A presidential crypto pump-and-dump.

This may be rhetorical but here the question goes: did any of you invest in the $Libra memecoin endorsed and backed by Argentine president and darling of the global Right Javier Milei (who admitted to being paid a fee for his promotion of the token)? You know, the one that soared above $4 billion in worth after his Friday night announcement and then collapsed entirely within 24 hours after the original memecoin sponsors (3-4 in number on a cryptocurrency web site) cashed in their stake, leaving dozens of investors with unsecured million dollar losses in what was basically a crypto Ponzi scheme? Hmm.

When confronted Milei said that investment is about risk and people should have gauged the level of risk exposure that they could sustain. He would not say what his fee was or whether he was part of the original memecoin sponsor group (others in the know suggest that he was). He disavowed any responsibility for pumping up investor interest on Fridaay night via social media (you can imagine whose platform was used) before the token was dumped by the sponsors, in what is known in the crypto world as a rug-pull.

In his defence some have pointed to the fact that memecoins are like figurines or troll dolls: they have no intrinsic value and are purchased just for fun. But Milei pushed $Libra as a genuine investment, one that could presumably help small and medium sized Argentine businesses by allowing them to raise funds at low investment costs (the buy-in of $Libra started at USD$.1.00). Less than 12 hours later he deleted his original post on social media.

The fact that the sitting Argentine president was promoting a crypto currency of any sort–or any other financial asset or scheme–seems dodgy at the very least. That he was promoting a rug-pull pump-and-dump as a legitimate investment opportunity is Trump-level criminally audacious.

But maybe that was the play all along? Phrased differently and to pervert an honorable saying, the NZ Special Air Services (SAS) have as a motto “he who dares, wins.” Perhaps Trump, Musk and Miley have their own version of that. Does it not occur to anyone that the moral character of all of these people playing on the public trust is the same–that they are a kinship of immoral miscreant sociopaths? In NZ, is not David Seymour not the same?

Milei îs now being investigated for financial crimes and is facing the possibility of impeachment (juicio politico) over the scheme. But this is Argentina we are talking about so it is anyone’s guess how justice will be served.

When he said that he was going to take a chainsaw to public finances and remove “the caste” from politics perhaps he meant something a bit different than cleaning up the public sector under conditions of austerity. Maybe he just meant that the nature of official mendacity and corruption, and the beneficiaries of it, would simply change with him in office, not that it would go away entirely. I tend to believe, having been raised and socialized in that country, that the latter is the case.

You can read up on the scam details here.

The limits of over-reach.

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s. But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South. This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself. In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks. They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch. In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina, Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organization and even NATO if it does not do what he says. He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea). He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere–i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the world order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralyzed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it. That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisors are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing. Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal. Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world. An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programs. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order. Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

Unserious People.

In past times a person was considered “unserious” or “not a serious” person if they failed to grasp, behave and speak according to the solemnity of the context in which they were located. For example a serious person does not audibly pass gas at Church, or yell “gun” at a playground, say “sorry, just kidding” at a marriage ceremony, yelling that ” the lid is moving” at a funeral internment, put a whoopee cushion on the Prime Minister’s seat or try to barge into a plane cockpit just for laughs or as a prank. That is for comedians and idiots to do.

“Serious” in this old-fashioned sense means that a person knows the context in which s/he is acting and takes that context, well, seriously when behaving and speaking within it. That includes considerations of decorum, audience impressions, immediate and future consequences, the weight of tradition and importance of standards of comportment. Sometimes are not the time for a piss-take. The gravity of the moment dictates the degree of seriousness that should be taken.

Fast forward to the Oval Office press conference held by Musk and Trump this week. Trump sat hunched over the Resolute Desk while Musk, wearing a MAGA baseball cap and a t-shirt and accompanied by his four year old (and restless) son, pontificated about DOGE finding all sorts of dodgy doings at various government agencies. He lectured on what he thinks democracy is, spoke of mandates and unelected bureaucrats, smeared judges as activists and questioned their independence, asked why spending taxpayer money on foreign aid is considered a good thing, and spouted assorted other rubbish like some pimply-faced high school Ann Rand-inspired debate geek. On the other side of the desk from where Musk stood was a map depicting the “Gulf of America” just in case the media (including foreign press) did not get the point of Trump’s unilateral name change of that particular body of water. For at least 20 minutes the assembled press sat and watched in silence at the spectacle of Musk pontificating and Trump interjecting, perhaps collectively wondering why Musk was giving a joint press conference in the Oval Office in the first place. Everything after that was circus side-show gravy.

His son puttered around and behind the Resolute Desk, including picking his nose and wiping his nose-picking finger on the Resolute Desk, squirmed at his father’s feet and got hoisted onto Musk’s shoulders, where he played with the hat. The kid, whose name is “X,” also told Trump that he was not the president and that he should “shut the f**k up” (this was picked up by a hot mike and has now gone viral). Make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, outside the Oval Office windows it snowed gently on the South Lawn in what was the only concession to seriousness, serenity and reflection in that moment.

This is why Musk and Trump are not serious people. They may be using their respective positions and powers to pursue their overlapping agendas and interests, but even those agendas–annex Greenland and Canada, ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to make it beachfront real estate, re-occupy the Panama Canal, scrub “woke” language and information from government websites, kill off entire agencies and fire thousands of public servants and yes, rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (seriously?)–are not the acts of truly serious people.

These are the acts of delusional madmen intoxicated by their own egos and unconstrained by what should be the normal checks and balances of a stable and mature democracy, including the protections offered by the rule of law and US Constitution. Instead, if you add in the GOP-controlled two Houses of Congress, what you have is a three-ring political circus masquerading as a federal democratic Republic.

The tragedy may be that although they are not serious in the pure sense of that term, they are all the more dangerous because of it. The analogies about destruction done and chaos legacies left by these criminal bigots write themselves, but the consequences will be worn by serious and unserious people alike in the years, perhaps decades ahead.

Thank goodness my second son will spend his teenage years in Aotearoa, which is a place that, some exceptions and US influences notwithstanding, still takes governance and policy-making pretty darn seriously.

A reminder about soft power.

Waste and fraud certainly exist in foreign aid programs, but rightwing celebration of USAID’s dismantling shows profound ignorance of the value of soft power (as opposed to hard power) in projecting US influence and interests abroad by non-military/coercive means (think of “hearts and minds,” “hugs, not bullets,” “honey versus vinegar,” etc.). Soft power is also a component of “smart power” and “sharp power” strategies in which a combination of foreign policy instruments are used in concert in pursuit of a variety of non-kinetic ends (i.e. objectives short of war).

This razor-gang approach is short-sighted at best and stupid at worst given that the humanitarian/developmental aid vacuum left by US withdrawal from such efforts opens up the field to potential inroads by US rivals. Add to that the fact that USAID pays US farmers around $2 Billion for surplus rice, soy, corn and other agricultural commodities that otherwise would not be grown or go to waste, and the MAGA/DOGE move against USAID is a double-sided own-goal.

The NZ government, which currently is under the sway of MAGA/DOGE-style public policy ideologies, might do good to remember this when it deals with soft power competition in the South Pacific. Waving a (thornless) stick (say, in the form of withdrawal of foreign aid) at Pacific Island Forum countries when they negotiate bilateral economic, diplomatic and developmental aid agreements with non-“traditional” (non-Western/colonial) partners is likely to elicit some blowback of its own.

After all, regardless of the specific compacts agreed to in the past, sovereign States, whatever powers and protections they may have ceded to “traditional” partners, ultimately are autonomous agents of their own destinies. Foreign aid is a good way to remind them that that may be true but destinies can often be intertwined for mutual benefit even if other parties come late to the table.

On the DOGE data sweep.

Among the many other problems associated with Musk/DOGE sending a fleet of teenage and twenty-something cultists to remove, copy and appropriate federal records like social security, medicaid and other supposedly protected data is the fact that the youngsters doing the data-removal, copying and security protocol and filter code over-writing have not been properly security vetted and have at best been temporarily deputised into public service to do the retrieval tasks. They are loyal to Musk first, second and third and MAGA/Trump fourth. They are not loyal to the US public whose data they have now appropriated. This means that all that data collected is potentially being compromised or at risk of wider exposure and can even be data-mined, gifted or sold off to third parties for purposes other than public sector auditing or transparency.

That is pretty mind-boggling. As someone who held a S/TS/SCI clearance before leaving the US for a better life overseas, I had to undergo two polygraph and background checks conducted by the Defence Intelligence Agency before being granted the clearances, and upon leaving the security community I was placed under a 20 year gag order on what I had seen/done, with any material that I wanted to use after the 20 year gag window period ended subject to DoD censoring and editing (should I have decided to write or speak about topics that included using classified materials). I say this because I handled material that was just pertinent to my official duties, not wide swathes of data about everything under the sun, so the lack of security vetting of Musk’s minions is, again, astonishingly wrong.

This has the potential to end very badly, not just for the US government or what will be left of it after this reckless DOGE wrecking ball is done with it, but for the millions of people whose data can now be manipulated and used for untoward ends. We must remember that Musk is a dishonest and unscrupulous person, his cult minions and other “techbros” subscribe to variant of an anti-democratic and Social Darwinistic ideology known as “neoreactionism,” and MAGA acolytes like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Biondi and the authors of Project 2025 now installed in the corridors of power are all too happy to use any means to pursue the Trump/Musk agenda. Since all of these people are disreputable curs, none can be trusted to prevent misuse of personal confidential data for revenge, profit or other non-accountable purposes.

The questions then become: who benefits from the data-grabbing move? The GOP? Putin? The techbro oligarchy? What is the end game?

Whatever it is, it is a disaster in the making.

The politics of cruelty.

What seems to be the common theme in the US, NZ, Argentina and places like Italy under their respective rightwing governments is what I think of as “the politics of cruelty.” Hate-mongering, callous indifference in social policy-making, corporate toadying, political bullying, intimidation and punching down on the most vulnerable with seemingly unrestrained glee seem to be a hallmark of their respective approaches to governance. The fact that they share ideological and organisational ties through entities like the Atlas Network and Heritage Foundation suggests that this common approach is orchestrated rather than spontaneous and comes from the top down from conservative elites rather as an expression of the desires of the voting grassroots.

To be clear, they all won open elections fairly, albeit not by as wide margins as they claim, so their “mandates’ are a bit more tenuous than they may appear at first glance. But it is not so much whether they have large electoral margins of victory that matters but how they have chosen to exercise power once having won. On that score the post-election moment is alarming and the trend is authoritarian. What fuels this trend is belief in the power of “chaos theory,” where “disruptors” smash the system as given in order to achieve social, economic and political break-throughs after a period of stagnation and decline. This has been an ontological pillar of modern neo-Right thought–out of chaos and disorder comes rebirth–but it requires the firm hand of a determined leadership to push through the needed changes against the wishes of a reluctant or opposed polity.

In addition, although they all have their own variants of rightwing approaches to policy-making, be they MAGA populism (US), anarcho-capitalism (Argentina), post-neoliberalism (NZ) or neofascism (Italy), every one of these governments has elements of the “neoreactionary” movement growing strength in global rightwing circles. That movement sees liberal democracy as terminally flawed because it allows less-intelligent people to vote, which in turn produces political societies dominated by inefficiency, waste and rent-seeking collusion between public bureaucrats, their clients and feckless and avaricious politicians. For the neoreactionary movement, rule by a “monarchy” of corporate technocrats (e.g., Musk and Thiel) is preferable even if not possible over the short term. The new ‘masters of the universe” come from Silicone Valley rather than Wall Street, and are supported by legions of so-called “groypers” (younger rightwing ideologues and trolls) who serve as the foot soldiers of the new political-technocratic order.

At a political level, given the impossibility of immediately dispensing with elections and installing direct rule by the technocratic elite (as the leading edge of capitalism, now replacing finance capital), the short term remedy is therefore to elect “strong” leaders who rule by decree, fast-track legislation and/or emergency powers in which a Blitzkrieg approach is applied to institutional reform without regard to legal niceties or constitutional norms. The idea is to throw policy reforms against the societal wall and see what sticks given economic, socio-political and legal conditions. And given the pervasive influence of what can be called the attention-seeking (as opposed to information-seeking) culture accelerated by social media, this aim-at-the-wall approach flies below the radar of scrutiny by a public and mass media obsessed with clicks, likes and selfies rather than the incremental slide into authoritarianism. Because of that campaigns can be based on lies, disinformation and primal scapegoating of designated “others” because the ends justify the means. Elections have no intrinsic worth other than as serving as another instrument by which power is attained, and the turn towards authoritarian cruelty is the manner in which the spoils of victory are shared by election winners.

Not surprisingly given the above, in all of these cases rammed-through reforms have stuck. It remains to be seen what the long term effect will be or whether successful challenges can be mounted against them, but the disruptor neoreactionaries are on the rise and disruption is at play with no effective counterweight yet in sight.

For the time being, it appears that an era of darkness has descended upon us.

***Thanks to Lorenzo Wachter Buchanan and Dr. Jeanne Guthrie for their insights on this subject.***

Political societies and economic preferences.

Much discussion has been held over the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB), the latest in a series of rightwing attempts to enshrine into law pro-market precepts such as the primacy of private property ownership. Underneath the good governance and economic efficiency gobbledegook language of the Bill is a desire to strip back regulations in order to give capitalists of various stripes more latitude of action.

The RSB is interesting for two reasons. One, it is the type of omnibus bill that is designed to supersede other legislation in the policy enforcement chain. It is a “mother of all laws” or foundational stone type of legislation that its proponents hope will serve as a basis for future legislative reforms and policy-making and to which all existing laws must be retro-fitted. Although it varies in its NZ specifics, it emulates the “Ley Omnibus” (later named “Ley Bases” (Base Law) pushed through by Argentine president Javier Milei last year, which basically allows for the dismantling of the Argentine State bureaucracy, reform of labor and environmental laws, slashes the public budget, and opens the economy to foreign investment.

As a result, although the inflation rate has been drastically reduced and some foreign investors have taken interest in the Argentine economy, the poverty rate now reaches nearly 60 percent, health indicators (and facilities) have cratered, pension and social welfare plans have been decimated, unemployment and crime have risen, and basic public services are on life support (including power and water provision in some areas). Despite these deleterious effects, Milei’s “chainsaw” approach has been celebrated by the ACT Party, sponsor of the RSB and its predecessors, so here again we see an example of NZ politicians borrowing concepts from similarly-minded foreign governments.

They are not alone: the incoming Trump administration’s Project 2025 and Project 47 copy aspects of Hungarian president Viktor Orban’s authoritarian-minded constitutional reforms (since it centralises power in the Executive Branch and restricts civil liberties and opposition rights). More ominously, because it is an omnibus bill that redraws the NZ constitutional map in a preferred image, it echoes the Nazi “Empowerment Law” that Hitler pushed through in the German parliament after the was named Chancellor in 1933, albeit without the repressive powers later confirmed upon him. As in the case with Milei and his Base Law (and Hitler at the beginning of his legislative campaign), the RSB depends on securing a slim parliamentary majority in order to to pass into law.

What is important to note is that such omnibus legislation is most often used in democracies by authoritarian-minded politicians who are afraid that they cannot get their policy reforms passed and accepted otherwise. It is a soft form of constitutional coup whereby the “rules of the game” are stacked via legislative reform in favour of a specific set of interests, not the public good. It is a “soft” type of coup because it uses lawful/constitutional means to achieve its ends. In a perverse way it is a sign of weakness that its proponents do so, as if they know that their preferred policy prescriptions will be rejected by the electorate in the absence of an overarching law forcing the public to follow them.

To be clear, here the focus is on omnibus or foundational laws, not more specifically drawn laws that follow from them. For example, commercial and environmental law cover aspects of social and economic life but are not “foundational” in the sense that they do not provide cornerstone underpinnings to civil and criminal law, which in turn address detailed and specific rights and obligations regarding various aspects of social life, including enforcement of those rights and obligations by an independent judiciary. “Penalties under the law” refer to this level secondary of judicial oversight, which in turn is governed by foundational principles enshrined in omnibus legislation (which is the province of constitutional law).

There is a second, more fundamental problem with this approach. It involves the distinction between political society and economic society and why they should not be intertwined.

Political societies are aggregations of people within given physical boundaries who agree upon or are forced to accept certain universally-binding rules regarding representation, leadership and collective decision-making. Because NZ is the subject of this post, we shall leave aside for the moment various authoritarian political communities. As a liberal democracy, NZ has a form of rule based on majority contingent consent to the system as given, formally expressed through elections but more granularly in the everyday actions of voters who accept their positions in the social order. People go to work, play, attend school, have relationships and generally comport themselves as members of society in accordance with commonly accepted notions of acceptable behaviour (e.g., “live and let live,” “due onto others as one would do onto oneself,” respect difference and the rules of the road, etc.). But that majority consent to any given democratic rule is contingent on public expectations being met, both materially as well as politically. Political and economic societies are formed to address (and shape) those expectations.

Economic societies are aggregations of people operating within a given productive structure, making things and generating surpluses from their labor and labor-saving inventions while exchanging goods and services. “Homo economicus” is non-political. S/he maximises economic opportunities in order to pursue material interests. The ways of doing so are many and can involve collective as well as individual effort, which is often determined by the type and modalities of production (industrial, agricultural, mixed, etc.) and the material goods being pursued.

Vulgar structuralist thought holds that the type of economic society determines what type of civil and political society emerge from it. To this day, proponents of things like (neo)modernisation theory adhere to this belief. But such views offer a simplistic read on the interplay between economic and non-economic factors, so claims such as “free markets lead to democracy,” and ” political parties are the political equivalent of economic agents in the productive process” are overdrawn at best. A more nuanced take is that civil and political life may have a grounding in economic life but are not reducible to or epiphenomena of it. In some instances, say in the cultural sphere, human behaviour is not a surface reflection of an underlying economic reality or framework.

Political society is about collective governance and civil engagement. In democracies it involves a “legal” agreement, compact, or contract about the way in which the political order should be governed, which involves ostensibly neutral institutions and processes, As such, it can co-exist with a number of economic arrangements and is not inherently linked to any one. For example, over the years democracy has coexisted comfortably with varieties of capitalism and socialism. Authoritarianism has also co-existed with capitalism and socialism. The particular combination of economic framework and governance structure defines specific variants of regime type: NZ is a “liberal” democracy because it is based on a capitalist economic foundation (first settler colonialist, now primary good export, real estate ownership and services dependent production). North Korea is a Stalinist country because it combines one-party authoritarian rule with State control of the mixed industrial/agrarian economy.

What this means is that laws in a democracy are basically a means of adjudicating disputes, avoiding collective conflicts and regulating individual and collective behaviour regardless of economic status (think of the “justice is blind” adage). Ideally, they should be agnostic or neutral with regard to economic preferences because it is possible that future generations of voters will elect to support different types of economic arrangements that they believe suit their collective and individual material interests better than current schemes.

But that is not what has happened. In NZ and elsewhere in liberal democracies, things like private property rights have been enshrined in law and thereby protected by the State. The evolution of this marriage of political and economic societies is complex but the bottom line is that NZ is a capitalist society governed by a democratic capitalist State that enforces the primacy of capital above all other things. To be sure, much lip service is given to civil liberties, human rights, equality before the law, even adherence to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. But the foundation of the modern NZ State is not based on a contract between interested parties such as the agents who signed the Treaty, or on respect for the rule of law per se, but on the structural dependence of NZ society on capitalism. The role of the NZ State is to help resolve the contradictions that inevitably emergence in a political system where a minority of voters control major parts of the productive apparatus but rely on the labour of others (wage labour) in order to generate the material surpluses (profits) that allow them to exercise (indirect) political as well as (direct) economic control in NZ society.

The RSB seeks to further deepen that structural dependence of NZ society on capital by giving certain capitalist fractions more leeway in the conduct of their self-interested affairs. When fully implemented it will atomise wage-labor both in and out of production while consolidating specific types of capitalist structural control. In that light the RSB codifies the State’s role (or non-role) in facilitating capitalists’ (aka businesses) self-interested pursuit of profit. From then on self-interested maximisers of opportunities, individual and corporate, will seek comparative advantages in the deregulated marketplace.

The problem, again, is that enshrining a specific set of economic preferences or biases in a political charter interferes with voter’s freedom of choice when it comes to their own economic interests and desires. Depending on their circumstances and structural location in the productive apparatus, not everyone may be a fan of capitalism or accept the primacy of private property rights. Some may even prefer socialism, however that is defined. Prioritizing and facilitating the pursuit of specific economic preferences contravenes the commonweal (public interest) basis of democratic political charters such as that governing Aotearoa. Instead, it rigs the societal “game” in fair of a select few.

Other, more astute minds have already voiced their opposition to the RSB on a variety of grounds. Here the point is to remind readers of why omnibus bills are inherently anti-democratic even if they are legally constitutional, and why democratic political society is distinct from and should remain “above” economic society however construed. The former deals with universal values and interests; the latter involves specific sectorial interests and their material objectives in a system structurally based on the pursuit of profit. Although they may be overlapped in fact because of NZ’s history of structural dependence on capital, the public good is best served when the political/legal framework is agnostic or neutral when it comes to sectorial interests. That is what democratic collective bargaining systems are for and why political lobbying needs to be tightly regulated. Instead, the RSB seeks to tilt the game board in the direction of a specific set of interests, not the public interest at large.

Alas, although it is not meant to be, the rightwing NZ economic and political twain have met, and the outcome is the RSB. For the reasons outlined above, that is why it should be opposed.

The disinformation grift in NZ.

A while back I was engaged in an unpleasant exchange with a leader of the most well-known NZ anti-vax group and several like-minded trolls. I had responded to a racist meme on social media in which a rightwing podcaster in the US interviewed one of the leaders of the Proud Boys movement (in 2017) in which the Proud Boy made claims that 55 percent of UK Pakistanis were in-bred (“consanguineous” in their pseudo- scientific terminology) and that 50 percent of the births by women in such relationships were still-born. The IV was reposted late last year as a way to link the incidence of inbreeding to the “Pakistani gang rape networks” stories circulating in the UK and picked up by white supremacists the world over. The local anti-vax leader reposted the IV approvingly.

I made a comment on the thread about how if their data was true they should have nothing to worry about since a 50 percent stillborn rate pretty much is a path to extinction, especially when half of the surviving in-bred children would be too mentally incapacitated to do anything dangerous and pose a threat to the UK status quo (which was the implication in the IV). Because the Proud Boy leader showed photos of supposed official medical data charts to back up his views, I questioned if he had data on Mormons or Hasidic Jews in order to make cross-religious/ethnic comparisons. Instead, one of the trolls on the thread posted an official looking chart (but with no title, source or other information) listing a number of Muslim majority nations with their respective “consanguineous” birthrates. When I noted that the data presentation look cherry-picked because it only covered Muslim majority countries, the respondent insisted otherwise. So be it. The best response I got was that Pakistani Muslim in-breeding in the UK was a problem because they would burden the health care system. Fair enough but that was not the thrust of the discussion, which again was focused on social issues related to Muslim immigration in the UK. In any event, after that the argument descended into personal insults, ridiculous claims and, well, racism.

I have chosen not to identify the NZ anti-vax group or the referenced particular leader other than with generic “woke” pronouns because they are not worth the energy. People who follow the NZ anti-vax movement will know who the person is. So why expend oxygen on them and give them more attention, especially since that is what they crave? Also, when I refer to the “disinformation grift” I am not referring to the government-funded anti-extremism and radicalization entities that sprung up after the March 15, 2019 rightwing terrorist attacks in Christchurch, which have been falsely accused by rightwing mouthpieces of being opportunistic troughers pilfering from the public purse. I give no credence to those accusations and instead will focus on those who deliberately spread lies and falsehoods about vaccines, the nature of government health edicts, health indicator demographics and assorted other seditious claims among the tinfoil hat brigade.

The exchange with the anti-vaxxer and racists got me to thinking about how it appears that this NZ anti-vax leader has materially benefitted from arguing against government pandemic mitigation efforts, health authority mandates, “socialist” or “fascist” infringements on individual rights (of movement and assembly), forced introduction of foreign materials and nano-technologies into humans via the “jabs,” and imposition of quarantines and travel bans while vilifying Jacinda Ardern as being a modern day Hitler or Stalin with Ashley Bloomfield (and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the US) being her Dr. Mengele, among assorted other lunacies.

The twist is that I know this person because “they/it” live in my small community and was a teacher’s aide at the local primary school that my son attended. They/it was known in the community for their/it’s anti-vax views (for diseases like measles) well before the pandemic, but back then they/it took a relatively low profile and did not proselytize their/it’s views until Covid struck. This is not to say that these views were unknown, since they/it used personal social media accounts to post about their/it’s beliefs. These include a well-known antipathy towards large people, particularly those of colour, seemingly due to they/it’s healthy diet and “wellness” lifestyle (let’s just say that they/it does not like people who enjoy KFC).

Unfortunately, in the exchange following the racist IV post they/it accused me of stalking and being “weird and creepy” because I could see they/it’s comments even though I had blocked them a long time ago (that is actually part of the blocking policy on the social media platform that we were using). The resort to personal attacks is of course taken off the rightwing playbook where, as Steve Bannon recommended, “you flood the zone with crap” by hurling false accusations and smears at detractors, who you then accuse of censorship, de-platforming and attempting to shut down free speech rights. I told they/it to not flatter themselves thinking that they/it was worth my attention. Ultimately the whole thing turned into a circle-jerking waste of time so I blocked them again and left the discussion.

They/it’s move into rightwing racial politics reminded me of they/it’s past comments and those of other anti-vaxxers on the subject. In fact, if I remember correctly, members of this particular anti-vax group appeared at anti-mandate rallies alongside neo-Nazis like Kyle Chapman. In that light I continued to reflect on how they/it’s material fortunes seem to have improved since they/it founded their group and began soliciting funding for it (some which is allegedly from foreign–mainly US–sources), to the point that they/it now appears to have moved well beyond the knitting circles and reading to kids line of work that they/it had before the pandemic arrived. They/it was, unsurprisingly, part of the 2022 Parliament demonstrations but fled before the rioting began, and continues to agitate for their causes on social media and radio, including doing an interview with Infowars, the US-based conspiracy podcast website run by the attention-seeking cur known as Alex Jones.

They/it’s messages overlap with other “cookers” such as the now separated duo of lunatics at Counterspin Media and the seemingly deranged Liz Gunn, and their/it’s focus has evolved to include anti-Maori, anti-immigrant and the usual Deep State BS that gives rightwing extremists fever dreams. That is interesting because it appears that concerns about vaccines are not the only thing that they/it fears, which might explain their approvingly re-posting about Pakistani in-breeding in the UK and the general reproduction rates of Muslims world-wide. It seems replacement theory is on their radar, which is odd because one way to get ethnically replaced is to stop taking vaccines for previously common diseases while other groups follow the science of vaccinations. That is an irony lost on white reproduction-obsessed cookers.

Anyway, what struck me is that the entire anti-vax movement not only overlaps with other causes based on prejudice and “othering” of targeted scapegoats, but also is a source of grift for those who lead them. Gosh, who would have thought it? As that wretch Jones has proven, there is money to be made in disinformation if you are just dishonest and unethical enough to do so. From what I have discerned and without wanting to waste further time and energy on this sorry subject, here is how I see the disinformation grift progression as a crude flow-chart:

Prior anti-vax beliefs+general discontent with authority–> anti-vax disinformation riding on concerns about Covid mitigation efforts–>Deep State conspiracy theories (Ardern as Hitler/Stalin, bureaucrats trying to control everyone, etc.)–> Big Pharma/globalist machinations (dove-tailing with Jewish) conspiracies–> racism (anti-Muslim, anti-maori, anti-immigrant)–> homo- and transphobia–> climate change denialism–> defence of “free speech”–> pleas for money–> foreign funding–> realisation that fund-raising surpluses can be appropriated as personal rents= the disinformation grift.

The idea is to keep spreading lies and fomenting hate and division, make money off of the effort, put some money back into public information campaigns and pocket the rest. This could well be a lucrative business model for those so inclined. I do not know the tax status of this particular anti-vax group but would not be surprised if it claimed charitable status. As mentioned earlier, its sources of funding may include foreign donors as well as mum-and-pop subscribers/donors. But there does not appear to be any public auditing of the group’s accounts, including the remuneration of its directors and amounts spent on luxury items (as opposed to public information materials regarding the supposed dangerous of vaccinations).

As far as I can tell, no media investigations have been launched into the tax status, revenues and expenditures of this group or similar astroturf (as opposed to genuine grassroots) “interest group” cons like Counterspin, Groundswell or Brian Tamaki’s personal “church.” I shall leave aside for the moment alleged grifting at places like the Waipareira Trust simply because the Trust’s stated objectives are not based on abject lies and disinformation and they do deliver real tangible community services, so whatever grift that may be occurring there–and legitimate questions have been raised to that effect–is not a disinformation grift.

Presumably an OIA request might pry open some information about them from the IRD and other pertinent authorities, but that is beyond my forensic capabilities at the moment. Any investigative reporters willing to give it a go (if there are any left, other than Gordon Campbell, Nicky Hager and Matt Nippert)?

In the end, my suspicion is that even if there was legitimate vaccine skepticism before the pandemic arrived that carried over into some of the opposition to the Covid pandemic mitigation efforts in NZ and elsewhere, it has morphed into a broader-focused globally-networked rightwing money-making scheme based on the propagation of dis- and mis-information about health matters, social issues, culture, demography and identity. To make matters worse, the disinformation being peddled by “cookers” has crossed over into mainstream political discourse thanks to it being parroted and mainstreamed by some corporate media, most rightwing social media and ignorant and/or opportunistic politicians doing so for partisan gain.

None of this is good for democracy (the abuse of rights to free speech is part of the grift) or social cohesion. But that is the state of play as we begin the second quarter of the new century.

PS: Now that the Disinformation Project and the Violent Extremism Research Centre (sic) were defunded by NACT and have ceased to exist, is there any other dedicated research agency looking into the activities of group’s such as those mentioned above? Both of these entities had their flaws but at least kept their eyes on the ball when it came to political extremists in Aotearoa. But what exists now? Just curious.

A turn to the Big Stick.

This is from the 36th Parallel social media account (as brief food for thought).

We know that Trump is ahistorical at best but he seems to think that he is Teddy Roosevelt and can use the threat of invoking the Monroe Doctrine and “Big Stick” gunboat diplomacy against Panama and Greenland to leverage concessions from them. But he is no Teddy Roosevelt and this is not the early 20th century. Trump may find that abrogating Treaties and engaging in coercive diplomacy may suit Putin but may not be the useful tools that he thinks they are when dealing with two friendly democracies/military partners (Rio Treaty/NATO) in today’s world. Who is advising him on this?

Because it smacks of mobster thuggery mixed in with gross ignorance.

Trump’s reasoning appears to be rooted in his fear of Chinese influence in both countries. Chinese firms have invested in Greenland’s strategic minerals sector for over a decade while US and other Western firms have not. Trump and his advisors see this as a threat now that the Arctic Passage is opening thanks to global warming (that Trump refuses to acknowledge much less address), but neither the autonomous Greenland government or the Danish government that oversees it (the relationship between the two is akin to that of NZ and the Cook Islands) seem particularly bothered by their presence and welcome the investment. Even if it stationed military personnel there in WW2 and has mounted Arctic expeditions using military personnel stationed at a Greenland base, the US has no claim to Greenland whatsoever. It is Danish territory with a local independence movement (something that Trump may attempt to exploit), which means that he is eying the internationally recognised territory of a NATO partner for annexation or acquisition.

Since 1996 Hong Kong based maritime transport firms (COSCO in particular) have managed the container terminals at both ends of the canal. The locks are manned by a mixture of Panamanian, US and other nationalities, so the Chinese do not “control” it. Contrary to Trump’s lies, there are no PRC “soldiers” in the Canal Zone and the management of the canal, including passage fees and related levies, are not discriminatory against US-bound, US-originated or US-flagged vessels. Under the terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty that replaced the original Treaty signed in 1903 (in which the US paid Panama a flat sum and yearly rents for a ten-mile swathe of land on either side of the canal), no military personnel other than those of the US and Panama can be stationed in the Canal Zone, and foreign military forces must ask for permission to transit the waterway. The result is that the Canal Zone is sovereign Panamanian territory whose security is partially guaranteed by the US rather than be threatened by it.

As for the invocation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as a reason to intervene in Panama, beyond the imperialistic motivations behind it, the reality then and now is that the Doctrine is just a proclamation by one US president backed by military force. Its original focus was on deterring European powers (and Russia) from establishing footholds in the Western Hemisphere but over time it became an umbrella excuse for US interventionism even if it was not particularly effective in preventing the establishment of a Soviet naval base in Cienfuegos, Cuba, or Marxist/Maoist inspired and backed guerrilla revolutionary movements from cropping up throughout the region in the post-WW2 Cold War era.

Most importantly, the Monroe Doctrine has no basis in international or US law. It is not a Treaty (unlike the Panama Canal Treaty) that has been ratified by the US Congress, and therefore has no legal standing. It just survives as a historical relic propped up by notions of customary usage as a general justification for US interventionism in the Western Hemisphere. I had to deal with it when I was the Western Hemisphere Regional Policy Analyst in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, and let’s just say that US security hawks like it because they believe that it gives them unilateral carte blanche to meddle in Latin American and Caribbean affairs. They now have a chance to test that belief.

For some background on the Panama Canal see these US briefs on how the Panama Canal Treaties came into effect.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/panama-canal#:~:text=In%20his%20new%20role%2C%20Bunau,guarantee%20the%20independence%20of%20Panama.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/panama-canal

The text of the 1977 Treaty restoring Panamanian control over the canal can be found here: https://pancanal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/neutrality-treaty.pdf

About Syria.

I have been thinking about Syria and coverage of the fall of the Assad regime, and to be honest I believe that there is something missing from the picture being painted, at least in NZ. Although I am no expert on Syria or the Middle East, I do have some experience working with irregular and unconventional fighting groups as well as writing about authoritarian regime demise and the modalities by which that occurs. I will therefore take a moment to reflect on what I think is missing.

Media reporting has it that the attack on Aleppo and rapid, two-week drive through Hama and Homs to Damascus was a surprise. That may be true for the media, many non-Syrian laypeople and perhaps the Russians and pro-Assad Syrians themselves, but otherwise I beg to differ. The reason is because the training and massing of rebel fighters in Northern and Central Syria would have taken time (some believe the uprising has been 5-10 years in the making), and would have therefore been detected by Western and regional intelligence services some time ago. If we think about satellite and aerial imagery, signals intercepts, ground based thermal and other technical acquisition capabilities as well as human intelligence on the ground, then consider that Syria and its armed factions are in the middle of a larger geopolitical conflict in the Levant and wider Middle East, and then think about who has a direct vested interest in Syria’s fate (as well as their partners and patrons), it is probably safe to assume that intelligence agencies grouped in the 5 Eyes, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, France and/or Germany were monitoring at one level or another developments in rebel-held areas long before the assault on Aleppo was launched.

And then there is the pro-Assad intelligence community.

Perhaps distracted by events elsewhere, the Russians appear to have been genuinely caught off-guard, although it has been reported that they started pulling out personnel from Syria weeks before the attacks began (which would suggest they knew something was about to happen). Likewise, perhaps distracted by their own concerns regarding Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranians eventually airlifted key personnel out of Damascus shortly after Aleppo fell, so even if they were blind to the preparations for the uprising, they clearly believed, correctly, that momentum was with the rebels once the assault was launched. More tellingly, weeks ago there were credible claims that the Syrian State had been “hollowed out” by senior officials (i.e. state coffers were raided, corruption and drug-dealing was endemic and public service provision halted), who then fled the country. Make of that what you will.

All of this would have given some clear indications that the Syrian status quo was about to change and Assad and the rest of his henchmen were soon to exit one way or another. What is telling is that the intelligence agencies that would have known about the rebel’s preparations (including NZ via its connections to 5 Eyes and other Western intelligence agencies including Mossad), maintained excellent operational security and did not let it be known, either by leaks or mistakes, that a major coordinated assault by the rebels was in the making. This was done not so much to spite the mainstream corporate media, which clearly had zero boots on the ground in rebel-held areas prior to the assault, but to prevent the Syrians, Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas and Russians from learning about the uprising before it was underway. By the time the “axis of resistance” realised what was happening, it was too late to do anything but wait, watch and if need be, flee.

Whether the Russian, Syrian and Iranian intelligence failures were caused by them being stretched too thin on the ground, distracted with external events and/or incompetence, there are lessons to be learned learned from their lack of forewarning.

Israel’s successful (at least for now), multi-front campaign against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, with some sidebar strikes on Syria thrown in for good measure, degraded the axis of resistance’s capabilities to detect and prevent the uprising. Now it appears that Israel is opening another front in Syria with an eye to significantly changing the geopolitical landscape in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated as military forces. Iran has been intimidated into passivity. The Houthis have gone largely silent. This, thanks to Israel’s scorched earth, targeted assassination and long-range missile strike operations against all of them. Now Israel has launched a two-pronged offensive in Syria, conducting a bombing campaign against weapons storage facilities (some containing chemical weapons stockpiles) while simultaneous targeting command and control facilities as well as the entirety of the Syrian Navy (which shares major port facilities with the Russian Mediterranean fleet at the city of Tartus, which in turn raises the question of what will become of the Russian presence there and at a nearby airfield once the rebels seize control of them).

The IDF has also sent ground forces into and beyond the UN-monitored buffer zone separating Syrian control from Israel within and beyond the Golan Heights. Much like in Southern Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has seized the opportunity provided by neighborly discord in order to expand its presence in its neighbours’ territory, perhaps with an eye to redrawing their common borders. Since there is no foreign power capable of stopping Israel or willing to do so, it looks like the Israeli gambit will pay off. But that may depend on what the rebel-led government in Syria does next.

If foreign powers were aware in advance of the rebel’s plans, it is also very likely that they conducted more than passive observation and information-sharing amongst themselves. The US has 900 troops in Syria, most of them US Army Special Forces (Green Berets), Green Berets’ main mission is to train, advise and assist local forces in any given conflict, so it is possible that they had working ties to the rebel groups in advance of the assault on Aleppo. The US also has combat troops stationed in Jordan, Israel and Iraq and a variety of military assets in Turkey, effectively surrounding Syria’s land borders. Likewise, in part because of the lingering presence of ISIS in central and eastern Syria, a number of other countries–NATO members most likely–have special operators and/or military intelligence assets “in theatre.” Turkey acknowledges its military working relationship with one of the rebel groups, the Syrian National Army (SNA) in Northern Syria. The US has close ties to Kurdish insurgents in Northwest Syria and Northwest Iraq. The Jordanians are said to have operatives in Southern Syria and one can assume that, if not an surreptitious military presence, Israel has its covert hand in the pie as well.

What this means is that it is quite possible that foreign forces provided training, advising and intelligence and logistical support in the years, months, weeks and days leading up to and through the assault on Aleppo. If so, it should not be surprising that he rebels maintained an unusual amount of discipline previously unseen in their ranks, and that the various armed factions worked well together, sometimes in coordinated fashion. Even some of their combat fatigues and weapons look new and Western in origin!

So who are these rebels? Basically they are Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), who are the remnants of a group formerly known as Jabbat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), an al-Qaeda and ISIS-connected Islamicist group; the Free Syrian Army (an anti-Assad “secular” group backed by the West); and the afore-mentioned, Turkish-backed SNA. There are also Kurdish PKK/YPG/SDF militias in the mix who control approximately one quarter of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates River (and major oil fields), although these divide their time between mopping up Syrian Army troops in Northeastern Syria and fighting ISIS militants, the SNA, the Turkish military and pro-Turkish militias.

The rebel coalition has formed a tactical alliance against its common enemy. None of the constituent parts are particularly democratic in orientation, and in spite of HST’s claims that it has served all ties with ISIS and does not espouse (Sunni) Islamicist beliefs such as Salafism or Wahhabism, such statements must be taken with a grain of salt. There are numerous reports of lethal attacks on Christians and Alawites (which is a Shiite sect) by rebel forces in Aleppo and Hama, so the proof of the rebel’s good intentions remains to be seen, especially if military discipline has broken down amid the quest for collective revenge.

The sectarian nature of the rebel coalition is worth noting because the Assad regime was Alawite, which is a mostly coastal minority community in an otherwise Sunni-dominated country. Assad reserved many of his governments’ top positions to co-religionists in the Syrian Baath Party (originally related to the Iraqi Baathists led by Saddam Hussein), so retribution and revenge against those who formed the support base and bureaucratic staff of the Assad regime can be expected, HST assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. What is promising is that HST has agreed to form an interim (not yet transitional) government with various sects represented and some carry-overs from the Assad regime appointed in order to restore and/or maintain continuity in public services.

The HST-led government is now focused on rooting out Assad loyalists, imposing social order, securing military and police facilities (including notorious prisons), and bringing public services back to life where possible. But reconstruction of battle-damaged areas will be lengthy and difficult process given that Syria’s treasury has been emptied, many public offices looted and/or damaged, and corruption is rampant within and between various sectarian groups. The international community will be asked to foot the bill and provide the human, material and financial capital required to return the country to some semblance of normalcy. This is complicated but the fact that the HST and PKK/YPGSDF have been designated as terrorist entities by the UN and a number of countries (although for different reasons, with HST designated because of its ties to ISIS and the PKK/YPG/SDF designated at Turkey’s insistence because of their irredentist activities in pursuit of an independent Kurdistan in territory now controlled by Syria, Iraq and Turkey). Before international relief can be offered, the terrorist designations will have to be lifted, something that will not please many interested parties for a variety of reasons.

More broadly, the fall of the Assad regime is one variant of what is known as “bottom-up transitions,” where before the regime is prepared to exit it is forced to do so by public pressure and mass collective action. Bottom-up transitions can stem from revolts, rebellions, general strikes, mass protests and the ultimate sub-type, revolutions (which, unlike the others, involve parametric change in the economy, social order and political society). These are not to be confused with top-down transitions, in which the outgoing regime frames the conditions by which it relinquishes power. This can be done peacefully or by a coup d’état, which is essentially an armed quarrel amongst elites in which the military acts as the arbiter of who wins and loses in the power struggle by siding with those that favour an exit strategy and transition to a different regime type. Examples of peaceful top-down transitions were seen in Brazil in the 1980s and Chile in the 1990s, where power was devolved from military control and handed over to elected civilian rule rather than be overthrown by force.

In Syria as has happened elsewhere, there will be major tensions between so-called “moderates” and “militants” (soft-liners and hard-liners) in the HST-led coalition. Hardliners and militants tend to come from fighting backgrounds. They tend not to seek compromise and conciliation because they have succeeded in imposing their will by force of arms. They are reluctant to forgive their defeated adversaries and many are sworn to avenge the affronts committed against their families, friends and communities (and in Syria, the affronts included atrocities and other forms of barbarism committed by Assad’s forces against the civilian population). Moderates, on the other hand, tend to come from the non-fighting political opposition, religious, business and community leaders and foreign interlocutors. These seek to draw a line behind them when it comes to dealing with the past in order to facilitate the reconstruction of society and promote national reconciliation.

The key to keeping the post-Assad transition relatively peaceful is for the moderates and softliners to gain the upper hand in negotiations to form the new government. For that to happen, inducements and constraints (think carrots and sticks) must be offered to and placed on the militant hardliners. Inducements can include open trials for those accused of heinous crimes committed on Assad’s behalf, placement of senior rebel commanders in leadership roles the Syrian security apparatus, establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals that address past sins committed on all sides, and even material rewards for those who refrain from continuing to use violence as a means to an end. Constraints could include weapons impoundments, criminal prosecutions, and other legal and material disincentives that discourage continuation of hardline or militant behaviour.

None of this will be easy but it is necessary is stability is to return to Syria. It is possible that the armed factions and their political and social supporters can use the common ground forged fighting the common enemy to expand the basis for commonality into other aspects of Syrian life. It could start with something as simple as national sports or cultural traditions and then move to the more thorny issues of governance, economic accumulation and distribution, religious and secular civil rights, and so forth.

What is clear is that, for the short term at least, the big losers in Syria are Alawites, Iranian and Russians. Assad is gone and his minions routed. Iran has lost its major overland transit route connecting it to Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas) as well as the intelligence, forward basing and logistical support of the Assad regime. Russia has lost it foremost ally in the Middle East as well as the intelligence and military assets that it had stationed in Syria prior to Assad’s fall (assuming that the new regime will confiscate the Russian facilities at Tartus and Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia city). Reputationally, both Iran and Russia have taken a major hit with their weaknesses as a security partner now exposed.

Israel appears to be the primary short-term beneficiary of Assad’s overthrow. To a lesser but significant extent, so are Western and Middle Eastern powers with a stake in the Levant. But a longer-term prognosis is more difficult to ascertain because the direction of the HST-led government has yet to be determined, and the post-Assad settling of scores has yet to be decided. Whether or not this involves a return of Islamicists with or without the ISIS brand is foremost among the concerns of many security agencies.

In any event the best we can do is embrace the uncertainties inherent in the moment, attempt where possible to bolster the moderate/softliner positions within the new government and offer concrete steps based on the experience of others as part of the path towards national recovery. History will be the ultimate judge of the process but for the moment all we can say is that we live in interesting times.