Saturday, March 30, 2019

Post-Mueller — time to address the real threat


Now that we have Robert Mueller’s finding that neither President Donald Trump nor his staff colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 United States election result, perhaps we can turn to the most important question.

Was Russia involved in a dirty tricks campaign to swing American voters behind Trump and, if so, how can this be prevented?

Because as the Washington Post correctly pointed out in an op-ed written by the Professor at the Alabama School of Law, Joyce White Vance, the one person the Mueller Report did not exonerate was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his usual scatter gun approach to these matters Trump has sought to use his own exoneration to try and sweep the whole issue of Russian election interference away.  This cannot be allowed to happen.

If Putin gets away with this, then many other attempts to pervert democratic decisions around the world will follow. Every election result will be doubted, trust in democracy will be weakened, in some countries fatally.

What leader could claim legitimacy if the shadow of Russian interference, or that of any other democracy hating country with the resources to do so, looms over their elected victory?

As Vance states, there is little doubt that Russia did interfere “and Trump’s foot-dragging on the subject for the past two years has meant he has taken no steps to protect the security and integrity of future elections”.

US security agencies are united in their findings that Russia was involved in meddling. Trump has overruled them with his view that Putin had told him he didn’t and was “extremely strong and forceful in his denial”.

Putin is a former KGB operative: They are trained to lie.

The one thing that terrifies the Kremlin is the possibility of another US President in the mould of John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, because in any stand-up confrontation Russia is bound to back down.

Putin has built up the old Soviet military at huge cost to the country’s shrivelling economy. Population is ageing and falling, many of its people, especially in remote areas, are living in conditions barely above third world.

He maintains the fiction of a global superpower largely by bluff and bluster. Propping up an ally like Bashar al-Assad is easy when all that is required is bombing rebel positions that have no air defences.

Talk of new hyper weapons owes more to the skills of his spin doctors than anything remotely connected with reality.

However, cyber-weaponry – setting up fake websites, spreading fake news – is much easier and, up to now, very effective.

In a contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Putin’s candidate was clear.

An erratic narcissist, obsessed with internal issues such as building a wall across the Mexican border and destroying his predecessors’ health care plan — and with business ties to Russia that might be exploited later — it could hardly have suited the Kremlin better.

It seems that post-Mueller, US politicians are finally waking up to this much greater threat to their democracy. 

After years of downplaying Russian interference in the 2016 election Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally accepted that “Russia poses a significant threat to American interests”.

That threat has been present since shortly after Putin came to power, but it is much more potent now and a threat not only to American democracies but democracies around the world.

Action is needed — and the time is now.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Myanmar Government critics honoured


A recent story out of Myanmar indicates democracy and free speech, while under considerable pressure, is not yet dead in that troubled country.

7Day News, one of the few publications that has not buckled to the Government’s will, held an award ceremony in which it honoured a whistle-blower and a former policeman who refused to perjure himself in court to please his superior officers.

Soe Thura Zaw (pictured) took to Facebook to expose a Public Service training course which he described as a ‘brainwashing’ exercise in which participants were bombarded with nationalist and military propaganda.

His post was shared thousands of times and led to calls for the courses to be scrapped.

Moe Yan Naing took to the stand in the court where Reuters journalists Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone were charged with violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. The officer was expected to repeat the prosecution line that the two had stolen State secrets.

Instead he confirmed the journalists’ defence that they had been set up and deliberately entrapped when undercover officers handed them documents, then arrested them as they were leaving the meeting.

Both Soe Thura Zaw and Moe Yan Naing faced State retribution for their courageous acts.

Soe Thura Zaw was hauled before the Civil Service Board which reported his action to his employer at the Department of Health.

Moe Yan Naing lost his job in the police force and was jailed for a year.

The awards recognise “ordinary people who have displayed extraordinary acts of courage” and those who have spent “long careers making personal sacrifices for the sake of others”. 

There is much that is wrong in Myanmar, a lot of it down to an alliance between ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks and the military which has allowed the systemic persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority to continue unchecked.

Most ordinary citizens are oblivious of the extent of the atrocities and believe the Government propaganda that the military is dealing with a dangerous insurgency.

However, the fact that the newspaper’s awards have taken place, and are prepared to honour individuals who have proved to be no friends of the Government, is a confirmation that the freedom to dissent in Myanmar, however fragile, struggles on.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

Time to hand Brexit back to the people


At the time of writing it seems the most likely outcome of this week’s Brexit votes in the United Kingdom Parliament will be to postpone the March 29 deadline for leaving the European Union.

It is futile simply to kick the Brexit can down the road. This hugely damaging debate is tearing the nation apart — town against country, young against old, families have turned on each other.

Among my friends are two brothers, once close, who have not spoken to each other for more than two years because they are on opposite sides of this issue.

It is easy to look back at the events of July 2016 and see how things could have been handled better.

Had then Prime Minister David Cameron decided that such a crucial move as leaving the EU should be decided only by near consensus — a three fifths or two thirds majority in favour rather than the simple majority that divided the nation almost down the middle.

It was Cameron’s hubris; his belief that the vote to Remain would be overwhelming, that has led to the current disaster. That and the fact he was succeeded by Theresa May, who believes blinkered stubbornness to see ‘her’ Brexit succeed is a virtue.     

It should be remembered that the Conservatives were one very firmly ‘the party of Europe’ at a time when its senior members either fought in or had vivid memories of the chaos of a World War II brought about by rampant nationalism running out of control.

The change began when leaders like Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath left the scene to be replaced by those who believed that the peace and prosperity created by the Treaty of Rome was no big deal and would have happened anyway.

Jacob Rees Mogg and his cronies in the European Research Group have even gone so far as to liken the EU to 19th and 20th century dictators who tried to unite the continent by force of arms.

They disregard, or do not care, that their beloved Brexit has the potential to succeed where Napoleon and Hitler failed — to bring about the end of the United Kingdom.

A ‘disorderly” or ‘hard’ Brexit will surely lead to Scottish demands for a second referendum on independence, which has a much better chance of success as the pro-EU Scots feel they are being dragged out of union by the English.

And how long before there is a majority in Northern Ireland that realises they have a better European future by joining the Irish Republic?     

The debate over Brexit itself has gone on too long. If Parliament cannot decide this issue, they must hand it back to the people in a second referendum.

If a majority decides after all this they still want to leave, then so be it. History will take its course.

If Remain is the victor, it will result in ardent Brexiteers complaining that Leave has been ‘stolen’, but at least it would be their fellow citizens who stole it.  

Saturday, March 2, 2019

A global effort on the way to the stars?


You could be excused for not noticing, but there has been an awful lot going on in outer space these days.

Confrontations in the Middle East, Brexit and the antics of the man in the White House ensure these exciting developments get downgraded in news bulletins and relegated to the inside pages of newspapers.

To recap, the Chinese have landed a probe on the far side of the moon in the first step towards establishing a permanent lunar base; a Japanese probe has touched down on an asteroid and will return bits of it to Earth for analysis, and an Israeli spacecraft is heading for the moon in that country’s first venture of its kind.

Then there’s Russia, India and the European Union with varying space capabilities and projects. Even Australia has announced the creation of a space agency.

Meanwhile the daddy of them all, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), continues its work with its InSight Lander just beginning and exploration of Mars as the Opportunity Rover completed a 15-year mission on the Red Planet — an incredible feat considering it was originally scheduled to work for just 60 days.

Finally NASA’s New Horizons probe has sent back pictures of the most distant object to be photographed — a snowman-shaped clump of ice and rock 33 kilometres in length and 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth.  

While a US President once inspired a generation with his vision of placing a man on the moon, the contribution of the present incumbent is a call to weaponise space with the creation of an armed space corps — a plan the Pentagon wants no part of and, thankfully, has little chance of being approved by Congress.

Most of the other world leaders look in other directions as the various national agencies concerned with space get on with their jobs as best they can, usually under the continuing threat of funding cutbacks.

There is no doubt that space exploration is a very costly business, and although I was one of millions around the world who thrilled to the moon landings of the 1960s and early 70s, I realise that they came about through the race to be ‘first’ between the US and the Soviet Union, a wasteful exercise in superpower rivalry.

I still believe that space holds a continuing fascination for millions of people, and further explorations are inevitable, but could these be done in a better, less wasteful way?

The key would be a truly international effort with nations contributing their current resources and expertise — no one would probably have to give any more to the field than they do now, but the pooled effort would have the ability to greatly accelerate the push into the cosmos.

With the International Space Station proof of what can be achieved, Luna bases and manned explorations of Mars could be a reality, not at some distant point in the future, but within the next decade.

This may seem like science fiction never to come close to reality in a world currently fraught with a groundswell of nationalist feeling in many countries, but when populism has run its course, and the bankruptcy of its philosophy exposed, the need for international cooperation in so many areas will be overwhelming.

Space exploration may not be high on any one nation’s ‘to-do’ list, but it should never be discounted as an inspiration to people everywhere and an opportunity for humankind to satisfy its noble desire to explore and do things that have never been done before.