International : The Atlantic

Picture of the Day: A 40-Foot Shark Lands in Pakistan

2012-02-09T14:46:22-05:00

Pakistani fish monger Qasim Khan purchased this 40-foot whale shark, discovered dead off Karachi coastline, according to the AP.

Khan was charging visitors 22 cents to see the sea beast until policemen told him that national fishery authorities ruled that viewings should be free.

Khan told the police he was just trying to recover costs, after purchasing the giant creature for $2,200.

Can Russia Save Syria? Can Anything?

2012-02-09T10:42:00-05:00

Earlier this week I criticized Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice for their high-volume indignation over Russian and Chinese vetoes of a UN resolution that would have called on Syria's president to step down. And I still think Clinton and Rice were hypocritical, given America's long tradition of overlooking the atrocities of dictators who are as close to America as Bashar al-Assad is to Russia.

Still, it looks like the public shaming of Russia may have done some good. Russian leaders are sounding pretty defensive, and Russia's foreign minister says he'll work to start negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition. His prospects can't be great, but I've got to think Russia has a better chance of influencing Assad than that UN resolution did.

I wonder if national leaders are more sensitive to international shaming now than they were back before electronics made the world seem small. Or maybe it's just that the things they're ashamed of are harder to cover up; the images coming out of Homs must make it harder for Russia to walk away. (In 1938 Chamberlain famously described turmoil in Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." Today you couldn't say that about Papua New Guinea.)

Meanwhile, I haven't found anyone with a compelling idea about what to do. Everyone seems to agree that this would be a much messier intervention than Libya (where, the New York Times reminded us yesterday, things remain a bit messy even now.) And everyone seems to agree that things will be very messy in the absence of an intervention.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, America's standard dictator narrative doesn't apply. That narrative envisions a single "autocrat," with a small coterie of thugs and lots of military hardware, oppressing the rest of the population. But it looks like Assad may be able to hold the allegiance of ethnic groups constituting a third of the country (Allawites, Christians, Kurds)--plus the military hardware.

There is at least some cause for hope in two New Republic pieces--one pro-intervention and one not--that go beyond indignant denunciations of Assad and of Russia and actually look at things from their point of view.

The pro-intervention piece notes that if Russia is to join in authorizing an intervention it will have to be guaranteed post-war use of its cherished warm-water naval base in Syria. (I would add that the same pre-requisite holds if Russia is to truly support more peaceful regime change.) The anti-intervention piece notes that if diplomacy is to work, key members of the Assad regime will have to be guaranteed safe exile after this is over.

Looking at things from the point of view of bad guys is always unpopular--certainly in America, home of the good guys--but it's just about always valuable.

Coda: I had actually raised the last point--about guaranteeing Assad safe haven--in a recent Bloggingheads dialogue with Matthew Lee of Inner City Press, who is the world's most dogged United Nations correspondent. When I asked him if it was possible to grant immunity from prosecution to a dictator who has committed atrocities, he pointed out that, actually, we just did that with another dictator who is probably at the Ritz Carlton in New York at this very moment:

Could Putin's Nationalist Crisis Lead Russia to Redraw its Borders?

2012-02-09T09:59:00-05:00

The Russian leader is struggling to balance some of his country's most powerful social and historic forces.

A masked activist carries Russia's nationalist flag in Moscow / Reuters

Don't look now, but Vladimir Putin, the man who wants to reclaim the Russian presidency in March, seems to be losing touch with one of his key constituencies - nationalists.

This development has several important implications for Russia, as well as for Russia's neighbors in Eurasia. It may improve the chances that Russia can find a balancing point between republican political ideals and nationalism, thus encouraging the development of a genuinely democratic nation-state. It just as easily may stimulate attempts to change Russia's current state borders, something that could have unpredictable repercussions.

In the aftermath of the November 2011 parliamentary election, which caused unprecedented public protests, Putin's authoritarian political model has lost a lot of its luster. Rampant official corruption and a significant spike in ethnic tension, generated by the presence of labor migrants in Russian cities, have helped fueled a sense of alienation among a broad swath of the population.

Hoping to reinvigorate his base, Putin published a lengthy article January 23 in the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, headlined Russia: The National Question. The piece is, at its core, campaign propaganda designed to persuade voters, especially Russian nationalists, that Putin's brand of nationalism offers the best way forward for Russia. Boiled down, it offers an eclectic mix of dated tenets of what can be called imperial, or civilizational nationalism, as well as a promise to strictly regulate labor migration.

For Putin, Russia is a "unique civilization" to which traditional notions of the nation-state do not apply. While he repeatedly has described Russia as a "multiethnic country," he also has argued that Russians are a "state-forming people" whose "great mission" is to "unite and bind" a unique civilization. While a multitude of ethnic groups may reside in Russia, "we are one people," united by "common culture and common values," according to Putin's vision. He doesn't specify the nature of these binding values.

Putin goes on to make the case that his authoritarian political model is the glue that keeps this unique civilization, in the form of the Russian Federation, together. As such, the prime minister/president-to-be makes it clear that no major policy changes are desirable, and that preserving the status quo provides the best guarantee for the country's long-term stability.

But if Putin believed the Nezavisimaya Gazeta piece would solidify his nationalist credentials, and mobilize nationalists behind him, he was sorely mistaken. Instead of placing Putin in the forefront of the nationalist movement in Russia, the article has shown the Kremlin to be behind the curve when it comes to current trends in nationalist ideology.

Nationalism in Russia has undergone a dramatic shift lately, one that Putin, apparently, has been slow to catch on to. Two competing strains of nationalism have always existed in the country - one that can be described as imperial, or statist nationalism, the other ethno-cultural. The first worshipped the state, its power and international prestige; the second glorified the nation, its culture and faith. Throughout Russian history, statists have tended to hold a pragmatic view of nationalism, seeing it mostly as an instrument to strengthen state institutions and bolster the authority of the ruling class. As such, statists have traditionally favored territorial expansion, followed by efforts to assimilate minority groups.

Radical ethnic nationalists, on the other hand, see no place for non-Russians in the state. This strain of nationalism, naturally, has caused particular problems for imperialists, whether they have been Russian tsars, Soviet commissars or Putinists advocating "managed democracy" and relying on energy policy to expand their influence in the near abroad.

In recent years, economic hardship has boosted the popularity of ethnic nationalism at the expense of the imperial variety. This trend is underscored by the growing popularity of the slogan "Russia for the Russians." Putin, who clearly aligns himself with the imperial school, has been reluctant to acknowledge this trend. Instead, he has tended to oversimplify the rise of ethnic nationalists, casting them as trouble-makers whose ideas could encourage the disintegration of the Russian Federation.

Another factor that Putin has been blind to is that the nationalist movement is more fragmented than ever. Some younger and better-educated imperial-nationalist thinkers have drifted away from worshipping the strong state, and have embraced democratic values. These modernists now are calling for the merger of nationalist and democratic principles, and are advocating the formation of a broad national-democratic movement to fight the ruling authoritarian regime.

Finally, another branch of Russian nationalists, somewhat aligned with ethno-cultural thinking, argues for the need to repudiate residual elements of imperial, messianic and neo-Eurasianist doctrines. They prefer to concentrate, as the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested, on the reconstruction of a Greater Russia.

Of course, what constitutes Greater Russia remains a tricky issue for all types of nationalists. Unlike imperial nationalists of Putin's generation, younger and more liberal-minded nationalists appear ready to accept the idea that the creation of a democratic Russian national state probably entails the redrawing of the country's borders. Some leading nationalist ideologues, such as Valery Solovei, foresee the secession of the Northern Caucasus, Russia's classical imperial possession, as well as the possible loss of other non-Russian territories "during our lifetime."

While Russia may shrink in some places, it could expand in others. Solzhenitsyn, for example, suggested in the early 1990s that Greater Russia should include northern Kazakhstan, an area with a large ethnic Russian population.

It's unlikely the developing split between Putin and a sizable portion of the nationalist movement will cost him the presidency. Despite the rising discontent with his governing style, he remains a virtual shoe-in to win in March. But with Putin doggedly clinging to his traditional imperial-nationalist views, there could be trouble for his administration lurking just over the horizon.

So long as genuine federalism in the Russian Federation remains absent, the state will be, in its essence, an imperial entity. Such a "mini-empire" as some commentators have called it can be ruled only undemocratically, with an unyielding Kremlin needed to keep both Russian ethnic nationalism and other ethnic nationalisms in check.

Putin has lashed out against the slogan "Russia for the Russians" and has warned that any attempts to set up region-based political parties will not be permitted. Such statements indicate that force will be necessary to maintain his vision of a "unique Russian civilization." But how forceful can Putin be, if a large number of nationalists, perhaps a majority, are not behind him?

This article originally appeared at EurasiaNet.org, an Atlantic partner site.

Syria On Track to Kill More People Than Died in Both Intifadas

2012-02-09T09:30:27-05:00

It's estimated that roughly 6,000 people have been killed in the Syrian uprising since it began last March, and the Assad regime is upping the tempo of murder (thanks in part to cover provided by Russia). Hard numbers are difficult to come by these days, because Syria is too dangerous a place for human rights monitors to function safely. The United Nations estimate of 5,400 deaths as of January does not take into account the recent slaughters in the city of Homs.

I was curious to see how long it would take for Bashar al-Assad to kill more people than died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since December, 1987, when the first Intifada erupted, so I went to the website of B'Tselem, Israel's top human rights group, and did some addition. A total of 2,294 Palestinians and Israelis were killed in the first Uprising. This number includes Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces, Israeli soldiers and civilians killed by Palestinians, and Palestinians killed by other Palestinians. The second Intifada, which began in December of 2000, took many more lives. The total number of Palestinians and Israelis killed since 2000 is 10,760, according to my math. So, a total of 13,054 Palestinians and Israelis have been killed since 1987. Assad has killed roughly 6,000 people over the past 11 or so months. So, to be conservative about this, let's say that it will take him another 10 months to reach the 13,000 mark. (Although I do expect the pace of state murder to increase, barring some sort of intervention.)

And just to provide you with another benchmark of violence, roughly 3,500 people were killed during the three decades of the Irish Troubles. So, Assad is quite the achiever. Of course, in 1982 his father murdered somewhere between 10,000-25,000 people in one city, Hama, over a couple of days, so the son is still a piker domestically.

Afghanistan's Opium Child Brides

2012-02-09T07:23:39-05:00

As the heroin trade suffers in Afghanistan, poppy farmers are marrying off their daughters, sometimes to unsavory and far-away men, to pay their debts.

A 40-year-old Afghan man sits next to his 11-year-old bride, Ghulan / AP/UNICEF

She was a 12-year-old girl, with fiery green eyes and defiance on her face. Her father had promised her hand to a stranger from Helmand province who didn't speak her language, was more than 30 years her senior, and already had eight children. Her father had borrowed the man's money for his poppy venture. And now it was up to her to repay that debt.

Darya, as she was called in a new book by Fariba Nawa, Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey Through Afghanistan, represents a growing trend in Afghanistan, a trend in which families marry off their daughters to settle debts originating from the opium trade. "Opium brides," they called them.

Nawa, an Afghan-American journalist, spoke on January 10 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on the impact Afghan's opium economy has on girls like Darya. Nawa met the girl when she traveled to Afghanistan in the early 2000s. She witnessed a town deluged with opium addicts and countless widows whose husbands and sons had died while smuggling drugs across borders. But nothing shook her like Darya. It was the child bride who opened up to her, talked to her as if she was a savior, while others around her hid behind their fear. Darya's narrative, as well as stories of those like her, make perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the opium trade.

"What's the saddest part? What's the most interesting part of this story to you?" she had asked her guide before she met the girl. "It's the opium brides," her guide had answered. And when Nawa asked him to introduce her to one, he responded, "Oh, which one? There are so many of them."

MORE FROM THE PULITZER CENTER:
Too Young to Wed
Child Marriage: Documenting Sorrow
The Secret World of Child Brides

Child marriage exists throughout the world. Even if the number has decreased globally over the past 30 years, 64 million women ages 20 to 24 still marry or enter a union before they turn 18, according to a UNICEF estimate. In Afghanistan, that would be about 378,000 women. Although Kabul has passed a law to curb the practice, raising marriageable ages to 18 for males and 16 for females, more than 60 percent of marriages in Afghanistan involve girls below the legal age.

Marrying girls at a young age is nothing new to Afghanistan. For centuries, marriages have been used to settle debts and improve a family's financial condition. Many poor households see their daughters as an economic burden and would rather send them off quickly to their husbands. They have also treated women and girls as a means to settle monetary disputes, making them "loan brides" in exchange for debt relief. "But those marriages are within family," Nawa said. Cousins would marry. Two brothers would betroth their son and daughter to each other. But not many would promise their daughters to strangers from a completely different town, men with wives and families, who smuggle drugs and don't speak their language. "It has been done in the past," Nawa said. "But the level and how many are being done is unprecedented inside Afghanistan right now."

Nawa attributed that spike to the opium trade, Afghanistan's biggest industry. Despite the 65 percent increase in eradication in 2011, the country still managed to roll out a growth of seven percent in net poppy cultivation. As a result, opium production in Afghanistan has exceeded global demand for the past several years. A sharp production decline in 2010 barely hurt the world's supply; there was no major shortage of heroin -- a derivative of opium poppy -- reported from the consumer markets. The country is now the center of global heroin manufacture, with roughly 300 to 500 operating laboratories producing about 380 to 400 tons of heroin per year.

The Taliban regime relied on opium production for revenues. It legalized the farming, trafficking and processing of the illicit crop. Its agricultural program consisted of flying experienced poppy farmers all over Afghanistan to teach people the techniques of opium cultivation.

It didn't take much to convince Afghans to embrace poppy. Decades of war have destroyed their traditional orchards. Cyclical drought and poverty hinder Afghan farmers from growing high-profit fruit and saffron, which require an investment in irrigation systems. In the end, it was the poppy that met all the prerequisites: higher yield with less land, little irrigation, and greater profits. With the price high and rising -- 2011 gross income from opium per hectare has skyrocketed 118 percent from the year before -- it would take a lot more than free alternative crop seeds and fertilizer distribution to wean Afghan farmers off opium production.

Poppy seeds and fertilizer also cost money, but start-up farmers are willing to approach traffickers, asking to borrow money with a promise to repay with kilos of opium at harvest time. They know opium is much more promising than wheat. As eradication efforts ramp up, however, farmers who don't have enough to bribe officials end up watching their lucrative crop ripped up and flattened. Gone with it is their hope for a better future -- and, sometimes, their daughters.

"This is a business deal, essentially," Nawa said. "This has become a more common practice because of the opium trade, because this society has disintegrated and family is being interrupted."

Poppy farmers who give their daughters in marriage to lenders receive quittance -- and sometimes a cash dowry that can be used to start a new life. Even so, such opportunity offers little consolation to those who have chosen that path; loan brides are considered a shame to the culture. "The fathers who sell their daughters to settle their opium debts are ashamed of what they're doing," Nawa said. "It is not something that is accepted or normal."

There are no statistics on how many girls have been traded as a result of the opium trade. Data collection isn't the norm in Afghanistan--not even for birth records. And when these marriages are performed without being registered with the state or religious authorities, statistics are likely to be clouded by severe inconsistencies; the real number of girls entering marriage before 18 could be much higher.

Despite the shame and heartache the opium trade has brought Afghan families, poppy cultivation is proven increasingly resilient. For a country that's ranked almost at the bottom of the Human Development Index, growing opium poppy can be a real opportunity. Stories of those who have improved their lives through the illicit crop continue to be a source of inspiration. There are farmers who grow rich and reinvest the opium money to rebuild their communities. There are women who enjoy the ability to work; cultivating and processing opium are done within a compound, thus available to women under the Taliban regime. This gives women a chance to become an integral part of the society.

Still, many farmers want to stop growing poppy, but they won't until they can establish other sources of income.

And it's possible. Nawa has seen it: a woman who was able to quit opium cultivation once she had provided alternative sources of income for her family.

Poppy had given her the money to buy her son a car that he turned into a taxi. She also bought her daughter a carpet frame that turned into another source of revenue. "I think women who do grow poppy are very willing to stop growing poppy if they're able to invest in other businesses," Nawa said.

But such cases are rare. The source of strength in Afghanistan--the Afghan family--has been weakened by the drug trade, war and violence, according to Nawa. Families are broken. People are drowned in a never-ending cycle of poverty. Corruption has sucked away most aid money that could have pulled Afghanistan out of the heroin assembly line, she said.

The country, it seems, has become a network of spider webs that torture the innocent lives as much as the wrongdoers. And girls like Darya are a part of this web, though not intentionally. After many kind attempts to convince her to go with him -- each met with Darya's firm rejection -- the Helmand smuggler finally took her away, marrying the girl before she even reached puberty.

"There are many sad stories," Nawa said. Despite much tragedy she has witnessed while documenting how the drug trade has impacted women, she sees a glimmer of hope. "One thing that you will know, or you will see among the characters is the resilience and their ability to just pick up and keep living. And I think that's where the hope is for women."

This story was reported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, an Atlantic partner site.

Razing History: The Tragic Story of a Beijing Neighborhood's Destruction

2012-02-09T07:15:00-05:00

As the Chinese capital develops, the demolition of historic neighborhoods and displacement of once-secure families is becoming one of the city's most controversial issues.

Children play in the ruins of a residential neighborhood in the process of being demolished / AP

BEIJING -- On a cloudy day last March, a retired office clerk surnamed Sun stood outside of his courtyard home in the heart of Beijing, lit a cigarette, and tried not to dwell on the eight-acre swath of rubble down the street that used to be his neighborhood.

Despite an inundation of official bulletins urging residents not to indulge in gossip, the remainder of Sun's street was teeming with whispers. Some were tales of arrests and disappearances -- a botched protest, a terrorized lawyer -- but most were attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: what would they build once the street was razed?

Sun told me that he was confident that he knew what it would be. About 200 meters east of his doorstep, behind a high red wall under the perennial watch of large, uniformed men in unmarked vans, was Zhongnanhai, a sprawling, closed compound home to the offices and reception halls of the central leadership of China.

"They must have run out of space," Sun said, flicking away his cigarette.

The demolition of Beijing's historical courtyard alleyways, called hutong, has long been one of the city's most controversial issues. At the height of the city's headlong rush to modernity in the 1990s, about 600 hutong were destroyed each year, displacing an estimated 500,000 residents. Seemingly overnight, the city was transformed from a warren of Ming dynasty-era neighborhoods into an ultramodern urban sprawl, pocked with gleaming office towers and traversed by eight-lane highways.

Remaining hutong dwellers are worried, and for good reason -- they have a lot to lose. Their courtyard houses have survived centuries of war and revolution, the strain of collective ownership, and the turbulence of early economic reform. Passed down from generation to generation, they are often last-remaining monuments to entire family lines.

Patchy compensation schemes have left some displaced families insolvent. Unable to afford a new home in the old city, which is gentrifying almost as quickly as it's disappearing, they are forced to move into shoddy high-rise communities on the city's exurban outskirts.

While some hutong residents are resigned to their fates, others are more resistant. Over the past few years, hutong preservationists have succeeded in forestalling some high-profile redevelopment projects, such as a plan in 2010 to refashion a large swath of hutong north of the Forbidden City as a cluster of museums and public squares.

But Zhongnanhai-area demolitions are not like other demolitions. They're more frightening, less easy to understand. Their location eliminates the possibility of a commercial motive. I called the neighborhood police and the district government looking for answers, but their spokespeople hung up the phone or put me through to disconnected lines. Remaining tenants responded to my questions about their neighborhood's future with incredulous stares.

"Before they build something, you never know what they will build," said He Shuzhong, the director of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, a Beijing-based NGO that works on hutong preservation. "Every time it's the same. They give some money, the people leave. Some people object, but in general, they can't be helped."

"Looking at a map," he said, "it's not hard to understand the situation"

Indeed, in the absence of domestic media coverage (experts including He affirmed the real possibility of a reporting ban), maps do tell an intriguing story.

In January, 2005, over a decade of negotiations between officials and hutong preservationists culminated in the passage of a sweeping proposal called the Beijing City Master Plan. The Master Plan designated a large swath of hutong in central Beijing as a "historical and cultural protected area," immune from redevelopment. On a map of protected areas, the hutong around Zhongnanhai glowed in a bright, safe yellow. Obviously, it didn't do much good.

Overhead satellite images viewed on Google Earth suggest that the protected safe zones were neither safe nor protected. In images from early 2005, a small area by Zhongnanhai's eastern border appears as a dense cluster of trees and rooftops, virtually indistinguishable from any other hutong neighborhood in Beijing. In an image from April, 2006, it is a construction zone.

A walk through the neighborhood is enough to understand its transformation -- the old hutong is now concealed by a high brick wall, the tops of vaulted roofs and boxy office buildings visible from beyond its unmarked gates.

"That over there is Zhongnanhai. You can't go in there," said a nearby restaurant owner who only gave his surname, Fu, waving his hands as if to refuse a favor.

Yao Yuan, an urban planning expert at Peking University, told me that he believes that the Zhongnanhai-area demolitions may be a belated consequence of city planning decisions made over 60 years ago, when the ruling Communist Party first came into power.

"Every area of Old Beijing is in accordance with the kind of thought that went into city planning in the Ming and Qing dynasties," Yao said. Until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, he explained, Zhongnanhai and its surrounding hutong lay within the sacrosanct heart of Beijing -- the walled Imperial City, built by Emperor Yong Le in the early 15th century.

Although most of the Imperial City was occupied by the Forbidden City and its surrounding lakes and gardens, a small area by its western wall -- the site of the recent demolition -- was brimming with upper-class courtyard homes and ornate temples. "Because it was home to officials in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the architectural quality of the structures in this area were very high," Yao said.

After Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen Square rostrum in 1949, however, he decided that China ought to leave its history in the past. Mao demanded the transformation of Beijing from a "consumption city" to a "production city," an industrial metropolis that would lead China into the modern age.

To help lead his urban planning committee, Mao hired Liang Sicheng, an architecture professor at Tsinghua University with a graduate degree from the United States. Liang, inspired by his time in America, envisioned Beijing as a political and cultural center akin to Washington, DC. He proposed that the regime establish its administrative center in the city's western suburbs, preserving the Old City as a living monument to Beijing's past.

But Mao had declared the People's Republic in Tiananmen Square, forever linking Communist Party rule to the historic square, and his officials believed that an adjacent administrative quarter would better promote the square's political gravitas. The Forbidden City was a sufficient reminder of Beijing's history, they argued. In June of 1953, Liang's proposal was rejected.

In late January, after a three-year battle between hutong preservationists and the Beijing government, the courtyard home where he lived through much of the 1930s was razed by a property developer.

"Once a mistake is made," Liang once wrote, "it may take a hundred years to correct it, during which residents will have to endure endless sufferings." In other words, Mao's party put politics before urban planning, and now some residents are paying for it with their homes.

Yao, looking back from the Beijing of today, put it in simpler terms. "Now, they don't have as much space as they need for their work," he said. "So they need to keep on expanding into the Old City, constructing new office buildings. And this brings problems."

Until last February, Zhao Xi, 39, lived in a small courtyard house west of Zhongnanhai that her great grandfather had built soon after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. During the 2008 Olympics, she explained, the city government sent a team of workers to replace her neighborhood's old wiring and plumbing, leading many residents to believe that, despite their 20-year-old fears, the neighborhood would not be destroyed.

But in September 2010, she received a notice that her hutong had been recently inspected by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning.

"The current situation of the Old City's people, land and housing, and the residents' living situation is relatively poor," it read. "At the same time, Old City protective work is complicated work. Melding the style of the Old City with the development strategy of a world city is of the utmost importance in Beijing's Old City protection."

Two weeks later, Zhao's home was marked for demolition.

"A lot of people, after leaving, would go back, to see their old neighbors," said Zhao. "But I won't go back. I think it would be too hard to take." Her parents, who fought for years to regain ownership of the house after it was expropriated under Mao, had been back twice. Both trips ended in tears.

I decided to take one last walk through the neighborhood on a bright afternoon in early February, but found the site sealed off by a high concrete wall. I followed the perimeter until I came across a discrete metal door. Within seconds, somebody opened it.

The man wore a black police coat and ushered out another man, who was wearing a hardhat. Although I only caught a glimpse of the site, I could see immediately that the last remaining street was gone. The space was enormous, the ground covered in white dust from the wreckage. A fleet of empty police cars was parked to one side. A few men walked around holding clipboards.

Then I saw it, at the far end of the expanse -- one house was still standing. Of course it could be empty, I thought. But what if it wasn't? I strained my eyes for signs of movement. The house's roof still looked intact, but its walls were crumbling, its windows broken. Under the circumstances, what could possibly justify staying behind?

The black-coated man and I locked eyes for a moment. Before I could say a word, he closed the door.

How Do You Say 'Badonkadonk' in Chinese?

2012-02-08T15:09:03-05:00

The story of OMG! Meiyu, Jessica Beinecke's wildly popular web video series for Chinese who want to learn American slang.

Jessica Beinecke's "OMG! 美语 (American slang)" / YouTube

That language shapes culture and vice versa seems intuitive and axiomatic. Language and educational exchanges have always been a defining feature of the U.S.-China relationship. Regular people-to-people exchanges, including the State Department's "100,000 Strong" initiative started under President Obama, have been important to the bilateral relationship because of persistent and often serious mutual distrust. The experience of teaching English in China was perhaps most memorably captured in Peter Hessler's book Rivertown. Like Hessler and many Americans since, I too was once an English teacher in China, attempting to dissect the ingenuity of Jay-Z and explicating Hamlet's neurosis to my students. Though I can't say they fully understood the significance of H.O.V.A and To Be or Not to Be (I'm still not sure I do either), I hope they at least learned something about the diversity of America.

Given that experience, I was delighted to discover that, in the age of YouTube and social media, American English lessons have been taken to another level. Meet Jessica Beinecke, a Voice of America journalist who decided that she could leverage all the web 2.0 tools at her disposal to create a show that taught Chinese youth American slang. It's shot with only a webcam and was exclusively on Chinese Youku until recently migrating to YouTube. A profile in the Washington Post describes the show:

Beinecke's two- to three-minute shows appear online only. She posts on Weibo, a Chinese social media site, where she has more than 100,000 followers. For each episode, she sifts through American lingo, introducing expressions and explaining their meanings in Chinese in her signature peppy, comical style.
"You can look up the word 'cow' in the dictionary, but knowing what that means, knowing that you can call someone that? In a dictionary, it's really hard to find," Beinecke said. The same may be said for "rocking a dress," "sweating bullets" or having a "muffin top," expressions familiar to "OMG!" watchers.
Beinecke's fans, particularly teens and 20-somethings, post adoring messages on Beinecke's page and eagerly await each installment from the woman they know as Bai Jie, the Chinese name given to her by a friend when she began learning Mandarin in 2006. Only later did she learn there is also a Chinese porn novel called "Bai Jie," which means white and pure; she kept her name, regardless.

Beinecke went viral in China much earlier than in the U.S., having somehow struck a chord with a video about boogers that garnered 1.5 million hits:

She now has posted hundreds of shows -- covering everything from "badakadonk" to "chillax". The solo effort has paid off, winning hundreds of thousands of adoring Chinese fans on Weibo and accumulating nearly 8 million total hits on the shows.

I caught up with Beinecke recently to chat about her show and her Chinese language training:

How did you come up with the idea of doing the web show?

OMG! Meiyu started as a monthly travel TV show produced for the China branch of VOA. The first travel show we produced focused on U.S. and UK English differences in April 2009, which we shot in London and New York. I hadn't been on television before that, having studied public relations and Chinese at Ohio University. Television was not my goal at all until I found the VOA job on Monster.com.

OMG is an acronym very popular among Chinese and American youth culture. Young Chinese people take it to the next level and say "Oh My Lady Gaga!" So we settled on a name that represents a slang term that both American and Chinese cultures use, and I think we reach a lot more people on a daily basis.

We posted the "Yucky Gunk" episode last August and it went viral. You certainly can't find a lesson on "sleepies" and "boogers" in a textbook, which I think is why it resonated with our viewers. Although we discussed some gross terms in that episode, like snot, those words are useful in American English. Calling someone a "snot" is sort of like calling someone a snob, but you first need to know what snot means.

Was VOA immediately supportive of the idea?

Last spring I actually gave a presentation about turning the TV show into a daily online show. I don't think anyone could have imagined the overwhelmingly positive response we've received. We now have more than 200,000 followers and 7.8 million hits in 6 months. I am so excited to wake up everyday and interact with the cross-cultural community we've developed, and VOA has been extremely supportive.

How much does the video personality resemble your off-screen personality? Did you intentionally adopt this "bubbly" personality because you were trying to reach a young Chinese audience?

First of all, I took an entire year of acting classes at the Studio Theater in D.C. last year because, after shooting the D.C. travel show for VOA, I realized I didn't know how to act! Those classes really helped me open up my emotions and develop confidence in front of the camera.

But I am also a naturally bubbly person. I guess I take after my father, who's the funniest and most encouraging person in my life. Being an eternal optimist, he would always say "Jessi, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life." He was the one who initially supported me when I started studying Chinese, and said it was the best investment he's ever made.

I'd say my default disposition is lively. But subconsciously, my Chinese was very influenced by living with female Chinese roommates in China. We spent so much time talking and giggling together, and I think their lighthearted silliness sort of comes out in my Chinese on the show. Also, I think it's very important to be authentic. I would never put any slang terms or idioms in the show that I wouldn't say to my friends. I think it's important to be as genuine as possible because our young Chinese viewers are coming to me everyday to learn authentic American slang.

I think social media presents a unique opportunity to let followers create the content. Every week I ask our followers on Weibo which words they want to learn, and I get hundreds of responses. So each episode is based on user-generated content, which is the core of this cross-cultural learning platform.

Have your videos received a lot of attention in China?

Yes, we have a very active fan club in Beijing. They threw an OMG! Meiyu party in December when I was in Beijing, and I got to meet hundreds of fans.

How much Chinese language training have you had?

I have the equivalent of about the fourth year Chinese language level. I reached fluency in 1.5 years, thanks to Middlebury College's Chinese language programs. I admit I wasn't the best student in class. I've always wanted to learn just enough to connect with people, make friends and learn more about the culture. I don't know every "chengyu" [Chinese idiom] and I can't recite ancient Chinese poetry. But I am really proud of the way we're connecting two cultures and starting conversations about language learning every day.

Being based in DC, how do you keep up your Chinese, other than doing the videos?

Shooting and posting the daily videos is only the first step in interacting with our followers. I "re-Tweet" their comments 24/7 to keep the daily conversations flowing, and that is always conducted in Chinese and English. Also, 95% of my coworkers are from Mainland China or Taiwan. My interaction with them keeps me fresh.

What advice would you give to US high school and college students who are studying, and perhaps struggling with, Chinese?

1) Watch OMG! Meiyu.

2) Learn the characters. Write them individually and in sentence form over and over. Muscle memory sticks!

3) You don't need to go to Middlebury or study abroad. You can start very cheap on your own by finding a language partner. I think an informal language exchange is so much more fun to have with peers. It takes a lot of motivation and drive to commit to a weekly meeting, but it's worth it.

4) Listen to as much Chinese-language music as possible. I love singing and dancing, so it barely feels like studying when you're having a great time.

What has been the hardest American slang to translate into Chinese?

Translating slang can be difficult because sometimes a direct translation doesn't exist. I mean, what's the Chinese equivalent of "badonkadonk" or "jiggly!?" Our followers love those fun words, and I provide a Chinese explanation for the American slang terms.

I also share my daily routine on a regular basis, which includes an ice-cold fruit smoothie every morning. Our followers were quick to comment and warn me of the impending health risks one faces when drinking cold beverages in the morning [this reaction is familiar to anyone who has spent enough time in China]. I love starting discussions about these US-China cultural differences because we have so much fun comparing and contrasting our day-to-day lives.

This is how soft power is done, by individuals trying and doing, unencumbered. These efforts add up and they are powerful.

Monti Warns of European Disintegration

2012-02-08T14:45:46-05:00

photo credit: Reuters

The ancient North African Christian theologian St. Augustine once wrote: " Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies."

That feeling of bitterness, national self-directed anger, and disdain among nations inside Europe for each other has become palpable and manifested itself in Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti's comments last night on The News Hour.

In an interview with senior correspondent Margaret Warner, Monti said "The Eurozone crisis has indeed brought about quite a bit of misunderstandings and the re-emergence of old phantoms about prejudices between the North, the South of Europe, and a lot of mutual resentment."

The Warner-Monti discussion focuses on the broad impact of the European financial crisis and the economic crush underway in Italy as well as the fate of the Euro. Prime Minister Monti hinted that the Eurozone crisis could not only lead to the disintegration of the Euro, but of Europe itself.

He stated "And it is very, very important that we all take this with great attention in order to avoid that something that was meant to be the culminating point of the European construction -- namely, the single currency -- turns out to be, through psychological negative effects, a factor of disintegration of Europe."

Europe may not disintegrate tomorrow -- and the Euro could some how squeak by in a two-speed European deal, but the deep divisions between those citizens who are now choking under the prospects of long-term, imposed debt burdens and the loss of sovereignty to German bankers and financiers could have the impact of a 21st century Versailles Treaty that dissolves the ties that have bound together the once fractious region.

Monti's comments are not the reckless sort that Silvio Berlusconi might have made. They are serious and sobering.

Picture of the Day: Fire and Water at a Swasthani Festival in Kathmandu

2012-02-08T14:13:10-05:00

Reuters

Pious Hindus offered prayers and incense at a suburb of Kathmandu yesterday, in honor of the month-long Swasthani festival, which celebrates the Goddess Swasthani.

Swasthani is thought to grant wishes to the pure-heaerted. Some Hindu women, such as those pictured in the background of this photo, will ask Swasthani for good husbands.

Some Suggestions for New Assad E-Mail Passwords

2012-02-08T12:25:48-05:00

Bashar al-Assad's office e-mail accounts were hacked by the Anonymous collective the other day, in part because... well, it's hard to believe:

While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn't take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad's office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study.

As a public service to the Ba'ath regime in its dying days, I thought I would suggest a few alternative e-mail passwords he could use:

1. MyWifeIsSoHot
2. MyWifeIsSmokingHot
3. QueenRaniaIsSoHot
4. SergeiLavrovIsSoHot
5. Rosebud
6. ArabSpringGotoHellAsstards
7. KissMyAssSusanRice
8. IWasGoingtoExpelYouAnywayHamas
9. JewsSuck36
10. IWantDaddyNow

Update: Max Fisher has contributed numbers 11-13, in honor of that wonderful and incisive Vogue profile of the Assads:

11. WildlyDemocracticPrinciples
12. JoanJulietBuckIsSoHot
13. Vogue4Lyfe

China's Land Grab Epidemic Is Causing More Wukan-Style Protests

2012-02-08T09:27:48-05:00

Every year, local governments appropriate land from 4 million rural Chinese.

Residents of Wukan rally against land grabs and other forms of corruption / Reuters

MORE FROM THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

A few days ago, the Global Times posted a brief opinion piece that questioned the West's preoccupation with the Wukan village uprising last year and concluded: "China cannot be understood by focusing on the small details, something Western media would do well to appreciate."

Despite this sage advice, I've always liked details and found myself captivated by a just-released survey of 1,791 Chinese farming households across 17 provinces. Conducted by Landesa Rural Development Institute, Renmin University, and Michigan State University, the survey explored issues surrounding rural land use and retention. The survey is especially valuable because it has been conducted five times since 1999, thereby providing a sense for whether conditions have been improving or worsening over time.

Some of the most striking findings:

There has been a steady increase since 2005 in the number of "land takings" or compulsory state acquisitions, and about 43 percent of the villages surveyed have been subjected to such land takings over the past decade.

The mean compensation that the local government paid to the farmers was approximately $17, 850 per acre. When it was resold by local authorities, mostly to commercial property developers, the mean price was $740,000 per acre.

When farmers are relocated or "urbanized," only a bit more than twenty percent gained an urban hukou or registration; 13.9 percent received urban social security coverage; 9.4 percent received medical insurance; and only 21.4 percent had access to schools for their children.

Every year, local governments appropriate land from 4 million rural Chinese.

None of this is a good deal for the farmers, and the result, according to Chinese researchers, is that land conflicts are the source of 65 percent of the more than 180,000 protests China experiences annually.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who never misses an opportunity these days to push for a bit more political reform, made the issue of farmers' rights a central point in his early February 2012 visit to Guangdong. He noted, "The root of the problem is that the land is the property of the farmers, but this right has not been protected in the way it should be." Wen also noted, "We must certainly protect the voting rights of farmers, and be unwavering in properly carrying out village self-governance and direct election of village committees."

Despite Wen's best efforts, without a real system of official accountability or the rule of law, there seems little likelihood that farmers will gain the upper hand any time soon. The Global Times notwithstanding, the details of the survey data say it all: more Wukans are on China's horizon.

This article originally appeared at CFR.org, an Atlantic partner site.

Iranian Website Calls for Murder of All Jewish Israelis

2012-02-08T09:25:09-05:00

This just in from the Department of Non-Ambiguous Iranian Threats to Wipe Out The Jews: A regime-linked website, Alef, has produced an article calling on Iran to use its missile arsenal to kill all of Israel's Jews, and describes just how this could be done. The author, Alireza Forghani, is linked to office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the article's release coincided with Khamenei's latest "Israel is a cancerous tumor" speech.

Here's a bit of Forghani wrote (you can read the entire translation on MEMRI's website):

"Israel is the only country in the world with a Jewish majority. According to the last census of [the] 'Israel Central Bureau of Statistics,' this country has a population of 7.5 million, including 5.8 million Jews. The other ethnicities in [its] population structure are Muslims, Christians, Druzes [sic], and Samarians. The largest ethnic minorities are [the] so-called Israeli Arabs."
"Residents of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and H[a]ifa can be targeted even by Shah[a]b 3 [missiles]. Population density in these three adjacent areas composes about 60% of [the total] Israeli population. Sejjil missiles can target power plants, sewage treatment facilities, energy resources, [and] transportation and [communication] infrastructures; and in the second stage, Shahab 3, Ghadr, and Ashura missiles can target urban settlements until [the] final annihilation of Israel['s] people.

But here is my favorite part of the MEMRI entry:

Alireza Forghani provides the following details about himself on his blog:

"forghani_alireza@yahoo.com"

"Married, a resident of Tehran, born August 31, 1983
"Telephone: 09124906386
"Favorite book: The Absolute Rule of the Jurisprudent
"Favorite sport: Jihad in fierce war"

I've emailed at Forghani at his Yahoo address, seeking an interview.

Azerbaijan Is Eager to Host Eurovision—but Not Any of Its Gay Fans

2012-02-08T09:14:04-05:00

When the European supershow arrives at Baku in May, openly gay celebrants won't be welcome.

Azeri youth celebrate their country's victory in the 2011 Eurovision contest, which means Baku will host the enormously popular event next / Reuters

With performers from all over Europe getting ready to descend on Baku in May to compete for the best pop act of the year at Eurovision, conservative, tightly managed Azerbaijan is confronting a host of its cultural and political demons.

Money is not an issue here. The hydrocarbon-rich country is splurging big bucks to dazzle viewers with a show worthy of Eurovision, an annual exercise in glitz and disco beats. But the contest will bring along demographics that are not particularly popular in Baku -- journalists, Armenians and gays.

Since the contest is known to have a strong gay fan base, some thought it is a perfect occasion to hold a gay pride march. The proposal immediately sparked an angry response. Opponents demanded that Baku keep its streets straight with a "Say No to Gay Pride in Baku" Facebook page, where the merits and demerits of homosexuality are being hotly debated.

Interestingly enough, the head of one organization that deals with LGBT issues in Azerbaijan is also not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of a gay pride march. "Neither our community, nor [the] majority of representatives of sexual minorities are ready for it," commented Kamran Rzayev, chairperson of the Gender and Development non-profit group, told News.az.

The chances for a gay pride march in Baku may look remote, but many in Azerbaijan hope that the music contest nonetheless will become a catalyst for change. Human rights activists have tried to use the opportunity to draw attention to the country's poor democratic credentials, while some observers hope that the event will contribute to peace-building between Azerbaijan and its main antagonist, Armenia, which plans to take part in Eurovision.

The government, busy decorating the city for the razzle-dazzle in May, keeps saying that everyone -- Armenians, included -- is welcome to Baku, but how far that welcome will extend to gays remains a toss-up.

This article originally appeared at EurasiaNet.org, an Atlantic partner site.

How Germany Gamed the Euro and Worsened the Crisis

2012-02-08T08:55:12-05:00

The country's economic policies exploited the continental currency at the rest of Europe's expense. Fortunately, there may be a solution.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at party convention in Leipzig / Reuters

BERLIN -- On a recent trip to Greece, I visited my aunt in her Athens apartment. I'd arrived from Berlin, and she, like many Greeks these days, wanted to talk about Germany in not the nicest terms.

"The Germans are so strict!" she said, feeling, as do most of her compatriots, under the thumb of German-backed austerity measures. After all, she added, Greeks had for long been such loyal buyers of German products.

In order to illustrate this point, she pinched the collar on her button-up blouse. The shirt, she said, was made in Germany. She then pointed to the pot in which she was warming up the lunch she had prepared for us. It was also made in Germany. So was the oven, for that matter, and the refrigerator too. And as she pointed out later, even the porcelain cup with which she was drinking her coffee. "But what," my aunt asked, "do the Greeks sell back?"

She was alluding to a very important and often overlooked point. Since the advent of the euro currency, Germany has maintained a trade surplus, with about 40 percent of its exports going to other eurozone nations. But German policies meant to bolster these exports are now increasingly coming under the scrutiny of some economists, who blame German practices for some of the structural problems at the core of the eurozone's problems.

"The German conversation is obsessed with export and national competitiveness."

The issue is not so much that Germany sells a lot of stuff to other nations in the euro zone, as much as it doesn't buy back as much as it should.

"The problem is not Germany's high exports, it's the export surplus," says Till van Treeck, an economist with the Germany-based Macroeconomic Policy Institute. "Imports have been particularly low because domestic demand has been so weak." In real terms, he points out, private consumption in Germany over the past decade has barely increased.

Germany's aversion to debt and overspending has, of course, spared the nation from the sovereign debt rating reductions and credit bubbles that have troubled its neighbors. In addition, the German tendency to save for a rainy day -- a consequence, it's often thought, of collective angst and the ingrained trauma of repeated war and economic collapse -- also helps keep consumption proportionately lower than in other nations. These traits are, of course, nothing to criticize.

But add stagnating wages as part of Germany's export-oriented growth policy to the equation, and you get an economy increasingly dependent on selling goods abroad, rather than consuming at home. Since Germany is the largest economy in Europe, accounting for a quarter of the GDP of the entire eurozone, this has a huge impact on its struggling neighbors, who'd like to sell more of their wares in Germany.

If you compare wage growth across the different eurozone nations, the result is startling. From 2000 until 2010, Germany's average annual growth rate of hourly private sector labor costs was 1.7 percent, the lowest in all of Europe and nearly half the European Union average.This represents, according to a recent Macroeconomic Policy Institute report, a "blatant downward deviation" from the eurozone average.

This phenomenon is largely the result of German government deregulation of its labor market shortly after the euro was introduced, making it possible, for instance, for German companies to hire temporary workers and pay them less than their full-time colleagues.

Germany's lower labor costs are meant to lower unemployment and add fuel to the nation's growth engine: manufacturing and exports. If the cost of producing goods is cheaper, they can be sold abroad cheaper as well, undercutting competitor's prices.

Germany, with its design and manufacturing prowess, has long been a proud exporter of automobiles and machinery. But this didn't always necessarily come at the expense of its neighbors. The introduction of the euro complicated matters. Beforehand, due to flexible exchange rates, a comparatively lower German wage growth, says Sabine Stephan, an economist at the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, would have led to a higher medium-run Deutsch Mark valuation, naturally offsetting any price-competitive export advantage. Meanwhile, less competitive nations with weaker currencies, like Greece, would still have been able to sell their goods on the German market relatively cheaply.

The euro changed all that. I can see signs of this when I go food shopping in Berlin. As my aunt asked, what do Greeks sell back? Perhaps feta cheese? But even when I've seen Greek feta for sale in a German supermarket, it's virtually always next to a German-made competitor that is nearly half the price. The Greek version might taste better, but because Germans have less expendable income, not all that many are likely to buy it. Even some headache-inducing, poor-quality Greek wines are much more expensive in Germany than better domestic wines.

Now, to get the cost of such items down, Greece's only real option is to try to depress costs and wages at home. German-backed austerity measures, in fact, are meant to make Greece do so, in essence, making the nation more like Germany.

As the Greek government wrestles with the deeply unpopular austerity measures mandated by its European creditors and the International Monetary Fund, one of the thorniest issues, appropriately enough, is proposed private sector wage reductions. Greek political parties on both left and right are reluctant to bow to pressure to slash the minimum wage, arguing the move would sink the ailing Greek economy even further into recession.

While labor costs in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were higher than the eurozone average before the debt crisis, those costs have since come down significantly, says the Macroeconomic Policy Institute report. Current proposals to further bring down labor costs are meant to increase price competitiveness in order to boost exports. But whereas the improvement in export performance for a nation like Greece would be marginal, if any, says Stephan, the drop in domestic demand has a far greater recessionary effect. Also, as the economist van Treeck argues, "It's logically impossible for them to have the same growth model as Germany," since "not everyone can have a surplus."

So what's the solution? Stephan argues that its far more important for Germany to push its labor costs up than it is for crisis-laden nations to adjust them further downwards. In this event, nations like Greece would not need to suppress wages as much to become price competitive, while Germans would be able to buy not only more of their own products, but more of their neighbors' as well. Raising German wages, she said, "is the only sustainable path" towards remedying some of the structural problems at the root of the debt crisis. Otherwise, she added, "the situation is hopeless."

Ironically, Germany's competitive wage and export practices may not only be harmful to its neighbors, but ultimately to itself.

"The German conversation is obsessed with export and national competitiveness," says van Treeck. German media, he adds, speak of the importance of Germany as an "export world champion." Yet, he says, higher domestic consumption would better contribute to German GDP growth, which idled near the bottom of eurozone nations through 2007, despite the country's rising trade surpluses.

It might seem counterintuitive to question the benefit of German wage policies, at least for Germany, at a time when national unemployment is at a record low of 5.5 percent (especially as it hits 23 percent in Spain and near 19 percent Greece). But the matter of low-wage jobs and rising income inequality stirs passions in Germany. A recent Süddeutsche Zeitung headline about German employment numbers, "Miracle with a Shady Side," captured how many Germans feel about their country's successes. From 2005 to 2010, the article explains, the number of low wage earners (less than 9.76 euros per hour in the West, and 7.03 euros in the East) grew 13.5 percent. In addition, it says, almost half of all new full-time jobs are low-wage.

Some economists argue that Germany's lower wage growth might have had only a marginal boost for its exports, especially since wage stagnation in Germany has disproportionately affected services jobs, and to a lesser extent manufacturing (though the two are intertwined). And many German exports are luxury or high-quality items, which are in demand regardless of marginal differences in the price.

A recent report from the International Labour Organization, a United Nations specialized agency, also singles out German wage policies. "As German unit labor costs were falling relative to those of competitors over the past decade, growth came under pressure in these economies, with adverse consequences for the sustainability of public finances," it says. But the report also questions how much benefit those German policies had on the nation's exports. "As a matter of fact," it says, "recent export successes owe little to these wage policies and more to the geographical orientation of German exporters to dynamic emerging economies."

Putting German wage growth more in line with the European average, then, would arguably be good for everyone. It would allow, as the Macroeconomic Policy Institute report puts it, German workers to receive "a fair share of the economic gains of the past decade." It would also give the weaker eurozone nations a chance to catch up and sell more to Germany's enormous consumer market.

To blame the European debt crisis solely on Germany's competitive export policies would be absurd. Clearly, nations like Greece and Spain require broad and overdue reforms, which is part of why they are hard hit . Yet, if growth in wages and consumption in the eurozone's largest market continue to languish far behind the rest, the great advance toward European integration that German leaders have heralded for decades may quite simply collapse before any sensible reforms are given a chance to work.

Why the Syrian Rebels Should Put Down Their Guns

2012-02-08T07:05:00-05:00

Nonviolent organization has a better chance at unseating Assad's regime than an armed uprising.

A member of the Free Syrian Army gestures during a patrol in the western border town of Zabadani / Reuters

It is remarkable how quickly we've forgotten about nonviolence in Syria. Only a few months ago, the White House was testifying unequivocally in favor of nonviolent protest, rather than armed opposition, against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime's awful crackdown. Even today, President Obama eschews military intervention. Yesterday, Yahoo News' Laura Rozen offered the views of four experts on moving forward in Syria. While one doubted the efficacy of arming the opposition, none advocated nonviolence. When blogger Jasmin Ramsey wrote up a rundown of the debate over intervention in Syria, nonviolence wasn't even mentioned.

There are reasons for this. No one is going to march around Homs singing kumbaya while the Syrian army shells the city. It is correct to believe that Syrians have the right to defend themselves from a state that is attacking them. Certainly international military intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, and arguably Libya saved a lot of lives. Why should Syrians not be entitled to protection? Isn't it our responsibility to meet that expectation?

First on protection: the responsibility belongs in the first instance to the Syrian government. The international community is not obligated to intervene. It may do so under particular circumstances, when the government has clearly failed to protect the population. I don't see a stomach for overt intervention in the U.S. Nor do I think the Arab League or Turkey will do it without the U.S., as Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests.

If the violence continues to spiral, the regime is going to win.

The Syrian government has not only failed to protect, it has in fact attacked its own citizens, indiscriminately and ferociously. Self-defense and intervention are justified. The question is whether they are possible or wise, which they do not appear to be.

The Free Syria Army, an informal collection of anti-regime insurgents, is nowhere near able to protect the population. Their activities provoke the government and its unfree Army to even worse violence. It would be far better if defected soldiers worked for strictly defensive purposes, accompanying street demonstrators and rooting out agents provocateurs rather than suicidally contesting forces that are clearly stronger and better armed. A few automatic weapon rounds fired in the general direction of the artillery regiments bombarding Homs are going to help the artillery with targeting and do little else.

Violence also reduces the likelihood of future defections from the security forces. For current Syrian soldiers weighing defection, it is one thing to refuse to fire on unarmed demonstrators. It is another to desert to join the people who are shooting at you. Defections are important -- eventually, they may thin the regime's support. But they aren't going to happen as quickly or easily if rebels are shooting at the soldiers they want to see defect.

But if you can't march around singing kumbaya, what are you going to do? There are a number of options, few of which have been tried. Banging pans at a fixed hour of the night is a tried and true protest technique that demonstrates and encourages opposition, but makes it hard for the authorities to figure out just who is opposing them. The Arab variation is Allahu akbar called out for 15 minutes every evening. A Libyan who helped organize the revolutionary takeover of Tripoli explained to me that their effort began with hundreds of empty mosques playing the call to prayer, recorded on CDs, at an odd hour over their loudspeakers. A general strike gives clear political signals and makes it hard for the authorities to punish all those involved. Coordinated graffiti, marking sidewalks with identical symbols, wearing of the national flag -- consult Gene Sharp's 198 methods for more.

The point is to demonstrate wide participation, mock the authorities, and deprive them of their capacity to generate fear. When I studied Arabic in Damascus a few years ago, I asked an experienced agitator friend about the efficacy of the security forces. She said they were lousy. "What keeps everyone in line?" I asked. "Fear," she replied. If the oppositions resorts to violence, it helps the authorities: by responding with sometimes random violence, they hope to re-instill fear.

Could the Syrians return to nonviolence after everything that's happened? As long as they are hoping for foreign intervention or foreign arms, it's not likely. Steve Heydemann, my former colleague at the United States Institute of Peace, recently suggested on PBS Newshour that we need a "framework" for arming the opposition that would establish civilian control over Free Syria Army. This is a bad idea if you have any hope of getting back to nonviolence, as it taints the civilians, making even the nonviolent complicit in the violence. It's also unlikely to work: forming an army during a battle is not much easier than building your airplane as you head down the runway.

What is needed now is an effort to calm the situation in Homs, Hama, Deraa, and other conflict spots. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is visiting Damascus, could help. The continuing assault on Homs and other population centers is a major diplomatic embarrassment to Moscow. The opposition should ask for a ceasefire and the return of the Arab League observers, who clearly had a moderating influence on the activities of the regime. And, this time around, they should be beefed up with UN human rights observers.

If the violence continues to spiral, the regime is going to win. They are better armed and better organized. The Syrian revolt could come to look like the Iranian street demonstrations of 2009, or more likely the bloody Shia revolt in Iraq in 1991, or the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, which ended with the regime killing thousands. There is nothing inevitable about the fall of this or any other regime -- that is little more than a White House talking point. What will make it inevitable is strategic thinking, careful planning, and nonviolent discipline. Yes, even now.

Gloria Steinem on Rape in War, Its Causes, and How to Stop It

2012-02-08T07:02:00-05:00

What the world can do about sexual violence in conflict

A victim of a 2011 mass rape attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo poses for a photo, her identity concealed for security reasons / AP

It doesn't matter where you look; sexualized violence is intrinsic to conflict. Qaddafi's soldiers committed rape in the last days of Libya's regime. The Egyptian military has been sexually violating female journalists and protesters in that revolution. Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of women are suffering the fallout of the sexualized violence that has torn apart their bodies, their families, and their communities.

A new project from the Women's Media Center, initiated by one of its founders, journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, has begun documenting this tool of war and genocide. From the Holocaust through today, Women Under Siege is illuminating the causes as well as the cures of sexualized violence by uncovering patterns and making links between them.

As the director of Women Under Siege, as well as a journalist myself, I interviewed Steinem about sexualized violence in conflict and what needs to be done to understand and stop it.

What are some of the reasons rape is so prevalent in war?

First, it's important to note that rape and war didn't always go together. For instance, European colonists wrote astonished letters home about how "even these savages" -- by which they meant the residents of this continent they were invading -- didn't rape, not even their women prisoners. But those were wars of self-defense. If you're going to get groups of men to risk their humanity, health, and lives in wars of offense, the traditional way is not to pay them a lot, but to addict them to the "cult of masculinity." You have to convince them they're not "real men" unless they kill and conquer. And, at its most basic, "masculine" means not being "feminine." On a continuum, it means controlling women, conquering women, raping women, even with objects: bottles and broom handles in "peacetime" here, and gun barrels and knives in Bosnia or Congo. There's a reason why it's a truism that rape is not sex, it's violence.

Because we genderize the study of childrearing as "feminine" and the study of conflict and foreign policy as "masculine," we rarely see that the first causes the second.

It's also true that men may rape in groups out of social pressure to prove their "masculinity" -- in peacetime, too -- but gang mentality is a way of life in war. Military officers sometimes order men to rape as proof of loyalty and shared culpability. Some men express regret and say they wouldn't have raped without group pressure. Also the group hatred war requires means humiliating enemies by raping "their" women, implanting sperm, taking over their means of reproduction, wiping out the enemy race or ethnicity. Cultures that put all "honor" in the purity of "their" women -- and keep women weak -- are actually setting them up as targets.

Even in peacetime, the "cult of masculinity" is so powerful that men commit crimes in which they have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose: "senseless" killings like those in schools and post offices, serial murders, domestic violence, stalking, killing their wives and children and then killing themselves. They're not hate crimes because they don't hate the people they kill -- but those people symbolize their lack of control, and so are killing the "masculinity" on which their whole sense of self depends. In interviews, such men often describe themselves as victims because they believe they should have been allowed to have control. I think we should call such crimes "supremacy crimes."

What do you say to people who assert that sexualized violence is a "natural" part of conflict?

I try to think of something from the past that was also thought to be "natural," and wasn't. For instance, violence was once a "natural" part of childrearing, as in, "Spare the rod, spoil the child." It was also "natural" in marriage, as in, "Wives and bells must be struck regularly." It was "natural" in religion, as in flagellating and starving the flesh to free the spirit.

Or I quote Olof Palme, the great former prime minister of Sweden, who said that gender roles are the deepest cause of violence on earth, and it's up to governments to humanize them. Gender roles may give us our first idea that it's okay for one group to eat and the other to cook, one to talk and the other to listen, one to order and the other to obey, one to be subject and one as object. The most shared characteristic of original societies in which violence was only for self-defense, not armies -- and of the most egalitarian societies now -- is that gender roles are fluid and not polarized.

So you might say it's the reverse. Conflict is not the only or even the primary normalizer of the extremes of "masculine" and "feminine." Those roles at home are the normalizers of conflict.

What inspired you to start Women Under Siege?

Two important books lit a match to what was already a long-standing concern. First, Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel sent me a manuscript of their anthology called Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust. I didn't know them and they were only asking for a quote, but once I read it, I was outraged. Why had it taken 65 years to reveal these facts? Why were they ignored at Nuremberg? If we'd known, might it have helped prevent rape camps in the former Yugoslavia? Or rape as a weapon of genocide in the Congo?

I got in touch with the authors and asked if the Women's Media Center could help by making these connections. Our first panel linked scholars of the Holocaust with women's current experience in the Congo. It was a big learning moment for us all.

Then I read At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance -- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to Black Power, by Danielle McGuire. It roots much of the civil rights movement in the massive sexual abuse of black women. For instance, Rosa Parks was investigating a gang rape of a black woman by seven white men in Montgomery, so the bus boycott was more a result than a cause. Black women's resistance to sexual assault helped fuel the movement.

For me, inspiration comes from seeing positive results. For instance, a woman survivor of brutal rape in the Congo is rejected by her family, but learns she's not alone or at fault from the story of a Jewish woman who survived rape and the Holocaust only to be shunned as if she had collaborated. Each example illuminates another. We have to know what's wrong to change what's wrong, but the special problem of sexualized violence is used to silence and shame the victim.

Documenting the problem allows individual victims to know they're not alone or at fault, and allows the institutions of society to create remedies, from laws to education.

Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it visible and subject to prosecution. In the past, what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The first was public and could be changed, and the second was private, off limits, even sacred. By making clear that sexualized violence is political and public, it breaches that wall. It admits that sexualized violence can be changed.

Why use the term "sexualized" violence?

Because there's nothing sexual about violence. Sex is about pleasure. Violence is about pain. Nature tells us what's good for us by making it pleasurable, and what's bad for us by making it painful. To get those things mixed up usually requires a childhood in which people we loved and depended on inflicted pain, and we came to believe we couldn't get one without the other.

It also works the other way around. People, especially men addicted to "masculinity," may think that inflicting pain is the only way they can get sexual pleasure. For instance, I didn't learn there was a mammoth concentration camp only for women -- it was called Ravensbrück -- until the end of the 1970s when my friend Konnilyn Feig included it in her book called, Hitler's Death Camps. Nazi doctors performed a higher proportion of so-called medical experiments there -- they simulated battle wounds and amputations, practiced surgeries and forms of sterilization; endless horrors -- and their subjects were mainly young, beautiful women. The other women in the camp called them "rabbits" because they were used as lab animals. They tried to protect them. This was the slow sexualized violence known as sadism.

Sexualized violence is frequently underreported. Why do you think this is?

It seems to be the one remaining form of violence in which the victim is blamed or even said to have invited it. That's true even where women have the ability to report and bring charges -- at least on paper. In other cultures, the victim is not only blamed but punished and shunned. For instance, Equality Now is working on the case of a young Buddhist nun in Nepal who was raped by men on a bus and then told by Buddhist monks that she couldn't be a nun anymore because she wasn't a virgin. We can help to expose sexualized violence wherever we live.

Do we need both men and women involved to stop these atrocities?

Yes, we do. There is more responsibility where there's more power. Though women have a responsibility to speak up for ourselves -- to reverse the Golden Rule and treat ourselves as well as we treat others -- men have more power and so are responsible not only for their own behavior, but for creating an atmosphere in which men are penalized for violence toward women and rewarded for treating women as equals. It's parallel to the fact that I, as a white person, have more responsibility for white racism than do the people of color who suffer from it.

Men also can show each other the rewards of full humanity. It's been said that the woman a man most fears is the woman within himself. Men are punished by being cut off from human qualities denied to them as "feminine." I think one element in men's punishing and killing of women is an effort to do away with what they fear within themselves.

Does your work in the women's movement give you encouragement that we can make headway on sexualized violence in conflict?

Yes, absolutely. In my lifetime, we've shown that rape is not sex but violence, and changed the laws that required a virginal victim and a bystander willing to testify. In my high school, boys used to say there was no such thing as rape, that "you can't thread a needle unless the needle holds still." They're not saying that anymore. Actually, I get letters from men in prison who really understand rape because, in the absence of women, they've been used as women. Sexualized violence, in and out of conflict, has been named and punishments codified. Now we have to get this off paper and into life.

Do you think it's ever possible to bring these atrocities to an end or at least significantly curb them?

Yes, I do. To say otherwise would be to excuse them as human nature. We know there have been societies in which such crimes were rare or absent; they are not human nature. And even if they were, the most significant characteristic of humans -- the one that allows our species to survive -- is that we're adaptable. Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street and in foreign policy. Because we genderize the study of childrearing as "feminine" and the study of conflict and foreign policy as "masculine," we rarely see that the first causes the second. Of course, the goal is to stop war altogether. If we raised even one generation of children without violence and shaming, we have no idea what might be possible. But at least we can limit war to those who want to fight it.

What do you say to people who believe that this happens far from home, in societies beyond repair? In other words, that there's nothing we can do.

I say, Open your eyes, watch the news, talk to the women in your families and neighborhoods, listen to our women soldiers who were raped by their own comrades. The difference is only one of degree. No society is beyond reproach or beyond repair.

This project is not trying to create a competition of tears. It's wrong whether men or women are suffering. It's just that the suffering has to be visible and not called inevitable or blamed on the victim before we can stop it.

Bomb-Iran Drumbeat Watch: An Ongoing Series

2012-02-07T22:39:40-05:00

Today's installment comes from Mike Lofgren, familiar in these pages for his observations after a career working mainly for Republicans in the Congress. He begins:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

You can read the rest here.

Also from Peter Beinart, an argument I don't have the same personal standing to make, about the potential for American Jewry to help spare Israel a rash error:

Yes, Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would create a lot of dangers and complications. But according to the latest testimony from the most authoritative American intelligence expert, the U.S. is not sure that Iran is even trying to build a bomb. It says nothing good about our current political/strategic climate that there is so much loose talk about "preventive" war at this stage. Eisenhower would not have talked this way, or Rabin, or other strong leaders from those two countries' modern history.

Saudi Arabia Promises To Go Nuclear if Iran Does

2012-02-07T16:28:54-05:00

More evidence that Saudi Arabia will not sit idly by if Iran goes nuclear, which means more evidence that the Middle East could be looking at a terrible nightmare, a nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region, which means that the chance for escalation to accidental nuclear war (which I wrote about here) would eventually be quite high:

A senior Saudi Arabian diplomat and member of the ruling royal family has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict in the Middle East if Iran comes close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, warned senior Nato military officials that the existence of such a device "would compel Saudi Arabia ... to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences".

He did not state explicitly what these policies would be, but a senior official in Riyadh who is close to the prince said yesterday his message was clear.

"We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don't. It's as simple as that," the official said. "If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit."

Walter Russell Mead notes that Saudi Arabia's pronounced interest in keeping Iran from going nuclear suggests that maybe, just maybe, this isn't only about The Jooz.

Asma Assad Condemns the Slaughter of Arabs

2012-02-07T15:14:43-05:00

Walter Russell Mead notes that Asma Assad, the wife of Bashar al-Assad (and Vogue pin-up), gets very upset when Arabs get killed. But only one sort of Arab:

In January 2009, a prominent political icon took to CNN to express moral outrage over the actions of a Middle Eastern government attacking civilians. It was a moving performance, filled with pathos and righteous anger:
"The numbers continuously and consistently increase...it's not even day by day, it's hour by hour. 824 people dead. Two hours ago that number was 821...
This is the 21st century. Where in the world could this happen? Unfortunately, it is happening.
[...]
You send your children off to school knowing that they'll be safe, knowing that they're going to get a good education. Mothers in [x] don't do that. Children don't go to school because it's not safe, because -- it's just beyond belief, to be honest.
[...]
Mothers -- think about when you put your children to bed at night. This is something I think on a daily basis. You put your children to bed at night and you expect to see them in the morning. That's a luxury that people in [x] just do not have.

So what would it have been like for you having -- living under those circumstances? That is something that we just cannot survive and wait for it to stop.

She was, of course, talking about Palestinians. About the slaughter of her own people by her husband, ~~she is silent~~ she is supportive.

Picture of the Day: The Worshiping Cats Hidden in Chinese Currency

2012-02-07T12:52:50-05:00

Chinese netizens on popular micro-blogging site Sina Weibo recently discovered images of what they are calling "cat worship," hidden in the intricate anti-counterfeit designs on the 100 Reminbi (RMB) note.

A representative of China Construction Bank told Chinese news site iFeng.com that the RMB's design is "a serious matter," adding that while some of the note's features may contain hidden significances, the patterns are mostly designed for aesthetics and anti-counterfeit measures.

One Weibo commenter, 眉间尺Samul-帝麦创意, noted that cat, or 猫（mao, 1st tone) in Chinese is a homonym for the Chairman's last name, 毛 (mao, 2nd tone).

这是哪个平面设计师这么牛逼，舍命把"mao崇拜"印到钱上去啦？民族英雄啊...... (Translation: What amazing designer risked his life to print "Mao worship" on this money? A national hero...)

Other commenters noted that the design is likely a coincidence.

The mysterious animal on the 100 yuan note is clearly horned. Personally, I think it looks more like Le Yangyang, mascot of the Guangzhou 2010 Asian Games (Pictured above).

The Most Consequential News From the Middle East Today

2012-02-07T11:20:39-05:00

The most important news out of the Middle East is not the Hamas-PA Agreement 4.0 (or 5.0 or 6.0, who can remember?). For various reasons, it doesn't seem likely to work (you can read Robert Danin here on some of the difficulties). Nor is it the "very productive meeting" Russia's foreign minister held in Damascus with the blood-soakwd Assad regime. Nor is it even news that the World International Zionist Organization is apparently promoting pornographic Purim costumes (hey, I aggregate -- you decide). It is, instead, this announcement from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, that Saudi Arabia will not allow the price of oil to rise about $100 a barrel:

"We can use our leverage, our excess capacity to be sure to pump more [oil] if needed so it will not impact the consumer countries while they're getting out of their recessions slowly but surely," the prince said.

As for Iran, he said it is important for the U.S. and other nations to put sanctions on the "renegade country" to force its government to negotiate. Issuing an ultimatum of war would push Iran to the "desperate move" of blocking the vital oil shipment waterway.

Why is this so important? Because it clears the way for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. I'm not suggesting coordination between Israel and Saudi Arabia on this, any more than I would ever suggest that Superpacs coordinate with presidential campaign staffs. I'm merely noting that one factor that inhibits Israel from striking at Iran is fear that an attack will cause Iran to retaliate against Persian Gulf shipping (among other things), which would cause oil prices to skyrocket, which would, of course, generate a fair amount of anger directed against Israel.

The Vital Role of Global Journalism in the Digital Age

2012-02-07T10:46:47-05:00

A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists shows the new challenges they face around the world.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has just marked its thirtieth anniversary, in a year notable for the breadth of international protest movements and the expansion of digital technology for the collection and distribution of information. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become embedded in the dissemination of events as they take place and have impacted the definition of news in fundamental respects. In ways unimagined a decade ago, the streets are filled with amateurs. Their efforts at working around the repressive techniques of authoritarian governments have made a significant difference in newsgathering. Trained journalists and the "citizen" reporters who supply so much of the raw material for them are at the forefront of upheaval, with consequences that are as dangerous as they are illuminating.

CPJ's annual report, along with the many additional surveys available on its website, provide unusually valuable insight into the organization's work: monitoring the role of journalism and defending the rights of journalists wherever unrest spreads. Joel Simon, who served first as deputy director and since 2006 as CPJ's executive director, summarized its activities in the introduction to this year's annual report:

The tumult of events around the world has tilted us wildly from exhilaration to despair and back again--sometimes within the space of a single day. We are privileged at CPJ to work with journalists on the frontlines of history, but we have never worked on so many fronts at once. From Arab Spring to bloody summer and onward, we have been consumed this year with events across the Middle East and North Africa. CPJ tracked attacks against journalism in real time, reporting on Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria--not to mention the ongoing crisis in Iran, one of the world's leading jailers of journalists. We did all this while responding to other crisis situations--a renewed crackdown on dissent in China following calls for a "Jasmine Revolution", a spate of attacks against journalists caught up in the outbreak of civil war in Ivory Coast and a spike in the murder of journalists in Pakistan...
With our 30th anniversary in 2011, CPJ enjoys greater influence and international reach than ever before. We also serve an exponentially growing constituency as more journalists today work independently without institutional guidance or support in cases of emergency.

Leafing through the pages of its report and scanning the extensive online output, what is striking is which countries stand out as particularly repressive, and, occasionally, where unexpected progress has been made. Under the headline "Imprisonments jump worldwide, and Iran is the worst," CPJ recorded a 20 percent increase in the jailing of journalists, to the highest level since the mid-1990s. Much of that is attributable to the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, but Iran, with 42 journalists behind bars, ranks first. On the other hand, CPJ found that, for the first time since 1996, no Cuban journalists are in custody, a culmination of eight years of advocacy that led to the gradual release of 29 who had been arrested in a major crackdown in 2003. Another major survey was headlined: "For journalists, coverage of political unrest proves deadly." At least 43 journalists were killed worldwide in connection with their work in 2011, with seven deaths in Pakistan the largest number, followed by Libya and Iraq, with five each.

The extraordinary growth in 2011 of social media and the daring engagement of protesters who funnel the information they collected represents the distinctive factor in how journalism operated in the arenas of turbulence, where arrests and killings were often recorded. The CPJ report contains revealing photographs credited to Ed Ou of the New York Times/Redux, captioned with this summary of what was happening in Egypt exactly a year ago: "Young Egyptians played a leading role in documenting the revolution as it unfolded. Journalists and activists collected pictures, videos and voices from protestors in the streets and posted their material on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Even when the Egyptian government switched off much of the Internet on January 28, media activists found innovative ways to get information out and stay connected with the world."

CPJ's findings reflect a profound shift toward reliance on Internet advocacy. "Blogging, video sharing and text messaging from cellphones now bring news from some of the most oppressive countries to the rest of the world," the annual survey concludes, "Yet the technology used to report the news has been matched in many ways by the tools used to suppress information." In Syria, for example, CPJ says, there is a practice that computer experts call "rubber-hose cryptanalysis," which means, bluntly, the use of force to extract critical data from activists, including passwords and log-in details. As 2012 unfolds, the likelihood is that the governments and regimes where civil strife continues will keep up the pressure on journalists, and social media will defy the attempts to suppress it. While Twitter has been a symbol of free expression, its management recently announced that it would, as the Wall Street Journal reported, remove messages if "the request to do so comes from 'an authorized entity' and would notify people whose tweets have been removed."

Twitter faces a storm of criticism if it holds to that position, but ultimately, the journalists and their sources among protestors and dissidents are likely to find ways around the restrictions. As Joel Simon wrote in the CPJ report, "journalism is a manifestation of a basic human urge to know and to communicate our knowledge to others. Such an essential impulse is impossible to fully repress."

Photo credit: AP Images

The Moscow-Protest Photo That Wasn't What It Seemed

2012-02-07T09:53:27-05:00

How a case of mistaken identity led to the discovery of manipulation in an image from the end of the Soviet era.

Last week, as large-scale protests dominated Moscow, a number of people were passing around photographs of the event on Facebook, Tumblr, and other social-media sites. One of the pictures being circulated, from the Associated Press (AP), was not, in fact, from 2012, but from 1991. As it happens, I had included this photograph in a post I published this past December, titled "20 Years Since The Fall of the Soviet Union" (photo #15), after which someone re-posted it, and others re-blogged it from there, as an erroneous documentation of current events.

The original caption on the image: Hundreds of thousands of protesters pack Moscow's Manezh Square next to the Kremlin, on March 10, 1991, demanding that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow Communists give up power. The crowd, estimated at 500,000, was the biggest anti-government demonstration in the 73 years of since the Communists took power, and came a week before the nationwide referendum on Gorbachev's union treaty. (AP Photo/Dominique Mollard) Click here to view large full-size image (very large).

Over the last few days, keen observers started noticing, and pointing out, that the photo was not from this week. A few took a closer look at the photo and discovered a section of the crowd that had some odd artifacts, lines, and apparent duplication -- hallmarks of photo manipulation. Those odd details are shown in the two photos below, one with outlines showing "cloned" areas, the other without outlines.

The outlined section from left was copied and pasted into the area on the right. Click here to view large full-size image.

Same as above photo, just without outlines. The section from left was copied and pasted into the area on the right. Click here to view large full-size image.

Several readers kindly contacted us and shared their discoveries, including Donna Meiss (via MIT professor Ken Oye), and Ernie Smith. After verifying that there was some apparent cloning going on, we contacted the AP, and told them the whole story. They got back to us after a brief initial investigation, and told us, "We've determined this was a case of cloning to reduce some lens flare. It's unacceptable under our news values and principles. We're looking into it further." I've since looked in the AP archives, and found they have removed the old image, and distributed a new version of the same image, without the cloning, so you can see what was hidden below (more crowd, minor lens-flare discoloration).

Caption: The un-doctored version of Mollard's 1991 Moscow photograph. Original caption: Hundreds of thousands of protesters pack Moscow's Manezh Square next to the Kremlin, Sunday, March 19, 1991, demanding the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow Communists give up power. The crowd, estimated at 500,000 was the biggest anti-government demonstration in the 73 years since the Communists took power, and came a week before the nationwide referendum on Gorbachev's union treaty. (AP Photo/Dominique Mollard) Click here to view large full-size image (very large).

I've been posting hundreds of photographs online every month for nearly four years now, and this is the first image I've posted that has verifiably been manipulated. Photo manipulation of this kind is unacceptable under my, and The Atlantic's, guidelines and principles. I try my best to publish only what I believe to be honest representations of people and events. But in some cases, as here, the alteration can go unnoticed for years -- until enough eyes come into play (the fantastic magnifying effect of the Internet) and unseen details start to emerge.

Many thanks to Donna Meiss, Ken Oye, Ernie Smith, and everyone else who caught this issue and brought it to our attention. The photo will remain in place in the original photo story here, with a prominent link back to this article, explaining the whole story.

Picture of the Day: Siberia's Polar Bear Club

2012-02-07T08:10:43-05:00

Reuters

A Siberian swim club warms up for an winter swim on the bank of the Yenisei River in an air temperature of roughly -13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Winter swims are a long-standing tradition throughout Russia, where ice water is thought to possess numerous health and spiritual benefits. The members of winter swimming clubs like the one pictured above are commonly referred to as "walruses."

Why France Might Copy America's New Deal, in a Very French Way

2012-02-07T07:44:40-05:00

Presidential candidate François Hollande wants to channel Franklin Roosevelt, with a twist.

Rajab walks during a February 2 anti-government demonstration in central Manama / Reuters

Should France get a New Deal of its own? How about a "French dream"? Americans watching the French presidential election and listening to Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy's leading challenger, are likely to find a lot of his terms and ideas strangely familiar.

"Culture is part of the French dream," Hollande declared at an event in Nantes in January, echoing a familiar campaign slogan. The French Dream is also the title of his collection of speeches, released last August. "Culture is not a cost, not an expense, but an investment," Hollande continued at Nantes. Culture is the antidote to the current "fear of the other, the sense of decline," and "French culture abroad is a way to make our language, our production, and paradoxically our economy more prominent," he said.

The notion of cultural revival as stimulus has plenty of precedent in American history. A gloss on the current "French dream" discussion, written by director of public radio institution France Culture, Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, for Le Monde, links the two explicitly:

An effective cultural policy involves continual reinvention. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, America invented the New Deal: as the crisis and unemployment raged, far from sacrificing the arts budget of his country, President Roosevelt proposed to raise the nation's morale and boost employment with a new cultural package. Through an ambitious program, he ordered dozens of thousands of public works and financed artistic creation in theatre and music.

Of course, there are other examples of this approach throughout history, but there's a way in which Hollande attaching himself to Roosevelt in particular, insofar as that's what he's trying to do, makes a lot of sense. As Yale political science professor David Cameron pointed out to me a few months ago, the French left has struggled in the past year to come up with a coherent response to the fiscal crisis. It's hard to be a Socialist Party candidate when austerity and a sharp, even magical, economic upturn are the flavors of the day. Hollande has frequently come under fire for the costs of some of his proposed programs.

Presenting an FDR-linked platform is a way of recasting a socialist candidate in the image of something both social-democratic and at least vaguely associated with economic success ("vaguely" because there's no real consensus among economists on what ended the Great Depression). The cultural aspect is a nice bonus, and the whole analogy could provide a helpful campaign shorthand: Hollande wants "investment" the American way -- everyone knows Americans aren't spendthrift socialists (size of national debt notwithstanding). Furthermore, in tying his campaign to a dynamic moment in American history, Hollande is cleverly cutting in on Sarkozy's turf: the sitting president is strongly associated with "Anglo-Saxon" economics, i.e. American-Thatcherite notions of deregulation and growth priorities. He's previously worked to cast himself as the French politician who isn't scared of Anglophone dynamism.

Of course, this is just one moment and one aspect of a long and multifaceted campaign. It's also hard to know how the "French dream" and cultural revival-as-stimulus ideas came into being, and mind-reading isn't the goal here. But while one wouldn't want to overemphasize this aspect of Hollande's campaign, this much can be said: putting an American spin on cultural revival while tapping into anti-finance sentiment -- as Hollande is also doing -- might be the only way a socialist could squeak by in this climate.

That should tell us something about the oddness of the political climate now more generally. Who thought we'd see a moment this decade when a French socialist chased after an American aura? Then again, who thought we'd see a moment this decade when American conservatives yearned for a European approach to government spending? The financial crisis has done some odd things to Western democracies, and the tales may yet get odder.