The demonstrations also frame a fundamental contradiction – a profound source of strength that has been transformed into a disabling weakness.

They deserve enormous credit for drawing a global spotlight to the perpetrators of that crisis: a sinister cabal of financial scamsters and rightwing politicians, backed by the dubiously “grassroots” electorate of the Tea Party. What almost no one, on the right or left alike, wants to talk about is that the cabal was empowered by the very people who are now denouncing it.

Progressives, out of a mixture of political correctness and embarrassment, carefully avoid the subject. The Republicans are delighted at the silence, because it masks what should be fatal weaknesses in their own position.

It may not be pleasant to hear it, but a massive Democratic voter cop-out in last year’s elections is what put the reactionary right in the driver’s seat, creating the disastrous logjam in Congress, and bringing to a dead halt the hyper-active first two years of the Obama Administration.

COP-OUT AT THE POLLS

In 2008, more than 65 million Americans cast Democratic votes in Congressional races, a 13 million-vote edge over the Republicans. In 2010, the Democratic vote plummeted to an abysmal 35 million, 6 million less than the G.O.P., which took decisive power in the House and paralysed the Senate.

We think we know this story. But the truth is, we haven’t begun to absorb its full details and implications yet:

• The number of voters under 24 who bothered to go to the polls in 2010 dropped by a stupefying 60 percent, and those between 24 and 29 by almost 50 percent. Altogether, the participation of young people – who had been overwhelmingly pro-Obama in 2008– declined by 11 million votes.

• Among over-65-year-olds, the core of the Tea Party Movement, the voting numbers barely changed, from 17.6 million in 2008 to 17.5 million in 2010.

• The African-American vote fell by 40 percent, and the Hispanic vote by almost 30 percent.

• Among the mostly white voters who earn more than $200,000 per year, the turnout fell by a scant 5 percent, from 7 million to 6.5 million.

• Voting by those with annual incomes under $30,000 dropped by 33 percent, more than six times the figure for the affluent.

In effect, the abstainers turned a potential Democratic landslide into a full-scale collapse – with nightmarish consequences for civil rights, for the U.S. and world economies, and for social programs that range across the board from health care and educational funding to employment programs, pension benefits and the sagging national infrastructure.

It was a dream come true for the radical right, the sworn enemies of all public services. Their vote, measured at exit polls asking whether government was too intrusive, scarcely changed between the two elections, dropping from 50 million to 47 million.

At the same time, the number of voters believing that government should do more for its citizens – the central plank of the progressive platform – sunk from 60 million to 32 million, a staggering 47 percent slide.

These are astronomical, game-changing numbers. It makes no sense to argue that the Democratic voting collapse was a matter of demoralization. Decisions on whether to go to the polls were made by the early autumn of 2010, just 20 months into an Obama Administration that had pushed through what many analysts regard as the most ambitious legislative agenda in modern U.S. history.

Half a century ago, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez understood that genuine change could only be achieved through longterm, patient struggle – and that the prize, in King’s famous word, was full access to the nation’s key institutions, notably the ballot box and the governing seats it fills.

The leaders and foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Era fought with unflagging commitment, and King himself was martyred, in a two-decade campaign for the voting privileges that 2010 abstainers dismissed as unworthy of an hour’s time on a single Tuesday in November. The Wall Street demonstrators are now debating an even broader boycott of the 2012 presidential election.

Yet if two-thirds of the 28 million progressive stay-at-homes had gone to the polls last year, the U.S. Congress today would be in the hands of a solid Democratic majority beholden to liberal votes.

THE REPUBLICANS’ BEST HOPE

The nation’s key institutions stand at a momentous crossroads, ripe for fresh ideas and energy.

But in response, the anthem so far is nebulous anti-institutionalism, a “leaderless resistance movement,” as the Occupy Wall Street web site proudly boasts, without defined structure or goals. “It’s not any more about parties, organizations or unions,” declares the manifesto of its Spanish counterpart, the International Commission of Sol,” which also calls for mass abstention from voting.

Visceral impatience is endemic today, especially where the young are concerned. The Internet Age, with its virtual substitutes for the real thing — for tangible community, for productive struggle – promises to deliver on every desire, easily and instantly. Just twitter a crowd into the streets, and the rest will fall into place. But the hard truth is that it takes far more than that. Ask the Iranians, the Tunisians and Egyptians, who are invariably cited as models by the Spanish and American protesters.

Neither easy nor instant solutions are possible when a society faces the challenges that greeted the incoming Obama Administration in January of 2009. The nation’s first African-American president took office amidst two unwinnable and unfunded wars and a global economic crash unparalleled since the Great Depression. He was confronted by a rabid political opposition that challenged the new president’s very right to govern on trumped-up charges that he is not certifiably “American,” when their transparent subtext was that he is not white.

As much as anything else, Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency was about the slow work of acquiring power and responsibility in the machinery of representative government. So too were the many milestones that preceded his victory: the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that dismantled segregated schools; the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination of based on race, colour, religion or national origin; its elaboration in 1965 with a Voting Rights Act that removed the last obstacles to the polls, and a presidential executive order enforcing affirmative action guidelines.

Each of those institutional steps flowed from the pressure exerted by election results, and each of them helped rewrite the terms of national life. Only someone who was not alive in the 1950s, when the struggle began in earnest, could maintain that nothing important has changed in the United States since then.

It is far more accurate to say that almost everything has changed – which is what terrifies the conservative right. They recognize that the institutions of representative democracy are expressions of collective interest, and that the crucial vectors of population and age are aligned against them.

Their sole hope for turning back the clock lies in a new majority that doesn’t bother to vote.

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

The answer, says an exhibition in the entrance hall of Palazzo Pancrazi, home of Barga’s municipal government, is not a fixed aesthetic vocabulary grounded in local history.  It is a rainbow of individual and sometimes impulsive choices by local property owners, abetted by romantic fantasies of what a Tuscan townscape ought to look like.

The exhibition itself, entitled “The Walls of Barga,” resembles an enlarged version of the colour samples that hardware stores offer to customers. Slashes of rose, burnt siena, yellow-gold and burgundy are painted across the 13 canvases displayed in the hall.

“They are literally the colours that were being ‘tested’ on the walls of Barga Vecchia in 2006 and 2007,” says the artist Keane, an editor of this publication.

“The architects and painters who did the work agreed to share the actual pigment samples with me. Each of the canvases at Palazzo Pancrazi represents one of the facades that was being resurfaced then.”

On one level, the “Walls of Barga” is deliberately meant to echo Keane’s earlier “Mutande di Barga,” a series of large-scale paintings devoted to the undergarments hung outside the town’s homes to dry. Like the mutande, the building colours are a principal but unacknowledged feature of community life, seen everyday although seldom remarked upon.

On another level, however, the new mostra is a meditation on the serendipitous nature of “classic appearance.”

In effect, the canvases picture dozens of varying guises that 13 of the town’s historic buildings might have adopted half a decade ago. “If all or most of the owners had made other choices from the samples, the Barga you see today would be remarkably different.”

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“Walls” invites the viewer to imagine that unrealized Barga – and in doing so, to speculate on the dynamic of choice. Its implicit themes range from political correctness to the vagaries of popular taste.

Since the 1980s, when Italy began rebelling against the mindless construction that ruined many historic town centres after World War II, exterior changes on venerable buildings have been treated as nearly criminal offences. A huge and nominally inflexible bureaucracy materialized, with its energies directed at saying “no” to any permit request that dared propose a window, a balcony – or even the installation of a solar panel.

Yet as any local oldtimer will tell you, Barga underwent a dramatic metamorphosis in those same years. Bureaucracy notwithstanding, she was transformed from a no-nonsense Val di Serchio casalinga, clothed exclusively in austere gray or cream-white, into a lively ragazza parading the colours that dominate Keane’s canvases.

The result, in cultural terms, is that mountainside Barga now closely resembles a Ligurian seaport, where cheery pastels are traditional. That, of course, is exactly how the town’s visitors – and increasingly its property owners – always imagined her.  A burst of colour under the warm Tuscan sun.

But as Keane notes, the mountains will always have the last word. The first canvas you see on entering the exhibition is a montage of chipped and faded paint strips, weather-worn into something more eloquent than bright pastels after one season of winter storms.

I più ardenti sostenitori di Barga amano definirla “una tipica cittadina sulla collina toscana”. Ma cosa dà a Barga quest’aria classica, così “toscana”?

La risposta viene da una mostra allestita nell’atrio di Palazzo Pancrazi, sede del Comune, e non è solo una mera questione di estetica radicata nella storia locale.

È piuttosto un arcobaleno di scelte individuali a volte anche impulsive fatte dai proprietari degli immobili, complici di alimentare la romantica fantasia di come il paesaggio toscano dovrebbe essere.

La mostra, dal titolo The Walls of Barga – I muri di Barga, assomiglia a un grande campionario di colori come quelli che le ferramenta e i colorifici mettono a disposizione dei clienti. Le tonalità del rosa, del terra di Siena, del giallo dorato e del bordeaux sono riprodotti sulle 13 tele in mostra.

“Sono esattamente i colori testati sui muri di Barga Vecchia nel 2006 e nel 2007” Spiega Keane, l’artista che ha realizzato le opere.

“Gli architetti e gli imbianchini hanno accettato di darmi parte dei colori utilizzati per le prove che facevano sui muri. Ognuna di queste tele rappresenta le facciate che stavano per essere rifatte”.

Da un lato “I muri di Barga” fa volutamente eco al precedente lavoro di Keane “Le mutande di Barga”, una serie di grandi dipinti dedicati alla biancheria stesa fuori dalle finestre ad asciugare. E come le “mutande”, il colore degli edifici è una caratteristica importante ma non riconosciuta della vita barghigiana, vista ogni giorno anche se raramente osservata.

Su un altro piano, invece, questa mostra è una riflessione sulla natura casuale dell’aspetto classico di Barga.

I quadri esposti a Palazzo Pancrazi, infatti, ritraggono le diverse forme che 13 dei più antichi palazzi della cittadina avrebbero potuto assumere cinque anni fa.

“Se tutti i proprietari o la maggior parte di loro avessero fatto scelte diverse confronto ai campioni provati, la Barga che si vede oggi sarebbe stata molto diversa”, continua Keane.

“I Muri di Barga” invita quindi il visitatore ad immaginare quella Barga non realizzata, e conseguentemente a riflettere sulla forza della scelta.

I temi impliciti della mostra spaziano dall’essere “politically correct” ai ghiribizzi del gusto della gente.

Dagli anni Ottanta, quando l’Italia ha avviato una sorta di ribellione contro le brutte costruzioni che hanno rovinato molti centri storici dopo la seconda Guerra Mondiale, si è cominciato a considerare i cambiamenti sulle facciate dei palazzi più antichi come azioni criminali.

È apparsa così una smisurata burocrazia, inflessibile, intenta a dire “no” ad ogni richiesta di permesso che osasse intervenire su una finestra, un balcone o sull’installazione di un pannello solare.

Ma alla fine, in questi ultimi anni, Barga è stata investita da una grande metamorfosi.

Nonostante la burocrazia è stata trasformata da una scialba casalinga vestita solo di grigio o giallo crema in una ragazza vitale che sfoggia i colori che oggi dominano i quadri di Keane.

Il risultato, per quanto riguarda l’aspetto culturale, è che Barga, cittadina arroccata sotto le montagne, adesso appare più un porticciolo ligure dove i colori solari sono tradizionali.

Questo, naturalmente, è come i visitatori che giungono a Barga e i sempre più numerosi proprietari di immobili nel centro storico l’hanno sempre immaginata. Un’esplosione di colori sotto il tiepido sole della Toscana; ma, come fa notare Keane, le montagne avranno sempre l’ultima parola.

La prima tela che vedrete entrando è un montaggio di strisce di un colore ruvido e sbiadito, consumate dal tempo atmosferico e trasformate  in qualcosa di molto più eloquente che dei colori pastello dopo una stagione di temporali.

“Women will be allowed to participate in the Shoura Council as members from the next session onwards,” the ageing king announced, referring to Saudi Arabia’s appointed legislature. They will also be allowed to vote in municipal elections – and even to stand as candidates, he added.

Given that it remains a crime for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, almost nobody had expected such a development. Except Dr. Aisha, who predicted it in 2003. “In a decade, maybe less, everything will begin to change,” she said in an interview at one of the Saudi capital’s top hospitals. “The reason is people like me. ”

What she meant is that a dramatic generational shift has been underway on the Arabian Peninsula for years, obscured by the stubborn longevity of her country’s ruling family.

HIDDEN GENERATIONAL SHIFT

Since its establishment as a state in 1932, Saudi Arabia has never been governed by anyone but its founder, King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud – who was born in 1876 – or one of his 37 sons by 22 wives.

In American terms, it would be as though no one had occupied the White House since the Roaring Twenties except Herbert Hoover and his sons, albeit there were only two.

“Many of my grandfather’s children were raised in Bedouin tents, and retained a very archaic view of how life should be led. Some were barely literate,” a third generation prince told me. “But those who were chosen to be kings had an instinctive understanding of power.”

Meanwhile, as Doctor Aisha put it, people like her were proliferating in the shadows of their elders’ entrenched power. What most distinguishes them is higher education, usually abroad.

Aisha is a graduate of Stanford and an Ivy League medical school. “The experience changed me forever,” she said. “I began to see everything through different eyes, and as a woman, I agonized about coming back here. But as a medical professional I felt an obligation to return and do my part to move the country ahead.”

In 2011, an estimated 100,000 Saudi citizens are enrolled in foreign colleges and universities, 54,000 of them in the United States, enormous numbers for a nation of 22 million.

The primary motivation of these students is “openness to others,” said Khaled al-Anqari, the Saudi minister of higher education, speaking at a gathering in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. He said the kingdom is determined “to build bridges of scientific communication and cultural exchange through a variety of paths, one of the most important of which is the sending of students abroad to study.”

THE WALLS OF THE KINGDOM

On a six-month assignment to Saudi Arabia in 2003, I met dozens of younger people whose eyes and minds had been opened by their experence overseas. They vastly outnumbered those who, like some of the September 11 terrorists, had embraced violent extremism after living in the West.

The effects reach deep into the ranks of the third and fourth generation of the ruling Saud family, men and women alike. Many have not only studied overseas, but at the most liberal institutions.

“We know very well that change must come, that we will one day have to build some version of a genuine democracy and give scope to the energies of our talented women,” a leading Saudi prince in his forties told me. He was a Yale grad in economics and a Harvard M.B.A., “but above all a Red Sox fan,” he laughed.

Like Dr. Aisha, the prince asked that I not use his full name. As a guest in his Riyadh home, I was able to speak freely with his wife and daughters, none of whom were veiled in accordance with Saudi law.

It was a breath of fresh air in a tightly compartmentalized society. When I dined at the homes of other, less daring acquaintances, wives were kept behind closed doors in another part of the house. At restaurants, women ate in separate rooms. In the nation’s commercial malls, they were obliged to shop on specific days, when men unaccompanied by their families were banned.

Gender is not the only wall. The nation’s 6 million imported workers inhabit boxes of their own, labourers from elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia in crowded dormitories, high-paid professionals and entrepreneurs in gated suburban subdivisions outfitted with western-style supermarkets.

What made Dr. Aisha’s life even more unusual than the home of the Red Sox royal – and in retrospect, predictive – is that it ignored all of these walls. “I’ve had princes and their wives as my patients, as well as several colleagues from Canada and the States,” she said. “But I’ve also done my best for Sri Lankan maids and Filipino taxi-drivers. There’s no difference for me. They were ill and I’m a doctor.”

Dr. Aisha is an expert oncologist, with research papers published in the globe’s leading medical journals. In a country where men and women are forbidden to shop or dine together, she was tacitly allowed to probe the most intimate secrets of both.

Put simply, her sheer expertise, acquired in California and New England, trumped the kingdom’s restraints on female roles and possibilities.

Demographic realities say this is the future. The sons of Abdul-Azziz will soon have to yield to the generation of the Red Sox prince and Dr. Aisha They are the internal force pressing for reform in Saudi Arabia.

EXTERNAL PRESSURES

The reform agenda has also been accelerated by the startling events of the Arab Spring — and arguably even more by the prospect of change in Iran, Saudi Arabia’s longstanding rival in the Islamic world.

The kingdom grew considerably more repressive during the 1980s, in direct response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. “The feeling was that we had to out-fundamental them, or we would lose our influence,” a veteran Saudi official said in 2003.

Today the social vectors are pointing in the opposite direction. In addition to the demands of insurgents in Iran and Arab North Africa, Riyadh must acknowledge the example of Turkey, which offers a new and immensely popular model of political Islam that merges pious values with secular democracy.

Nonetheless, the kingdom ruled by Abdul-Azziz’s progeny is not just another country, competing on equal terms for global influence. As the birthplace of Islam and the site of its two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia carries weight – social and moral – far beyond the modest size of its population or the astronomical value of its oil reserves

The coins were turned up by an equipment operator working above the Volta dei Menchi, a series of arched vaults below the Comune which are being renovated to house a new museum.

What makes the find somewhat mysterious is that the coins in question, dated 1827, were never legal tender in the Duchy of Lucca, Barga included — and were issued by its chief political enemy in the region.

All three coins are five-lire pieces. Their two sides, designed by the master engraver Amadeo Lavy, are respectively stamped with the face and coat of arms of Carlo Felice (1765-1831). He ruled over a powerful state, based in Torino, that stretched across large parts of northwestern Italy and southeastern France then – and would cease to exist with the unification of Italy three decades of his death. As the coins’ inscription notes, Carlo Felice was King of Sardegna and the region surrounding Nice, Prince of Piedmont and Duke of Savoy, Aosta and Genova.

Torino, in those years, was a hotbed of political reform and ferment, and would later be the springboard of the Italian Risorgimento set in motion by Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in 1860. Under Carlo Felice, Piedmontese troops fought two wars against the Austrian Empire, which governed all of northeastern Italy with an iron hand.

By contrast, from 1815 to 1847 the Duchy of Lucca was presided over by minions of the profoundly reactionary Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma – second wife and Empress of Napoleon Bonaparte, and daughter of the Austrian Emperor Franz II.

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It is believed that three coins may be later copies, produced for commemorative purposes. There are visible differences between the monarch’s face on on the unearthed pieces, and photographs of the genuine Lavy engraving. One possibility is that a commemorative version was struck in 1927 to mark the centennial of Carlo Felice’s declaration of a modern civil code for Sardegna, which served as a model for Italy’s national laws after unification in 1861. Carlo’s successors in the royal House of Savoy served as Italy’s kings from 1861 to 1946.

In 1927, much of Barga’s centro storico was still a construction site following the massive earthquake of seven years earlier, which might explain how the coins wound up lost under the restored paving stones.

If it were real, the coin would not be of great value to collectors. More than 2 million five-lire pieces were struck at the Genova mint in 1827, and another 700,000 in Torino, making it one of the period’s most readily available coins.

Carlo Felice is best recalled today as the royal patron of Genoa’s celebrated opera house, which was named for him at its inauguration in 1828.

Ritrovamento insolito ieri mattina nel cantiere dei lavori che stanno interessando Piazza Salvo Salvi, sotto il Comune di Barga. Sulla piazza è in corso la rimozione delle pietre di pavimentazione per individuare le infiltrazioni d’acqua che si registrano nei sottostanti locali della volta dei Menchi dove presto sarà realizzato il museo delle rocche e delle fortificazioni della Valle del Serchio.
Nella terra che si trova sotto le pietre, due operai della ditta Giacchini hanno rinvenuto una moneta dorata e successivamente ne sono state trovate altre due di identica fattura. A fare il primo ritrovamento è stato Fiorello Giacchini, uno dei dipendenti della ditta e subito dopo la scoperta avevamo con lui registrato questa intervista:

Si tratta di tre monete da Lire 5 del Regno di Sardegna e sono datate 1827. Riportano su un lato l’effige di Carlo Felice (1795-1831) e sull’altro lo stemma del regno di Sardegna.
Ripercorrendo un po’ la storia di questa moneta si scopre che si essa ne furono stampati 723.999 esemplari presso la zecca di Torino e 2.137.241 presso la zecca di Genova. Le viene attribuito in campo numismatico un valore che va da 100 a 185 euro a seconda della sua conservazione e comunque viene considerata una moneta comune.
Un ritrovamento insolito quello avvenuto a Barga, ma forse più insolito ancora è il fatto che queste monete sembrerebbero delle patacche.
Vagando un po’ in giro per i siti di numismatica, le immagini che si trovano in rete dimostrano chiaramente che le tre monete ritrovate sotto Piazza Salvi sono delle riproduzioni. Soprattutto perché la figura in rilievo della testa non assomiglia nemmeno un po’ a quella dell’immagine originale di Carlo Felice, ma anche per altri particolari. Le monete originali erano di argento e pesavano circa 24 grammi; queste sono di una non meglio identificata lega e sono più leggere.
Su internet si ha notizia anche di monete da 5 Lire di Carlo Felice false, alcune delle quali assomigliano proprio per la fattura della testa a quelle che sono state rinvenute a Barga. Bisogna dire ad onor del vero che in quel caso la contraffazione era evidente data la grossolanità dello stampo. Sempre sul web si riporta notizia che monete come quelle fossero state diffuse alcuni anni fa in regalo come riproduzioni con il giornale La Stampa.
Ci sono anche altre supposizioni però: una delle ipotesi è che le monete siano delle riproduzioni realizzate per scopi commemorativi nel 1927 per celebrare il centenario della dichiarazione di Carlo Felice di un moderno codice civile per la Sardegna, che servì da modello per le legislazioni nazionali dell’Italia dopo l’unificazione nel 1861. Ciò potrebbe spiegare anche il perché le tre monete si trovassero sotto le pietre del pavimento di piazza Salvi. Nel 1927, gran parte del centro storico di Barga era ancora un cantiere dopo il terremoto di sette anni prima. Le tre monete potrebbero così essere state perse o poste allora sotto i sampietrini restaurati.
Se invece fossero di produzione più recente (quelle magari regalate con la Stampa negli anni scorsi) verrebbe da pensare che siano state buttate negli scavi subito dopo l’apertura del cantiere. Insomma potrebbe in questo caso trattarsi dello scherzo di qualche buontempone, scherzo che intanto è costato la momentanea sospensione dei lavori su piazza Salvi per accertare la originalità o meno delle tre monete.
Un atto dovuto, ha spiegato l’assessore comunale Pietro Onesti, perché bisognava informare la Soprintendenza per eventuali rilievi del caso.  Adesso cercheremo di capire se queste monete hanno un qualche valore anche storico, ma non sembra proprio e soprattutto, quando riprenderanno i lavori sulla piazza, faremo una ulteriore indagine alla ricerca di eventuali altre monete.

The date is May 11, 1949, and the UN—in a show of remarkable consensus between the United States and its then arch-enemy, the Soviet Union—admits the young, embattled state of Israel to its General Assembly.

There are many echoes of Israel’s own birth in another momentous drama now unfolding in New York, with its backdrop in the same conflict. Acting on a deeply controversial initiative from Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority since 2005, the UN is to deliberate member status for Palestine. In effect, this would amount to official recognition of statehood.

The cluttered stage, in both dramas, features ex-terrorist groups whose leaders now claim the mantle of statesmen, contentious issues of long-term security, rapidly changing geopolitical realities—and no less significant, the domestic political agendas of world decision-makers.

There were profound doubts six decades ago on each of these points, with Security Council members Belgium, Britain, Canada, China and France all abstaining from a preliminary vote to endorse Israel’s UN application.

Six decades ago! That phrase alone should give pause to anyone who argues for business as usual— the continuation of more than half a century of fruitless negotiations between Israel, a state with internationally recognized powers and legitimacy, and Palestinians with no formal status.

The only way to move the agenda ahead is a step that replicates the dynamic of 1949, a step that takes at face value the repeated insistence of Israel and the United States that they support self-determination for the nationless people of Palestine.

Domestic Concerns

You don’t need to be a White House insider to grasp that Barack Obama was looking over his domestic shoulder on Wednesday, September 21, when he addressed the subject of Palestinian membership at the UN. The Jewish-American electorate is regarded as a crucial constituency in the 2012 presidential sweepstakes.

“One year ago, I stood at this podium and called for an independent Palestine. I believed then—and I believe now—that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” the President said. But, he added, “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN.”

The next day, the Administration confirmed that a Palestinian bid to join the UN would be vetoed by the United States, a permanent seat-holder on the Security Council.

On their part, Obama’s top Republican rivals have built their Jewish strategy on a fervent courtship of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most outspoken rightwing coalition partners. They make no secret of their determination to stall any solution until the “facts on the ground”—code language for Jewish settlement in the West Bank territories, the erstwhile site of a Palestinian state—renders outright annexation by Israel a fait accompli.

In 1950, the Arab population on the West Bank numbered approximately 500,000. Today, there are nearly 500,000 Israeli settlers there. Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have invariably foundered on precisely this point, with immediate expansion of the settlements as the postscript.

“I do not believe in a two-state solution,” Danny Danon, deputy speaker of the Knesset, the national legislature, flatly announced in August. Danon is a close acquaintance of Texas governor and G.O.P. presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who will visit Israel this year as his personal guest.

President Obama’s UN speech made no mention of the settlements.

Six decades ago, President Harry Truman had the courage to challenge his main Western European partners and a significant faction of his own party to back Israel’s petition for UN membership. In the end, as Israel emerged as one of Washington’s most dependable allies, Truman’s gamble proved to be far-sighted

Is President Obama really in a tougher spot than Truman? Will American Jews desert the Democratic ship if the captain disagrees with the likes of Danny Danon?

If they do, they aren’t paying close attention to Republican statements on subjects other than the Middle East. Perry, like fellow candidate and Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, is a born-again Christian who openly equates “real” American principles with “inviting Jesus into your heart.” That should ring alarm bells in every Jewish home in the land.

In fact, the evidence is strong that Jewish Americans do take notice of these peculiarities and are far more willing than the president to protest Israeli policies that increase Middle Eastern tensions. In a 2009 poll by the centrist Jewish organization J-Street, 60 percent of American Jews opposed the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

In a follow-up J-Street poll last year, only 10 percent identified Israel as a principal concern in Congressional elections. Nearly three-quarters said Washington should exert pressure on Israel, as well as the Palestinians, to achieve a peace breakthrough.

Sarkozy’s Compromise

Clearly, a major confrontation within the Security Council, or between the United States and a UN General Assembly that is largely sympathetic to the Palestinian claim, is in no one’s interest. It would further alienate the world community from Israel and seriously diminish U.S. influence in the Middle East at a critical juncture.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, not often an advocate of compromise, advocates a middle road. On Wednesday, he proposed that the Palestinian Authority be accorded “enhanced status as a non-member state,” an interim procedural motion that can be implemented by the General Assembly without Security Council approval.

The status would be subject to a strict timetable: 30 days to re-open peace talks, followed by six months to resolve border and security disputes, and a year to reach a “definitive agreement.” After that, the Security Council would be asked to recommend full member status, which must be approved by two-thirds of the General Assembly.

The approach has yet another precedent in the region’s history. Israel applied three times for UN membership before it was successfully admitted in 1949. But its initial step toward self-determination and legitimacy had been taken 18 months earlier—a timetable nearly identical to that proposed by Sarkozy—when the UN recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

Hardliners will argue that 2011 is not 1949, and that the history of Palestinian involvement in terrorism makes any step toward diplomatic recognition perilous.

Overlooked is the uncomfortable truth that Israel’s own road to legitimacy was marked by years of terrorism. The first UN mediator in the Jewish-Arab conflict, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, who negotiated the release of 30,000 prisoners from Nazi concentration camps in World War II, was assassinated by Zionist militants in 1948.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Netanyahu’s predecessor as leader of Israel’s ruling Likud party, was a founder of the Irgun, a lethal Zionist paramilitary force. Under his direction, the Irgun bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, killing 96 people, and carried out the massacre of more than 100 civilians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948.

Yet it was also Begin who invited President Anwar Sadat to Israel in 1977, brokering a lasting peace with Egypt.

“Now Is the Time”

If Begin could make such a journey, there is considerably less reason to suspect the motives of Mahmoud Abbas, a confirmed moderate with none of the violent baggage that former guerrilla chief and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat carried.

It is Abbas who has led the struggle to contain Hamas, the Gaza-based fundamentalist group behind many terrorist attacks, and prevented it from taking power in the populous West Bank.

If it is true that 2011 is not 1949—or the 1977 of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat—the essential difference lies the wholesale reordering of the region’s political geography in the past year. What lies ahead is anyone’s guess.

“Israel will not always find itself sitting across the table from Palestinian leaders like Mr. Abbas and the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who object to terrorism and want peace,” former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece Thursday.

Olmert worries that the UN bid is premature. But he is also convinced that an unprecedented opportunity for genuine progress is at hand, if Israel and the Palestinians alike will act on it. “Now is the time. There will be no better one.”

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

Lilly is a trend. An ominous, unknowable “other” whose identity is summed up in a face and name that aren’t “Francais de souche” – authentically French by rootstock and origin, like a certified Burgundy or Bordeaux. A European version of Sarah Palin’s “real Americans.”

“I listen to these politicians and their endless ranting and fear-mongering, and I know that on some level they’re talking about me,” says Lilly. “But I can’t recognize myself in the picture they paint.”

Her counterparts are found in every developed country today: Latino-Americans stopped by police on the streets of Arizona, Pakistanis in Britain whose every gesture is recorded by the world’s most comprehensive public surveillance system, Turks and Kurds in a Germany where “multiculturalism has utterly failed,” according to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

What trend-gazing overlooks is a fundamental truth about our world in motion, an epic human drama that cannot be reduced to charts and graphs. The epic is written by millions of individuals, all with distinctive and sometimes heroic sagas specifically their own.

As a reporter who has covered this subject on every continent since the 1970s, I’ve never met an immigrant who didn’t have a complex, personal tale. And that, rather than the numbers, was always the real story.

The Truth Lies in the Details

For the statistical record, Lilly Tan is filed among 350,000 ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia who emigrated here after the war in Indochina. In the common view, offered without embarrassment by many non-Asian Parisians, “they are all alike, you can’t tell them apart.”

In fact, Chinese Paris is a living atlas of the greater Chinese world’s enormous diversity, with several distinct sub-communities clustered in their own neighborhoods. The French press has nicknamed the largest of them, the sprawling high-rise Thirteenth Arrondissement, “Hong Kong sur Seine.”

As it happens, there are very few Hong Kong Chinese in Paris. The Thirteenth has a mixed population from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, further mixed by different ancestral origins in southern China and mutually incomprehensible dialects. On the opposite side of the river, there are two smaller settlements inhabited mostly by natives of Wenzhou Prefecture in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang.

Lilly herself was born and raised in Malaysia, where her grandparents fled during the violent turmoil that beset China in the early 20th century. As a child educated in a convent school, she learned to read and write from French missionary nuns. “When I was eight years old, I began dreaming about the France they described, about its liberty, equality and fraternity,” she says.

But nothing Lilly does, nothing she ever dreamed, can make her Francais de souche. Along with millions of Arab, West African and other Asian Parisians, she is regularly stopped at Metro stations by police, or pulled aside by immigration officers at DeGaulle Airport, and asked for documented proof of legal residence.

Each of the city’s major immigrant groups is burdened by its own particular stereotype. The Chinese are regarded as tribal and money-driven. “They are a very cold people, with no life beyond business, and no interest in our culture,” a retired civil servant told me. “They make a fortune and return home as quickly as they can.”

But at 58, Lilly has worked in French companies for 35 years, the last 30 of them as a French citizen. Inspired by an adolescent crush on the singer and actor Yves Montand, she has memorized dozens of classic French dance hall songs. “Once in awhile, if I drink a bit too much wine at a company party or the wedding of a colleague, I’ll sing a couple of them,” she says.

The performance amazes people, as though a Martian had begun reciting poetry. “How could she possibly know those songs?” they ask.

The question says more about the listeners than it does about Lilly. She speaks French flawlessly, with no perceptible accent, just as she speaks perfect English, Malay and three Chinese dialects. There aren’t many professors at the Sorbonne who are her equal in languages.

The closer you look at Lilly Tan, the more the collective statistics that frame trends – and engender stereotypes – dissolve.

There is nothing new about this.

The Sausage and Oyster Invasion

Turn the clock back five or six generations, and the Rue Montogueil, where Lilly lives on the Right Bank, was already a cultural battleground. On one part of the street were Auvergnats, rural folk from south-central France who made their first appearance here hawking country sausages and hams. After a generation of back-breaking work, their children were able to open small delicatessens and cafes.

From the west, in the same years, the sons and daughters of Breton fishermen carried oysters to feed the city’s insatiable appetite for fresh seafood. Rue Montorgueil was the epicenter of the trade, and by the 20th century its once-itinerant oyster-sellers were among the city’s premier restaurateurs. They also introduced the crepe to Paris.

The Auvergnats spoke an obscure patois that virtually no one in Paris understood. The Bretons’ maternal tongue was Celtic. When they became neighbors on the Right Bank, 11 separate language groups were represented in France, broken down into at least 46 major dialects and a hodgepodge of local dialects beyond counting. Only a fifth of the population spoke modern French.

That was the trend 200 years ago, just as it is now: a wave of incomprehensible aliens descending on the city. Fierce personal determination eventually made them synonymous with the French capital’s identity — her cafes and restaurants, her Auvergnat sausages, her Breton shellfish and crepes.

From time immemorial, Europe’s great metropolises have always been laboratories of constant flux and reinvention, not only for newcomers but also for the “native” cultures that surround them.

At the end of the 19th century, Italian immigrants – including members of my own Sicilian family — were widely reviled as low-wage invaders who stole French jobs. In 1893, 50 of them were killed in riots near the southern city of Aigues-Mortes. The presumed killers were tried, but acquitted and set free.

By the 1960s, no one came closer to defining French manhood than Lilly Tan’s favorite actor, the late Yves Montand – born “Ivo Livi“ in Monsummano, Italy, a former dockworker whose parents were peasant broommakers.

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

Nationwide, the economy was mired in triple-digit inflation and soaring joblessness, with a GDP of less than $116 billion, under $2,000 per person. Turkey in the 1990s epitomized a devastating crisis among Muslim-majority nations – a desperate spiral of poverty, violence and authoritarian rule.

Today, a decade after the September 11 terrorist attacks that turned much of the Islamic world into a chaotic battleground, Turkey has emerged as Islam’s most prominent icon of hope.

In 2011, it boasts the world’s 15th largest GDP, measuring $1.2 trillion – nearly $15,000 per person and rising by $125 billion annually. The Turkish economy now ranks ahead of such highly-developed nations as Australia and the Netherlands, and oil-giant Saudi Arabia. With a current growth rate of 11 percent, outstripping China’s and defying the effects of a global recession, it could surpass G-8 member Canada in the next few years.

More than 99 percent of Turkey’s 74 million citizens are Muslim.

Gaziantep, when I returned there on another assignment in 2010, had transformed itself into a city of manicured parks, architecturally stunning museums, carefully restored 10th century neighborhoods and 21st century shopping malls. High-rise residential suburbs had sprung from empty fields where army tanks were once marshaled. On a per capita basis, this city of 1.3 million is now the number one exporter and importer in the country.

The chief architect of Turkey’s miracle is the Justice and Development Party – popularly known by its Turkish initials, “AK” – an Islamic political group that took power in a landslide 2002 election.

Over the following decade, under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the new government dramatically reformed the bureaucracy-ridden Turkish economy, setting off an unprecedented boom in business starts, jobs and exports. Ten years ago, notes Bloomberg analyst Ben Holland, Turkey struggled under a debt load that dwarfed Greece’s on the eve of the global financial crisis in 2009. By 2010 Turkey’s debt was down to 46 percent of GDP, compared with 143 percent percent for Greece.

Turkey in 2011 is the thriving proof that a Muslim majority, democracy and economic modernization are compatible – the new model that, in the eyes of many, political Islam has been waiting for.

A New Look at Shariah Law
Frank Viviano

A central tenet of Islam is the conviction that the Koran, the Muslim book of revelation, is God’s final and direct word to humankind, as related to the Prophet Mohammed in 610 A.D. in what is now Saudi Arabia.

But the Koran is not the sole compendium of Islamic values. It is in an epochal project involving a second Islamic text, known as the “Hadith,” that Turkey’s bold reform movement may pave its most fruitful ground.

The Hadith is a digest of the conversations and deeds of Mohammed after the revelations of the Koran. It is the chief source of rules that inform Muslim life, including customs, social mores, dress codes and an estimated 90 percent of Shariah law.
For the past nine years, 80 eminent historians and theologians commissioned by Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs have been working on a 21st-century revision of the Hadith. It is scheduled for publication by the end of 2011.
“We want to bring out the positive side of Islam — that promotes personal honor, human rights, justice, morality, women’s rights, respect for the other,” Professor Mehmet Gormez, vice-president of religious affairs and senior Hadith lecturer at Ankara University, recently told The Times of London.
The revision would eliminate such medieval aphorisms as, “the best of women are those who are like sheep,” and “Your prayer will be invalid if a donkey, black dog or a woman passes in front of you.”
Instead, it will emphasize other passages, often of pointed significance to the contemporary scene. “Religion is very easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. So you should not be extremists,” Mohammed cautions his followers in a key Hadith.
“God does not judge you according to your bodies and appearances,” the Prophet says, in a conversation that seems aimed straight across the centuries at controversies over matters of dress and sexuality in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. “He looks into your hearts and observes your deeds.”
Turkey’s religious authorities have also subsidized advanced theological training for 450 women, appointing them as senior imams (“vaizes”) empowered to explain the “original spirit of Islam” in rural communities.
“A revolution is taking place here,” according to Taha Akyol, a Turkish political commentator.

The Old Model: Saudi Arabia

In 2003, thanks to the sponsorship of a Saudi official, I was able to participate in the haj, the pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula that is an obligation for Muslims but normally closed to others. Although I wasn’t permitted to enter Mecca, the epicenter of Islamic faith, I joined a vast throng silently marching to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the site of Mohammed’s tomb and Islam’s second most important shrine.

During shared evening meals at another Medina mosque, I spoke with pilgrims from China, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia and Uzbekistan – and also from France and Holland, home today to two of Western Europe’s largest Muslim communities.

The sense of peace and inner reflection, of profound tolerance and solidarity among far-flung people from every walk of life, was deeply moving. “This is what we see in our religion,” a young man from western China’s Yunnan Province said, “not suicide bombers or planes flying into sky-scrapers.”

Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that Chinese and Uzbek women on the haj — few of whom wear more than a light scarf in their own countries, and then only during prayers — were obliged to cover themselves in the head-to-toe black abaya, required of all women by Saudi law, including millions of Christians, Hindus and Buddhists who work as domestics in the country.

None of those non-Muslims are allowed to honor their own religious beliefs while in Saudi Arabia, a country that bans the establishment of churches or temples.

It was also impossible to ignore the Mutaween, the 5,000-strong religious police force formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The Mutaween stalk supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and apartment complexes in search of any breach of Wahabbism, the sternly fundamentalist brand of Islam favored by the ruling Saud family.

They can arrest and jail a woman with a single strand of hair exposed, along with unmarried couples – Saudi or foreign – who socialize in public, residents who are discovered with a bottle of beer or a Bible in their apartment, or anyone who observes “infidel superstitions” such as sending St. Valentine’s Day cards.

Indescribably wealthy as the source of the planet’s largest oil reserves, and respected as the home and protector of Islam’s most important holy sites, Saudi Arabia wields weight far beyond its own size (population 28 million) in an international community of believers that numbers 1.6 billion. One result is that political Islam — whether in the violent form practiced by Al Qaeda or the state theocracy of Iran – widely echoes the Saudi model of hectoring authoritarianism.

But in socio-economic terms, it is difficult to view Saudi Arabia as a functional model at all. Its resources are so vast and its distortions so extreme that virtually no country beyond the hyper-affluent oil states can really emulate it.

Saudi citizenship means free education, health care and housing – but often a life without gainful employment. According to the Saudi Labor Ministry, imported temporary workers account for a staggering 90 to 95 percent of private-sector jobs. It’s not much exaggeration to say that the only Saudis who actually work are those with the connections to acquire high administrative posts in the bureaucracy, or in enormous state enterprises tightly controlled by the Sauds and their retainers.

Ranks of young men on the streets of Riyadh, the capital, are visibly lost to boredom, in a land where movie theaters, clubs and mixed-gender socializing are illegal — and much of modern culture is only virtual, observed on the Internet or via satellite television broadcasts from uninhibited Beirut and Cairo. Frustrated and without clear purpose, they recall the kind of young man that the teenaged Osama bin Laden is said to have been, or the 15 Saudis among the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001.

The establishment of an elected parliament with formal powers has been under discussion in Riyadh for two generations, but remains a vague distant goal.

As for women – who have played frontline roles in the mass protests of Iran in 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011 – they are forbidden by law to drive in Saudi Arabia, and may not even be passengers in a car unless accompanied by a male member of their family.

The contrast with Turkey could not be more striking.

Faith Without Repression

At the outset of the Erdogan era, many secular-minded Turks warned that the AK party would eventually transform their country into another Saudi Arabia. But 10 years later, Istanbul reminds no one of Riyadh or the Mutaween.

The city’s main commercial thoroughfare, Istiklal Avenue, is a two-mile-long corridor of seething artistic and intellectual ferment, its surrounding streets and squares ringed with avant-garde theaters and cinemas, restaurants and nightclubs, art galleries and bookshops. By 2010, when the European Union named Istanbul the “European Capital of Culture” – despite the fact that Turkey is not an EU member-state – the district’s attractions were drawing up to 3 million people per day.

The dynamic street life of Istanbul, as well as Gaziantep and smaller urban centers across the country, shatters the notion that a Muslim nation must be repressive and uncompromising.

On the foreign policy front, the AK government has come closer than any government in the nation’s history to ending the Turks’ historic enmities with their Armenian, Greek and Arab neighbors.

In southeastern Anatolia, the expression of Kurdish culture has been legalized for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, permitting school courses, radio and TV broadcasts and books in the Kurdish language. After the bloody carnage of the civil war, tensions remain, and separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) still launch periodic assaults that bring targeted police or army reprisals.

But in the sprawling new suburbs of cities like Diyarbakir, the Kurds’ de facto cultural capital, “most young people prefer to speak Turkish these days, because they regard it as the language of modern life and opportunity,” says a 35-year-old Kurdish woman who once led militant protests.

Last month, in a gesture that remains unthinkable almost anywhere else in the Muslim bloc, Prime Minister Erdogan announced that Ankara will return or offer compensation for churches, synagogues, schools, hospitals and cemeteries that were confiscated by the state over the past 75 years.

“Times that a citizen of ours would be oppressed due to religion, ethnic origin or different way of life are over,” he said, speaking before representatives of more than 150 Christian and Jewish organizations.

Step-by-careful-step, the Erdogan administration – which won every national election after 2002 by huge margins, most recently last June – has broken the long reign of the Turkish Army as behind-the-scenes political powerbroker, in a world where dictatorial regimes rule most Muslim-majority states.

In the name of democracy, rather than religion, the expression of selected Muslim customs has been legalized, notably the right of devout women to wear light headscarves in public institutions if they choose. But today few observers speak of a hidden plan to impose theocracy.

The number of women in Turkey’s parliament increased by more than 50 percent in the 2011 national elections, to 78 seats.

“Secularism, one of the main principles of our republic, is a precondition for social peace as much as it is a liberating model for different lifestyles,” AK second-in-command Abdullah Gul insisted in his inauguration speech as president of Turkey in 2007.

Justice and Development, he says, is no different than the Christian Democratic parties that ruled Italy and Germany for most of the half century after World War Two. If religious values supply part of the AK identity, its outlook is resolutely centrist and modern.
Quietly, just months after September 11, it embarked on a controversial revision of the principal sources for Shariah law, the code that defines and regulates daily behavior for believers. The deliberate aim, say the project’s insiders, is to reconcile Islamic doctrine and Shariah law with the modern world. The final draft, due by the end of 2011, will be closely read by Muslims everywhere.

To the Wahabbist hardliners of Riyadh, the reforms proposed by Ankara look like heresy. But their fellow citizens overwhelmingly disagree. In 2002, according to a survey of Islamic world attitudes conducted annually by pollster James Zogby, a scant 20 percent of Saudis had a favorable view of Turkey. In 2011 the favorable rating reached 98 percent.
 

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

On both sides of the Atlantic – from the fires raging in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in early August – the institutional framework that came to define modern democracy in the 19th century is in deep trouble.
The principal organs of financial oversight and management are in tatters. Ferociously xenophobic political movements, an entire constellation of Tea Parties, now play important roles in nearly every European nation, as well as the United States.

Faith in elected leaders and legislatures, the central and defining institutions of democracy, has never been lower.
According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of the U.S. public expressing trust in the Federal Government has fallen from just under 80 percent in the late 1960s to barely 20 percent today.

A European Union poll last September found that only 29 percent of voters in its 27 member-states trust their own national government. Less than 20 percent believe that their elected representatives are capable of successful action “against the effects of the financial and economic crisis.”
A meagre 7 percent trust the United States, the West’s political and economic giant, to address the crisis – a resounding vote of no confidence a year before the disastrous U.S. Congressional budget struggle.

These numbers, put bluntly, are staggering.

Angry, violent civil disturbances, first in Paris and now in London, have revealed enormous tinderboxes of alienation. With the gap between rich and poor – between philosophical democracy’s matchless promise and contemporary democracies’ transparent inequities – expanding at a dizzying pace, more explosions are likely and perhaps inevitable.

Abroad in the Middle East and Central Asia, and at home in its urban streets, the Western Alliance is increasingly unable to maintain its values or defend them.

***********

Two factors separate these developments from the periodic lapses that marred democracy’s evolution in the past. The first is that they are intimately connected, a systemic malady. The second is that their strains are being felt not in one Western nation or even half a dozen, but in all of them simultaneously.

The links were strikingly evident in the scandal that erupted over the operations of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, the United Kingdom’s largest-circulation newspaper.

The story opened with what appeared to be narrow abuses of individual privacy, the hacking by News of the World reporters into the cell phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old British girl who vanished on the way home from school and was later found dead.
Within days, the scandal grew into an expose of Byzantine collaborations at the commanding heights of business and politics, leading not only to the firings and eventual arrests of Murdoch editors, but bringing down powerful figures in the British government and the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Then the storm crossed the Atlantic, setting off an FBI investigation and prompting the resignation of Les Hinton, chairman of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Both companies are also owned by Murdoch, as is the Fox News Channel, the chief broadcast voice of the populist American right.

A limited story about the callous treatment of a family tragedy had morphed into a full-fledged allegory on the cynical corruptions of business and politics, all in the name of “the people” – the mostly lower-middle-class voters who are the principal audience of Murdoch’s publications and broadcasts in Britain and America alike.

The tragedy is that their betrayal, which is precisely what it amounts to, is also a betrayal of their waning faith in democracy.

A private survey released by the Brussels-based polling firm Burson-Marsteller in June, even before the Murdoch scandal broke, found that Britons’ trust in their government had dropped by 51 percent in just two years.

***********

In the end, another of democracy’s critical institutions, a reliable and vigilant press, blew the whistle on the Murdoch empire’s shenanigans. The most damning evidence was hunted down by the investigative team at the Guardian, a British newspaper that stands at the opposite end of the professional spectrum from the tabloid sensationalism of the News of the World (which Murdoch eventually shut down in an effort at damage control).

Voters need a dependable flow of facts, the kind the Guardian team chased down, to interpret events whose complexities are all too often lost in the braying of extremists. Without a well-informed electorate, democracy is a sham.

But like public trust in government, the mainstream press is caught in a precipitous downward spiral. In the brief span of four years since 2007, more than 25 percent of all full-time reporters at U.S. newspapers have lost their jobs. In 2009 alone, the toll exceeded 6,000, the largest single year’s cutback every recorded.

The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy, with a combined population roughly 50 million less than that of the United States, laid off 6,500 reporters that same year.
Meanwhile the sensationalist tabloids and their broadcast equivalents prosper, scandals notwithstanding, with the nihilistic right as prime beneficiaries .

There is no mistaking its impact.

The European Union, an extraordinarily ambitious experiment in establishing democratic institutions across national boundaries, has brought six decades of continuous peace to a continent where history was defined by ceaseless wars among the French, British, Germans, Spaniards and their neighbours for two millennia.

Amidst a chorus of vapid nationalistic slogans on every side, the EU stands perilously close to collapse.

In the once-solid heartland of western tolerance, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, extremist anti-immigrant parties have been voted into every national parliament and exercise decisive power in many. The rhetoric that seized the imagination of Anders Behring Breivik, and sent him on a bloody one-day rampage in Norway that took 77 lives, is heard daily in the very legistatures where social democracy was polished into the globe’s most comprehensive health, job-creation and pension structure.

In Italy, where I live, the most important coalition partner in the government of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is the Northern league, a party openly dedicated to the dismantling of the Italian state. The League’s close American cousins, in spirit as well as in principle, are the Tea Party legislators of the U.S. Congress.

It also demands the forced repatriation of immigrants, from a country that saw 25 million of its own people leave for abroad in the lifetime of my four grandparents, who were among them.

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

“Madness. How could it happen in a place like Norway?” asked Marino, the proprietor of Da Aristo.

The customers, my friends and neighbors, shook their heads. But I wondered, without saying so aloud, if the events that shattered Norway were really inexplicable. I wondered how remote they were from this small, outwardly peaceful town on the western edge of Tuscany.

In his madness, the self-described Christian fundamentalist conservative Anders Behring Breivik turned his weapons on fellow Norwegians, most of whom who were as fair-haired and light-skinned as he is, killing nearly 100.  But in a 1,500-page manifesto posted on the Web, he made it evident that the actual targets were Islam and multiculturalism.

Muslim immigrants and their advocates, he charged, were intent on destroying the Norwegian identity. “The time for dialogue is over,” he wrote in the manifesto.

Europe has heard such charges before, and paid an incalculable price when they escalated from deranged fantasies into dominant political movements. It’s too soon to say that it’s happening again. But it’s never too soon to listen for alarm bells.

Even among the ostensibly sane, you hear words quite similar to Breivik’s in Europe today. Substitute “Jews” for “Muslims” in his rants, and terrible echoes sound. They also sound in the curva, the soccer-stadium bleacher sections favored by Italian Ultras, violently nationalist fans who scream racist epithets at the black and Arab players of rival teams and attack their fans with clubs and knives.

They sound in the rhetoric of xenophobic political parties, from Italy to Scandinavia, whose votes in national elections over the past decade have expanded at a pace unprecedented since the 1930s

HISTORY seldom repeats itself in precisely the same way. The Muslims who provoked Breivik’s rage are far poorer than the Jews who were the scapegoats of Adolf Hitler’s paranoid megalomania.

In the first decade of the 20th century, when Hitler was an art student in Vienna formulating his racial theories, more than half of the Austrian capital’s banking executives, lawyers and doctors were Jewish. Similar achievements had been registered by large Jewish communities in Paris, Warsaw, Berlin and Budapest.

They regarded themselves as fully Austrian, French, Polish, German and Hungarian, enthusiastically assimilated. Yet their very success as modern Europeans made them the objects of intense jealousy. Outright violence lay just under the surface. Hitler understood this, and transformed raging, irrational envy into a full-fledged militant ideology and a world war that cost 60 million lives.

By contrast, only a madman could be jealous of Europe’s Muslims. They are the poorest of the poor in today’s Europe — scarcely literate peasants from the Moroccan highlands, the slums of Algiers, rural Anatolia and parched sub-Sahelian villages in Mali and Senegal. The bankers, lawyers and doctors among them can be counted in the low hundreds, at most, in an Islamic community that numbers 16 million residents in a total European Union population of half a billion.

Their principal occupations are cleaning streets, collecting garbage, caring for infants and the Alzheimer’s-stricken elderly, washing dishes in restaurants or trudging on foot, with huge packs of kitchen tools and small appliances slung over their backs, to isolated hamlets in the mountains above towns like Barga.

The peak of ambition for most European Muslims in 2011 is to acquire a minuscule grocery store in Paris or Berlin, where they work 18-hour shifts trying to keep afloat against the competitive tide of giant supermarket chains.

ASSIMILATION, in the immigrant EU, is not a simple option. There’s no time or money to study and master the local language, much less the nuances of its politics, culture and social mores.

I speak, now and then, with Fatima, a Moroccan neighbor, who like many Arab women in Tuscany, had little formal education before emigrating across the Mediterranean. Her husband, a bricklayer, has picked up construction-site phrases in Italian. But elementary French is the best Fatima can muster outside of her family’s cramped two-bedroom apartment – home to her and her sister, their husbands and four children.

“On a toujours peur de tromper,” she tells me. “We’re always afraid we’ll make a mistake.”

Fear – endless confusion over life in modern — leads many immigrants to cling to the customs and dress of their distant homelands. Fatima wears a head scarf. Her sister has put it aside, and I notice that her daughter, now 13, also goes without one. Yet the sister, ostensibly the more modern of the two women, always turns away when I greet her in the street, and as far as I can tell she has no Italian women friends.

“La peur,” Fatima says again, when I bring this up. “Fear is why we stay in our little Morocco.”

The fear and self-isolation of Muslim immigrants provokes a parallel reaction among the native-born who surround them. Theirs is the fear of being swept away by an alien culture, a sinister Islamic “other” that is as confusing to them as the modern world is to Fatima.

“There are hundreds of them here!” I overheard one of my friends, a woman of natural tolerance and generosity, say recently of Barga’s Moroccans in headscarves.

I’ve done a census of my own at the Questura, the provincial police headquarters where immigration statistics are kept. There are fewer than 800 foreigners resident in the entire 66-square kilometer (26-square-mile) area around Barga, out of a population of 10,300. Roughly 200 are Muslim.

Fatima agrees with my estimate that only 20 or so wear the headscarf, and in the town center of Barga itself they number less than a dozen.

FEAR is an immensely potent tool, another point that Adolf Hitler understood very well. And if it’s too soon to conclude that Europe is headed toward racial Armageddon, there is no mistaking that irrational fear is everywhere in the landscape — as are politicians who are quick to make use of it.

Longtime liberal bastions Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Holland have all seen extremist rightwing parties enter parliament on the basis of anti-immigrant electoral campaigns. In Norway, the xenophobic Progress Party took a stunning 23 percent of the vote in 2009’s legislative elections, making it the second largest political grouping in the country.

Anders Behring Breivik was among its early activists, leaving the party a few years ago when he decided that it had become too centrist.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front, stands a good chance of finishing second in next year’s presidential election. Umberto Bossi, the firebrand demagogue of Italy’s Northern League, has emerged as chief powerbroker in the fractious coalition of Silvio Berlusconi. Under pressure from Bossi, Berlusconi has increasingly ordered strategic police round-ups in immigrant districts, turning up the thermostat on popular anxieties when the coalition faces critical legislative votes – or when his personal problems land him in court.

Not the least of those problems, cynics note, is a criminal investigation of his relationship with Karima El Mahroug, better known as Ruby Rubacuore (“Ruby Heart-Stealer), an underage Moroccan nightclub dancer.

Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New American Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.

Copyright – New America Media

Like almost everyone who has watched, in growing dismay, (article from August last year here) as the war in Afghanistan has dragged mercilessly on, I agree with President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing U.S. troops. But I have doubts that few of my friends, on either side of the Atlantic, seem to share.

Here in Europe, support for foreign engagement in Afghanistan approached 70 percent in 2008. It has now all but collapsed. In the most recent comprehensive polls, nearly 80 percent of Italians said they want their forces brought home by the end of 2011, echoing 79 percent of Germans, 73 percent of the British and 70 percent of the French. After the United States, their countries have the four largest contingents in deployment, totaling more than 20,000 men and women.

We entered Afghanistan a decade ago with mixed motives, dominated initially by a desire for revenge on the planners of the September 11 terrorist attacks. As time went on, however, the focus shifted to Afghanistan itself – to revulsion at what the Taliban had done to the country and its people, and to the awful damage wrought by a quarter century of murderous conflict before the United States assault opened on October 7, 2001.

I covered the American war from its very first day, while reporting in the Middle East and Central Asia on the Islamic world’s reaction to September 11. I’ve been writing about it periodically ever since.

“It is the longest military conflict in our history, and also the most futile and ineffective,” notes my eminent colleague William O. Beeman, a leading expert on the region.

Roughly a third of the present 100,000 Americans in Afghanistan will be pulled out by next summer, and the remainder by 2014. I know that the war’s cost, to our overstretched military and bruised economy, is clearly not justified by its meager results.

Shadows of Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia

Yet, despite myself, the image that comes to mind when I envision the effect of withdrawal is set in a Bosnian forest, rather than Kabul.

On a humid July afternoon in 1995, I was a few miles west of Srebrenica when thousands of women and children came fleeing through the trees, crazed with grief. Behind them, an estimated 8,000 of their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers had been executed by Serbian infantrymen and dumped into open trenches.

The outside world had been nominally present in Bosnia since 1992, in the form of United Nations Protection Force – 40,000-strong — that offered neither real protection nor convincing force. Its efforts were paralyzed by a United Nations Security Council “mandate” so ambivalent that it authorized virtually nothing. UN tanks and troops stood silently by as years of atrocities unfolded, climaxing at Srebrenica.

What I saw and heard that summer day, under drenching rain at a makeshift refugee camp, will remain carved in my memory until the end of my life.

Military intervention can have terrible consequences. But all too often, so do diplomatic restraint, botched implementation, hasty withdrawal — and outright moral evasion.

This is unquestionably the meaning of Rwanda, where the developed world looked the other way as more than 800,000 people were slaughtered, and of the Cambodian killing fields, where 1.7 million perished. It might also have been the final meaning of Bosnia, had Bill Clinton not overcome his doubts and approved U.S. bombing sorties in 1995, ending the war within months.

Yes, we need to draw down our effort in Afghanistan, which shows no sign of ending in years, much less months. But we must be prepared for a grisly aftermath.

Taliban’s Barbarism

The Taliban were deeply feared in Afghanistan long before foreign intervention began, to what was then general relief. Their worldview is characterized by an utter contempt for any beliefs except their own — the destruction in 2001 of the revered, 1,600-year-old statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan speaks for itself. They treat women as abject chattels, with less value than a pack animal, and have blinded young girls who commit the sin of attending school.

Less than a year ago, on August 6, Taliban “warriors” shot or beheaded 10 foreign doctors, nurses and medical technicians in a valley north of Kabul.

This has nothing to do with Islam or a contest between Asian traditional values and western secularism. At issue in Taliban rule is the triumph of sheer, undisguised barbarism.

There is strong reason to expect a Taliban return to power in the vacuum left by departed international forces, and with it a horrifying settling of accounts. Put bluntly, we are likely to witness, from a safe distance, a bloodbath of the innocent.

The abrupt statistical curve of emigration from Afghanistan graphically measures public horror of the Taliban and relief at their overthrow. The human tide rose inexorably between their seizure of power in 1996 and the closing months of 2001. By the opening of the American war, there were 7.4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran alone. Since 2002, more than 5 million Afghani refugees have repatriated.

To be sure, NATO and Washington have made unforgivable mistakes. In Hamid Karzai, we backed a petty dictator, who has proven both corrupt and incompetent.

Beeman emphasizes that the war has been “an astonishing windfall for U.S. contractors and external advisors, who reaped billions of their own with little or no supervision.”

Air attacks by unmanned drones, controlled electronically from as far away as Florida, have been responsible for hundreds of “accidental” civilian deaths. Approximately 10,000 Afghans have been killed, by both sides, in the current 10-year-old war.

Yet by comparison, an estimated 1.3 million Afghans died during the 1979-1989 Soviet invasion, and 400,000 in the 12-year Taliban civil war that followed. Many Afghans perceive the period of international occupation as the most secure in their devastating recent history.

Makings of a Global Catastrophe

A Taliban-run or anarchic Afghanistan will almost certainly recover its attraction as a sanctuary, training ground and rear base for militant extremists. Along with the danger of massive refugee waves, this prospect explains why Kabul’s neighbors –including Iran and China – tacitly backed international intervention at its onset.

Afghanistan is the linchpin of an immensely troubled neighborhood with violent uprisings underway in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China’s Xinjiang Province; severe political turmoil in Iran; and perilous instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The clouds building on the horizon are not simply a nightmare for Afghans. They have the makings of global catastrophe.

At its peak, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan counted soldiers and civilian advisors from an unprecedented 42 nations. That remarkable alliance, the largest since World War II, stands on the verge of total dismantling.

The danger is that feverish withdrawal will unravel the logic of all foreign intervention, paving the way for countless Bosnias, Rwandas and Cambodias in the future.

At least, the reasoning goes, Afghans will be spared the “collateral” casualties of foreign military engagement in their affairs.

Think again. The foreign armies will be gone. But as Washington has openly announced, they will be replaced by a vastly increased dependence on drone aircraft and other instruments of faceless, electronic war.

The killing will continue.

Copyright – New America Media

“Il  Duomo  di  Barga – Storia, arte e spiritualità nei primi tre secoli dopo il Mille” – “The cathedral of Barga – History, Art and Spirituality in the three centuries after the year 1000”  Presentazione edizione in italiano a cura del prof. Stefano Borsi – Presentazione edizione in inglese a cura del giornalista Frank Viviano – Saturday 18th June – Hotel Villa Moorings – 9 pm

Stampato da Bandecchi e Vivaldi, il nuovo libro sulla storia del Duomo di Barga realizzato dalla Polisportiva Val di Lago di Barga. “Il Duomo di Barga. Storia, arte e spiritualità nei primi tre secoli dopo il Mille”, raccoglie gli interventi della conferenza sulla storia e sul culto del Duomo che venne organizzata a Barga la scorsa estate con i contributi di Pier Carlo Marroni, Pier Giuliano Cecchi, Antonio Nardini, Giancarlo Marroni e del prof.
Stefano Borsi.

Antonio Nardini: An Eye-Witness Account of Restorations to the Duomo in Barga carried out from 1927 to 1939

When these restorations took place I was little more than a youngster and someone might ask how it was that, at that age, I was interested in those works and on what occasion.

At that time I was an apprentice in the photographic studio “Iacopetti” (later, “Pietrino Rigali”), known to everyone for over 60 years, which closed down a few years ago.  Pietro Rigali was also the official photographer of the “Opera di San Cristofano” (Administration of the Cathedral of St Christopher/St. Cristofano) and it is for this reason that so many photographs (so precious today!) of the cathedral during the restorations have been preserved.  For my part, I did everything possible to be present at the restoration work:  Pietro loaded me up with the photographic stand, mounted with glass negatives measuring 13 cm x 18 cm, then, naturally he took the photographs.

[View with PicLens]

Because the interior of the cathedral was very dark, especially in winter, it was necessary to work using a magnesium flashlight, and it was my job to make it work.  To explain: the flashlight worked like today’s cigarette lighter – a spark created a burst of flame which floodlit the whole area.  You had to close your eyes in order not to be blinded!  Obviously, the camera had the lens open which then closed immediately after the flash.

Doing this kind of work I began to get interested in everything I saw and, whenever I could, I was always in the cathedral.  I was 14/15 years old.

Thus I was present at many important events which, in part, I have already narrated and which concern nearly all the restorations of the cathedral over a number of years and which were completed in 1939 with its inauguration.

I remember, for example, having seen the construction of the boundary walls.  These were built against those already in existence and the latter can still be seen today through the arches.  The steps (known as the “Scalaccia”) leading up from the boundary walls to the “Aringo” (the high, fortified, area immediately surrounding the cathedral) were also entirely rebuilt, with each individual step made from a single piece of sandstone, difficult to move because each one weighed about half a ton.  The individual steps were brought to the “Aringo” and then, from above, made to slide down into position on planking.

The “Aringo” has a low wall on one side below which there is a small, very steep, strip of land.  At the time of the restoration, vines grew there but, today, these have made way to a line cypress trees.

I remember seeing on the “Aringo”, laid out in rows, all the stone blocks which had been removed from the cathedral.   Each one was identified with letters and numbers so that it could be replaced in its exact position during the reconstruction of the walls.

Though it may seem strange, the bell tower was left as it was and was only reinforced with a structure of intersecting concrete trusses, still visible today in the interior of the bell tower.  This structure was an integral part of the then new foundations which go down to the square lying below the cathedral.

Whilst excavating inside the bell tower in order to create the base for the concrete trusses, a number of well-preserved pine trunks, embedded in the ground, were found.

“Our history is our memory. Remembering what has been, what our ancestors created and the reasons which inspired the construction of certain works of art or monuments helps us to understand the present and discover its secrets and hidden meanings.

This is why I welcome with great satisfaction a publication on the history of a sacred place such as the Cathedral of Barga, with contributions from authoritative experts and scholars who explain, in a clear, direct and detailed way, not only the origins of this monument but also the delicate phases of its restoration.

This small volume offers a wealth of details on the history of the Cathedral, and on a long period of the history of the City of Barga and its people, through stories and events, legends and facts, and symbols and eye-witness accounts. Together with the description of the restoration works, the religious significance of St. Christopher and the meaning of the symbolism of the sculptures of the Cathedral, the section dedicated to the search for traces of the

Templars stands out in the way it interweaves with the narration of the enlargement of the building. St. Christopher is the protector saint of travellers and pilgrims who, on their journeys faced mountains, rivers and other obstacles which they had to overcome, and our church is dedicated to him.

I would like to give special thanks, not only from a professional but also a personal point of view, to the authors of this volume, to the Polisportiva Val di Lago and to all those who have contributed to this publication which, I am sure, will make an important addition to the many works which have been written on the history of the Cathedral and on the City of Barga”. – Stefano Baccelli – President of the Province of Lucca

Because the excavations could have endangered the stability of the bell tower, part of the cavity was hurriedly filled with concrete and stones thrown down from above, and the intersecting trusses were raised from there reaching up as far as the bell house.

As regards the interior of the cathedral and the roof of larchwood , I recall that the massive beams were unloaded at the square outside the “Porta Reale”  (Royal Gateway) and brought, on pallets, to the “Aringo” by five pairs of men – the same method as was used to carry the sandstone steps of the “Scalaccia” to the “Aringo”.

For the restoration of the St Christopher, as with the sandstone steps, sloping planks were used and thus, after being taken down from its niche, the statue was carried, again on pallets, to the Convent School of St Elizabeth and placed in the last room which overlooks the tennis court.

During the restoration of the cathedral, the Supervisory Service sent to Barga two restorers – Santoni and Lumini – the first for the glass windows and the latter for the St Christopher.  Lumini was a smallish man, with a grey apron which came down to below his knees.  I remember seeing him at work, while he was scraping the surface of the statue.  When the St Christopher was in the cathedral and before being removed for restoration, Pietrino Rigali was commissioned to photograph the face of the saint on which there was a large crack.  I can also remember the room in which the saint was lodged – it had black and white tiles.

Because Lumini saw that I was interested in what he was doing, he took a liking to me and talked to me about his work.  One day, when he was cleaning the surface of the statue, he told me that he had already removed eight layers of paint and that, on the face, he had found some patches of cloth, perhaps because the face had become cracked over time.  Then, while he was using an engraving tool, some pointed bits of metal appeared.  At first he took no notice of them but when others emerged he began to look at them more closely and saw that they were the tips of arrows or lances.  Tradition relates that whenever Barga was besieged, the citizens would carry the St Christopher onto the walls to encourage the defenders.  So, there are two possibilities: the “barbs” were either loosed in the church or over the walls, and these have remained fixed in the wood of the statue until the present day – if we tried to drive a nail into a piece of wood as hard as that of the statue, which is oak, we would find out how difficult it is to remove it.   Perhaps, in olden times, they didn’t waste time trying to remove them, but broke them off at the level of the wood leaving behind the tips, whose presence would give credit to the ancient legend.

Another important thing concerns the discoveries made during the resurfacing of the cathedral floor.  In front of the high altar a tiled covering was revealed.  This covering was semi-circular in shape, about two metres wide and three or four long.  Immediately, amongst the workers, there was an enormous curiosity to see what there was underneath, or, better, inside, and given that there was neither the provost nor the superintendent of the works, nor even the cathedral administrator and town mayor, Morando Stefani, the workers, on their own initiative, began to demolish the covering.   I was there when part of the vault gave way and, as quick as a flash, I put my head in the hole.  The fact that the roof of the cathedral was missing because of the restorations enabled me to see inside that subterranean room and I was able to make out three or four bodies of priests seated on two parallel benches placed against the longest walls.  The extraordinary thing was that what I saw lasted for only a few seconds: as soon as the oxygen entered the vault the priests’ bodies dissolved into little heaps of ashes!  For a moment I was frightened and actually believed that I hadn’t seen clearly because I was ignorant of the fact that such a phenomenon could take place.  I climbed down into the room:  the bodies were no longer there.  I remember, too, that on the ground there was a small terracotta cup which, unfortunately, was not placed in safekeeping

Early this spring, the van I was travelling in while on assignment in Guatemala was forced into the jungle by four hooded men. My fellow passengers and I, all foreigners, were relieved of everything we carried – money, credit cards, cameras, passports, driver’s licenses, cellphones. Each of us in turn was shoved bodily into the vehicle’s aisle, the machete hovering just under our chins and a battery of handguns and rifles trained on us.

We remained calm and cooperative and no one was hurt, in large part because we assumed that serious violence was unlikely. We were nearly dead wrong about that. When I returned to Guatemala City by bus, after walking out of the jungle, I learned that one American had been shot during a hold-up the day before, and another the day after.

Two days later, 19 Guatemalans were beheaded on a ranch 20 miles away from the site of our abduction and robbery.

This is Guatemala – and much of Central America – today: a grim tapestry of crime and mayhem, with the annual passage of $40 billion worth of cocaine as its backdrop.

The probability of a violent death in Guatemala in 2010 was seven times greater than in Iraq, and more than ten times greater than in the gun-crazy United States. In neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, statistically the two most violent nations on Earth, it was even higher.

Guatemala and El Salvador experienced ghastly civil wars between 1960 and 1995, with an estimated 250,000 deaths. The murder rate in both countries now exceeds the levels of the war years.

Behind this homicidal nightmare lies a 3,000-mile chain of narcotic supply and demand, anchored by Colombian and Mexican drug cartels on one hand and U.S. consumers on the other. Together, they have devastated some of the poorest nations on the planet, recruited their jobless young people as hired gunmen, and bankrupted the few legitimate industries that might have seeded genuine economic development.

An honest, focused assessment of the crisis leads to a single conclusion: the only way to end the cocaine criminal nightmare is to decriminalize cocaine. “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” a high-level commission reported this month.

EL PETEN AND THE MARA

El Peten, the northern province of Guatemala where my mind was so sharply focused by the edge of a machete, is ground zero in the Central American nightmare.

The tale of its descent into the abyss begins in Washington DC a decade ago, with a dramatic reinforcement of Coast Guard patrols and other activities aimed at interdicting cocaine shipments from South America via the Caribbean.

The cartels soon found it necessary to abandon the Caribbean routes. But in remarkably short order, they managed to shift much of their transport operations to land. In effect, the new strategy led to the wholesale takeover of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala by organized crime.

One of the major unintended consequences of the U.S. drug enforcement approach, the international study notes, has been the emergence of a “huge criminal black market, financed by the risk-escalated profits of supplying international demand for illicit drugs.” The study was carried out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a bi-partisan international body chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz that includes five former presidents or prime ministers.

Small planes and boats now ferry cocaine to isolated coves on the Pacific Coast and remote Central American air strips, across waters where U.S. interdiction efforts are very difficult, if not impossible. From there, the drugs are carried over mule tracks to El Peten, where the they are refined in hidden labs and consolidated for onward shipment. Their guards are provided by Guatemala’s fast-growing network of “mara,” the regional slang term for criminal gangs.

Before the unwitting collaboration of Washington policymakers and Latin American drug cartels turned Guatemala into a narcotic highway, its annual homicide rate was 26 killings per 100,000 people. It is now approaching 60. The corresponding figure for Iraq at the height of its bloodletting in 2004 was 7.3.

Cocaine smuggling leaves a trail of illicit cash everywhere it thrives. It corrupts the law enforcement agencies meant to combat it. (At the police station where I filed a useless deposition, I was told that “no crime had been committed in the area in more than three years.”) It corrupts trucking and car-rental firms that double as freight carriers for 350 tons of narcotics passing through El Peten each year.

Most insidiously, it corrupts the region’s young, mostly indigenous Native Americans who are the footsoldiers of the mara and have no other employment prospects. They quickly grow dependent on cocaine cash and often use the drug themselves. The mara are encouraged to rob and kill in their spare time, augmenting their income and discouraging outsiders from traveling through the trafficking corridors.

The ruins of Tikal, the greatest city in the ancient Mayan empire, are ten miles north of the site where I was mugged. In the three hours I waited for police on the highway that serves it, exactly two cars passed. Tikal, a potential tourism goldmine, is as empty as it was after Mayan civilization collapsed a millennium ago.

According to the World Bank, Guatemala in 2011 is the third hungriest nation on the planet, with more than 50 percent of its children suffering from chronic  malnutrition. The average citizen has just four years of schooling. Over half the population of 14 million lives on less than two dollars per day, and more than a quarter of them on less than one dollar.

Imagine the impact of $40 billion worth of cocaine in that landscape, and you begin to acquire focus.

THE CASE FOR DECRIMINALIZATION

For more than a generation, the United States has met the influx of South American drugs with astronomically expensive, militarized security programs – wall-building and armed patrols along the Mexican border, high-tech surveillance and warship deployment on the Caribbean,  helicopter assaults on coca plantations in Peru and Bolivia. At home, it has spent billions more in an orgy of criminal prosecutions and prison-building.

The results include a vast proliferation of organized crime clans abroad, especially in Mexico, that are even more brutal than their predecessors, and a staggeringly overcrowded domestic prison system that serves as a de facto graduate school in the narcotics trade.

“About about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes,” former U.S. President Jimmy Carter noted in a June 16 New York Times op-ed article. “And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.”

The policy has also wrought unprecedented levels of death and devastation in three of our hemisphere’s least-developed and most powerless nations.

What it hasn’t done is reduce the ability of drug suppliers to move their products north, or the willingness of affluent North Americans and Europeans to pay huge sums of money for cocaine. The Global Commission points out that cocaine wordwide cocaine use has risen by 27 percent in the past decade.

It pains me that it took a machete at my throat before I recognized the self-defeating purposelessness of U.S. enforcement policies. Before I faced the hard truth that decriminalization is the only answer – and the harder truth that no politician or bureaucrat in Washington is likely to address the crisis honestly.

Decriminalization, supporters of the military war on drugs say, would only concede victory to the cartels.

Yet decriminalization is surely the turn of events that traffickers most fear. It would reduce cocaine to the same status as tobacco, alcohol and many prescription drugs, substances that are perilous to those who abuse them but can be taxed and controlled. Deaths due to overdoses of prescription drugs have risen by 400 percent since 2000 in the United States. No one argues that they should be made illegal.

I have no sympathy for the well-heeled consumers who account for 80 percent of cocaine consumption in the United States, much less the murderous cartels that supply them. But sympathy isn’t the point. Decriminalization, put simply, would drive the the cartels out of business.

It would end the devastation that makes normal life a distant and ever-receding fantasy for the people of Central America.

Handled intelligently, it might even produce a much-needed tax windfall from $40 billion worth of annual self-indulgence.

Copyright – New America Media

Stampato da Bandecchi e Vivaldi, il nuovo libro sulla storia del Duomo di Barga realizzato dalla Polisportiva Val di Lago di Barga. “Il Duomo di Barga. Storia, arte e spiritualità nei primi tre secoli dopo il Mille”, raccoglie gli interventi della conferenza sulla storia e sul culto del Duomo che venne organizzata a Barga la scorsa estate con i contributi di Pier Carlo Marroni, Pier Giuliano Cecchi, Antonio Nardini, Giancarlo Marroni e del prof.
Stefano Borsi.

Antonio Nardini: An Eye-Witness Account of Restorations to the Duomo in Barga carried out from 1927 to 1939

When these restorations took place I was little more than a youngster and someone might ask how it was that, at that age, I was interested in those works and on what occasion.

At that time I was an apprentice in the photographic studio “Iacopetti” (later, “Pietrino Rigali”), known to everyone for over 60 years, which closed down a few years ago.  Pietro Rigali was also the official photographer of the “Opera di San Cristofano” (Administration of the Cathedral of St Christopher/St. Cristofano) and it is for this reason that so many photographs (so precious today!) of the cathedral during the restorations have been preserved.  For my part, I did everything possible to be present at the restoration work:  Pietro loaded me up with the photographic stand, mounted with glass negatives measuring 13 cm x 18 cm, then, naturally he took the photographs.

Because the interior of the cathedral was very dark, especially in winter, it was necessary to work using a magnesium flashlight, and it was my job to make it work.  To explain: the flashlight worked like today’s cigarette lighter – a spark created a burst of flame which floodlit the whole area.  You had to close your eyes in order not to be blinded!  Obviously, the camera had the lens open which then closed immediately after the flash.

Doing this kind of work I began to get interested in everything I saw and, whenever I could, I was always in the cathedral.  I was 14/15 years old.

Thus I was present at many important events which, in part, I have already narrated and which concern nearly all the restorations of the cathedral over a number of years and which were completed in 1939 with its inauguration.

I remember, for example, having seen the construction of the boundary walls.  These were built against those already in existence and the latter can still be seen today through the arches.  The steps (known as the “Scalaccia”) leading up from the boundary walls to the “Aringo” (the high, fortified, area immediately surrounding the cathedral) were also entirely rebuilt, with each individual step made from a single piece of sandstone, difficult to move because each one weighed about half a ton.  The individual steps were brought to the “Aringo” and then, from above, made to slide down into position on planking.

The “Aringo” has a low wall on one side below which there is a small, very steep, strip of land.  At the time of the restoration, vines grew there but, today, these have made way to a line cypress trees.

I remember seeing on the “Aringo”, laid out in rows, all the stone blocks which had been removed from the cathedral.   Each one was identified with letters and numbers so that it could be replaced in its exact position during the reconstruction of the walls.

Though it may seem strange, the bell tower was left as it was and was only reinforced with a structure of intersecting concrete trusses, still visible today in the interior of the bell tower.  This structure was an integral part of the then new foundations which go down to the square lying below the cathedral.

Whilst excavating inside the bell tower in order to create the base for the concrete trusses, a number of well-preserved pine trunks, embedded in the ground, were found.

“Our history is our memory. Remembering what has been, what our ancestors created and the reasons which inspired the construction of certain works of art or monuments helps us to understand the present and discover its secrets and hidden meanings.

This is why I welcome with great satisfaction a publication on the history of a sacred place such as the Cathedral of Barga, with contributions from authoritative experts and scholars who explain, in a clear, direct and detailed way, not only the origins of this monument but also the delicate phases of its restoration.

This small volume offers a wealth of details on the history of the Cathedral, and on a long period of the history of the City of Barga and its people, through stories and events, legends and facts, and symbols and eye-witness accounts. Together with the description of the restoration works, the religious significance of St. Christopher and the meaning of the symbolism of the sculptures of the Cathedral, the section dedicated to the search for traces of the

Templars stands out in the way it interweaves with the narration of the enlargement of the building. St. Christopher is the protector saint of travellers and pilgrims who, on their journeys faced mountains, rivers and other obstacles which they had to overcome, and our church is dedicated to him.

I would like to give special thanks, not only from a professional but also a personal point of view, to the authors of this volume, to the Polisportiva Val di Lago and to all those who have contributed to this publication which, I am sure, will make an important addition to the many works which have been written on the history of the Cathedral and on the City of Barga”. – Stefano Baccelli – President of the Province of Lucca

Because the excavations could have endangered the stability of the bell tower, part of the cavity was hurriedly filled with concrete and stones thrown down from above, and the intersecting trusses were raised from there reaching up as far as the bell house.

As regards the interior of the cathedral and the roof of larchwood , I recall that the massive beams were unloaded at the square outside the “Porta Reale”  (Royal Gateway) and brought, on pallets, to the “Aringo” by five pairs of men – the same method as was used to carry the sandstone steps of the “Scalaccia” to the “Aringo”.

For the restoration of the St Christopher, as with the sandstone steps, sloping planks were used and thus, after being taken down from its niche, the statue was carried, again on pallets, to the Convent School of St Elizabeth and placed in the last room which overlooks the tennis court.

During the restoration of the cathedral, the Supervisory Service sent to Barga two restorers – Santoni and Lumini – the first for the glass windows and the latter for the St Christopher.  Lumini was a smallish man, with a grey apron which came down to below his knees.  I remember seeing him at work, while he was scraping the surface of the statue.  When the St Christopher was in the cathedral and before being removed for restoration, Pietrino Rigali was commissioned to photograph the face of the saint on which there was a large crack.  I can also remember the room in which the saint was lodged – it had black and white tiles.

Because Lumini saw that I was interested in what he was doing, he took a liking to me and talked to me about his work.  One day, when he was cleaning the surface of the statue, he told me that he had already removed eight layers of paint and that, on the face, he had found some patches of cloth, perhaps because the face had become cracked over time.  Then, while he was using an engraving tool, some pointed bits of metal appeared.  At first he took no notice of them but when others emerged he began to look at them more closely and saw that they were the tips of arrows or lances.  Tradition relates that whenever Barga was besieged, the citizens would carry the St Christopher onto the walls to encourage the defenders.  So, there are two possibilities: the “barbs” were either loosed in the church or over the walls, and these have remained fixed in the wood of the statue until the present day – if we tried to drive a nail into a piece of wood as hard as that of the statue, which is oak, we would find out how difficult it is to remove it.   Perhaps, in olden times, they didn’t waste time trying to remove them, but broke them off at the level of the wood leaving behind the tips, whose presence would give credit to the ancient legend.

Another important thing concerns the discoveries made during the resurfacing of the cathedral floor.  In front of the high altar a tiled covering was revealed.  This covering was semi-circular in shape, about two metres wide and three or four long.  Immediately, amongst the workers, there was an enormous curiosity to see what there was underneath, or, better, inside, and given that there was neither the provost nor the superintendent of the works, nor even the cathedral administrator and town mayor, Morando Stefani, the workers, on their own initiative, began to demolish the covering.   I was there when part of the vault gave way and, as quick as a flash, I put my head in the hole.  The fact that the roof of the cathedral was missing because of the restorations enabled me to see inside that subterranean room and I was able to make out three or four bodies of priests seated on two parallel benches placed against the longest walls.  The extraordinary thing was that what I saw lasted for only a few seconds: as soon as the oxygen entered the vault the priests’ bodies dissolved into little heaps of ashes!  For a moment I was frightened and actually believed that I hadn’t seen clearly because I was ignorant of the fact that such a phenomenon could take place.  I climbed down into the room:  the bodies were no longer there.  I remember, too, that on the ground there was a small terracotta cup which, unfortunately, was not placed in safekeeping

In Europe, Arizona arrived a generation ago – with hardly a ripple of organized protest.

Heavily armed officers of the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (CRS), France’s elite national riot troops, have been deployed at major transfer stations on Paris commuter lines and other public gathering places since the 1990s, waylaying hundreds of black African, Arab and Asian travellers every day in search of “sans papiers,” undocumented immigrants.

“Not a single week passes without a cop asking me for my I.D.,” a West Africa-born Parisian says. “I have to build time for interrogation into my work schedule.”

Counterparts to the CRS patrol the streets of most European capitals in 2011, against a backdrop of escalating violence and surging anti-immigrant political parties.

In mid-May, Athens was rocked by three days of riots, touched off by rumours that a “dark-skinned foreigner” had fatally mugged a Greek. More than 100 Africans and Asians were attacked by the rioters, and scores of immigrant-owned shops were looted.

In legislative elections on April 18, voters in Finland gave the “True Finns,” an extremist anti-immigrant party, one-fourth of their nation’s parliamentary seats. Similar parties have achieved prominence in such other liberal bastions as Denmark, Sweden and Holland, demanding harsh measures against “illegal intruders” and fortified borders to keep them out.

None of this will sound unfamiliar to Americans, who will hear echoes of the Tea Party in Europe’s xenophobic rhetoric. Yet the similarities are far from exact.

EUROPE IS NOT AMERICA
It means something quite specific, rooted in the collective DNA and thousands of years of history, to be French or German or Greek. In this respect, the European experience with substantial immigration, which dates back to the 1970s, turns the American controversy on its head.

Viewed strictly from a cultural perspective, Europeans have more in common with Arizona’s Latinos than they do with the white legislators who pushed for their state’s hardline law.

Arizona has been populated by Native Americans for more than ten millennia and by Hispanics since the 16th century. It was part of Mexico until the mid-19th century, and remained predominantly Hispanic in culture and population long after it became a U.S. state a century ago. Only in the two last decades has massive migration from the northern rustbelt given Arizona a slim (and almost certainly temporary) white majority – the voting bloc behind the draconian bill that Governor Jan Brewer signed in April 2010.

Like Hispanics across the U.S. Southwest, indigenous Europeans have seen their towns and cities overwhelmed by waves of recent arrivals who share neither their culture nor their longstanding attachment to the land.

The principal language spoken at home today in huge stretches of northern Paris and its adjacent suburbs is Arabic. On the city’s south side it is Chinese, in several dialects used by a quarter million residents from China and Southeast Asia. More than 10 million residents of France are immigrants or their children.

Almost 4 million Turks now live in Germany, some 250,000 of them in the capital, Berlin. Immigrants and their progeny in Rotterdam, the second largest urban centre in the Netherlands and Europe’s busiest port, will comprise more than half the population by 2020. Already, the city has an immigrant mayor in Ahmed Aboutaleb, the son of a Moroccan imam.

The vast majority of Europe’s newcomers are Muslim – some 16-20 million people – and thus living reminders of the longest continuing conflict in world history. In cultural terms, Western Europe and Islam have been at odds, often bitterly, for 1,400 years.

This doesn’t mean that more than a tiny handful of Muslim immigrants are potential terrorists, or that more than a similarly tiny number of white Europeans are violent racists. It does mean that ancient tensions still run high on both sides of the cultural divide, and are no longer buffered by natural borders. The differences in beliefs, customs and attitudes are acute, and painfully evident when they involve the people next door rather than distant strangers across the sea or beyond a mountain chain.

Europe, after the cataclysmic horrors of Fascism and Stalinism, has constructed liberal, secular societies that are the envy of the modern world. By contrast, many of its recent immigrants are deeply traditional and ill-at-ease with secular mores.

“Multiculturalism,” anti-immigrant European politicians declare, “is an American concept. It won’t work here.”

MY PLUMBER’S CONUNDRUM
The question is whether Europe really has a choice, notwithstanding the implications for its venerable cultures and contemporary fears.

It comes down to numbers, to blunt statistics and the phenomenon I think of as “my plumber’s conundrum.” The plumber to whom I refer is one of the most successful businessmen in the small town where I live in central Italy. Almost to a person, his apprentices and sub-contractors are immigrants. “I can’t find a young Italian to hire,” he says. “That’s the whole story.”

The same story is told by plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, masons and countless other tradespeople and industrialists across Italy and the continent.

In 1950, when Western Europe began its climb out of the ruins of World War Two, its birth rate was almost 20 children per 1,000 inhabitants. In 2010, it was just over 10. Italy’s birthrate, at 9.1, was the second lowest among 227 countries surveyed by the United Nations last year.

The current birthrates in West and North Africa, two of the main sources of immigrants to Europe, are respectively 38.5 and 23.

Put those sets of numbers together and you begin to understand my plumber’s workforce – and more, the crisis that Europe faces if it refuses to adjust to the challenges of a world in motion.

The liberal paradise of secular Western Europe, with its enviable health care, schools, transit systems and pension benefits, is a product of affluence, of economies fuelled by a constant infusion of young workers and consumers. That entire structure totters on a cliff today, not because of a Muslim immigration wave but because of Europe’s own plummeting fertility and soaring retirement population.

In 1950, 10 percent of Western Europe was above the age of 65. The proportion will soon approach 30 percent, and not decline for the rest of the 21st century.

Who will support all those retirees? Who will keep Europe’s economies rolling? There is only one feasible answer at present – more immigration, rather than less. Multiculturalism, in some form, whatever the cultural cost.

Copyright New America Media

andrea guzzoletti outside his studio in Barga this morning pointing to his new QR code ceramic tile linking him to the new iBarga information system

Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino, Italy’s most imaginative 20th century writer. Le Citta Invisibli, published in 1972, was ostensibly an account of Marco Polo’s “conversations” with Kublai Khan – descriptions of the Mongol Empire’s far-flung capitals by a wandering merchant who knew the Great Khan’s immense realm better than the emperor himself. The two men shared no common language, and in Calvino’s rendition their exchanges revolve around largely non-verbal reactions to emblematic objects that Polo has acquired on the long road from Venice to China. It is left to the reader to interpret the responses that each object invokes in the emperor and his Venetian guide.

Beyond the acknowledged debt to Calvino stretch a long line of more purely musical resonances, dating back most notably to another celebrated Venetian, the Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi.  Like Vivaldi in his lyrical potrait of the “Four Seasons,” the nine tracks of Guzzoletti’s “Invisible Cities” employ instruments and musical phrases to capture the soundscapes that define our experience of the physical world, often more distinctly and powerfully than the landmarks that serve as their backdrop.

Early in the genesis of this work, I spent a memorable day listening to parts of half a dozen tracks with Keane – a writer and a painter – both of us held in thrall by a musical composition that took its inspiration from literature and wielded its notes as though they were subtle brush strokes.  We played a little game as we listened, speculating on real cities that seemed to emerge from Guzzoletti’s passages. Hong Kong and Tokyo came up, as I recall, along with New York and Paris. We thought we heard Sao Paolo and Bahia, and the vast megalopolises of Africa: Nairobi, Cairo and Lagos.

I can’t say why, exactly. There weren’t specific musical references – none of the precise allusions to Broadway taxis or smoky Montparnasse bistros that act as signposts in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “American in Paris,” two other grand monuments in the line that leads to Andrea Guzzoletti. It was, rather, an inexplicable sensation of those places that his composition (and he and his extraordinary fellow musicians) provoked. A plunge into the very meaning of “city,” its mythic force and creative vitality, whether invisible and nameless or visible and named.

You can’t ask for more from an act of the imagination, whether its medium is music, words or paint.

Article by Frank Viviano

Andrea Guzzoletti – Invisible Cities, the music project that has been gradually evolving for the past three years finally moves into its finished state as this morning it was released to the public on line on itunes and Amazon and will be available in record shops later on this month.

The record is dedicated to the memory of the great musician Hector Zazou who tragically passed away in September 2008, and will contain a previously unreleased live track which gives us further valuable insight by way of a performance by Andrea Guzzoletti on stage together with his friend Hector Zazou.

In July for the art event THE CUBE in Piazza Angelio it was possible to hear some of the music written for Invisible Cities but now for the first time it is possible to hear the complete cycle of music composed by Andrea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWXw8bv9Mb0

Complete article on Invisible Cities can be seen here

In questi giorni sta uscendo sui principali portali il mio disco “Invisible Cities” in formato digitale, e per la fine di settembre inizi di ottobre sarà in distribuzione fisica anche nei negozi di dischi. Il disco Invisible Cities nasce come lavoro legato alla lettura del libro “Le Città Invisibili” di Italo Calvino, come nel libro si tratta di un viaggio spesso mentale attraverso città che non hanno riscontro nella realtà. – Andrea Guzzoletti

The Taliban control much of the countryside and dozens of key towns. Casualties among U.S. troops and civilians are soaring. The commanding general of NATO and American forces has been forced to resign. Government corruption is rife.

There is little doubt that the situation in Afghanistan is unravelling. But there is tremendous doubt, in my mind, about what should be done.

This column will be up-front and personal, not a bit detached. My first overseas newspaper stories were filed from the killing fields of Central America and the refugee camps of Southeast Asia, and my last from Iraq, with three decades of civil wars and insurrections between them. I arrived at firm views on all of them – as firm as the view of my closest friends today that it is time for the United States and NATO to get out of Afghanistan.

I know, painfully well, what war looks like. The sheer horror and brutality of it. That part of me wants out.

A 58-percent majority of Americans regard Afghanistan as a lost cause, according to July’s Bloomberg National Poll. Yet each time I edge toward agreeing with them, something happens that stops me cold.

The most recent something, on August 6, was the summary execution of ten doctors, nurses and medical technicians in a remote valley north of Kabul. What matters is not that six of them were American. It is that by every account — apart from the Taliban’s, with its specious assertion that the murdered aid workers were spies – the victims had made extraordinary sacrifices, over an entire adult lifetime in two cases, to bring help to Afghanistan’s sick and poor.

What matters is the blunt, hideous reminder of the stakes in that shattered land. The war isn’t about religion, although the aid workers were Christian and their murderers Muslim. It is about a struggle between civilization and absolute barbarism, about the best that human beings are capable of and the worst, without encumbering labels.

That’s the confrontation we’d be fleeing, if we cede victory to the men who claimed responsibility for the massacre on August 6, as the Taliban did through an official spokesman less than 24 hours later. But in doing so, we wouldn’t escape the war’s consequences.

A GROWING CONSENSUS

There are two lenses through which foreign intervention can be viewed – the moral and the strategic. From both perspectives, the landscape of Afghanistan is marred by inconvenient truths, to borrow Al Gore’s global warming phrase.

This isn’t Vietnam in 1970, where moral contradictions and public disgust eventually drove Washington to abandon the field. A reasonable argument  could be made that the Vietcong and their allies in Hanoi were widely seen in their own country as liberators, leading the final battle in a 30-year war to forge a unified nation.

Very few observers, inside or outside of Afghanistan, would confuse the Taliban with an army of liberation.

For the left, which led the opposition to U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, they are a portrait of evil incarnate, characterized by the most extreme form of religious fanaticism, mindless violence against women and children, totalitarian rule and the utter rejection of modern science.

The message was amplified just three days ago, when a young couple were publically stoned to death at the Taliban’s orders in northern Kunduz Province. Their crime was eloping.

For the political right, the Taliban represent the principal threat to worldwide U.S. power, influence and leadership, an extremist anti-Western cabal that gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and served as co-architects of September 11.

If morality alone was the defining measure, it would take unprecedented hypocrisy across the ideological spectrum to justify withdrawal. Yet the right increasingly – and the left overwhelmingly – wants the troops pulled out. The Bloomberg poll found that 48 percent of Republicans believe the war has been irretrievably lost in Afghanistan, along with 71 percent of Democrats.

The calculation couldn’t be simpler. We don’t appear to have accomplished anything in a conflict that has raged for a decade, twice the combined length of U.S. participation in World War One and World War Two. Why go on?

THE ULTIMATE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

The answer is as bluntly pragmatic as the question. Vietnam didn’t matter very much strategically, which is a major reason why it was finally allowed to “fall.” By contrast, Afghanistan sits astride the most volatile and perilous region on the planet.

The first result guaranteed by withdrawal is a resounding Taliban victory, and with it the restoration of worldwide terrorism’s key sanctuary and operational base.

This grim outlook isn’t a product of Pentagon hype or Republican Party paranoia. Everything argues for it: the stated goals of the Taliban; their well-documented links to Al-Qaeda and other armed fundamentalist groups; the rugged terrain, which provides natural shelters that are all but impervious to strikes by bombers, missiles and drones from beyond the Afghan borders.

With long-range weapons as the main (and largely futile) response available to counter the Taliban and its allies, innocent civilian casualties are likely to continue rising while militant extremism flourishes.

The second consequence is written all over the regional map. Afghanistan shares borders, ethnic ties and religion with Pakistan, Iran, the restless western provinces of China and three shaky former Soviet republics. India and the Russian Caucasus lie just beyond the horizon.

They add up to the ultimate inconvenient truth.

Afghanistan is ringed with nations experiencing serious political instability and religious terrorism, several of them established or imminent nuclear states. If a third world war were to break out in the foreseeable future, its spark is most likely to be struck in the Central Asian mountains and steppes that have Kabul at their dead centre. But the effects would surely be global.

Put coldly, foreign intervention could once be treated as an accounting problem. Potential strategic and moral gains were weighed against possible setbacks. The context was immediate and relatively short-term.

We don’t live in that world any more. The madness unleashed in a Taliban-run Afghanistan a decade ago killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001. From the very first, the challenge it posed has defied short-term considerations or predictable accounting.

There are signs, most notably in Iran and Iraq, that the pendulum may be slowly  swinging against extremism in Central Asia and the Middle East.  But the timetable is uncertain and the jury is still out. The realities of the twenty-first century, strategic and moral,  present us with a terrible choice.

We can turn our heads on barbarism and pay the price, sooner or later, when the next September 11 explodes. Or we must accept the need, however unpalatable, to fight lengthy wars that may not be winnable – but cannot be lost.

Article by Frank Viviano

Another way to view that universe is a catastrophic explosion, fragmenting knowledge into a vast amorphous cloud and obliterating the very institutions that give it shape and value.

At issue in this choice of metaphors, whether benevolent or apocalyptic, is not the capabilities of the Internet and its myriad applications. Their promise is almost infinite.

But 20 years into the Information Age, it’s time to set promises aside and ask what the revolution’s sum results have been. The answer, at the moment, is “explosive.”

REPORTERS: AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
As the Internet has taken hold, the institutional machinery that collects new facts about local and world affairs, organizes them and places them in context – in short, the established press – has been shattered.

With print circulation evaporating, and free access to online editions generating a tiny percentage of advertising revenues that comprised the principal source of newspaper income, publications all over the country are cutting their operations to the bone or shutting down altogether.

In the 30 months since World View first addressed the Internet’s effect on news, more than one-fourth of all fulltime newspaper reporting posts in the United States have been eliminated. The nearly 6,000-job decline in 2008-2009 alone was the greatest one-year loss in the history of the annual employment census conducted by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE).

The 2010 ASNE census found that a paltry 1,333 journalists nationwide, roughly 2 percent of the number who once filed in print, work solely online. A sizable proportion of them are columnists, rather than reporters.

It’s not the financial crisis of the news industry as a viable business that concerns us here, not simply the sinking fortunes of venerable media enterprises. Business models come and go. What matters is their performance.

The evidence, overwhelmingly, is that the basic functions of the news media are being abandoned – and with them, an essential bulwark of democracy.

On April 26, Arizona Republican John McCain defended his state’s xenophobic new anti-immigration law in a fiery speech at the U.S. Senate. He described the nation’s southwestern frontier as “unsecured,” wracked by lawless violence, and witnessing arrests of illegal border-crossers in numbers “that stagger.”

YouTube videos of the speech immediately went viral on the ‘net, and its most provocative excerpts were cited ad nauseum by conservative gurus on cable television and talk radio. Amid the rising clamor, President Obama sent 1,200 National Guard troops to the borderlands, tacitly suspending plans for comprehensive immigration reform.

It took three months before a single journalist, the New Yorker’s William Finnegan, filed the basic facts that tell the real story. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, he reported on July 26, arrests are actually at their lowest point in 35 years, and down 60 percent since 2000. Violent crime has risen in Mexico, but on the U.S. side of the border region it has plunged by 30 percent over the past two decades. The country’s four safest big cities, the F.B.I. confirmed, are San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, all of which are in border states.

Not long ago, reporters would have been assigned to follow up on McCain’s charges at scores of U.S. dailies. But that was before their staffs were gutted and their national bureaus shut down.

The Internet is destroying the Great American Fact Machine, while creating no new fact-hunting institutions to replace it.

THE GREAT AMERICAN FACT MACHINE
For a century or more, the American press recorded the life of cities as large and powerful as New York, and villages as modest as Whitesburg, Kentucky (pop. 1,600), whose weekly “Mountain Eagle” published my own early dispatches in the 1970s.

The Fact Machine registered marriages and births, murders and robberies, wars abroad and wars at home against disease and poverty, the peaks and valleys of economic output, the effects and causes of natural disasters, the scheduling and response to films, plays and concerts, the triumphs and traumas of sports and fashion.

In effect, it painted a complete and ever-changing portrait of a civilization, pictured down to its smallest elements.

“There’s a local angle to every story” was the punchline of a running joke in the business, but it was a joke with the ring of elementary truth. American democracy hummed with a ceaseless conversation fueled by the Fact Machine – a constant exchange of new data and analysis that connected the dots between Whitesburg, the Big Apple, Washington DC and the rest of the world.

The implicit object of that conversation was a search for meaning: accumulating new and more precise knowledge through direct experience, and interpreting it. There’s no better definition of journalism’s fundamental purpose, whether the setting is Main Street, Pennsylvania Avenue – or the far side of the planet.

A decade ago, ambitious reporting forays, foreign and domestic alike, were the lifeblood of the American press and the society it served. Their cumulative effect was perspective, taking seriously the axiom that nearly every story in today’s globalized world is “local”.

In 1998, the San Francisco Chronicle sent photographer Tim Kao and me on a three-month assignment to the Middle East and Central Asia. The main focus was on huge discoveries of oil and natural gas in the region surrounding the Caspian Sea and the Anatolian Plateau.

The series that emerged from our trip eventually touched on the rise of radical Islam, the consequences of the Soviet empire’s collapse, the emergence of a global traffic in arms, human beings and contraband, the impact of all these forces on such volatile lands as Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey and Afghanistan – and their distant ripples in California.

The point is not that Tim and I had accomplished something unheard of. Our assignment might have been undertaken at dozens of regional U.S. newspapers then. Today, almost certainly, it would be considered by none but the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

The well of reported facts is drying up. The dots are no longer being connected.

INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
With each passing day, the need for extensive media restructuring to meet this crisis grows more critical. The initial steps must be taken at the bottom line – convincing the public that news online is worth paying for, and building new online institutions that will invest in reporting.

The battle hasn’t yet been lost, especially if the surviving producers of news can agree on a unified economic strategy and lobby for legislation that extends effective copyright protection to online intellectual property.

But until restructuring is seriously underway, reporters will continue to vanish, not only at the international level, but also in the monitoring of local affairs. On both ends of that long chain and everywhere between, hardly anyone is watching the shop.

Aggregate press sites, such as Google News, Yahoo News and the Huffington Post, are what now passes for institutionalized journalism on the Internet. They are famous not for what they report – aggregates dispatch few or no reporters of their own into the costly fields of fact-gathering – but for what they snatch, without payment, from the shrinking ranks of print publications that continue to bear those costs.

The damage is piling up across the entire gamut of events and developments that once made the news an indispensable part of daily conversation, and by extension, daily life.

The army of reporters who once covered culture in all its guises – books, films, theater, architecture, painting and sculpture – has been reduced to a demoralized platoon. Musicians and actors complain of appearing before half-empty houses. “Our industry is dying along with yours,” a talented young violinist from Wisconsin told me in June “People don’t know when or what we are playing. They don’t read reviews anymore.”

I’ve had similar conversations with medical researchers appalled at the steady decline of science reporting in the press, and with it an indispensable link to ordinary citizens whose support is crucial to their work and its funding. Two decades after the Internet assumed a major role in U.S. society, promising its hyper-democratized flow of information, 85 percent of the scientists polled in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that the public’s ignorance of their work had become “a major problem.”

The Great American Fact Machine’s reporting role, we’re told, has been passed on to Facebook and Twitter, to millions of “people’s journalists.” Whatever their skills or motives, the effect is to reduce the world’s complexities to cursory electronic messages, spat promiscuously into a cyber-space environment whose chief characteristics include high-velocity “web surfing” and a dismally brief attention span.

Studies conducted by the Danish researcher Jakob Nielsen, an expert on human-computer interaction, have found that many people who follow news exclusively online read no more than 20 percent of an article.

HARRY WHO?
The system has all but collapsed, and its analytical conversation has faded into silence – or worse, been replaced by the braying of Fox News and talk radio, which trade in destructive propaganda and outright invention, nihilism disguised as journalism.

When professional reporting crumbles, so does the edifice of documented facts that offer safeguards against lies and manipulation. Against the perils of ignorance.

In a January 2010 nationwide survey of 1,000 American adults by the Pew Research Center, less than 40 percent recognized the name of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a main player in almost every significant American political debate over the past decade.

Only 32 percent knew that not a single Republican senator voted for the health reform bill, the number one domestic issue of 2009.

Last year, the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a national test designed to measure “civic literacy.” It surveyed U.S. students who entered college after 2005 – the first generation of Americans whose entire lives have been passed in the Internet era – on their grasp of the major issues of our day, the core premises of democracy and the key themes of American history and government. Fewer than half of incoming freshman were able to choose the right answers to 50 percent of the questions. Seniors hardly did better, with an average of 54 percent correct answers.

Not one of the participating schools, which included Harvard and Yale, achieved a score higher than 69 percent in its graduating class.

Think of them as context for Monday’s (June 28) 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in the case of McDonald v. Chicago – which strips American cities and states of the right to enact their own restrictive gun-control laws, even when they are strongly supported by local voters.

My brother Sam and I, trying to look inconspicuous,  stood next to those two young men at 11pm in the sports department of a late-night discount chain store in Naples, Florida. We were there to acquire permits for a dawn fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico the following morning. They were there in response to an ad featuring .32 caliber revolvers on sale at 40 percent off list price.

The revolver transaction took ten minutes and involved almost no paperwork, as far as I could tell. A hour later, Sam and I were finally issued our fishing licenses, after filling out several pages of detailed forms and submitting two pieces of official identity each.

Our nonresident fishing license cost $30 and was good for seven days. That works out to roughly 100 times the weekly cost of a seven-year $117 permit to carry concealed weapons in Florida, which has some of the loosest gun laws in the world.

Thanks to the Supreme Court and its conservative majority, Florida’s laws – which treat the Second Amendment to the U.S. Consitution as a blanket endorsement of universal gun possession – are set to become the national standard.

AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

It is a matter of faith among American conservatives that their country is in the vanguard of the world’s civilized nations. The McDonald decision challenges the U.S. claim to belong in that club at all, much less lead it.

In the United States, 90 out of every 100 residents already possess a gun. That’s 50 percent more than the next most heavily armed nation on the planet –  Yemen, an all-but-lawless state on the Arabian Peninsula, in a region endlessly plagued by bloody clan wars.

American gun ownership is over three times the per capita figure for France, Canada and Germany, seven times for Italy and Spain, 17 times the proportion of gun-ownership in England, 45 times the figure for the Netherlands and 150 times that in Japan.  By any reasonable estimate, these are our erstwhile peers in the civilized-nation club – prosperous middle-class societies with high levels of technological development and well-established legal systems.

The consequences of America’s leadership in the realm of personal firepower can be charted with horrifying ease. The annual murder rate in the United States is 4.3 victims per 100,000 people. In France it is 1.7, in England 1.4, in Italy 1.3, in the Netherlands 1.1 and in Japan 0.5.

Comparisons of murders specifically committed with firearms are just as damning. They amount to almost three per 100,000 people in the United States annually – the vast majority fallen to handguns expressly manufactured for human targets – against 0.1 in the United Kingdom, a difference of 30 to one.

Anyone who doesn’t see a pattern in the juxtapostion of these statistics  is in profound denial.

WILD WEST 2010

The rest of the world was stunned by the McDonald decision, even though it confirms a widely held view that 21^st century America remains “il Wild West,” as my Italian neighbors often call it, a land that has witnessed little change in its approach to conflict-resolution since the Earps gunned down the Clantons at the O.K. Corral.

What surprised observers abroad was to see O.K. Corral methods blithely endorsed by the nation’s highest magistrates. The U.S. court system has long been respected as a model of reasoned and detached jurisprudence, the antithesis of the Wild West vigilantism that universal pistol-packing encourages.

A website of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s premier business publication, openly speculated on “the probable return, in the coming months, of thousands of armed persons to New York and Chicago, two cities that had prohibited them up to now.”

Chicago’s gun-control law, which the ruling overthrew, had been on the books for three decades.

“The bullet-proof gun lobby strikes again,” read the headline in Britain’s Guardian. Some 100,000 people in America are shot every year, its reporter observed, and more than 30,000 die. On average, 85 people in America perish each day from gunshots, nine of them teenagers or children.

A concealed weapon permit, which at least one of the young men at the Naples discount store had apparently been granted, is issued by Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to nearly anyone who can fill out a brief eligibility questionnaire. Applicants simply check “yes” or “no” in boxes alongside such queries as “Have you ever been involuntarily committed to a mental institution,” “Are you currently under arrest or charged with any felony?” and “Have you renounced US citizenship?”

The correct answers are hardly a mystery, and no supportive documents on these or most other questions are necessary.

Florida Agriculture and Consumer officials boast that their staff does everything possible to expedite the permit process. “The concealed weapon license application intake service at our Regional Offices is designed to allow applicants to complete the entire application process quickly and conveniently,” the department’s online brochure assures prospective gunslingers.

The well-documented truth is that firearms are overwhelmingly used in criminal acts against private propery, and not in its defense, as the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby and its five friends on the Supreme Court contend. A 2009 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that “gun owners are more than four times as likely to get shot in an assault as individuals without a gun.”

Put another way, the Court’s ruling can be read as precisely the sort of “soft on crime” measure that conservatives usually rail against.

CONSERVATIVE HYPOCRISY
Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., in the Court’s majority opinion, emphasized that carrying a gun is a “fundamental” constitutional right.

“That one-word label carries enormous import,” according to legal scholar Lyle Denniston.  It means that any new law aimed at limiting or controlling gun sales must now satisfy “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding test in U.S. judicial practice, which requires unequivocal proof that the limitation is a matter of necessity.

“Some laws can survive ‘strict scrutiny,’ but not a great many do,” Denniston says.

In his dissent on behalf of the Court’s liberal minority, Justice Stephen Breyer predicted chaos in the new standard’s implementation. “Does the right to possess weapons for self-defense extend outside the home?” he asked. “To the car? To work? What sort of guns are necessary for self-defense? Handguns? Rifles? Semi-automatic weapons? Does time-of-day matter? Does the presence of a child in the house matter? Do police need special rules permitting patdowns designed to find gun?”

Breyer’s questions about the ruling’s practical interpretation are not the only ones it raises.

The anything-goes Florida position, the Court would have us believe, is the bonafide American way, the one and only way. Its ruling in the McDonald case implies a major augmentation of Federal power, imposed from Washington DC, on the entire nation.

But what of the supposed conservative attachment to state and municipal rights, its vaunted aversion to central government interference in local affairs?

Countless American communities have enacted stiff controls on concealed weapons and other firearms in the past 30 years, with the full backing of their citizens. On June 28, 2010, their freedom to protect themselves from mindless carnage, as they see fit, was tossed into the garbage by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Article by Frank Viviano

Apart from a handful of aggregate sites like Google News, which spend virtually nothing on the borrowed stories they bring to readers, the gamble that online media operations would generate significant advertising revenue has yet to pay off.

But there is reason to hope that a turning point is near. Instead of more and more websites with less and less content, the thrust of online journalism to date, we may be on the verge of an era that fulfils modern technology’s promise to deliver more of more.

It makes for a classic news story in its own right: a revolution forged in the convergence of dazzling technology, a transformed market and sheer human energy and imagination.

The year 2010 will be key.

WHO NEEDS THE NEWS?

The most compelling reason for hope is straightforward supply-and-demand. Reliable information – gathered by experienced professionals and backed up by established institutions – is an absolute necessity for three immensely powerful constituencies: business, the public bureaucracy, and the scientific research community.

The demand in their ranks for documented facts is constant. But for more than a decade, the supply has been in free-fall. There is no mistaking the consequences:

- Probing, widely-circulated reporting on distortions in the economy – notably the enormous proliferation of rogue, unregulated lending practices – might have deflated the trans-Atlantic housing balloon before it exploded into the worst financial debacle since the Great Depression.

- Ideological considerations often colour the rhetoric and legislative initiatives of politicians. But from the State Department in Washington to the city halls of California suburbs, the daily life of government is measured in countless practical management decisions. They rely on a consistent flow of dependable information about local, national and international realities – on facts. Most of those facts, historically, were gathered and brought to public attention by news institutions.

- In the scientific community, the news crisis has provoked widespread concern over evaporating links between research efforts and the general population.

“Journalists serve the public with their daily reports about our studies of flu vaccines and voting patterns and hominid fossils. But they also serve us. Every news story mentioning a professor’s research is a small strut supporting our mission,” says Harry R. Lewis, professor of computer science at Harvard, and co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion.

“In the absence of professional journalists specializing in health, for example, who will report news of the latest medical research to the broader public, and its implications for society?” asks Neil Henry, Dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“With ever fewer highly trained education and science reporters gainfully employed, who will cover the important policy and fiscal issues connected with those critical fields, and their intersections with government and society?”

Similar questions are being posed today almost everywhere in the academic, business and public sectors. The demand is making itself heard, ever more loudly, at the upper levels of power and influence, and it is difficult to believe that the market will not find a way to respond.

THE PROMISE OF TECHNOLOGY

A second reason for optimism lies in technological developments affecting the media. After years of innovation that had the unintended effect of devastating the old world of institutionalized journalism, high-tech firms today are consciously working to undo the damage – recreating and radically updating the world that technology all but destroyed.

Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader are quickly moving toward the day when downloaded media of all sorts will be universally available and even more portable than the traditional printed newspaper, magazine or paperback book – but at a fraction of print’s production and distribution costs.

The bottom line is a lethal problem when publications are obliged to continue bearing the high costs of print, at the same time their product is offered by online sites that inevitably erode the subscription base.

The Kindle and its rivals are essential mediators in this painful transition, emulating the most desirable qualities of print – portability and ease of use – while erecting a platform for a functional online fee system.

But media technology’s larger impact, which still hangs in the balance, will rest on changes in the presentation of content. The Internet has not simply altered the way news is delivered. It has vastly expanded its potential scope and refashioned the expectations and habits of news consumers.

Bred on the explosive speed and phenomenal reach of Twitter, YouTube and other social media, the news junkies of the coming decade will not settle for a limited selection of individual subscription-walled publications, or a narrow choice between words and broadcast images, between professional reporting and impromptu dispatches filed from cell phones in the streets where history takes shape.

They want regular access to all of these sources of information and ideas, and if it deserves to survive, the industry must accommodate them. The emergence of the multi-media audience isn’t a threat to journalism. It is where salvation lies.

A NEW GENERATION

Fierce debates on the fate of the media are now raging all over the world. They involve lifelong journalists and editors, the private sector and the public sector, universities and think tanks, militants from both the left and the right.

We seem to be moving, at long last, out of a period of futile despair over what has been lost. There is ferment in the air.

Young people will be the principal architects and beneficiaries of what lies ahead, and they are taking up the challenge. I’ve found myself in extraordinary conversations about the future of journalism, over the past few years, with twenty-something reporters in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, as well as the United States. Their intelligence and determination – the fire in the belly that is the unquantifiable but necessary fuel of great reporting – humbled me.

In North America alone, 10,000 reporting jobs disappeared between 2001 and 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. Another 7,500 are thought to have been eliminated in 2009. Yet applications to college journalism programs are soaring, up by nearly 40 percent at Columbia in the past year, 20 percent at Stanford and s
imilar rates at major state universities – despite graduate school costs that range from $30,000 to $60,000 per year a profession where starting salaries averaged $40,000 in 2007.

For the students who flock to these programs,” says Dean Miller, Director of the Center for News Literacy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, “the ‘decline’ of the traditional news media is a gift of clarity. What the eager see in this period of sweeping change is a ‘journalistic renaissance,’ one graduating senior told us recently. He knows all bets are off, and he still wants in.”

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

While the Obama Administration confronts military setbacks in Afghanistan, and Congress struggles through an acrimonious healthcare debate, there is unprecedented good news from a part of the world that is usually synonymous with crisis.

For the first time in three decades covering the Middle East, I returned from a recent assignment there with optimism about the future. The reason, in a word, is Turkey.

Under the moderate Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara is registering dramatic progress in its own most stubborn crises – violent hostilities with its minority Kurds and Armenian neighbours.
On October 10, Turkey confirmed that it will establish full diplomatic relations with the Republic of Armenia. The step paves the way to eventual reconciliation between the two nations, almost a century after bloody clashes that left most of Turkey’s once large Armenian population dead or in exile.

Last week, Erdogan announced plans for the massive reform of “Turkish only” cultural laws, formally ending a decades-long ban on Kurdish-language books, broadcasts, and even recorded songs.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of these developments. The Obama Administration has made little progress in undoing the damage left behind by the Bush era’s disastrous foreign policy record. Almost everywhere Washington’s influence is in decline. The European Union has no joint foreign policy, is at best a minor supporting player on the diplomatic stage.

Ankara’s star, by contrast, is soaring, thanks not only to domestic stability and diplomatic engagement with Armenia, but also to an economic miracle that translates into big-time geopolitical clout.

A NEW START AT HOME

The effects of the miracle are unmistakable in the two largest cities along Turkey’s eastern borders. A decade ago, Diyarbakir was ground zero in a bloody war with separatist Kurds that took 40,000 lives, while Gaziantep, 200 miles to the south, was reeling from the arrival of hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees.

Today, both are in the midst of a sustained boom that has transformed the landscape – and expectations – of southeastern Anatolia, historically Turkey’s poorest region.

Gaziantep

Timur Schindel, a Turkish-American raised in Istanbul and educated in California, moved in 2001 to Gaziantep, where he opened a boutique hotel in an area known as “Kurdish Hill.” About a third of the city’s metropolitan population, now approaching 1.5 million, are Kurds – most of whom fled their bomb-cratered ancestral villages at the height of the war in the mid-1990s.

Less than 15 years later, as Schindel put it, “Gaziantep is an Anatolian version of San Francisco.”

The city is awash with hip cafes and neo-Italian restaurants. It boasts a manicured central park outfitted with swimming pools, a planetarium and an ultra-modern museum. One of Turkey’s most prestigious universities has been built in Gaziantep, along with a state-of-the-art medical center and a light-rail transit system.

With just 2 percent of Turkey’s population, Gaziantep Province is the nation’s largest exporter and largest importer, accounting for 6 percent of its booming small-scale industries.

“There’s no friction here between different ethnic groups,” Schindel said. “None, period. Everyone is too busy living.”

The transformation is even more striking in Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Turkish Kurdistan, the most volatile flashpoint of its tensions.

Like Gaziantep, its ancient city-center is now surrounded by immense new high-rise suburbs. The population has quintupled, from 400,000 in 1995 to nearly 2 million. But the biggest changes are political.

For a decade, October 9 has been marked by annual protests in support of the imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the separatist Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), and longtime leader of its guerrilla war against the Turkish Army. This year, as in the past, most shops in the city were closed and boarded up, to avoid collateral damage from confrontations between protesters and riot troops.

But apart from authorized speeches in public squares, nothing happened. Business was back to normal at nightfall, and the troops were quietly withdrawn to their bases.

Tensions have been easing since 2004, when the government began gradually relaxing the “Turkish only” ban. The reforms are meant to bolster its efforts to join the European Union. But Erdogan and his ministers also realized that the old policies pointlessly alienated Turkey’s 18 million-strong Kurdish community, 25 percent of the population, and seriously damaged its stature overseas.

Within three years, the relaxation had paid measurable dividends. In the general election of 2007, many eastern Anatolian cities voted in heavy majorities for government candidates. By 2009, Turkish was no longer regarded as the language of “the enemy” by many Kurdish young people. It was simply a practical tool, suited to modern life. “It’s okay to speak Kurdish openly now, and older people do in the city centre,” said Sirin Gencer, a Dirabakir official. But in the new suburbs, she said, “hardly anyone does.”

On November 14, detailed legislation was presented to the country’s parliament, terminating most of the cultural restrictions, restoring the Kurdish names of towns and cities that had been forcibly changed, and creating an administrative body to investigate claims of ethnic discrimination.

“Today is the beginning of a new timeline and a fresh start,” Erdogan told the nation in a televised speech.

ENGAGEMENT ABROAD

The policy revolution at home has been accompanied by radically new initiatives abroad, headlined by the forging of diplomatic relations with Armenia.

Ankara has dramatically upgraded its profile in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, keeping pace with its $31 billion in annual exports there, up an astonishing 700 percent in seven years. It has signed free-trade agreements with Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Israel – with which it maintains critical military ties, despite a falling out over January’s lethal Israeli assault on Gaza.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu

In early October, high-level Turkish envoys signed no fewer than 88 mutual cooperation agreements in Damascus and Baghdad, on subjects ranging from anti-terrorism to regional tourism promotion. Turkey – a NATO member in good standing, with 1,600 troops in Afghanistan – has taken the lead in keeping international channels open to Iran during its post-election turmoil.

The overall policy aim, said Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, is “zero problems with neighbors.”

But it has much wider implications. A stable and engaged Turkey, a nation that is geographically both Asian and European – an overwhelmingly Muslim nation that is industrialized, tolerant and democratic – is the most promising model for change in the Islamic world. A natural mediator in the central conflict of our times.

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5