Confrontations With Colonialism: Resistance, Revivalism & Reform Under British Rule In Sri Lanka

By Sumanasiri Liyanage and Charitha Herath –February 17, 2017

In the last ten years or so, Prof. P V J Jayasekera has been working on revising his doctoral dissertation for publication as many friends had insisted that it should be offered for public consumption. Finally the first volume of it is out. We are not a historians so we possess neither the subject knowledge nor the capacity to comment on the wider field the book is grappling with. Hence this is just a reader’s response.

Confrontations with Colonialism: Resistance, Revivalism and Reform under British Rule in Sri Lanka 1796- 1920. Vol. 1 By P V J Jayasekera

Confrontations with Colonialism: Resistance, Revivalism and Reform under British Rule in Sri Lanka 1796- 1920 (hereafter Confrontations) begins with a long introduction on the failure of existing historiography to account for the domination technology deployed by the colonial rulers and the complexities of how natives reacted to it. Eurocentric historiography with its univocal, positivistic, linear and meta-discourse has viewed the imperialist mission as a civilizing agent of continuing the European Enlightenment project throughout the globe. According to the author, this view was challenged by postcolonial studies initiated by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Prof. Jayasekera talks about the subaltern studies as a positive contribution to colonial history writings as the subalternists have focused on the specificity of colonial context and the non-elites and their struggles in the colonial setting. However, in a recent book, Vivek Chibber (Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital) has made a substantive critique of subaletern studies notion of the specificity of colonial capitalism by bringing in the complexities of the historical development in the metropole. Prof. Jayasekera’s main critique is that this debate in historiography has no influence in Sri Lankan historiography of colonialism. His is a critique of the Sri Lankan historiography in the writings of academics following the colonial master’s format. Hence. those work remained “within the paradigm set by European historiography of colonialism” (p xx).) Hence, P.V.J suggests that we need a different perspective in writing history of the colonial period in Sri Lanka that includes critique and re-reading.

Confrontations has three long chapters that the author has defined as parts. A reader may wonder why he called chapters as parts in the Volume 1 while using the usual word “chapters” in the Volume 2. The three parts are as follows:
Part 1. The British Colonial Project in 19th Century Sri Lanka: The Orwellian Logic
Part 2. Christian Colonialism and the Resistance and Revival of Buddhism
Prat 3. Buddhism, Theosophy and Nationalism

The Nature of the Colonial State

P.V.J in Part 1 of the Confrontations questioned the seemingly dominant view that the colonial state in Sri Lanka after Colebrooke- Cameron Commission’s recommendation had turned into a Laissez- Faire state. K.M.de Silva representing the dominant position writes: “The basic purpose of Colebrooke and Cameron was to impose on Ceylon the superstructure of the laissez -faire state. And in this they succeeded to a greater degree than they themselves could have anticipated.” (quoted in p. 38). This view was upheld by many other historian including G C Mendis. Contrary to this view, P.V.J argues that “The colonial state in its typical 19th century form emerged not with the Colebrooke- Cameron reforms but with the development of the plantation system as the dominant sector of the economy and its concomitant result of firmly establishing the hegemony of the British bourgeoisie over the colonial society.” (p. 41) In support of this argument, he quoted Vijaya Samaraweera’s view that the legislation on land, labor and taxation that facilitated the development of the plantation system amounted to a total rejection of Colebrooke- Cameron recommendations. What is the nature of the colonial state in Sri Lanka? As P.V.J argues that “the hegemony of the British bourgeoisie over the colonial society” was established in the 19th century, the question arises what were the concrete mechanisms that facilitated this hegemony. The central argument of the Part 1 of Confrontations as it appeared in the quotation cited above is that the colonial state was an interventionist state on behalf of the British capitalist class in their endeavor to make profit. Here one may see a minor contradiction. On page 41 onwards, the author gives the impression that the colonial bureaucracy was relatively independent from the British capitalist class so that one may wonder that the colonial state’s interventionism was an outcome of this relative independence of the bureaucracy that had direct interests in plantation industry. Whatever its source, the book gives ample evidence to show that the colonial state was not a laissez- faire state but a state that intervened in multiple means in order to promote the plantation industry in grabbing land and hiring low-cost labor. As noted in page 50, K.M. de Silva has also emphasized that the colonial state used deception, denial of information and misinformation to get the legal validity for draconian Land Ordinance 5 of 1840.

Although the Confrontations relates the colonial interventionist state to direct plantation interests represented by the colonial bureaucracy that operated as a power bloc, S.B.D. de Silva in his study argues that plantation system was not in fact directed and controlled by the owners whether they were colonial bureaucrats or absentee owner class but by novel institutions called agency houses. He sees agency houses not as a form of productive capital but a form of merchant capital. In the analysis of the nature of the colonial state, it would have been better had the author focused on the web of alliances between the colonial state, its bureaucracy and the agency houses.

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Iconic child war victims Bana, Abdel urge help for ‘children of Syria’

Bana al-Abed, whose tweets gave tragic description of bombing of Aleppo, meets Abdel Basset, who lost his legs in bombardment of Idlib

Seven-year-old Syrian girl Bana al-Abed, whose Twitter account gave tragic description of bombing of Aleppo (AFP/file photo)

Saturday 18 February 2017

Two Syrian children who have become powerful symbols of their homeland's conflict met on Saturday, vowing that "the war will not stop us" in spite of the horrific violence around them.

Seven-year-old Bana al-Abed - whose Twitter account gave a tragic description of the bombing of Aleppo - met 10-year-old Abdel Basset, who lost his legs during the bombardment of Idlib.

Abdel was caught in a barrel bomb attack by regime forces in the town of Al-Hbeit, in northwest Idlib province on Thursday.

A video circulated by activists on social media showed him lying amid thick clouds of smoke, screaming in agony, CNN reported. "Baba, carry me, baba!" he cries out for his father, unable to stand, his legs blown off at the knees.

Turkish NGO the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said Bana visited Abdel in hospital in Hatay, southern Turkey, where he is being treated.

In a live Periscope video on Twitter, Bana gave Abdel presents before she urged people to "help the children of Syria".

She added: "We will go to school, we will play. The war will not stop us. We are strong."

Sharing the clip, Bana said she was "very happy" to meet Abdel in a tweet.

Bana al-Abed meets fellow Syrian Abdel Basset, who lost his legs in bombardment in Idlib, at hospital in Hatay, Turkey, on Saturday (AFP)

The IHH said Abdel's mother and three-year-old sister were killed during the bombardment, while his other two sisters are suffering from unidentified health problems.

A monitoring group said the barrel bomb attack came from Syrian army warplanes. CNN said it could not independently verify claims of the origin of the attack. There's been no comment from the Syrian regime or Syrian state media.

Idlib has been under rebel control since 2015 and is currently covered by a nationwide ceasefire deal brokered by Russia and Turkey in December, that requires the Syrian government to halt military operations against anyone who isn't affiliated with the Islamic State group or other terror groups, state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported.

Bana became known worldwide with her tweets from flashpoint city Aleppo that offered insight into the raging conflict.

She gained a global following last year with her Twitter updates from Aleppo has written an open letter to US President Donald Trump asking him to help other children her war-torn country.

Bana drew some 363,000 followers after she joined the micro-blogging site last September where she uploaded messages and pictures of daily life in Aleppo on the @AlabedBana handle, an account managed by her mother Fatemah.

In December, the young girl and her family were evacuated from the rebel-held eastern part of the city amid a government offensive. They arrived in Turkey, where they met President Tayyip Erdogan.\

 Follow

@Mr.Alhamdo @Mr_Alhamdo

Bana who was in Aleppo and I personally met her many times knows the pain children have during war. #Daddycarrymehttps://twitter.com/AlabedBana/status/832683774949281793 …

8:01 AM - 18 Feb 2017

 
•  4242 Retweets
 
•  6161 likes

Turkey has supported rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Bana recently wrote an open letter to US President Donald Trump asking him to help other children in her war-torn country.

On her own @FatemahAlabed Twitter account, Fatemah posted a picture of a handwritten letter where the young girl introduces herself to Trump as "part of the Syrian children who suffered from the Syrian war".

"...Can you please save the children and people of Syria? You must do something for the children of Syria because they are like your children and deserve peace like you," the letter reads. "If you promise me you will do something for the children of Syria, I am already your new friend."

In the letter, Bana also talked about losing friends in the nearly-six-year conflict ,and her new life outside Syria.

"Right now in Turkey, I can go out and enjoy. I can go to school although I didn't yet. That is why peace is important for everyone including you," she said.

"However, millions of Syrian children are not like me right now and suffering in different parts of Syria. They are suffering because of adult people," she wrote.

The Western Roots of “Middle-Eastern” Terrorism

We would like to invite the public to ponder the wisdom of a thinker who once said that in the past weapons were manufactured to wage wars, but today wars are manufactured to sell weapons.

by Amir Nour-Feb 18, 2017

( February 18, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian)  Convinced that terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes, is unacceptable and unjustifiable, member States of the United Nations were finally able to adopt, on September 8, 2006, a common approach within the framework of the “United Nations global counter-terrorism strategy ». But, ten years later, the “international community” has yet to agree on a consensus definition of the common enemy, which continues to grow and expand, thus inflicting devastation and untold misery, mainly to the States and the peoples of the Arab and Muslim world.

The Western Roots of “Middle-Eastern” Terrorism.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Netanyahu’s Trump predicament

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at right, is under pressure from education minister Naftali Bennett, at left, to drop the two-state pretense altogether.-Abir SultanReuters

Omar Karmi-13 February 2017

When the gods wish to punish us, Oscar Wilde once wrote, “they answer our prayers.”

Something like this now confronts Benjamin Netanyahu as he contemplates a future whose horizon would appear to have broadened significantly with the election of Donald Trump as US president.

Trump’s election should be a gift to Netanyahu: outside restraints on what Israel can do in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and with the Palestinians have almost completely fallen away.

But the Israeli prime minister now has to decide how far his nationalist pro-settler coalition is prepared to go in dismantling decades of peace process logic – however little heed he has paid to it in the past.

Israel’s far-right – comfortably in power at the moment with no serious domestic opposition – has never had it so good. The Middle East is in violent disarray, and Sunni-Shiite conflict and competition dominate a regional agenda down which the Palestinian issue has slid inexorably.

Palestinians themselves are divided and unable to put up a common front.

Trump, meanwhile, has promised to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, a step that would signal US acceptance of the Israeli claim to the city as its “eternal, indivisible capital.” This would also end Palestine Liberation Organization aspirations for the capital of a future Palestinian state in the city’s eastern sector, occupied and unilaterally annexed by Israel in 1967.

Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, moreover, is a fervent supporter of Israeli settlements in occupied territory, illegal under international law, and heads a US nonprofit organization that raises money mostly for the Beit El settlement just outside the West Bank city of Ramallah.

He has also gone on record to say that a Trump administration will support whatever Israel wants in terms of resolution with the Palestinians, even if that means annexing the West Bank.

Seizing the day

Without US support, international efforts to rein in Israel will have even less effect than usual.

December’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning West Bank settlements was vigorously protested in Tel Aviv.

But it now seems like the final death throes of a bygone era, one in whose coffin the new Trump administration has not been slow to hammer in nails: Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the UN, called the resolution a “terrible mistake” and a new low for American leadership in the world.

Israel is, in other words, facing an open goal. Shoot and score.

But what is the goal? Jewish Home, a pro-settler party with a primarily Orthodox base, has been quick to assert its aims.

Its leader, and current minister of education, Naftali Bennett, has long advocated the annexation of large tracts of the West Bank and Bennett welcomed Trump’s election by announcing that “the era of the Palestinian state is over.”

He is pushing a bill through parliament that would see the annexation of Maaleh Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank, though he agreed to postpone a vote on it until after Netanyahu and Trump meet in Washington on 15 February.

His party was also the driving force behind the so-called Regularization Law, which allows Israel to expropriate privately owned Palestinian land in the West Bank on which settlements have been built.

(For all the moral outrage over the some 4,000 settlement houses this affects, the law is just a pale imitation of the kind of expropriation rubber-stamped under the 1950 absentee property law that allowed the Israeli state to seize the lands and property of some 850,000 Palestinians who fled or were forcibly expelled in 1948.)

Here again, Netanyahu wanted to wait until after his tête-à-tête with Trump, but this time, Bennett forged ahead, mindful that his base had been outraged by the evacuation of the Amona settlement outpost at the beginning of this month.

From this “painful loss,” he doubled down, “will emerge the State of Israel’s application of sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria.”

Applying the brakes

The expropriation law passed parliament on 6 February even though Netanyahu was understood to have been against the bill out of fear that it might see Israeli leaders brought to the International Criminal Court. Still, while Netanyahu conveniently was on a flight back from London, his Likud Party and the government coalition voted for the bill, ensuring its passage.

Israel’s state attorney Avichai Mendelblit, however, has already stated he will not defend the law if it is challenged in court. And it would suit Netanyahu very well should his pick for attorney general do his dirty work for him. That way he can support the expropriation bill – so popular with the Likud base – and see it defeated at the same time.

This is how Netanyahu has operated over the past eight years. His is not a politics of strategic vision. Netanyahu works for the short term, to ensure his political survival and not alter a status quo that favors settlement-building as a way of creating facts on the ground ahead of any potential final status agreement.

Every prime minister since the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993 has engaged in this kind of land grab. The only difference between mainstream Israeli leaders is how much territory to take and what kind of Palestinian entity to eventually countenance.

This requires striking a balance between showing support for the more gung-ho pro-settlement forces while not going so far as to render a pliant Palestinian Authority helpless to maintain the illusion of prospects for statehood or indeed reach the point most Israelis say they fear: a single binational state – whatever rights may or may not be afforded to Palestinians.

Netanyahu tinkered with that balance by forming an extremely settler-friendly coalition. But he could count on Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama to allow him to make political capital from being bullish on settlements while still maintaining that status quo.

That cushy situation has now, temporarily at least, been upset by the Trump wild card. Netanyahu will be very keen for the new US president to play the Obama spoiler role again, lest the balance tilts so far toward facts on the ground that even the Palestinian Authority has to concede that statehood is no longer possible.

“It is reasonable to assume … that Netanyahu has signalled to Trump to put some brakes on,” said Yossi Alpher, a former Israeli intelligence officer and author of No End of Conflict: Rethinking Israel-Palestine. Alpher told The Electronic Intifada that Netanyahu needs to balance the demands of his “right-wing settler buddies” and “the need to maintain some kind of facade of devotion to the two-state solution.”

Moment of truth

This might explain the sudden shift in mood music from Washington when White House spokesperson Sean Spicer issued a surprise warning to Israel over an accelerated settlement construcion program that has seen the approval of some 6,000 new housing units since Trump’s inauguration.

It would also explain the interview Trump gave the pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom newspaper published Friday. “I am not somebody,” he said, “that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”

This is a moment of truth for Netanyahu. He is under growing pressure to drop the two-state idea altogether when he meets Trump on Wednesday.

But his support for a two-state solution was always predicated on his overriding fear of the alternative, binational scenario. Netanyahu “understands that we are on a slippery slope to some sort of one-entity reality,” said Alpher. And members of Israel’s influential security establishment are already sounding that alarm.

So Netanyahu, prayers answered, finds only a predicament.

Trump – who in the Israel Hayom interview published Friday observed that “every time you take land for settlements, there is less land left” – may get on board to save the charade for another while.

But it is ultimately an unsustainable charade that settlers and their supporters are now rudely exposing.

Omar Karmi is a former Jerusalem and Washington, DC, correspondent for The National newspaper.

Pence’s speech on Nato leaves European leaders troubled over alliance’s future

Despite the US vice-president reaffirming a commitment to collective defence, the mood in Munich was mostly one of frostiness and consternation

Pence criticised most of Nato’s members for failing to pay their fair share. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images

Ewen MacAskill in Munich-Saturday 18 February 2017

Europe’s leaders gathered in apprehensive mood in Munich on Saturday for their first chance to weigh up the new US leadership’s approach to collective defence in the face of what many perceive as a growing Russian threat.

The signs have been mixed, and confusing, since Donald Trump won election last November. He initially signalled warmth towards Vladimir Putin and some scorn towards Nato. More recently he has appeared to backtrack on both fronts.

The US vice-president Mike Pence, making his first visit to Europe since taking office, failed to quell those anxieties in a speech on Saturdayat the Munich security conference.

Instead, he left some of his European allies confused and alarmed, angry at being chastised for failing to pull their weight in the defence alliance, and concerned that too little attention is being paid to the future of the European Union.

The audience, made up of national leaders, defence and foreign ministers and other senior government figures, who would normally, out of politeness, offer up a warm welcome for a senior US politician, greeted some of his comments with sparse applause.

Pence, reiterating that the US remained committed to Nato, attempted to soothe concerns that Trump might deal directly with Putin, bypassing western Europe. The audience welcomed his promise that Russia will be held “accountable” for its actions in Ukraine, although he didn’t spell out how.

But he lost them when he went further than US defence secretary James Mattis at Nato headquarters last week in rebuking Nato members such as Germany, France and Italy for failing to pay a fair share of its financial burden.

Echoing Trump’s threat last year that he would not necessarily be bound by Nato’s article five, which commits every member to come to the aid of any that comes under attack, Pence reiterated the president’s warning that military help might depend on how much a country under attack had contributed to Nato.

Pence reminded the audience in Munich that Nato had two core principles; one was article five but the other, usually forgotten, was article three, dealing with shared financial burden. “We vowed in that treaty to contribute our fair share to our common defence,” Pence said. “The promise to share the burden of our defence has gone unfulfilled for too many for too long and it erodes the very foundation of our alliance. When even one ally fails to do their part, it undermines all of our ability to come to each other’s aid.”

Speaking after Pence, Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, made it clear, as did German chancellor Angela Merkel earlier, that the country did not intend to be bullied by the Trump administration into increasing defence spending. “I don’t know where Germany can find billions of euros to boost defence spending if politicians also want to lower taxes,” Gabriel said.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, tweeted to express disappointment that Pence’s speech contained “not a word on the European Union”. Trump has welcomed Brexit and seems hostile towards multilateral organisations such as the EU.

Ayrault, as well as Merkel, hailed multilateralism as more necessary than ever at a time of increasing crises, not least the rise of nationalism. In comments that seemed to be targeted at Trump’s “America First” policy, the French foreign minister, said: “In these difficult conditions, many are attempting to look inward, but this isolationism makes us more vulnerable. We need the opposite.”

Pence’s mission to Munich – he was accompanied by Mattis and US homeland security secretary John Kelly – served only to confirm a widening gulf between the US and core European countries, the UK excepted, and left allies as uncertain as before about Trump’s commitment to Nato.

Nicholas Burns, former under-secretary of state in the Bush administration and a former US ambassador to Nato, tweeted: “Despite VP Pence’s statement, the big question at Munich security conference: Does Pres Trump truly support Nato and the European Union?”

The Munich conference has been running for more than 50 years, founded by a senior German officer, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, famous for his part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. He proposed bringing together leaders from around the world as a way to help prevent another world war.

 Mike Pence tells Nato allies to ‘do more’ on defence spending

The conference has grown into one of the biggest international forums outside the United Nations. It is an informal and pleasingly chaotic affair, with lots of chat in crammed meeting rooms and bars in the Bayerischer Hof hotel, a place of faded grandeur – chandeliers, tapestries, marble floors and busts of Bavarian notables from previous centuries – but with the advantage of being in Munich’s city centre.

Among the estimated 500 attending are 15 government leaders, 16 heads of state, 47 foreign ministers, 30 defence ministers, 59 representatives from international organisations including the secretary-generals of the UN and Nato, and philanthropists and celebrities including Bill Gates and Bono. As important as speeches in the conference hall are the many bilateral meetings – a Syrian peace agreement, even if it proved illusory, was reached here between the US and Russia last year.

US senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, war hero and former Republican presidential candidate, delivered a blistering attack on Trump on Friday. “What would Von Kleist’s generation say if they saw our world today? I fear that much about it would be all-too-familiar to them, and they would be alarmed by it,” McCain said.

He expressed concern about an unwillingness to “separate lies from truth”, the disarray in the Trump administration and a shift away from universal values “toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism”.

Taking part in a panel discussion on the issue “Can the west survive?”, he said: “In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism. Not this year. If ever there was a time to treat this question with deadly seriousness, it is now.”

McCain is not given to hyperbole. Nor is Wolfgang Ischinger, 70-year-old former German ambassador to the UK and US and now chair of the Munich conference, who said that Europe had entered an era of “maximum uncertainty”, a period more volatile than any time since the end of the second world war.

Europe already has a host of issues stacking up. It has failed to deal with the Russian involvement in Ukraine that led to the Crimea annexation in 2014, other than to support the imposition of sanctions that so far have proved ineffective in ending the violence. Europe and the US sat on the sidelines of the Syrian conflict, again outmanoeuvred by Russian intervention.

There are fears in Europe too of Russian intervention through cyber-attacks or the spread of fake news in upcoming elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany, though the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Munich, rejected US intelligence claims that Moscow had interfered in the US presidential election. “I would like to say: ‘Give us some facts’,” he said.

Problems on Nato’s eastern and southern flanks, even if more serious than at any time since the second world war, are not new. What is new is that for the first time Europe cannot look with certainty towards the US for help.

And there is the other threat from the west, closer to home, the potential for Brexit to be the catalyst for the break-up of the EU.

The British tend to be more sanguine about Trump than their French and German counterparts. Foreign secretary Boris Johnson, also at Munich and on the same panel as McCain, was dismissive of apocalyptic warnings about the future of Nato and the west. He said there was nothing new in such predictions, recalling that Oswald Spengler’s seminal work The Decline of the West had been written in 1918.

The British defence secretary, Michael Fallon, speaking on a panel of defence ministers on Friday, said that the problem Europe should be worried about is not Trump but Putin. “It’s Putin, not Trump, who’s deploying those missiles. It’s Putin, not Trump, who’s interfering in foreign democracies,” Fallon said.

But security, in particular Nato and Russia, is viewed differently in Germany and France and elsewhere in Europe than it is among British Conservatives.

With Pence having failed to satisfy all those unanswered questions, Europeans might have to wait until May when Trump is scheduled to make his first trip to Europe as president to attend the annual Nato summit, being held this year in Brussels.

TRANSATLANTIC FLASHPOINTS

Russia

Russia is scheduled in September to hold its biggest military exercise along its western border for 20 years, citing provocation from Nato expansion. Tensions with the west have risen since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and it is accused of continuing violations against Ukraine. Trump, in the interests of rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, could abandon US sanctions.

Baltic states

With large ethnic Russian populations in the Baltic states, Putin could test Nato through hybrid warfare: a mixture of cyber-attacks, propaganda and deniable interventions. A decade ago, Estonia, amid a dispute with Russia, received a taste of such cyber-attacks, which hit its parliament, government departments, banks and other key infrastructure.

Brexit

March sees the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome that led to the creation of the European Union. The same month the EU faces its biggest challenge when the UK triggers article 50. The fear among the remaining 27 members is that this will encourage others to leave too, with Donald Trump, who applauded Brexit, cheering on the sidelines. Against this turbulent background and the rise in populism, elections are coming up in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and concern that Russia might interfere, as it is alleged to have done in the US.

Russians Are Turning on Donald Trump

One month in, the new White House is looking chaotic and weak -- the opposite of what Russia respects in a politician.

BY AMIE FERRIS-ROTMAN-FEBRUARY 17, 2017

MOSCOW – Several months ago, on the outskirts of Moscow, someone took white paint and scrawled a short statement of political protest onto the side of a garbage depot. “Trump is a faggot,” the graffiti read.

This small act of defiance in then-Donald Trump-loving Russia went largely unnoticed, however — until this week. Now, the photo, which journalists say was taken in November, is making the rounds on Russian social media, where it’s being greeted with mockery. “We believed in you! And your despicable self betrayed us!” the Moscow-based photographer Sergey Sukhorukov wrote this week, in a poem he shared with the picture.

The new U.S. president has been in his role for just under a month, taking office in a transition that has been marked by chaos and missteps. And already, from the right of the political spectrum to the marginalized Russian left, a mixture of disappointment with the new U.S. president — who came into office promising to remake relations between the two countries — and a sense of vindication that Trump couldn’t be trusted after all has crept into Russian political chatter. “Is Trump already out of fashion?” the independent Russian journal Russkaya Fabula asked on Wednesday — the same day that the Trump administration was dealing with the fallout stemming from revelations about National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. The site pointed to a small demonstration by hard-line nationalists this week, which picketed a major state-run news outlet and demanded the end of the “cult of Trump” in Russian media.

It’s true that in recent months the adulation has been inescapable. According to a recent Russian media survey, Trump surpassed the omnipresent Russian leader Vladimir Putin as the most-mentioned person in the Russian press in the month of January, with 202,000 references, versus Putin’s total of nearly148,000. “Judging by the top news items on (Russian search engine) Yandex, Putin has somehow turned Russia into one more American state. There’s none of our own news. There’s only interest in the USA,” said liberal politician Ilya Yashin.

That’s in part because the Russia question has loomed so large over Trump’s nascent presidency. Relations between Russia and the United States were at a post-Cold War nadir in the waning days of the Obama administration, dogged by differences on Ukraine and Syria, and accusations of election-related hacking. Trump came into office having declared several times over the course of the campaign his admiration for Putin, and promising a dramatic shake-up in relations — potentially even a revisiting of sanctions that were slapped on Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. Such pledges spurred a sort of “Trumpomania” across Russia. Sugar, charcoal, hamburgers, and silver minted coins have been made in his honor; Trump’s inauguration was celebrated with glee at several Moscow locales.

It wasn’t just the promise of a reset, however: Trump’s tough talk on migration and terrorism, combined with his success in business, appealed to Russians too, both ordinary and high-ranking. They saw in Trump the sort of strong, law-and-order leadership they found attractive at home. For many Russians, especially Putin supporters, presenting an image of strength is vital to how they want to be viewed on the world stage. The memories of the chaotic, impoverished 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union still haunt the country, and Putin’s tight grip on power has become the hallmark of his leadership. Clumsy, directionless rule is frowned upon.

But the last few weeks of Trump’s administration have been marked by signs of weakness. The president’s controversial executive order banning refugees and immigration from several Muslim-majority countries was met with large-scale protests, and then stayed by judges; his nominees for high-ranking positions have been met with opposition. And the less commanding Trump has seemed, the less alluring he has come across — not just to Americans, but to Russians, too.

“Never has Trump been so close to failure,” right-wing politician and former lawmaker Nikolai Travkin said after Flynn’s resignation, making reference to a popular Russian joke about a fictional Soviet World War Two spy. Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, tweeted on the changing mood in Moscow on Wednesday, asking, in Russian, “Well, colleagues, is [Trump] still yours?” McFaul referred to the widespread Russian hashtag #TrampNash, meaning “Trump is ours” and a play on words on the oft-heard phrase “Krim Nash,” or “Crimea is ours.”

The disappointment in the fledgling U.S.-Russian rapprochement seems to have been cemented, both in the Kremlin and among ordinary Russians, earlier this week with the Trump administration unexpectedly declaring that Crimea was taken forcefully by Russia and should be returned to Ukraine. Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, the largest land-grab in Europe in decades. In a press conference on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that Trump had made it “very clear” that he expected Russia to return Crimea, and urged Russia to de-escalate the situation in eastern Ukraine, which has recently experienced an uptick in fighting.

Russia’s reaction to the Trump administration’s seeming U-turn was swift and straightforward: “We do not return our territories,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a routine media briefing. “Crimea is a territory of the Russian Federation. That’s it.” The Kremlin also ordered state media to cut back on their overly positive coverage of Trump, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

At the beginning of the year, some polls put the number of Russians feeling positively towards the U.S. at double the numbers seen in 2015, reaching some 40 percent. But now, there are signs that some Russians feel they spoke too soon.

“We were too early in our decision, made with absolute sympathy towards President Trump’s constructive rhetoric, that he would somehow be pro-Russian,” Leonid Slutsky, head of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on Wednesday. “But he turned out to be pro-American,” said Slutsky, whose nationalist LDPR party welcomed Trump’s win by publicly quaffing champagne.

Pavel Danilin, director of the pro-Kremlin Center for Political Analysis, said on his Facebook page that since the “holy veil” had fallen from Trump, “it’s now possible to talk about the president’s actions normally.”

Distaste for Trump is also beginning to be heard in Russia’s Muslim community, which up until now had been largely silent on what have been widely seen as Trump’s anti-Muslim tendencies. Russia is home to around 20 million Muslims — about 15 per cent of the population — and most Muslim leaders in the country enjoy a close relationship with Putin. (By contrast, the United States is home to just over 3 million Muslims). During the Trump campaign and in the brief post-inaugural honeymoon period, Muslim groups were dissuaded from talking disparagingly of Trump in order to avoid upsetting the Kremlin, community insiders say. Russia’s official response to Trump’s travel ban for people from seven Muslim-majority countries was, in the words of Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, “not our business.”

But that stance is already beginning to change. “Trump is not a genuine person,” said Gulnar Gaideeva, spokeswoman for the Union of Muftis in Russia, the country’s most prominent Muslim organization. Like most Muslims around the world, Russia’s community is unwavering in its support for Palestinians, and is unlikely to allow Trump’s comments on a one-state solution in Israel to go unchallenged. “We are citizens of Russia and also stand in solidarity with our fellow Muslims around the world,” she said.

And so, what had looked like it was going to be a warm embrace between two erstwhile Cold War foes could be already turning into another botched attempt at a reset — only this time around, we might not even get to the misspelled red toy button stage. As a popular Russian saying goes, “Be true to your word, or don’t give it at all.” In other words: Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Photo credit: OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP/Getty Images

John McCain just systematically dismantled Donald Trump’s entire worldview

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hit out at President Trump in a speech on Feb. 17 at the Munich Security Conference, saying, “this administration is in disarray.” (Reuters)

By Aaron Blake February 17

John McCain is increasingly mad as hell about President Trump. And on Friday, he went after Trump — hard.

During a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the Republican senator from Arizona delivered a pointed and striking point-by-point takedown of Trump's worldview and brand of nationalism. McCain didn't mention Trump's name once, but he didn't have to.

And even considering the two men's up-and-down history and the terrible things Trump has said about McCain, it was a striking display from a senior leader of a party when it comes to a president of the same party.

In his speech, McCain suggested the Western world is uniquely imperiled this year — even more so than when Barack Obama was president — and proceeded to question whether it will even survive.

“In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism; not this year,” 

McCain said. “If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.”

In case there was any doubt that this was about Trump. Here's what followed:

• "[The founders of the Munich conference] would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism.”
• “They would be alarmed by the hardening resentment we see towards immigrants and refugees and minority groups -- especially Muslims.”
• “They would be alarmed by the growing inability -- and even unwillingness -- to separate truth from lies.”
• "They would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent."

That's Trump, Trump, Trump and Trump.

[‘That’s how dictators get started’: McCain criticizes Trump for calling media ‘the enemy’]

McCain continued: “But what would alarm them most, I think, is a sense that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West, that they see it as a bad deal that we may be better off without, and that while Western nations still have the power to maintain our world order, it's unclear whether we have the will.”

Trump has repeatedly suggested a desire to pull out of or scale back on international involvement and agreements. His slogan is “America first,” after all. And it's not just on free trade: It's also when it comes to things like NATO, the transatlantic military alliance that Trump has suggested the United States is getting a bad deal on and has flirted with not enforcing.

Then McCain invoked some of those close to Trump and emphasized that his message won't square with theirs:

I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. That's not the message you heard today from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. That is not the message you will hear from Vice President Mike Pence. That's not the message you will hear from Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. And that is certainly not the message you will hear tomorrow from our bipartisan congressional delegation.

McCain then concluded with another direct shot at Trump.

“I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries,” he said. “I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it. For if we do not, who will?

[Trump’s war with the media isn’t new. Thomas Jefferson railed about ‘newspaper lies,’ too.]

Two weeks ago, you may recall, Trump suggested the United States didn't exactly have the moral high ground on Russia. Asked by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly about wanting good relations with a “killer” like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump demurred.

“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

Ever since, it seems, he and McCain have been on a collision course. McCain didn't fight back when Trump questioned his war-hero status long ago — perhaps because both men were trying to win elections — but the battle between McCain and the White House is picking up steam.

And on Friday, McCain traveled across the Atlantic to deliver a calculated, planned attack on Trump's entire system of beliefs.