domingo, 23 de junio de 2013

HOLLANDE FACES A DILEMMA




François Hollande, président français, aux côtés de Jean-Paul Delevoye, président du Conseil économique et social, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Premier ministre et Michel Sapin, ministre du Travail, lors de l’ouverture de la conférence sociale, à Paris ce 20 juin.


HOLLANDE FACES A DILEMMA
From “Geopolitical Diary“
June 21, 2013

The French government is trying to reconcile its need for economic reforms and its desire to maintain social stability. On June 20, France held the first day of the "great social conference," a summit of businesses, unions and government representatives, to address the country's main social and economic reforms. Central to the summit was France's highly controversial pension reform.
France spends roughly 12.5 percent of its gross domestic product on pensions, more than most almost any other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member. (For reference, Germany spends about 11.4 percent of its GDP on pensions, and Japan spends roughly 8.7 percent.)
The fact that an increasingly larger proportion of France's population qualifies for pensions factors into the debate. In 1975, there were 31 workers paying contributions for every 10 retirees; today, there are 14 workers paying contributions for every 10 retirees. As the baby boomers from the 1950s and 1960s begin to retire in the next decade, the pressure on France's coffers will grow substantially. The deficit of the French pension system is projected to double between 2010 and 2020, when it will exceed 20 billion euros.
Most French citizens admit that reforms are necessary, but they disagree on how to apply them. On June 14, a group of economists and lawyers submitted several proposals to the French government in a document known as the Moreau report. Headed by Yannick Moreau, the commission that authored the report was tasked by the government to formulate reform proposals, which are nonbinding but nonetheless may guide Paris' decisions.
The proposals include a reform that would increase the number of contributions necessary to qualify for a full pension, which would extend contributions from 41.5 years to 44 years. Proposals also call for a reduction of tax benefits for retirees and a modification to the methodology for calculating pensions in the public sector. (In general, pensions in the public sector tend to be higher than those of the private sector).
Notably, this is not the first "great social conference" undertaken by French President Francois Hollande; he held one in July 2012, just two months into his presidency. But unlike the first conference, the current summit is taking place during a much less optimistic social climate. The unemployment rate is higher than it has been since the mid-1990s, and the economy is in recession. Hollande's popularity is below 30 percent, and most French citizens doubt the president's ability to implement the necessary reforms. Moreover, these reforms are particularly controversial within the Socialist Party, which is forced to enact policies that run counter to its convictions.
The president's strategy is to look for consensus on the reforms to prevent mass protests like those that accompanied reforms adopted by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010. Hollande thus faces a dilemma: He could try to push for comprehensive reforms unilaterally, but that would be incredibly unpopular, at least in the short term. Otherwise, he could try to enact diluted reforms, which would be more palatable for French citizens but ultimately would be ineffective at reducing the costs of the French pension system.
Hollande's problem is shared by many Western European leaders, who have responded to the ongoing economic crisis by implementing painful reforms in their welfare states. The problem is that countries consider the welfare state one of the defining economic, political and social features of postwar Europe and a symbol of economic prosperity. The French have a long and rich tradition of fighting for their civil and social rights, and the notion of a social contract between rulers and the constituents is a key feature of French politics. For the French -- not to mention the Italians, Spanish or Germans -- a generous welfare state is an acquired right, a part of the social contract in Europe.
Denying citizens these rights comes at a high political cost. For example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder was forced to call for early elections in 2005 because of the unpopularity of the reforms he applied in the labor sector. In the long run, those reforms helped the German economy regain its competitiveness.
During his first year in office, Hollande favored tax increases over structural reforms. But as the economic crisis worsens, Paris is acknowledging the need to implement reforms to improve France's competitiveness and reduce spending. With the parliament in recess, Hollande has time in July and August to discuss reforms with unions and employers. The big challenge will come in September, when the National Assembly will begin analyzing the reforms discussed during the summer. Two major French unions, Worker's Force and the General Confederation of Labour, already have announced strikes against the pension reform.
The European crisis forced most eurozone governments to implement painful economic reforms aimed at cutting state spending and making their economies more competitive. Over the past two years, governments that have implemented unpopular economic reforms -- Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia and Italy, for example -- have been forced to resign early. Today protests continue in most of these countries. And in the coming months, Hollande faces the challenge of finding the right balance between structural reforms and social stability.

jueves, 20 de junio de 2013

EE.UU. Y CHINA DISCUTEN DE ESPIONAJE CIBERNÉTICO







 LOS LÍDERES DE LAS POTENCIAS MUNDIALES DISCUTEN ESPIONAJE CIBERNÉTICO

Prof.
Javier Bonilla Saus
Catedrático de Ciencia Política
FACS – ORT Uruguay



Barack Obama y el flamante Presidente de China, Xi Jimping, se reunieron los días 7 y 8 de junio pasados en el ”Rancho Mirage“, en pleno desierto californiano, cerca de Palm Springs, en lo que fue definido como “una visita de cortesía“ del Presidente Xi Jimping al norteamericano.

Éste acaba de asumir la Presidencia del gigantesco país asiático en marzo pasado y organizó una potente gira por el continente americano tomando buen cuidado de no iniciarla por los EE.UU. , para que quedase claro que la China no está dispuesta a respetar “zonas de influencia“ predeterminadas por la historia.

Aunque no hay agenda ni orden del día específicos (en buena medida ambas partes así lo quisieron porque prefieren esperar la cumbre del G20, en San Petesburgo, en el mes de septiembre, para ingresar de lleno al terreno de la “diplomacia formal”), nadie duda que unos de los temas centrales de las conversaciones habrá de ser la cuestión de la piratería sistemática que lleva adelante el gobierno chino con sus “hackers” vía Internet. Esto no es sin embargo óbice para que la reunión tenga además un interés global evidente ya que otros temas serán igualmente tocados. Como declarase un portavoz estadounidense en la reunión: “Se trata de construir un nuevo modelo de relaciones entre grandes poderes. Ambos líderes han entendido que existe el peligro de que un poder emergente y un poder establecido puedan entrar en colisión en algún momento, y que para evitar ese tipo de rivalidad es necesario poner en marcha mecanismos que eviten la inestabilidad”

Obama se encuentra en la peor de las condiciones políticas imaginables para abordar el más importante y delicado punto de la actual agenda bilateral, el del mencionado espionaje cibernético. Un Presidente que está bombardeado, de todas partes, por la intromisión de los servicios de inteligencia norteamericanos en la vida de los ciudadanos mediante escuchas en el espectro electrónico, no es el personaje más creíble para pedir, de parte de la China, que no continúe generalizando su actividad de espionaje por esa misma vía.

Es cierto que, aunque injustificable, el espionaje de los EE. UU. dice apuntar a proteger a sus ciudadanos mientras que el chino es una vulgar política de piratería comercial, tecnológica y militar. Pero ambos casos son igualmente ejemplos (aunque diferentes) de gobiernos que están violando principios básicos del Derecho en aras de intereses políticos estratégicos.

La cuestión es grave aunque seguramente no se transformará en un contencioso realmente explosivo entre ambos gobiernos.

El Presidente Obama lo mencionó directamente en la primera llamada que le hiciese a Xi Jimping para felicitarlo por su elección. Y el gobierno norteamericano, desde entonces, no quitó el dedo del renglón. Escasas semanas más tarde los EE.UU. denunciaron que el gobierno chino habia construído un poderoso aparato de ciberespionaje destinado a robar a la economia civil y militar norteamericana.

Hasta ese momento el mundo no tenía clara la enorme escala de la piratería llevada adelante por la China hasta la fecha. En un informe hecho público hace un mes, los servicios norteamericanos denunciaron que la China habría robado, nada más que en 2011, información decisiva (con planos incluidos)  perteneciente a medio centenar de armas significativas, entre las cuales se incluían datos relativos al futuro caza bombardero F 35 y a dos sistemas antimisiles relevantes en la defensa de Europa.

Pero la historia anterior a 2011 no es menos sorprendente. Entre los años 2007 y 2010, la sociedad “Qinetiq”, que fabrica desde satélites hasta drones para el Pentágono, hubo de ser hackeada de manera sistemática e inmisericorde. Una demostración de esto no tardó muchos meses en llegar: los hackers chinos transmitieron la información y poco demoró la industria china en presentar un robot para eliminar minas que era la “copia calco” del llamado “Dragon Runner” producido por “Qinetiq”. Los casos similares son realmente innumerables, aún si nos limitamos a la industria militar.

La dimensión de la política china de piratería es tan gigantesca que el Defense Science Board  de los EE. UU. declaró que "Los ataques tienden a alinearse con el Plan Quinquenal de Desarrollo del gobierno chino”, concentrándose en los sectores que dicho plan fija como prioritarios para los cinco años por venir. Es una suerte de “planificación socialista” de la piratería cibernética. El robo de las mencionadas 50 armas altamente significativas, denunciado a principios de mayo pasado, responde exactamente a esa lógica.

Recién en marzo de este año, una empresa norteamericana especializada en seguridad informática logró obtener datos aproximados, pero seguros, de la envergadura de la piratería cibernética china. Algunos ataques pudieron ser rastreados hasta el año 2006. El centro de espionaje parece encontrarse en la periferia de Shangai, sobre la avenida Datong del barrio de Pudong de esa ciudad, donde está basada la Unidad No. 61 398 del Ejército Popular, que ha sido irónicamente bautizada "Comment Crew" .

No es evidentemente este el lugar para agobiar al lector con la descomunal cantidad de información que revela la prensa internacional seria sobre las dimensiones de las actividades de espionaje y de hackers chinos. Las instancias oficiales norteamericanas que pretenden enfrentar el asunto están convencidas, ya, que todo intento de construir “barreras defensivas” es inútil. Siempre alguna información será robada dada la sistematicidad de la política aplicada y la calidad del trabajo de la piratería de China.

Por ende, este encuentro entre Xi Jimping y Obama es particularmente importante porque no existe otra solución que intentar llegar a un arreglo político al respecto antes de comenzar a pensar en alguna medida de retorsión. Aunque no se esperan resultados espectaculares de esta reunión, nunca fue ese el objetivo: de lo que aparentemente se trataba era de crear las condiciones para avanzar en una solución política de la cuestión. Para ello cabe esperar un acuerdo que permita reducir las tensiones actuales en torno al problema y que se avance en la dirección de algún tipo de regulación internacional del tipo que se ha construido en materia nuclear.

Luego de la instancia del fin de semana que nos ocupa, se intentará organizar una multitudinaria reunión entre ambas administraciones para acordar medidas concretas contra el ciber-espionaje. La tarea no será seguramente fácil pero no parece haber otro camino para que el asunto no adquiera niveles más peligrosos.
Link Original: http://www.ort.edu.uy/facs/boletininternacionales/contenidos/166/poluno166.html

IRÁN: UNA TRISTE PANTOMIMA ELECTORAL









IRÁN : UNA TRISTE PANTOMIMA ELECTORAL


”Hassan Rouhani´s
surprising first round victory in the
presidencial elections represents a
 significant shift in the Iranian political landscape.”
Shaul Bakhash from “The Wilson Center”.
15/06/2013


Luego de las recientes elecciones llevadas a cabo en Irán el fin de semana pasado, todo parece indicar que la mayoría de los medios de prensa a nivel mundial (e incluso algunas cancillerías o instituciones altamente reconocidas como la que mencionamos arriba) han entrado en una suerte de amnesia que, si bien no es estrictamente inexplicable, no deja de ser llamativa e incluso políticamente peligrosa.

Basta escuchar los informes remitidos por los enviados internacionales desde Teherán, las manifestaciones de entusiasmo de un electorado que votó con una participación superior al 72% y la tranquila figura del ganador en primera vuelta, Hassan Rouhani, para que cualquier observador distraído crea que, efectivamente, en Irán acaba de llevarse a cabo una verdadera “fiesta de la democracia“. En realidad, a poco que se observe el proceso de cerca, las elecciones han sido un aquelarre de autoritarismo teocrático, de negación de las libertades políticas y de desconocimiento de la voluntad del pueblo iraní.

El ganador, Hassan Rouhani,  de 64 años es, para comenzar, el único candidato religioso y, paradójicamente, el único considerado “moderado“ de los seis candidatos que sobrevivieron políticamente a la masacre de precandidatos (eran mas de 670 y fueron autorizados 8 a presentarse – 2 se retiraron a último momento) que realizare el Ayatolah Alí Jameini y sus acólitos agazapados en el “Consejo de Guardianes”.  La definición de quienes estaban capacitados para competir como candidatos en estas recientes elecciones fue una versión islámica, multitudinaria y renovada del viejo “dedazo” priísta de México. Aquí, un viejito supuestamente dotado de no se sabe que saberes o legitimidades infusas, acompañado de otros tantos ancianos sádicos y fanáticos, entusiastas de seccionar manos de ladronzuelos, azotar o lapidar mujeres, y demás “purezas éticas“,   decidieron por las suyas que, entre más de 670 candidatos, sólo 8 eran “aptos”.

Evidentemente, la sucesión de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planteaba algunos problemas. Su proverbial incompetencia había complicado la política iraní durante aproximadamente unos 8 años. Además de haber sido el implementador del fraude electoral del 2009, Ahmadinejad evidentemente era una figura de mucho menor envergadura que Rouhani: desde su sistemática desprolijidad hasta el conservadurismo cerril que lo caracterizaba, signaron uno de los períodos más negros de la historia del Irán moderno.

Mientras que su política exterior aislaba totalmente a Irán (con la excepción del aplauso del finado Chávez y de algún otro gobierno latinoamericano despistado), el país se hundía en una descomunal crisis económica que ha llevado a ese gran productor de hidrocarburos al colmo de las paradojas: tener que establecer un estricto régimen de racionamiento de gasolinas.

Rouhani, en cambio, obtuvo (y aparentemente sin fraude ostensible) unos 18 millones de votos de entrada, en la primera y única vuelta de las elecciones, y, apoyado en esa alta participación electoral “aplastó” a los candidatos conservadores más cercanos al ex presidente, Mohammed Qualibaf y Said Jalil.

El triunfo de Hassan Rouhani, poco tiene que ver con su supuesta “moderación”. Responde en primer lugar a un voto “anti-Ahmadinejad” masivo. En segundo lugar también es el efecto de la arrasadora crisis económica que, entre las sanciones occidentales y la incapacidad del gobierno Ahmadinejad, a desmantelado el nivel de vida de los iraníes. No debe dejar de mencionarse el hecho de que Rouhani se manejó de manera infinitamente más inteligente que sus contendientes (y que su antecesor), lo que no debería sorprender a nadie, con los medios y la prensa en general, antes  y durante la campaña.  El flamante ganador es un hombre culto, habla media docena de idiomas y ostenta un doctorado en Derecho en la Universidad de Glasgow. En otros términos, mantiene alguna relación de comprensión cultural con el mundo contemporáneo, cosa que la mayoría de sus contendientes carece radicalmente: ensimismados en un fundamentalismo grotesco, aspiran a transformar a Irán en una potencia simultáneamente medioeval y nuclear.  Aunque Corea del Norte se parecería un poco a eso, lo menos que puede decirse que semejante programa es altamente improbable de que sea viable.

En el desierto político causado por el totalitarismo fundamentalista del “lider” Alí Jameini en Irán, Hassan Rouhani es una suerte de sobreviviente. Por ello es que los escasísimos políticos todavía existentes de lo que fue, en su momento, una corriente razonablemente “moderada” y “reformista” dentro del demencial extremismo del régimen iraní, le otorgaron su apoyo. Mohammed Khatami, Akbar Rafsanjani y el propio candidato Mohammed Reza Aref (uno de los 2 renunciantes a ser candidatos que sobrevivieron a la “razzia” de precandidatos instrumentada por Ali Jameini) se plegaron a la causa de Rouhani y pusieron toda su escasa influencia en el voto a su favor. Pero hasta aquí va la lista de los llamados “moderados” que puedan ser considerados como activos. Los verdaderos reformistas de antes yacen bajo tierra, otros han optado por el exilio, muchos han optado por bajar los brazos y sólo algún personaje como Khatami (que lleva años en arresto domiciliario) hace esporádicamente alguna declaración divergente con el ”establishment”.

Por ello, a pesar del estruendo y de los desmedidos entusiasmos como los que se expresan en fragmento mencionado arriba, nada permite augurar un cambio significativo ni en la política interna ni en la internacional de Irán. Por más que el presidente recientemente electo haya mencionado en su campaña la existencia de algo tan exótico en Irán como una “carta de derechos civiles”, de “pluralismo político”, “apertura internacional del país”, nada hace pensar que dichas declaraciones no sean otra cosa que una simple retórica electoral para cosechar los innumerables votos anti-conservadores que quedaron huérfanos desde la brutal represión que siguió la fraudulenta reelección de Ahjmadinejad.

Cualquier analista que hoy, a la luz de los elementos que disponemos a la fecha, pretenda que el nuevo presidente electo en Irán estará dispuesto a negociar sensatamente el programa nuclear, que se avendré en un futuro inmediato a detener al Bachar el Assad en su empeño de asesinar al pueblo sirio o que piense que va a iniciar el desmontaje del demencial aparato de Hizbollah, directamente desconoce radicalmente la lógica política del totalitarismo teocrático iraní.

Link Original: http://www.ort.edu.uy/facs/boletininternacionales/contenidos/166/editorialjavierbonillasaus166.html

martes, 18 de junio de 2013

LE CORBUSIER AT MOMA






 FROM “THE NEW YORKER”

Culture Desk - Notes on arts and entertainment from the staff of The New Yorker.


June 18, 2013

Le Corbusier at MOMA




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The psychological center of the Museum of Modern Art’s giant Le Corbusier retrospective, “An Atlas of Modern Landscapes,” is located in the second-to-last gallery. There, taking a few steps in any direction, it’s possible to see many of the Swiss architect’s qualities represented, for better and for worse. 

His ardent explanations, for one, which are embodied by wall-size drawings made during lectures on his 1935 trip to America, describing what’s wrong with New York skyscrapers (“not big enough”) and how the traditional peak-roofed house must be replaced by a house on stilts. His attention to reputation, represented by a 1947 collage laying sole claim to the design of the United Nations complex, sketch by sketch. His make-no-little-plans ambition, realized (for once!) in the design of Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, in India, seen in plan, drawing, film, photograph, and an arresting six-by-eight-foot wooden model, built by a cabinetmaker and hung on the wall like sculpture. His lifetime exploration of materials, which took him from the delicate hardwood veneer of his mother’s writing desk, designed in 1915-1916, to the curved, chromed tubing of his famous 1928 chaise, or from the white stucco walls of the modernist icon Villa Savoye (1928-31) to the béton brut (rough concrete) of his apartment tower, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1946-52).

These products suggest the terrific span of Le Corbusier’s career in time, space, and scale, attacking the problems of how we should build and how we should live at home and abroad. They also point to his awareness of audience: Le Corbusier understood, as so many younger architects do now, the publicity value of the provocative image, the aggressive quote. Films by and featuring Le Corbusier offer an additional and welcome look at his self-presentation. If current architects take anything from the exhibition—a must-see, despite some critical flaws—it should be the power of those big, gestural drawings, where visual and verbal argument vividly come together.

Perversely, for an architect that many blame (incorrectly) for the failed towers-in-the-park model of American public housing, the theme of this long-overdue exhibition is landscape. The show begins with a tiny watercolor of the Jura, painted by the fifteen-year-old Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and ends with his tiny seafront cabanon in the south of France. (He renamed himself Le Corbusier in 1920, in the first issue of the journal L’Esprit Nouveau.) It was while at this one-room retreat that the architect made his final swim in August, 1965; it is assumed that he had a heart attack and drowned. Landscape is much on the minds of architects today, as parks have replaced buildings in the narrative of urban transformation, and the resilient city, as outlined in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s twenty-billion-dollar waterfront-defense plan, depends as much on wetlands as it does on bulkheads. Every generation finds contemporary resonance in heroes of the past, and the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, marshalling vintage models, room-size installations, paintings, and drawing after detailed drawing, make a valiant attempt with Corbu.

Does it work? I don’t think so, not in the exhibition as presented here. Knowing the theme makes you notice the presence of landscape (mountains, trees, views) in many of the archival drawings on display, but these elements are often rendered generically, or from Le Corbusier’s favorite “view of the airplane.” Among the most spectacular of these views are his ideas for Rio de Janeiro, running horizontal highways across the city’s up-down topography, and building cell-like structures below the roadbed. This idea of the endless building, one that would house the population and give everyone a look at the water, is repeated elsewhere, as in his Plan Obus for Algiers. Is it truly sensitive to the “landscape” if you can pack up the idea and take it on the road? Or was Le Corbusier merely an opportunist, shopping his ideas to whoever had the power to make them happen?

Complicating acceptance of the landscape theme is the minimal wall text, which sometimes fails to connect the dots between the domestic, mountainous, and urban landscapes on display, and even to state some Le Corbusier essentials for the general public. We get a 1916 perspective of a Dom-ino housing scheme placed on a Mediterranean site, but not the definitive Dom-ino drawing that explains his then revolutionary idea that houses could be made of concrete columns and flat floor plates, the better to wrap the exterior in glass. The wall text refers in one place to Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture,” but never tells you what they are. (One, pilotis, the first-floor columns seen on so many of his projects; two, roof gardens; three, the free plan; four, the free façade; and, five, the horizontal window.) Three of the five are essential to Le Corbusier’s design approach, as described in “Vers Une Architecture”: “Considering the impact of a work of architecture on its site … the outside is always an inside.” Dear MOMA: Please type them out and put them up, preferably with Le Corbusier’s drawing of such a building.

It’s not as if there isn’t any evidence for Le Corbusier’s interest in landscape. If I were trying to convince you of Le Corbusier’s love for natural forms, I might pick a repeating design motif, like the curving path, and show how he uses it over decades, in projects domestic and monumental. Here it is as a ramp on the deck of the shipshape Villa Savoye; here it is again in the uphill approach to the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (its landscape position right there in the name), in Ronchamp (1954); here it is a third time rendered in concrete for Le Corbusier’s only American building, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard (1963). The ramp appears at the urban scale in many of Le Corbusier’s unbuilt planning projects: there, it is designed to accommodate the motorcar, which one suspects the architect loved equally. (A drawing of a 1935 design for a multistory apartment building in Montmartre includes what must have been a rare-for-Paris surface parking lot, the autos pencilled in.) The exhibition also includes a series of Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings from the late teens and early nineteen-twenties, clearly connecting these abstract, tabletop still lifes to the architect’s habit of arranging prism-like buildings on an open field. In comparisons like these, one glimpses the creative mind at work, filing visual effects away for later use at the city scale.

It’s these details, like the lecture drawings, that make Le Corbusier’s practice come alive in the gallery. Urbanism is always a hard sell in an exhibition, as it is difficult to engage with the details of city planning, particularly in cities where you’ve never been. But given the many scales at which Le Corbusier worked, there seem to be missed opportunities to make his choices more tactile, and to triangulate between photography, drawing, model, and three-dimensional example. (Photographs by Richard Pare are mounted high on the walls, as if giving us the long view through a horizontal window. Their impact was dulled by the distance and the glare from gallery lights.) In my hazy memories of previous MOMA retrospectives on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto, what stands out are chunks of architecture, made of real materials, in the galleries. Don’t just tell us about béton brut, show us a piece! I appreciated the mention, in a 1966 documentary on the making of Chandigarh, that the whole complex was made by hand, with footage of Indian women carrying materials on their heads.

The exhibit does include Le Corbusier’s pastel-tinted paintings and a period model of the Villa Savoye in the same gallery, walls colored in matching light blue and terra cotta. The wall text should make that chromatic connection, and mention Le Corbusier’s line of paints and specific palettes. He can seem so cerebral, so abstract, that more objects like the heavy, crusty sand casting made in collaboration with the sculptor Costantino Nivola, on Long Island, would show him as he was: tactile and sensual as well as technical and analytical. What makes Le Corbusier so fascinating is his many parts, the terrible ideas and the brilliant ones, the big plans and the tabletop studies. Choosing landscape as the theme may be topical, but those new to Le Corbusier are likely to need a better map.

lunes, 10 de junio de 2013

France's Post-Intervention Role in Mali‏



Previous message


June 10, 2013 | 1257 GMT
Summary
While France's military intervention has severely deteriorated jihadist militants' capability to establish sanctuary in northern Mali, militant activity continues throughout the Sahel region. The insecurity in vast areas of southern Libya, which originally contributed to the emergency in Mali, still provides a potential staging area or safe haven to several internationalist militant organizations. Militants also continue to move freely across national borders in the Sahel, into countries with weak governments such as Libya, Mauritania, Niger and Tunisia, posing a threat throughout the region -- including to several French energy and diplomatic assets.
Analysis
Jihadist militants' reach throughout the region is not a new challenge to France; they have been present in the area for a long time, conducting operations such as kidnapping foreigners or smuggling. However, France in recent years has become alarmed by the newly observed capability of militants to establish bases -- specifically in northern Mali -- and threaten national sovereignty. Militants obtained these capabilities by exploiting the fall of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime, which resulted in the spread of weapons and fighters throughout the region, as well as the Tuaregs' struggle for autonomy and the resulting March 2012 coup in Mali.
France's decision to intervene in Mali has brought about several changes in the militancy situation in the Sahel region. Though militants are no longer able to establish sanctuary in northern Mali, many of the groups that were active there have now appeared in neighboring countries, showing that they were able to decline combat with the French and flee into the rest of the Sahel while maintaining their ability to conduct remote attacks. Regional support for intervention operations, especially in the form of Niger's and Chad's military presence in Mali, has also brought more countries of the Sahel into direct confrontation with the militant groups that exist throughout the region.
Recent attacks against French assets, such as the French Embassy in Tripoli, the uranium mining facility in Arlit, Niger, and multiple attacks on French forces in Mali, have shown that France's actions against jihadist militants have increased the threat to French assets and civilians in the Sahel. There have been fears of operations in Mali leading to militant attacks within France, but so far this has failed to materialize; the biggest concern seems to be the threats within the Sahel, both against French interests and other countries in the region.
France has addressed these threats by allocating financial resources to improve the security of its diplomatic assets across northern Africa and the Middle East and by readjusting its military strategy in Africa. Though France was previously in the process of closing permanent bases in Africa and moving troops to other regions, the military intervention in Mali has shown the benefits of having forward deployments and access to regional logistical nodes to support operations. France has already declared that it will continue to base troops in Africa, including a permanent presence of 1,000 soldiers in Mali, for quick deployment in the case of emerging threats.
France has also been a proponent of increasing the capabilities of regional security forces. An EU Training Mission is already working with the Malian army and Malian troops are operating in close cooperation with French military forces, with the goal of increasing Bamako's ability to defeat jihadist militants in future confrontations.
Southern Libya is the next major risk area, because militants that have fled Mali can move freely through this territory without interference from the weak government in Tripoli or its security forces. Because of this, France has offered to cooperate with Tripoli on issues such as border security in an attempt to limit militants' mobility and contain the threat to a specific region. But even if such a project is successful, it is impossible to completely secure such vast borders that run through rough and complex terrain.



                          Image: Regional Fallout of the French Intervention in Mali

 
The problem for Libya in dealing with the regional militant threat is that the central government has little effective control beyond Tripoli and must operate through relationships with willing local communities and armed groups throughout Libya. This presents a dynamic similar to that of northern Mali, where al Qaeda has manipulated local communities to gain refuge. A NATO initiative is exploring the possibility of training Libyan security forces, which could increase the country's overall internal security capabilities and limit militant operations. 
France has also worked with Niger and Chad to improve border security. This cooperation is in both countries' national interests, since their direct confrontation with militants in Mali has increased the threat of militant attacks against them, as shown by the attack on military barracks in Agadez, Niger. However, Algeria, which has the largest military and security forces in the region, has opposed the French intervention from the beginning, even though it also suffered losses from regional militants during the hostage crisis at the Ain Amenas gas facility. Algiers' aloofness and history of mixed relations with its former colonizer make it difficult for Paris to cooperate with Algerian security prerogatives in the region.
The French intervention in Mali -- which in the eyes of French strategists is necessary to avoid an imminent threat -- has achieved local success in northern Mali but has not rectified the issues that led to the emergency in the first place. The French presence in northern Mali has also triggered a migration of militants throughout the region, where more French interests are present. Because of this, France will be forced to continue its involvement in regional security to safeguard its economic and diplomatic activities.

domingo, 2 de junio de 2013

A film on Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”



            THE NEW YORKER

            THE FRONT ROW - Notes on the Cinema by Richard Brody

  “Hannah Arendt” and the Glorification of Thinking

             May 31, 2013,





HANNAH-ARENDT-brody.jpg
There’s a device in historical drama that I’m especially fond of, in which events of great import are traced to the small, daily actions from which they arose. (One great recent example is the HBO drama “Cinema Verite,” about the making of the 1973 TV series “An American Family.”) The disproportion stokes amazement at the way the world works and, overleaping the particulars of the story, giddily induces a general sense of wonder. That’s why I came to Margarethe von Trotta’s bio-pic “Hannah Arendt” (now playing at Film Forum) with great expectations. The story concerns the writing of, and controversy around, the reporter and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” about the trial of the Nazi war criminal, from its origin as a series of articles for this magazine to the defense that Arendt mounted on its behalf and the personal price that it extracted from her.

The movie, unfortunately, doesn’t do Arendt justice. Instead of giving small gestures and daily labors grand scope, “Hannah Arendt”—which stars Barbara Sukowa in the title role—diminishes them with hagiography and a tone-deaf attempt to depict quotidian life in a grand sentimental mode. The movie balances Arendt’s apparently very happy marriage to Heinrich Blücher (played by Axel Milberg) and her friendship with Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) not with the turmoil of a regular life from which the extraordinary emerges but, rather, with the gleaming nobility of the life of the mind. Von Trotta preserves Arendt’s dignity to the point of dehumanization, depriving the protagonist of any trait that could render her ridiculous.

In one aspect, the movie is worse than ridiculous: its use of footage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as seen by Arendt on television screens in Israel. The mystery, ambiguity, vastness, complexity, and horror in the black-and-white images of that trial seem to escape not only Arendt (which I doubt was the intended dramatic effect) but von Trotta as well, making her simplistic, unquestioning representation of the story’s historical events all the more offensive.

A movie that depicts intellectuals isn’t necessarily intellectual. There’s more real cognition at work and on display in Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” and Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”—neither of which depict people who make a living from intellectual pursuits—than in this movie, which comes off as a sort of soft-core philosophical porn. “Hannah Arendt” titillates the craving for the so-called intellectual life while actually offering little intellectual substance. A. O. Scott, in his review of the movie in the Times, writes that “the work of thinking is notoriously difficult to show” and praises the film for the way that it does so: “In this case, it looks a lot like smoking, with intervals of typing, pacing or staring at the ceiling from a daybed in the study.”

Actually, the work of thinking is easy, almost effortless, to show—it’s what almost every movie is made of. Here is what it looks like when a person thinks; here is what it looks like; here, too, and (thanks to Stanley Cavell) here; but also, here and here. Thinking is something that everyone does, like breathing. Some are particularly adept at it; others do it with difficulty or suffer impairment. The movie’s sanctimonious depiction of “thinking” as something greater than what the regular run of people do is one of the signs of its artistic failure.

And then there’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Even without von Trotta’s film, the book would be a subject of discussion at the moment, thanks to Claude Lanzmann’s new film, “The Last of the Unjust,” which premièred last week at the Cannes Film Festival (I haven’t seen it yet). It is based on his 1975 interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, who, as the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt, worked under Eichmann and put into practice the policies dictated for the camp, including the deportation of inmates to Auschwitz. After the war, he was harshly criticized by some Jewish leaders, who considered him a Nazi collaborator. Lanzmann has described his film (as in this recent interview with Annette Lévy-Willard, in Libération), as an attempt to “show these so-called Jewish collaborators weren’t collaborators. They never wanted to kill Jews, they didn’t share the Nazis’ ideology, they were powerless unfortuntes. We see clearly who the killers were.”

In discussing his own film, Lanzmann also criticizes Arendt’s book; he repudiates both her critique of the Jewish Councils and her book’s key idea, the “banality of evil.” If Eichmann was, as Arendt asserted, a bland and “thoughtless” functionary who organized deportations with no evil intent but, rather, just to follow orders, then his crime would be no greater than that of Jews who worked under his command and were merely following his orders.

Von Trotta’s movie gives Arendt the bombastic and impassioned last word on the “banality of evil.” Regarding the angry response that Arendt sparked, with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” by accusing Jews of complicity in their own murder, von Trotta presents the author as correct in her claims, though unsympathetic and lacking compassion in making them. As von Trotta depicts it, Arendt’s fault is one of style and of tone, not of substance—the writer is presented as too frank, perhaps even too cold, but absolutely right.

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt insists that the book is a “trial report.” Yet, as Arendt admits and as von Trotta’s film shows, she only attended part of the trial in Jerusalem, and relied heavily on trial transcripts and other printed documents, and this distance shows in the book. Arendt makes the mistake of taking Eichmann at his word. She traces the implications of his statements, his rhetoric, and his turns of phrase, but she does so from the point of view of a philosopher, not of a journalist. That may be why she concludes that Eichmann is “banal” and that his deeds are the work of his “sheer thoughtlessness.” Von Trotta makes the same mistake as Arendt: she sets up “thinking” as a special category of activity, and distinguishes Arendt’s crowd of circumspect intellectuals from the run of faceless bureaucrats who do their jobs with no sense of their place in the world.

This is what I take to be Arendt’s ultimate target in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,”: she shoots through Eichmann in order to strike at contemporary Western society and at modern technocracy, with its presumptive detachment from its intellectual, humanistic, or philosophical roots. Arendt implies that if Eichmann had lived a rich intellectual life he would have been in a better position to resist his instrumentalization in a dehumanizing bureaucratic machine—or would be fully morally responsible for his part in it. That’s why Arendt, in her book, takes such pains to filter evil intent—any actual sense of anti-Semitism—from Eichmann’s persona. She takes the word of the accused, defending himself, in an Israeli court, against charges of participating in the extermination of Jews by claiming not to be an anti-Semite, at face value.

Arendt cites “the German text of the taped police examination” of Eichmann as “a veritable gold mine for a psychologist,” but Arendt herself is no psychologist, not even at this banal level. Nor is she a particularly analytical historian. In her chapters on the deportations (the “ten pages” about the Jewish Councils, as cited in von Trotta’s movie, that sparked the controversy), she doesn’t note the crucial distinction between German-occupied countries (such as Hungary and Greece), where Eichmann successfully established Jewish Councils to carry out his policies, and ones (such as Denmark and Bulgaria) where he didn’t. For that matter, she fails to see that the conduct of Jewish leaders under Eichmann also provided a “gold mine for a psychologist”—she never takes into consideration the mind-bending fear that Jews in Nazi-occupied countries faced, and their desperate desire to preserve a sense of order that might save them from the ambient madness.

Arendt charges Eichmann with a “lack of imagination,” but take this sentence:
The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann’s men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.
Even the phrase “Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory” implies an entire novel (one such as Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française”) or a meticulous work of history. One of the great things about “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hilter and Stalin,” the historian Timothy Snyder’s colossal and agonizing work about the mass murders committed by the two regimes, is that it draws on firsthand accounts to extract the hidden and horrific core of personal experience from the summaries and abstractions of historical study.

The best and most enduringly valuable aspect of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is its account of the Holocaust as its events accrete around Eichmann. Although Arendt’s view of Eichmann is utterly externalized, she follows him through an extraordinary series of activities, from his signing up with the S.S. to his role in the “resettlement,” deportation, and murder of Europe’s Jews. At its best, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a modernistic nonfiction novel, a companion to the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon, in which psychology and inwardness are effaced in favor of mechanical exposition of bare facts.

The end of Arendt’s sentence, above—“by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers”—dispatches the victims with a solipsistic, emotionally blank, anti-literary mechanism. The book is filled with such monstrous abstractions: “The extermination program that was started in the autumn of 1941 ran, as it were, on two altogether different tracks.” Yet her meticulous pileup of facts has a terrifying, implacable, unbearable power. The cumulative effect, then, of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is overwhelming, incommensurable, alien to human experience. As such, the book reflects the absolute darkness of the Holocaust, its unassimilable otherness. From her philosophical, historical, and journalistic failures, Arendt created an accidental literary masterwork despite itself.
Original Link:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-glorification-of-thinking.html