development initiatives, and community engagement programs are essential for long-term security and stability in the region. Through these efforts, the government can create an environment conducive to peace, harmony, and progress in Gilgit Baltistan.

Pakistan, a nation brimming with diverse cultures, languages, and identities, has long grappled with the challenge of fostering national unity amidst regional diversity. One significant obstacle on this path is the proliferation of sub-nationalist propaganda, which often amplifies ethnic, linguistic, and regional divisions. The ramifications of such propaganda reverberate through the social, political, and economic fabric of the country, posing a formidable threat to its stability and cohesion. In this opinion piece, we delve into the multifaceted impact of sub-nationalist propaganda on Pakistan’s national unity and explore potential pathways to mitigate its divisive influence.

Sub-nationalist propaganda encompasses various forms of communication aimed at promoting the interests and ideologies of specific regions or ethnic groups within a nation. In Pakistan, this phenomenon manifests in the dissemination of narratives that prioritize regional identities over the national identity, often fueling sentiments of exclusion and alienation among marginalized communities. Whether propagated through media outlets, political rhetoric, or social discourse, such messaging fosters a sense of us versus them and perpetuates the notion that certain groups are inherently superior or entitled to privilege.

The impact of sub-nationalist propaganda on national unity in Pakistan is profound and far-reaching. Firstly, it exacerbates inter-ethnic tensions by reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices, thereby eroding trust and cooperation between different communities. This fosters a climate of suspicion and hostility, hindering efforts towards social cohesion and integration. Moreover, sub-nationalist propaganda undermines the legitimacy of the central government and weakens its authority, as allegiance and loyalty become increasingly fragmented along regional lines. This not only impedes effective governance but also jeopardizes the country’s territorial integrity.

Furthermore, the proliferation of sub-nationalist narratives hampers economic development and exacerbates disparities between regions. By prioritizing the interests of certain groups over the collective welfare of the nation, such propaganda stifles investment, hinders infrastructure development, and perpetuates economic marginalization in neglected regions. This not only perpetuates cycles of poverty and underdevelopment but also fuels grievances that can be exploited by extremist elements, posing a grave threat to national security.

Addressing the challenge of sub-nationalist propaganda requires a comprehensive approach that addresses its root causes while safeguarding democratic principles and fundamental rights. Firstly, there is a need for proactive measures to promote inclusivity and diversity within the national narrative. This entails recognizing and celebrating the rich tapestry of cultures, languages, and traditions that constitute Pakistan’s identity while emphasizing the common bonds that unite its people.

Moreover, efforts to counter sub-nationalist propaganda must prioritize education as a tool for fostering tolerance, empathy, and mutual respect among citizens. By integrating curricula that promote pluralism and intercultural understanding, Pakistan can cultivate a generation of young people equipped to reject divisive ideologies and embrace a shared vision of national unity. Additionally, media literacy programs can empower individuals to critically analyze and discern between credible information and propaganda, thereby mitigating the influence of divisive narratives.

Furthermore, enhancing political inclusivity and representation is crucial for addressing the grievances that fuel sub-nationalist sentiments. By ensuring equitable participation and representation of all communities in the political process, Pakistan can promote a sense of belonging and ownership among marginalized groups, thereby strengthening the bonds of citizenship and allegiance to the state.

The impact of sub-nationalist propaganda on national unity in Pakistan is a complex and multifaceted challenge that requires concerted efforts from all stakeholders. By fostering inclusivity, promoting education, and enhancing political representation, Pakistan can confront divisive narratives and forge a path towards a more cohesive and resilient society. In doing so, it can harness the rich diversity of its people as a source of strength and unity, ensuring a brighter and more prosperous future for generations to come. 

In light of these consequences, it is imperative for those who support sub-nationalist propaganda to reassess their actions and recognize the importance of fostering national unity and cohesion. Instead of perpetuating divisive narratives, they should strive to promote inclusivity, dialogue, and mutual respect among all segments of society. By embracing a shared vision of citizenship and belonging, we can work towards building a stronger, more resilient nation where diversity is celebrated as a source of strength, rather than a cause for division.