Saturday 30th of March 2024

decaying into competitive authoritarian regimes...

"thinkers""thinkers"

It’s arguable that Britain’s path to this point — where it is at risk of decaying into a ‘competitive authoritarian’ regime — can be traced back to the first of the ‘conservative’ think tanks.

 

Britain’s democracy is in a perilous state. While 100 scholars of democracy recently posted a letter expressing their fears about the imminent threat to America’s political tradition — echoing many voices — the awareness of the threat to Britain’s Westminster system is less prominent, drowned out by the shambolic handling of the Covid crisis.

 

BY Lucy Hamilton

 

Like America and Australia, Britain’s government is at risk of decaying into a “competitive authoritarian” regime.

Arguably, Britain’s path to this moment of authoritarian threat began in World War II. Economist Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society provided an inspiration for the emerging libertarian thinkers. His ideas underpinned their resistance to the threat of totalitarian regimes in general, and Keynesian interventionist government in the UK in particular.

Ironically, the libertarian think tanks that proliferated in the following years have become a phenomenon that argues strenuously for freedom for the richest but have produced a political group that is attempting to impose growing authoritarian control of resistance in the populace more broadly.

Inspired by a meeting with Hayek, chicken farming magnate Antony Fisher followed the academic’s advice to found the first of the “conservative” think tanks that have achieved their goal most effectively: Hayek’s recommendation was that they should aim to change public opinion against government intervention in the free market through academic arguments, filtered through journalists, the “second-hand dealers in ideas”.

After establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1955, Fisher went on to found the US-based Atlas Network in 1981, which has promoted a metastasising international web of 500 of these bodies that have worked to foster “ultra free market” ideas. The Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is one of those Atlas affiliates.

The “shells” of ideas took explosive effect under Margaret Thatcher after Tory minister Keith Joseph introduced her to the IEA and then set up his own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, in 1974. These groups created the body of ideas that constitute Thatcherism.

 

The European Research Group (ERG) was founded in 1993 as a Eurosceptic force in conservatism. The urgent crisis in Britain’s democratic tradition began in the culmination of the ERG’s work during the lead up to the Brexit referendum.

It was clear during the campaign in 2016 that the work of private funders, shady internet forces such as Cambridge Analytica and the might of the radicalising tabloids was working to distort Britons’ ability to vote on the facts. The anger of the populace at the government’s austerity measures following 2008’s financial crash fuelled the fire.

The fostering of ethno-nationalist bigotries and fears was a key factor in the Vote Leave campaign. It is uncertain how much of this was driven by genuine jingoism amongst the leaders, and how much was a move to capture Nigel Farage’s UKIP voters.

The deployment of unreliable propaganda has been clearly apparent under the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign was filled with disinformation and his last election campaign was marked by the scandal of a “fact-checking” website run by the Tories that in fact disseminated lies. Johnson’s alleged lie to the Queen in order to suspend parliament was perhaps the most dramatic.

There is evidence of competitive authoritarianism’s misuse of government funds to support the incumbent. In 2021, for example, Labour is demanding that the Tories pay back £580 million of government money misspent on polling, while in 2019 the government misused £25 million on partisan Facebook advertisements.

While Britain has been protected from the fringe hysteria of its tabloid newspapers in the critical television news market, a hedge fund manager, an investment firm and the Discovery group are working to undo the “fairness” tradition with a local Fox News-style competitor for established news services. The early appearance of GB News is amateurish, but Sky News Australia’s former boss Angelos Frangopoulos is its CEO. Our own antipodean “Fox” has shown that inflammatory clips on YouTube can have at least as much impact as a successful television station.

A series of laws are under discussion in the UK in mid 2021 that political journalist Ian Dunt describes as “some of the most draconian authoritarian legislation” for decades.

Priti Patel’s Home Office has proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act to remove a “public interest defence” that would see journalists relabelled as spies and jailed for up to 14 years.

Whistleblowers, sources and publishers would face similar risks. This is on top of the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, that instituted a chilling surveillance power over citizens even those not suspected of any crime.

UK defamation laws are already one of the strongest protections the world’s powerful have against investigative journalism, with new oppressive secrecy provisions proposed. They work with striking effectiveness to limit publicity about the ugly sources of money brought into the UK by kleptocrats.

The Tories have been working for a year to neuter their electoral commission, aiming to make it subject to the government of the day. The Elections Bill of July 2021 also introduces a voter ID bill that Labour argues threatens to “lock millions of people out of democracy”. Like America, voting is not compulsory in the UK which opens up voter suppression strategies not available to those chipping away at Australian democracy. Cynicism about politics and politicians has had a marked effect on voter turnout in recent decades in the UK, but came to pervade all sectors of the electorate overwhelmed with disgust and frustration about the manoeuvres either side of the Brexit referendum.

 

The European Research Group (ERG) was founded in 1993 as a Eurosceptic force in conservatism. The urgent crisis in Britain’s democratic tradition began in the culmination of the ERG’s work during the lead up to the Brexit referendum.

It was clear during the campaign in 2016 that the work of private funders, shady internet forces such as Cambridge Analytica and the might of the radicalising tabloids was working to distort Britons’ ability to vote on the facts. The anger of the populace at the government’s austerity measures following 2008’s financial crash fuelled the fire.

The fostering of ethno-nationalist bigotries and fears was a key factor in the Vote Leave campaign. It is uncertain how much of this was driven by genuine jingoism amongst the leaders, and how much was a move to capture Nigel Farage’s UKIP voters.

The deployment of unreliable propaganda has been clearly apparent under the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign was filled with disinformation and his last election campaign was marked by the scandal of a “fact-checking” website run by the Tories that in fact disseminated lies. Johnson’s alleged lie to the Queen in order to suspend parliament was perhaps the most dramatic.

There is evidence of competitive authoritarianism’s misuse of government funds to support the incumbent. In 2021, for example, Labour is demanding that the Tories pay back £580 million of government money misspent on polling, while in 2019 the government misused £25 million on partisan Facebook advertisements.

While Britain has been protected from the fringe hysteria of its tabloid newspapers in the critical television news market, a hedge fund manager, an investment firm and the Discovery group are working to undo the “fairness” tradition with a local Fox News-style competitor for established news services. The early appearance of GB News is amateurish, but Sky News Australia’s former boss Angelos Frangopoulos is its CEO. Our own antipodean “Fox” has shown that inflammatory clips on YouTube can have at least as much impact as a successful television station.

A series of laws are under discussion in the UK in mid 2021 that political journalist Ian Dunt describes as “some of the most draconian authoritarian legislation” for decades.

Priti Patel’s Home Office has proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act to remove a “public interest defence” that would see journalists relabelled as spies and jailed for up to 14 years.

Whistleblowers, sources and publishers would face similar risks. This is on top of the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, that instituted a chilling surveillance power over citizens even those not suspected of any crime.

UK defamation laws are already one of the strongest protections the world’s powerful have against investigative journalism, with new oppressive secrecy provisions proposed. They work with striking effectiveness to limit publicity about the ugly sources of money brought into the UK by kleptocrats.

The Tories have been working for a year to neuter their electoral commission, aiming to make it subject to the government of the day. The Elections Bill of July 2021 also introduces a voter ID bill that Labour argues threatens to “lock millions of people out of democracy”. Like America, voting is not compulsory in the UK which opens up voter suppression strategies not available to those chipping away at Australian democracy. Cynicism about politics and politicians has had a marked effect on voter turnout in recent decades in the UK, but came to pervade all sectors of the electorate overwhelmed with disgust and frustration about the manoeuvres either side of the Brexit referendum.

 

Read more: https://johnmenadue.com/thanks-to-think-tanks-british-democracy-is-at-risk/

 

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corruption was central to it all...

If corruption was central to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, and US intelligence ignored it, what should become of the Five Eyes alliance?

 

BY Michael McKinley

 

In the stampede of analysis and blame to explain the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and conversely, the debacle and defeat of the Afghan army and its western patrons, there is a unanimous consensus that corruption was central to it all and yet, perversely, it was also a studiously ignored factor by the US intelligence agencies (and perhaps by the remaining four of the Five Eyes partners?).

What, then, of this lauded “jewel in the crown” of the alliance if it failed to warn of that Afghanistan’s soldiers were unwilling to fight, kill and maybe die for what was, essentially, a criminal cartel?

What needs to be clear from the start is that it is not just corruption that reflects badly on Five Eyes. All of the fault-finding accounts point to factors which, logically, imply a litany of flaws in the intelligence analysis and findings relating to Afghanistan: misreading the geopolitical realities of the region, misjudgements, and missteps – all of which contributed to the mismanagement and waste of resources, shortcomings of policy and, more bluntly, strategic blunders.

Few accounts, however, grasp the significance of corruption, specifically, that the government of Afghanistan was an enterprise that had more in common with Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra, Stidda, Sacra Corona, and Società foggiana.

The few that were alive to this and took steps to counter it reported it within the US command system and in widespread media publications.

One of the more outstanding investigators in this field was Sarah Chayes who, from 2002-2007, ran development organisations is Kandahar and subsequently was appointed as a special assistant to two commanders of the inter national military forces in Afghanistan, and the the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[For those unable to access her recent article behind the paywall in Foreign Affairs, a very similar account is available from her website].

What Chayes describes in some detail is rampant, endemic corruption running, in 2010, to somewhere between US$2 and 5 billion annually. Its origins are to be found in the US intervention in Afghanistan and was thriving from 2002 on. Of this, as she (and others researching among the general population) makes clear, the US agencies and command structure were aware when they wanted to be, or dismissive, because they chose to be ignorant. Either way they were complicit in a national, networked system of diversified business which were parasitic upon the population and totally prejudicial to the mission at hand.

Especially galling to read are the warnings of this system’s inevitable disastrous consequences, and recommendations to counter them, which were passed up the command structure in 2007 but were ultimately acted on only in the form of public relations exercises. These defaults, moreover, were perpetrated by four successive administrations despite the fact that the US had intelligence capabilities which could map the networks of corruption and thus thwart and/or sanction its beneficiaries.

In Washington, DC, the case had already been made through and by other sources no later than 2009. In Bob Woodward’s, Obama’s Wars, he details a White House meeting on October 9, President Barack Obama was told by General David Petraeus that, yes, the government in Kabul was a “criminal syndicate;” by the then ambassador to Afghanistan, General Carl Eikenberry, that he would challenge even the assumption that the US and that “extraordinarily corrupt” government were even aligned, and by Special Envoy Richard Holbrook, that the “US presence is the corrupting force.”

For those who find the testimony of individuals unconvincing, the case is made beyond doubt in the form of the reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Individually and collectively, and at considerable length, they catalogue what the country had become: a “gallery of greed,” for all who operated there, and they predicted with great accuracy what eventually happened.

It could hardly have been otherwise: Corruption in the Afghan army included but was limited to: tens of thousand of ghost soldiers whose pay-checks were directed to their commanders; under-paying or not paying those that did exist for the same purpose, and the redirection of food and ammunition, again for the same purpose. Others, such as military contractors eventually paid Taliban commanders not to attack their supply convoys.

All the while, the bare costs mounted: Well over 72,000 military personnel, and at least 50,000 civilians killed.

While there is a raft of questions that demand answers five seem to command priority.

The first is this: is it remotely possible that, over the with years Australia was in Uruzgan, its intelligence capabilities (military and civilian) were unaware of the profound and fundamental forces which would bring about defeat?

The second is: if they were, then why?

Third, did they know but did not communicate their knowledge to those who needed it to make decisions effecting life and death?

Fourth, if they did now, did they communicate their knowledge to those who needed it, but who rejected it?

Fifth, if it was rejected, was it because there was an override – blind loyalty to the Australia-US alliance – which reduced the intelligence into a corpus of inconvenient truths – in which case is another case of the relationship’s periodic demand for blood sacrifice?

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/five-eyes-intelligence-failure-in-afghanistan-or...

 

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