Día: 27 diciembre, 2016

Encuentran muerto a un agente de la OTAN que investigaba la financiación del Estado Islámico

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El auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN), Yves Chandelon, fue hallado sin vida en Bélgica. Varios medios señalan que se trató de un suicidio, versión que la familia no admite.

Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte, OTAN. Imagen: Sputnik Türkiye

Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte, OTAN. Imagen: Sputnik Türkiye

El cadáver de Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la OTAN, fue encontrado hace unos días en la ciudad de Andenne, Bélgica, a 140 kilómetros de su oficina, con un disparo en la cabeza.

El alto cargo de la OTAN investigaba las redes de financiamiento a los grupos terroristas, entre ellos, el Estado Islámico (EI), refiere el portal de Luxemburger Wort. Aunque la hipótesis de las autoridades, difundida a la prensa, fue que se trató de un suicidio, los familiares de Chandelon discrepan.

Según el portal belga Sudinfo, las circunstancias de la muerte han generado todo tipo de suspicacias, ya que aunque el agente tenía tres armas registradas, el disparo mortal en la cabeza provino de una cuarta que se encontró en la guantera de su auto y no aparecía entre las que estaban a su nombre.

Por otra parte, otros medios como La Gaceta, en España, destacan que el alto cargo de la OTAN “había recibido extrañas llamadas telefónicas”, lo que extiende un manto de duda sobre la versión del suicidio.

El parte oficial de la Fiscalía, citado por el diario Tageblatt no ha dado crédito a esas suposiciones, mientras se esperan los resultados de la autopsia, que se conocerán este martes. Chandelon vivía en la localidad de Lens, situada a unos 100 kilómetros del lugar donde fue encontrado su cuerpo.

Aunque el cadáver fue hallado el pasado 16 de diciembre, el hecho no fue reseñado inmediatamente por los grandes medios occidentales, lo que ha sido objeto de críticas encendidas por los internautas en las redes sociales.

En: RT

Mas en: Russian Ambassador, Senior NATO Staff and Russian Diplomat – All Dead Same Week

Here’s how American journalists covered the rise of Hitler in the 1920s and 30s

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How to report on a fascist?

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler. AP Photo

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Adolf Hitler at the German Opera houseAdolf Hitler at the German Opera house. AP Photo

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In: businessinsider

 

I ‘Went Back to China’ — and Felt More American Than Ever

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Six years in Hong Kong showed me how deep racism runs in Asia’s world city.

BY CRYSTAL CHEN / OCTOBER 21, 2016

On Oct. 9, New York Times metro reporter Michael Luo revealed that he and his family had been subject to a racist outburst on the streets of New York City’s posh Upper East Side. Readers, especially of Asian descent, were quick to volunteer their own stories in the aftermath, showing that while racism against Asians is not always in the U.S. public eye, it is widespread. I’d like to address this article to the woman who told the U.S.-born Luo — and to all those who may have harbored similar sentiments at one point or another — to “go back to China.”

My parents left China in the wake of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to seek refuge in American higher education in the 1970s, eventually becoming entrepreneurs. I was born in Ohio, raised in Nebraska and California, and attended Yale University in Connecticut. Six years before that woman on the streets of New York told Luo to go back to China, I had already done so. After graduating college, I moved to Hong Kong, a port city that has been the West’s gateway to China since the mid-1800s.

I believed the city, a place brutalized and molded by colonial forces before its return to China in 1997, was somehow like me: an East-meets-West pastiche. I also believed that Hong Kong, more multicultural, global, and outward-looking than any mainland city, was likely to be the most racially enlightened. But after more than six years of living and working there, I would learn just how racially progressive the United States was by comparison. It’s not just because anyone can speak up and defend themselves, but because doing so is embedded in our culture.

Growing up in Nebraska, I was “ching-chong’d” in school and asked why my eyes were so small. Later on, popular kids would compel me to do their homework with overtures of friendship, only to ignore me at recess. Even in relatively liberal California, I was bullied and shut out by the girls in my all-white Girl Scout troop. My early life in white, Christian America impressed upon me the notion that my real home, my real friends, was where my parents had left it — back in China.

In college, I devoted myself to the notion. I holed myself up exclusively in Asian cultural clubs and worked to beef up my half-hearted, lisping Mandarin Chinese. I took classes in Chinese philosophy, sociology, and politics. Internships in Beijing and Shanghai and travels around the mainland gave me a glimpse of what my new home would be like. After graduation, I secured a job in Hong Kong.

My mother, who had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong to the United States, was distraught: “Why do you want to go back there?”

But much, I insisted, had changed. The mainland wasn’t the Mao-era hot mess she’d left behind; the 2008 Beijing Olympics painted a glorious image of a new Middle Kingdom, and Lehman Brothers’ collapse that same summer foretold an ominous future for the United States. Out in the dizzying economic rise of the Wild Wild East, opportunities abounded for those willing to work in a globalizing China, particularly in Hong Kong, which billed itself as “Asia’s world city” and was also deepening ties with the mainland.

What I didn’t tell my mother was that my desire to leave was primarily motivated by the possibility of escaping the unfriendly U.S. racial climate. In Asia, I wouldn’t have to deal with being “Asian.” I wouldn’t be a minority, much less a model one. For once, I was certain, my race wouldn’t matter.

I moved to Hong Kong in 2010 to work for a multinational education company and cast myself with a privileged lot of expatriates, or huayi — ethnic Chinese who have grown up abroad. It was deeply comforting to be surrounded by people who looked like me. And because I spoke perfect English and had attended an Ivy League university, my social currency in status-conscious Hong Kong went further than most. I was not just able to “blend in” — I was privileged. I was heard, respected, and invited to glittering parties. Those first years in Hong Kong were beautiful and easy.

But eventually my conscience began to gnaw at me. At work, invisible walls divided colleagues by skin color. White managers who had worked all their lives in Asia sometimes looked surprised when I spoke up in perfect English to volunteer my opinion — a small thing, but revealing. A few seats away from my desk sat Filipino colleagues, often ignored or greeted with terse, awkward smiles when they tried to make conversation. I saw a Pakistani colleague of mine held at arm’s length during team happy hours, lonesome with his glass of wine while his colleagues buzzed around him. A Sri Lankan friend of mine working in investment banking cried when she was passed over for a raise once again.

The city’s thorny relationship with race was even more obvious outside of work. I remember dining with an Indian companion and being thoroughly ignored by the waitstaff, even beyond the standards of usually brusque Hong Kong service. Locals regularly complained to me about being paid less than their expat counterparts. And on the streets, images of hapa women, men, and babies — half white, half Asian — were featured prominently on billboard ads, the city’s aspiration to whiteness hiding in plain sight.

Hong Kong is also home to hundreds of thousands of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers — 320,000, as of 2013. On Sundays, their day off, Hong Kong’s otherwise mostly hidden domestic helpers swarm public parks, much to the chagrin of locals who I’d hear complain of what they saw as their parks being “overrun.” Workers who have served Hong Kong families loyally for decades cannot become permanent residents, dependent instead on a work visa that could be stripped from them at any moment. The 2016 Global Slavery Index — compiled by the Australia-based nonprofit Walk Free Foundation, which tracks government action on forced labor, human trafficking, and other conditions of modern slavery — ranked Hong Kong’s government in the bottom 5 percent worldwide. Reports surface regularly about domestic workers being beaten or sexually abused by their employers. These people served me cocktails, cooked the food I ate, bussed my plates without a sound, painted my nails, massaged me, and cleaned my apartment. “That’s just capitalism,” my erudite friends would say, but I couldn’t shake the truth that my privilege floated on cheap Southeast Asian labor and the diminished social position they occupied.

With each year that passed, I became increasingly aware of the morally fragile foundations of the lifestyle I enjoyed. I had believed that spiriting myself to Hong Kong would mean that I wouldn’t have to face racial discrimination anymore. Bewitched by the possibility of transcending the racial totem pole, I only later realized that I had merely relocated to the top, and the view wasn’t what I expected. Being brought up in the United States meant my standards for racial equality were forged in a culture built around the dissent, dialogue, and disruption that the First Amendment vouchsafes.

It was only after six years in Hong Kong that I began to understand why people leave their countries to come to the United States and why it’s so difficult to repatriate. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned or unsee what you’ve seen. Neither could I unlearn the promises of equality that I’d repeated every time I took the Pledge of Allegiance.

I had been running away for a long time. I had run away from being a “victim” of American racism to become part of the perpetrating class in Hong Kong. I had hid from the yellow face in the mirror and pretended, with my perfect English and my elite education, that I was someone else. I had tried to “go back to China,” only to find myself more American than I’d realized. But I’m not running away anymore. I’ve found that my “home” isn’t limited to a physical place. It’s not in Hong Kong, China, or the United States. It’s in the people I love and the work that needs doing. It’s in the values I hold that grow and change over time.

So, to all those who have ever wanted people like me to “go back” to China: My home is on a bridge as short as a hyphen and as wide as the Pacific Ocean. My home is an in-between place, as it is for all Americans who remember their roots, their history, and the journey that got them here. My home is a compromise, a discussion, a negotiation.

In: foreignpolicy