Is the far right in Europe a matter of concern?

The European response to the financial crisis has produced a conglomerate of far right parties across Europe that makes the Tea Party look like a benign movement. The far right has wielded great power over European society and is on the way to rise, the example of which is the far-right Front National victory in the local by-elections in the town of Brignoles in southern France. The European Parliamentary elections is set to take place in May 2014 and you don't have to be a genius to expect a big boost for the right-wing populism.

The far right parties such as the FPÖ in Austria, UKIP in the UK, Golden Dome in Greece, FN in France and also to a certain extent 'Alternative für Deutschland' can reach behind their traditional base of disenfranchised white groups into traditionally labour and conservative working and middle class. The reason is that they have become more flexible, overcome a certain cultural guilelessness, and is making use of modern media and methods. While parties in the centre lack clear ideology and appeal to the general public.

The implementation of far right programmes in any Euro zone country will bring about a collapse in the value of the currency, a huge increase in the debt burden and higher import prices. At the same time stopping immigration would destroy numerous industries and services. In order to be effective, both policies presuppose sealing off borders, which would immediately lead to a higher rate of departures, an end to exports, a rise in the cost of living and an explosion in unemployment levels. The repercussion from the economic shock will push these countries toward further national socialism and undermine democracy.

There are two things that can change the far right momentum, the first is the political centre through heroic leadership should bring daring reforms that would cut the budget deficit, stimulate the economy and over the long term cut the national debt to restore market confidence in the financial management of the state. None of this is happening and on the contrary a less responsible fiscal policy under the auspices of national socialism is implement in Europe, link. The second point is directly linked to the first, the political centre can only hash out the lethargy of the far right in a thoroughgoing debate if they do not resort to the strategies common to them. They must forswear deals with the far right, or trying to outbid it with populist gestures. This would merely legitimise the far right. They must be honest about the challenges facing Europe, and the need to embrace globalisation. Their failure to do so is one of the reasons there is so little faith in their leadership.

The ailing of Europe is the policy of accommodation, a perennial reliance solely on innate moderation. There is no virtue in moderation, virtue is in robustness of ideas. The mainstream parties in order to maintain the status quo through moderation has maintained an unsustainable welfare state, a dogmatic idea of European Union, dysfunctional immigration policy and unwillingness to bring radical changes to the declining institutions of the state. Unless they bring key changes in these areas the far right will not be stopped. 

Hypocrisy: The cover for the failures of Islamic Politics

I was talking with a friend in Kabul over the phone earlier today as he was walking out of Indra Gandhi Paediatric Hospital in Kabul. My friend signed in her daughter who is seriously ill into Indra Gandhi hospital a few days ago but she has not received the appropriate treatment and the hospital condition is dire. He could not get his daughter to Charsad Bistar hospital which is slightly better condition because it does not admit children. He was on his way to ISAF hospital where a foreign friend offered to help him get his daughter signed into the hospital. ISAF hospital is not open to general public and the condition is very good as it is for treating foreigners. After I got off the phone I was thinking about the hospitals in Kabul and there is one thing strikingly similar about all Kabul hospitals: they are founded and funded by foreign countries. Indra Gandhi Hospital, obvious enough from the name, was established and mentored by Indians. Charsad Bistar was founded by Russians. It is modern and big and rival any US funded public building. ISAF hospital is run by NATO and the administration rotates between European nations. All these hospitals were built at the time when the Afghan government developed close ties with the country of sponsors. Kabul hospitals date back to fifty years and it shows how the country always relied on foreign support. Afghanistan has always relied on foreigners to sustain some sort of government. It was true fifty years ago and it is true today. Doud Khan leaned toward USSR in the 70s because he needed money to bridge 70% deficit in his government budget; huge chunk of Afghan governments came from abroad and the reliance has been increasing ever since while the politics of Afghanistan is pervasively becoming ‘Islamic’ which means militancy and violence has been encouraged though Jihadi ideology. Jihad in its essence is xenophobia, Jihad is nurturing an attitude of hatred toward foreigners and they do not have to be non believers. Jihad in Afghanistan has been mostly concerned with massacring the next village or the other tribe. Below I will try to analyse how Jihadi groups, which are strongest ever in Afghanistan today, are subdued to Americans and international community.

I argue that Jihadis and Islamic politics which means no state affair could be contrary to the principles of Islam, as stated in the Afghan constitution, is based on hypocrisy. Islamic politics are so vulnerable to interpretation that it lacks any principle. Afghan politicians interpret Islam in the way to suite their purpose; it could be argued that Islam as a state mechanism provides a cover for tyranny. Afghan Jihadi leaders have killed thousands fighting an opponent because they believe the opponent has links with a foreign state while they are also supported by a similar foreign government. Islamic politics is not the only source of evil in Afghan society; the society inherently is closed and rejects any change except when it is forced up on it.

Change is an important concept of any society. Change means to exclude everything that is predictable. This means that only events that could not be expected in accordance with the prevailing state of knowledge qualify as change.

Afghanistan is a tribal society and tribal morality gave rise to a closed society, which confers rights and obligations on members of the tribe and discriminates against outsiders. Tribal morality doesn’t recognise certain fundamental human rights. Rights differ based on tribal, ethnic or religious affiliations. Afghan society, being a tribal society, is built on the absence of change. In such a society, the mind has to deal with one set of conditions only: that which exists at the present time. What has gone before and what will come in the future are perceived as if they were identical to what exists now. There is no need to distinguish between thinking and reality. This traditional mode of thinking has only one task: to accept things as they are. Islamist can get away with their actions until they admit they are devoted muslims which appeals to the status quo. The public would not challenge them because that is a change. This supreme simplicity extracts a heavy price: it generates beliefs that may be completely divorced from reality. Abdul Rassool Sayyaf commander who is famous for beheading ethnic Hazaras and then pouring boiled oil on their scored necks to watch what he called ‘dead dance’ is driving in a smart car in Kabul today. Perhaps the reason Afghan society does not protest actively against such gruesome action is they are detached from reality. The traditional mode of thinking can prevail only if members of a society identify themselves as part of the society to which they belong and unquestioningly accept their place in it. a better term than traditional or tribal to explain Afghan society is to call it ‘organic society’, a society in which individuals are organs of a social body. This explains why a women is killed if the husband is taunted about her. Paighure is tribal code and it is to punish a woman if she is misperceived by some other person in the society. She is not an individual but rather an agent of the society/tribe. Afghan society being an organic society does not function along side a working government. Afghan society is vulnerable to forms of social organisation that had a better grasp of reality.

Change as it occurs in Afghan society causes uncertainty. There are two ways to deal with uncertainty: we can accept it or deny it. the former leads to a critical mode of thinking; the later to a dogmatic mode. Each approach has its merits and drawbacks. The state of affairs in Afghanistan constantly changes, people are confronted by an infinite range of possibilities. Understanding what is going on from the haze of possibilities requires critical thinking. Critical thinking has a major drawback that it does not satisfy the quest for certainty. In a rapid changing place like Afghanistan critical thinkers can rarely provide answers because of the amount of uncertainty. On the other hand Islam and Islamic politics offers certainty through dogmatic thinking. The dogmatic thinking gives people the illusion of certainty but it distorts reality. Islamic leader despite their atrocities continue to appeal to society as oppose to any other form of politics because they are dogmatic in their action and Islamic in their ideology.

Hypocrisy: The cover for the failures of Islamic Politics

I was talking with a friend in Kabul over the phone earlier today as he was walking out of Indra Gandhi Paediatric Hospital in Kabul. My friend signed in her daughter who is seriously ill into Indra Gandhi hospital a few days ago but she has not received the appropriate treatment and the hospital condition is dire. He could not get his daughter to Charsad Bistar hospital which is slightly better condition because it does not admit children. He was on his way to ISAF hospital where a foreign friend offered to help him get his daughter signed into the hospital. ISAF hospital is not open to general public and the condition is very good as it is for treating foreigners. After I got off the phone I was thinking about the hospitals in Kabul and there is one thing strikingly similar about all Kabul hospitals: they are founded and funded by foreign countries. Indra Gandhi Hospital, obvious enough from the name, was established and mentored by Indians. Charsad Bistar was founded by Russians. It is modern and big and rival any US funded public building. ISAF hospital is run by NATO and the administration rotates between European nations. All these hospitals were built at the time when the Afghan government developed close ties with the country of sponsors. Kabul hospitals date back to fifty years and it shows how the country always relied on foreign support. Afghanistan has always relied on foreigners to sustain some sort of government. It was true fifty years ago and it is true today. Doud Khan leaned toward USSR in the 70s because he needed money to bridge 70% deficit in his government budget; huge chunk of Afghan governments came from abroad and the reliance has been increasing ever since while the politics of Afghanistan is pervasively becoming ‘Islamic’ which means militancy and violence has been encouraged though Jihadi ideology. Jihad in its essence is xenophobia, Jihad is nurturing an attitude of hatred toward foreigners and they do not have to be non believers. Jihad in Afghanistan has been mostly concerned with massacring the next village or the other tribe. Below I will try to analyse how Jihadi groups, which are strongest ever in Afghanistan today, are subdued to Americans and international community.

I argue that Jihadis and Islamic politics which means no state affair could be contrary to the principles of Islam, as stated in the Afghan constitution, is based on hypocrisy. Islamic politics are so vulnerable to interpretation that it lacks any principle. Afghan politicians interpret Islam in the way to suite their purpose; it could be argued that Islam as a state mechanism provides a cover for tyranny. Afghan Jihadi leaders have killed thousands fighting an opponent because they believe the opponent has links with a foreign state while they are also supported by a similar foreign government. Islamic politics is not the only source of evil in Afghan society; the society inherently is closed and rejects any change except when it is forced up on it.

Change is an important concept of any society. Change means to exclude everything that is predictable. This means that only events that could not be expected in accordance with the prevailing state of knowledge qualify as change.

Afghanistan is a tribal society and tribal morality gave rise to a closed society, which confers rights and obligations on members of the tribe and discriminates against outsiders. Tribal morality doesn’t recognise certain fundamental human rights. Rights differ based on tribal, ethnic or religious affiliations. Afghan society, being a tribal society, is built on the absence of change. In such a society, the mind has to deal with one set of conditions only: that which exists at the present time. What has gone before and what will come in the future are perceived as if they were identical to what exists now. There is no need to distinguish between thinking and reality. This traditional mode of thinking has only one task: to accept things as they are. Islamist can get away with their actions until they admit they are devoted muslims which appeals to the status quo. The public would not challenge them because that is a change. This supreme simplicity extracts a heavy price: it generates beliefs that may be completely divorced from reality. Abdul Rassool Sayyaf commander who is famous for beheading ethnic Hazaras and then pouring boiled oil on their scored necks to watch what he called ‘dead dance’ is driving in a smart car in Kabul today. Perhaps the reason Afghan society does not protest actively against such gruesome action is they are detached from reality. The traditional mode of thinking can prevail only if members of a society identify themselves as part of the society to which they belong and unquestioningly accept their place in it. a better term than traditional or tribal to explain Afghan society is to call it ‘organic society’, a society in which individuals are organs of a social body. This explains why a women is killed if the husband is taunted about her. Paighure is tribal code and it is to punish a woman if she is misperceived by some other person in the society. She is not an individual but rather an agent of the society/tribe. Afghan society being an organic society does not function along side a working government. Afghan society is vulnerable to forms of social organisation that had a better grasp of reality.

Change as it occurs in Afghan society causes uncertainty. There are two ways to deal with uncertainty: we can accept it or deny it. the former leads to a critical mode of thinking; the later to a dogmatic mode. Each approach has its merits and drawbacks. The state of affairs in Afghanistan constantly changes, people are confronted by an infinite range of possibilities. Understanding what is going on from the haze of possibilities requires critical thinking. Critical thinking has a major drawback that it does not satisfy the quest for certainty. In a rapid changing place like Afghanistan critical thinkers can rarely provide answers because of the amount of uncertainty. On the other hand Islam and Islamic politics offers certainty through dogmatic thinking. The dogmatic thinking gives people the illusion of certainty but it distorts reality. Islamic leader despite their atrocities continue to appeal to society as oppose to any other form of politics because they are dogmatic in their action and Islamic in their ideology.

The Politics of Democracy in Afghanistan

Every attempt of Karzai state institutions to establish themselves, to rationalize and integrate the villages and communities, they themselves became the object of a strategy on the part of the community, known in as Qawm, which involves not so much the assertion of power but the infiltration of those same institutions. There is no intelligentsia in Afghanistan who could leave the community to come to the state. The authorities in karzai administration, the aim is to insert the Qawm into the state institutions at a level which befits their own importance, from the minor local official to the minister. This operation is intended not only to produce material benefits (posts for the young, sinecures, exemptions), but especially to ensure that the local power game carries on as it has always done, and that the traditional rules of the game of politics will determine the way in which the state functions. Therefore, the current structure of the government which is influenced by very few has only not resulted in unprecedented corruption but it has also marginalized the majority from the state which is symbolized in the re-rise of Taliban.
Judging by the recent history of Afghanistan Qawm’s strategy has been a success, this is especially true when the state tend toward some liberal notion of democracy as Karzai and the state of Zahir shah and Doud, Karzai’s great mentors and political inspirers, it was tribal in the way that it was run, even and especially during the period which saw the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.
Because the Karzai government institutions have no certain bureaucratic stability, the state attempts to gain some by integrating the Qawms. Therefore the state has no other goal than that of perpetuating itself. This is not the end of it, the situation even get worst with foreign intervention. Because the foreigners are rightly not sure if the state is going to buy them both Qawm (community) and Qabila (tribe) buy in, they have set up aid agencies directly in touch with the community, the agencies are run by white people who have no idea of politics in Afghanistan. Their operation empower Qawm and Qabila and the result is undermining the state. That is why the great source of threat for establishment of government is not Taliban but all key aid and state players; its their mistakes in the first place which give hand to the rise of Taliban.
The last parliamentary and presidential election was nothing more than a joke; integrity Afghanistan a research organization reports that $35000 would buy a candidate a seat in the National Assembly. There has been numerous incidents of frauds which was not allowed to be investigated. The current parliament is a failure; I attribute this to the fact that political parties were not allowed. The election was based on a single non transferable voting STV system. Voters casted their vote for individuals. This absence of parties was a consequence not a cause of the weakness of the political class, for it took some time for parties to come into existence. The political class in the current government is depoliticized and rather islamised and oppurtunised. The MPs are representatives of their local qawms to obtain state benefits and privileges. This is well reflected in how votes were casted, every ethnicity went for their own candidate. The state is seen at the local level as a tool which is supported by resourceful foreign at whose expense they should profit as much as possible. The establishment is disunited because it lacks any coherent political goals; instead each tribe and ethnicity sought political dominance. The ruling class and especially the MPs have no conception of a unified state. The selection of political appointees clearly reflected the divisions within a society where primary allegiance was to the family and patronage was still a major factor; ultimate loyalties are not centred upon the state. No attempt is made to transcend the immediate group, or rather, if such an ideal determined the rhetoric used (state, the nation, Islam, democracy) it has no influence on individual behavior, nor even on the strategy pursued by a group. This explains for example why the struggles between various cliques within parliamentary groups often made it appear to the onlooker that they harboured a death wish. The state is no more than a stake in a larger game and the strategy of a Qawm consists in establishing an advantageous relationship with the institutions of the state.
This failure to reach out towards a broader social unity resulted in an ideological vacuum; political terms borrowed from the west circulates from one group to another, when it serves each best interest; losing their precision as they have so. the networks based on patronage and personal links remain firm, as if the most serious political disagreement did not exist; for example the former communist is an ally of Mujaheed or a form Taliban is an ally of US supported liberal.
The atmosphere in parliament (with high absention rate) is anarchic: a quorum can never be reached, there is a constant din, and simple-minded and fanciful speeches are the order of the day. the state is viewed by deputies much as the court is in the village by peasants ; each come to seek for favours. Each minister has complained that deputies are forcing them to appoint their Qawm or else they will be questioned in the parliament. In the parliament theatre it is truly a comedy, even the word ‘theatre’ is hardly a metaphor: the debates are broadcasted on radio and tv stations. Parliament is not news for journalists but a program. This democratic experiment is all form and no substance. Western democracy is only meaningful under certain circumstances: the identification of civil society with the state, and the evolution of a political entity which is something other than political theatre. The battles fought out on the sphere of politics must be a way of resolving tensions for the benefit of society and not a theatrical presentation of imported concepts and distorted ideas confined by Islam. Which tends to hide the fact that what is going on is a struggle for power within a restricted group. The alienation of political class from real politics especially when that class has social origin in qawm and countryside is another piece of evidence pointing to the separation between society and state. The MPs are made of warlords who have gained substantial power in the last two decades of war in the rural areas; their appointment to the parliament is inevitable in the desperate and collapsed state of Afghanistan, it is well explained by Hanna Arendt and Antonio Gramcia who have done extensive analysis of the origins of totalitarianism and the rise of fascism through democratic process; the rise of Islamism follows a similar suit. The intelligentsia hardly made it to the parliament and has no real power. Malalai Joya a critique of war criminals was expelled from the parliament by the majority of the Islamists. in no democracy an elected MP would be expelled for expressing her view of warlords.

the concern of democracy is not social justice but social morality. the political class has a tendency toward regressive attitude and repression of all sorts of freedom, minorities and women, inevitably the situation is going get worst for them, as it has in the last three years.