Day: March 2, 2024
By Samir Bhattacharya
On 16 September 2023, the three West African junta-led countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger declared the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States, or L’Alliance des États du Sahel (AES). On 28 January 2024, they took their pact one step higher when three national leaders simultaneously declared on their national television that they would be withdrawing their countries from the 15-member West African regional organisation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) effective immediately.
This undoes the decades of regional integration work and affects the ongoing attempts as well, which have been disrupted by several coups. As the move would thwart the region’s commerce and service flows worth US$150 billion annually, some experts have termed this West Africa’s Brexit moment.
Background of the Alliance
All three of the Alliance’s member nations have had coups since 2020. It started in Mali three years ago when Colonel Assimi Goita’s soldiers staged a mutiny and attempted a coup. In May 2021, Colonel Goita carried out a second coup against an interim government. In 2022, Burkina Faso experienced two military coups, joining this trend of falling regimes. Then, on 26 July 2023, Mohamed Bazoum, the democratically elected President of Niger, was overthrown again by the presidential guard.
The underlying cause of all these coups is the anger against the government vis-à-vis their inability to put an end to the rebel insurrection. Many army personnel are dying from insurgent attacks as they are neither adequately equipped nor trained to withstand such attacks. Poverty, inequality, and corruption are at an all-time high.
The three states’ relations with France have soured since the coups; following a tense standoff with the Junta governments, France was forced to withdraw its troops from Burkina Faso and Mali. In December 2023, the French operations in West Africa came to an end when the last of their troops left Niger. In the same month, UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA also ended its 10-year vigil in Mali and left the country. All of these countries were ruled by France, which is still accused of neo-colonialism, where France is taking their natural resources with very little in return.
ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States
Although it eventually softened its stance, ECOWAS had vowed to militarily engage in Niger in response to the coup. This placed the other two nations in an awkward situation. While Niger has an abundance of uranium, Mali and Burkina Faso were anomalies with little to no natural resources. In a way, it was assumed that Niger is not the same, and to protect its interests in the region, the West won’t let the government in Niger fall so easily.
But as time went on, it soon became apparent that ECOWAS’s threats to reinstate the ousted Nigerien leader Mohamed Bazoum were baseless. Not only did the citizens seem to be resistant to any external military intervention, but Burkina Faso and Mali also pledged right away to protect Niger from any military action. The Alliance is the result of this mutual solidarity.
Ironically, despite ECOWAS sanctions, dialogues, and threats of military action, the military authorities haven’t given a precise timeline for restoring constitutional governance since the coups. Instead, they have become more antagonistic toward the bloc and have charged that it is betraying its founding principles, becoming a threat to its member states and influenced by outside forces.
Alliance of Sahel States: A regional security pact or a tool for legitimacy?
The Alliance of Sahel States was established by signing the Liptako-Gourma Charter. The Liptako-Gourma region is the place where all three countries’ borders intersect. This large region of approximately 370,000km² is also home to 45 percent of these three countries’ total population. The region has been experiencing a severe security crisis due to the presence of different militia groups. Indeed, by February 2023, Burkina Faso and Mali had witnessed an overwhelming number of increasing deaths related to political violence, which rose by 77 percent and 150 percent, respectively. Burkina Faso has surpassed Afghanistan to become the world’s number one victim of terrorism.
In this mutual defence agreement, the Alliance of Sahel States pledges its members to support one another militarily should any of them come under attack. The accord also obligates the three nations to cooperate to end or prevent armed uprisings. The leader of Mali’s transitional administration, Colonel Assimi Goïta, declared that the agreement would create “an architecture of joint defence and mutual support for the benefit of communities.” Nonetheless, it is essential to distinguish the Alliance of Sahel States from “the Sahel Alliance,” another similarly named Alliance in the region founded in 2017 and consists of 17 full members and nine observers.
Impact of the Alliance on the region
The Alliance is set to diminish French influence in the region. Once-powerful France, first as a colonial power and then an occupying force, is fast losing its military and economic influence from the Sahel to the Gulf of Guinea region. Going forward, the Alliance may spell doom for France and bring an end to its not-so-glorious postcolonial legacy in West Africa.
The Alliance is also bad news for ECOWAS, as the three countries opted out of the ECOWAS in the same way Mauritania withdrew its membership. This may not be helpful to continental integration. It is not only the ECOWAS that will be divided against itself; it is mainly the Francophone states that will be more divided against themselves. For instance, Benin Republic is being used as an access territory to attack Niger. As a result, Niger strained its military cooperation with Benin. In the same vein, the pro-France countries cannot but be at loggerheads with those not favouring France.
Finally, while speculations are high that the move would draw non-Western powers such as Russia, China, and Iran closer, Russia would clearly be the winner of these developments. In January 2024, Russia has agreed to establish military cooperation with Niger. Several Russian military personnel recently arrived in Burkina Faso to protect the military leader. Meanwhile, despite the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russia’s private military group, around 1,000 Wagner troops continue to fight in Mali. With waning French influence in contrast to the growing Russian presence, the region may eventually become a theatre for a proxy war.
Way forward
Several Western experts claim that with the rising widespread anger against French neocolonial policies, the putschists are using this Alliance as a cover to increase their grip over power and hide their fear of uncertainty. It could also explain why there seems to be a recent upsurge in anti-French sentiment amongst the locals of these nations, as the putschists have successfully capitalised on the widespread perception that the region’s democratically elected authorities are nothing more than puppets playing to the tunes of France. Nonetheless, the Alliance is clearly more than just a security or military agreement. During the signing ceremony, Mali’s Defence Minister Abdoulaye Diop informed reporters that the Alliance would combine military and economic efforts among the three countries.
The three landlocked countries are among the poorest nations in the world. Despite the announcements, without finance and technical capacity, it won’t be easy for them to build new institutions. Although the Alliance fits within the framework of sub-regional integration, the block’s eventual success will be determined by how well these nations can formulate an economic agenda that benefits their citizens.
- About the author: Samir Bhattacharya is an Associate Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation
- Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation
Categories
Hamas In Lebanon – OpEd
Hamas seems intent on building up a fighting force inside Lebanon.
Early last December news emerged of a large-scale recruitment drive by Hamas in and around the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Dubbed “The Al-Aqsa Flood” – in line with the name given to the October 7 massacre – the recruitment program was aimed at young men aged between 17 and 20. There are 12 UNRWA refugee camps in Lebanon, housing some half-million Palestinian refugees as defined by UNRWA – namely a hugely inflated number of patrilineal descendants of the Palestinians originally displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israel conflict.
Evidence of Hamas activity within Lebanon came to light on November 21, when an Israeli drone struck a four-man Hamas squad in the Lebanese village of Chaatiyeh. All four were killed in the strike, including Khalil Kharaz, Hamas’s deputy commander in Lebanon.
Opinion is divided as to whether this new Hamas initiative is in opposition to Iranian/Hezbollah interests – an attempt to seize the initiative and ramp up the anti-Israel conflict – or in support of them. A third possibility is that Hamas, in anticipation of military annihilation in Gaza, is preparing to use Lebanon as a new base for continuing its fight against Israel.
That is the fear among mainstream Lebanese leaders and political parties. Many denounced Hamas when it put out its recruitment call on December 4, accusing it of violating their country’s national sovereignty. Wasn’t it enough that Hezbollah had established a political and military grip on the weakened and impoverished nation, without Hamas elbowing its way in? After all, Lebanon, on its knees economically speaking, was already supporting two military machines – its own national army and the even stronger Hezbollah militia. A third loose cannon, as it were, is the last thing Lebanon needs.
Opposition was particularly strong from Lebanon’s Christian community, among whom the painful memory of Lebanon’s 15-year-long bloody civil war persists. One of the key causes of that conflict was that Palestinian terrorists linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization had been operating with virtually complete freedom in southern Lebanon, launching attack after attack on northern Israel. This gave rise to the region’s nickname of “Fatahland”. Lebanese Christians now fear the creation of what they are calling “Hamasland.”
If Hamas succeeds in its recruitment drive, the question may well arise as to whether it will operate as an independent militia. Any attempt at effective collaboration with Hezbollah would bring into play an inescapable difficulty that militates against harmonious terrorist relations. Hezbollah is a Shia Muslim organization while Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is inescapably Sunni. Separated by the full length of Israel – with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – the intrinsic Islamic clash of traditions could be ignored. That is scarcely possible were the two forces to attempt operating side by side, each regarding the other as infidels, apostates and heretics.
For example, all was far from sweetness and light when fierce intra-Palestinian fighting broke out last August and September in Lebanon’s Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, near Sidon. The clashes, which lasted for three months, were triggered by the attempted assassination of Fatah leader, Mahmoud Khalil. Sixty-eight people were killed in the conflict, which was finally brought to an end through the intervention of the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, Nabih Berri. He spoke with both Fatah and Hamas leaders, and arranged a truce. Quoting this incident, Lebanese officials have been pressuring Hezbollah not to let Hamas gain military ascendancy inside the refugee camps.
Both Hamas and Fatah have a foothold within Lebanon, and Hamas’s latest recruitment drive is certainly partly aimed at achieving dominance over its Fatah rival. It has two other constituencies to win round – the dominant Hezbollah organization, and the large Sunni sector of Lebanese society. While Hamas does not have Fatah’s long-term connection with Lebanon, since October 7 it has, according to Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center, “gained popularity specifically among Sunnis in Lebanon.”
The leading Hamas personality is Abu Obeida, the so-called “masked spokesman” for Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. He invariably appears in public with his whole face and head enrobed in a red keffiyeh and only his eyes visible. His real name is unknown. He came to prominence in 2006, when he announced the capture of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, later exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
In late October, exploiting its new-found popularity, Hamas organized a large protest in downtown Beirut. Thousands of people were bussed in from around the country to take part as green Hamas flags filled Martyr’s Square. While much of the crowd was Palestinian, many Lebanese were also present.
Emboldened,, Hamas has since launched military operations from Lebanon – like the 16 rockets fired by the Qassam Brigades targeting the northern Israeli city of Nahariya and the southern outskirts of Haifa. Israel said that it had identified about 30 launches from Lebanon.
“The IDF is responding with artillery fire toward the origin of the launches,” the IDF posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Many in Lebanon were convinced that the Hamas recruitment drive would not have been possible without the positive approval, and possible collaboration, of Hezbollah. How deep that collaboration runs is the subject of speculation. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, will be aware that Hamas is trying to use its moment in the spotlight, allied to the unhappy conditions in the refugee camps, to expand its influence in Lebanon. He may also believe, with some analysts, that with its recruitment drive Hamas is initiating a longer-term aim – forming a new young cadre of supporters, deeply imbued with Hamas’s beliefs and objectives, to carry on its anti-Israel crusade from Lebanese territory. Nasrallah, acting in accordance with Iran’s own longer-term strategy, will view any such intention with suspicion.
It is perhaps this disparity in influence that Hamas is intent on redressing, as it strengthens its position inside Lebanon and seeks to make it a second military front from which to continue its struggle against Israel’s very existence.
Talk to just about any individual or any family dealing with an expensive-to-treat chronic illness and it won’t take you long to discover what needs fixing.
For millions of Americans (1) health care has become unaffordable and (2) the doctors and facilities they need are too often inaccessible.
But wait. Aren’t these the very problems Obamacare was supposed to solve? Indeed. Not only did Obamacare not solve them, in many ways it has made these problems worse.
But first things first.
We would have very few public policy problems if we followed this simple advice:
Goodman’s Rule for Rational Public Policy: Let the markets handle all the problems markets can solve; turn to government only to meet needs that competitive markets cannot or do not meet.
Interestingly, for the first four years of Obamacare, Goodman’s Rule was actually federal policy. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed in 2010. But the exchanges which replaced private health insurance in the individual market did not start until 2014.
Federal Risk Pool Insurance
In those first four years, the federal government made risk pool coverage available to any uninsured person who had been denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Called pre-existing condition insurance plans, the insurance resembled a garden-variety Blue Cross plan, and the premium was the same premium a healthy person would pay for such insurance. By the time these plans ended, roughly 135,000 people had enrolled.
On the eve of Obamacare’s passage, virtually the entire argument for Obamacare—on TV, on radio, on social media, in the halls of Congress—was that people with pre-existing condition should be able to buy insurance for the same premium healthy people pay.
Not only did the federal risk pool insurance described above solve the problem without disrupting everyone else’s lives, we came to learn how truly small the problem was of people unable to buy insurance if they had pre-existing conditions. Only 4/100ths of 1% of the whole U.S. population faced this situation.
But of course, people with a predisposition to meddle will always do so, given the chance. Obamacare went on to affect (generally in a negative way) almost every other insurance arrangement in the country.
As I noted in a recent article, Obamacare these days is a boon to the healthy. Four out of every five people in the (Obamacare) exchanges are paying premiums of $10 a month or less. If you have an average income, the insurance is free. Furthermore, the only medical care healthy people need is preventive care, and under the Affordable Care Act those services are also free.
Don’t Be Sick Under Obamacare
If you are sick, however, things are very different. The annual out-of-pocket maximum for a family in the exchanges this year is $18,900 and that is the exposure in a typical exchange plan. That’s the amount you may have to pay in the form of deductibles and coinsurance—over and above any premium payment. Plus, if you have an above-average income and don’t get a subsidy, the average family premium last year was $13,824.
It should come as no surprise that a lot of families are looking for alternatives. One possibility is short-term, limited-duration insurance.
The basic product has been around for many years. A typical plan lasts for only 12 months and serves as a bridge for people transitioning from a family policy to school, or from school to work, or from job to job.
What makes this product especially interesting is that it is largely unregulated. Obamacare-mandated benefits don’t apply; and most state-mandated benefits don’t apply, either. That means these plans don’t have to cover maternity care or substance abuse. They can and do ask health questions. They exclude people with expensive chronic conditions.
Precisely because these plans avoid cost-increasing regulations and they only need to cover risks healthy people care about, they often sell for as little as one-half of the price of Obamacare insurance. They also typically have lower deductibles and broader provider networks.
Out of an unfounded fear that the short-term market would pull healthy people away from the (Obamacare) exchanges, President Obama used his regulatory authority to restrict them. In a move never approved by Congress, he limited short-term coverage to three months, with no renewal after that.
Renewable Short-term Insurance
One of the most important things Donald Trump did was to reverse that restriction. Under a Trump administration ruling, short-term insurance can now last up to 12 months and it can be renewed for up to three years.
The Trump executive order also sanctions a separate type of insurance, what I call “change-of-health-status insurance,” to bridge the gap between three-year periods.
Health-status insurance protects you against any deterioration in your health. It pays any extra cost that arises because of a change in your medical condition, leaving you free to pay the same premium a healthy person would pay.
By stringing together these two types of insurance, we now have the possibility of a market that healthy people can buy into and that is guaranteed to be renewable (regardless of health condition) indefinitely into the future. Potentially, this could become the closest thing we have ever had to genuine free market health insurance.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is threatening (again by executive order) to cancel the Trump order and reimpose the Obamacare rules governing this market.
Note that the Trump approach is consistent with my regulatory rule. It lets markets do what they do best (with very little cost to the taxpayers), and keeps a safety net (the exchange) for problems that the market doesn’t solve. The Obama/Biden approach does the opposite.
Biden Goes After Indemnity Insurance
Another insurance option the Biden administration wants to restrict is called indemnity insurance. These policies pay a fixed amount of money per medical episode. For example, a plan might pay $100 per doctor’s visit up to five visits a year. For a hospital stay, the plan might pay $6,000 per day. The plan also allows patients to pay in-network rates to the providers.
Like short-term insurance, these plans are sold to healthy people (they don’t cover preexisting conditions), and they are not regulated by Obamacare.
Why would anyone want insurance like this? Because, when combined with a short-term plan, there are enormous savings vis-a vis an Obamacare exchange plan.
Take a family of three, with adults near age 50, living in Springhill, Florida (about an hour north of Tampa). A typical exchange plan with no subsidy would cost this family a $26,400-a-year premium. Plus, their out-of-pocket exposure (in terms of deductibles and coinsurance) is $18,900. And, that’s $18,900 every year!
By contrast, this family can buy a high-deductible, short-term plan and fill in the first-dollar expenses with an indemnity plan. The combined annual cost of both plans: $10,800.
Think about that. This family can avoid an outrageously expensive exchange plan with a risk of enormous out-of-pocket costs by buying two plans that cover roughly every medical expense they are likely to incur and save more than $15,600 a year in the process!
Plus, there is another benefit. Suppose someone in the family gets sick (cancer, e.g.), and they are denied the opportunity to renew their short-term policy. As a result, they will have to turn to an (Obamacare) exchange plan. But since the indemnity policy is guaranteed renewable, it can travel with them to the exchange. Also, you can buy indemnity plans that cover the entire country—which are ideal for people who travel a lot.
Even though the family is now forced to turn to the exchange, they can choose the cheapest plan (the one with the highest deductible) because their indemnity policy will cover most of their out-of-pocket costs.
In this case, the cost of the cheapest Obamacare plan is $16,494—roughly ten thousand dollars less than the cost of a conventional Obamacare plan.
Incidentally, the short-term and indemnity insurance markets are booming—growing by leaps and bounds. It’s not hard to understand why.
It is interesting that critics of less-regulated insurance call it “junk insurance” and see Obamacare as the remedy. I suspect that most people would be inclined to reverse that judgment.
Bottom line: Let people buy health insurance that meets their financial and medical needs. At the end of the day, if there are any remaining and socially important unmet needs, those should be the limited focus of government.
This article was also published in Forbes
By Phil Duffy
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may be the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature, but that does not make his work The Gulag Archipelago enjoyable reading. The detailed description of the methods of torture employed within the Soviet system alone will turn many readers away. Beyond the interrogations are the trials based upon a mock-legal system epitomized by Soviet jurist Andrei Vyshinsky’s theory that truth is relative and that evidence can be ignored, to be replaced by forced confessions gained under torture.
Beyond the nightmare of the Soviet judicial system, Solzhenitsyn described what he called “the ships of the archipelago,” the means of transporting the convicted to their final place of incarceration and enforced labor. The conveyances were called “Stolypin” passenger train cars, designed during czarist times to accommodate, at most, eleven prisoners per compartment. During the worst times, according to Solzhenitsyn, a Stolypin car might take seven days to reach its destination, stuffed with twenty-five prisoners.
In the best of circumstances, the compartments would be filled with political prisoners. However, thieves—or blatnye, as they were called—were transported with the political prisoners, and these thieves enjoyed a higher position in the dystopian Soviet hierarchy. They occupied the better places in the Stolypin compartment, continuing to pursue their trade by victimizing the political prisoners. The blatnye were not punished for having a weapon: “Their thieves’ law was respected (‘They can’t be anything but what they are’). And a new murder in the cell would not increase the murderer’s sentence, but instead would bring him new laurels. . . . Stalin was always partial to thieves—after all, who robbed banks for him?”
Solzhenitsyn, no doubt, was referring to Joseph Stalin’s role in planning the great robbery of the State Bank of Tiflis in Stalin’s Georgia. The purpose of the robbery was to finance the revolutionary efforts of the Bolsheviks, a plan allegedly approved by Vladimir Lenin.
How is it that a nation turns over its system of justice to its criminal class? In the case of Russia, the reasons are multiple and complex. Part of that phenomenon relates to its history and the class divisions that resulted from that history. However, there was another factor that played a role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular—ideology. Solzhenitsyn had an interesting perspective on this:
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short of a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
According to George F. Kennan, who had been a part of the ambassadorial team of the United States to Moscow between 1933 and 1953, the West—from the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917—had difficulty comprehending the motives of the revolutionary regime:
There was . . . an important substantive difference between the issue that interested the early Bolsheviki and that which interested the warring parties in the West. The first was ideological, with universal social and political implications. The Bolsheviki believed that questions of social organization—in particular the question of ownership of the means of production—had an importance transcending all international rivalries. Such rivalries were, in their eyes, simply the product of social relationships. This is why they attached so little importance to the military outcome of the struggle in the West.
Western politicians, by comparison, were focused on national interests and the maintenance of a balance of power among those nations.
As Marxists, the Bolsheviks were convinced that backward Russia’s achievement was an exception to Karl Marx’s rule that a socialist revolution would occur first in the most advanced industrial societies, particularly in Marx’s homeland, Germany. While anxious for Western credits that would allow them to acquire equipment from the West for industrial growth, the Bolsheviks simultaneously conducted propaganda campaigns in the West designed to bring down those economies and political structures.
Ideology thus formed the social justification for not only the violent overthrow of the czarist regime, but also for a continuing “purification” of Soviet socialism leading to Stalin’s infamous purges, which sent millions of Soviet citizens to their deaths. While there is little doubt that the purges were designed to eliminate Stalin’s political rivals, they were sold to the Soviet people as a part of a purity spiral, in which the ideals of the Russian Revolution—and classical Marxism—were being preserved.
Ideology had a particular grip on the Russian people at the outset of the February and October revolutions in 1917. Life under the czars had created a rigid feudal society that survived beyond Czar Alexander II’s freeing of twenty million serfs in 1861. There was no significant movement toward liberalism in that period as there was in Great Britain and other Western European nations.
Some of these differences were based on the physical nature of Soviet land and its cold northern climate, which produced short growing seasons. Its railroad system lagged far behind the West, hampering the movement of goods and services to markets. Jerome Blum, in “Russian Agriculture in the Last 150 Years of Serfdom,” observes: “During the 150 years from Peter to Alexander [II), when so many innovations were introduced into other sectors of national life, agriculture remained all but unchanged from what it had been for centuries.”
Daniel Field has noted in A Companion to Russian History: “The agricultural revolution, which began in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, had some admirers in rural Russia, but no practitioners.”
Russia was remote from the effects of the Age of Discovery, the British agricultural revolution, and the Industrial Revolution.
Even the distribution of land to the peasants that had resulted from their emancipation had its dark side:
Impressive though these freedoms first looked, it soon became apparent that they had come at a heavy price for the peasants. It was not they, but the landlords, who were the beneficiaries. This should not surprise us: after, it had been the dvoriane [courtiers] who had drafted the emancipation proposals. The compensation that the landowners received was far in advance of the market value of their property. They were also entitled to decide which part of their holdings they would give up. Unsurprisingly, they kept the best land for themselves. The serfs got the leftovers. The data shows that the landlords retained two-thirds of the land while the peasants received only one-third. So limited was the supply of affordable quality land to the peasants that they were reduced to buying narrow strips that proved difficult to maintain and which yielded little food or profit.
Moreover, while the landowners were granted financial compensation for what they gave up, the peasants had to pay for their new property. Since they had no savings, they were advanced 100 per cent mortgages, 80 per cent provided by the State bank and the remaining 20 by the landlords. This appeared a generous offer, but as in any loan transaction the catch was in the repayments. The peasants found themselves saddled with redemption payments that became a lifelong burden that then had to be handed on to their children.
In 1917, compounded by its participation in World War I, Russia was ripe for a revolution based upon Marxian ideology. However, the term ideology requires clarification to understand its impact in Russia. Britannica describes the evolution of the term:
The word first made its appearance in French as idéologie at the time of the French Revolution, when it was introduced by a philosopher, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, as a short name for what he called his “science of ideas” . . . Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idéologues devised a system of national education that they believed would transform France into a rational and scientific society.
Britannica adds:
Ideology in the stricter sense stays fairly close to Destutt de Tracy’s original conception and may be identified by five characteristics: (1) it contains an explanatory theory of a more or less comprehensive kind about human experience and the external world; (2) it sets out a program, in generalized and abstract terms, of social and political organization; (3) it conceives the realization of this program as entailing a struggle; (4) it seeks not merely to persuade but to recruit loyal adherents, demanding what is sometimes called commitment; (5) it addresses a wide public but may tend to confer some special role of leadership on intellectuals.
The broader definition of ideology, described by the first criterion above, is too general to be useful in understanding the contention that gave rise to the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. The remaining four criteria, however, explain the gulf that exists between the broad definition of ideology, which can encompass classical liberalism, and the stricter definition that is the essence of violent Marxism. It is the latter definition that demands our attention because it represents a thorough rejection of morality and thinking that has been the engine of human flourishing in the Western world.
One can speculate about Stalin’s career absent his adoption of Marxism, but it is clear that by 1907—when he engineered the Tiflis bank robbery—he was already committed to a life of crime that included robbery, murder, kidnapping, and extortion. This raises a question about the role of ideology in all collectivisms: To what extent are collectivist dictators dogmatically committed to the original ideology after it has benefited their rise to power? Certainly, Stalin used Marxian ideology as a cover to remove any opposition to his regime, and he employed his military to coerce other nations to become a part of his Soviet empire. Other dictators employed the same strategy, from Mao Zedong in China to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. All used the Marxist playbook while it served their purposes but ignored it to brutally eliminate opposition. The people in these countries, who were supposed to have benefited from Marxian socialism, universally suffered economic deprivation and a loss of liberty.
That raises the ultimate question: To what extent does ideology, strictly defined, result in a loss of liberty and economic opportunity within all collectivisms, to include non-Marxian socialism, fascism, progressivism, and even social democracy? Collectivists abandon the principle of nonaggression while justifying governmental violence based upon the false idea that the ends justify the means. As more and more power is concentrated in the United States federal government, the coercive nature of government is increasingly being used to enforce politically defined goals such as diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender identification “rights”; and questionable climate control strategies. Universities, once the bastions of free speech, now tolerate violence against those who oppose programs promoted by the collectivists. The key difference between the strict definition of ideology, which describes collectivists’ beliefs, and the broad definition, which describes the beliefs of the classical liberal, is the coercive social engineering conducted through the government.
In the realm of reason, collectivism can never win over classical liberalism and free-market economics. However, as Solzhenitsyn observed, ideology trumped reason in the years following the Russian Revolution. George Kennan’s containment policy was reasonably successful in quarantining virulent Marxism behind the Iron Curtain, and the Soviet system ultimately failed of its own contradictions.
However, that was thirty-three years ago, and the lessons of history have since been lost in the West. Classical liberalism and the free-market system can never be packaged into an ideology to counter collectivism. Reason must prevail, but we must avoid the kind of shallow thinking that prevailed among the Allies in World War I. The survival of Western morality is at risk. While all generations will lose, younger generations have the most to lose under collectivism because they will have to suffer longer under it.
- About the author: Phil Duffy is a regular contributor to WFYL’s We the People, the Constitution Matters , and a lifelong student of history.
- Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute
Delaware legislators don’t want Ancestry.com sharing your DNA with insurance companies. Given who owns the enormously popular genetic testing site, it’s little wonder they’re concerned.
“A new bipartisan proposal in the Delaware Assembly would prohibit insurance companies from accessing DNA testing results from their customers to set premium rates,” The Center Square reported February 16. “The legislation being considered by the House Committee on Economic Development, Banking, Insurance and Commerce would block insurance companies from using genetic testing results as a basis for life insurance company rates.”
The bill’s main sponsor is a Republican, and his reasoning for crafting the bill is simple enough. “Often, those [DNA] reports contain a disclaimer stating that knowledge of what you are about to receive may affect your life insurance,” state Rep. Jeff Spiegelman said. “I don’t think it’s fair that the information you received through a test you paid for can be used by your life insurance company to boost your rates or deny you coverage.”
“Several states, including Florida, Illinois and South Dakota, bar genetic testing companies from sharing an individual’s genetic test information with insurance companies without written consent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures,” The Center Square notes.
Exciting Corporate Synergy With Your DNA?
A look at Ancestry.com’s corporate spider web reveals how easy it would be for insurers to tap into the genealogy firm’s database.
Ancestry is owned by private equity behemoth Blackstone, which purchased the company in August 2020. “Looking ahead, in collaboration with Blackstone, we will continue to leverage our unique content, powerhouse consumer brand and technology platform to expand our global Family History business while bringing to life our long-term vision of personalized preventive health,” Ancestry CEO Margo Georgiadis said at the time of the sale.
Explications on attractive new opportunities to “leverage” Ancestry’s “unique content” in order to “expand” business sounds particularly ominous when you consider Blackstone’s hefty presence within the insurance industry.
A page on the Blackstone corporate website titled “Insurance Solution” details the implications involved.
Blackstone manages a staggering $192 billion in assets for insurers, the company reveals.
“We combine insurance industry expertise with Blackstone’s leading investment products to seek compelling returns for insurance companies and our investors,” the write-up continues.
Risk management is touted as a special talent Blackstone can offer insurance providers.
“We offer flexible capital solutions to insurance company partners and aim to deliver Blackstone’s leading investment expertise and insurance optimized products to our clients based on each insurer’s unique objectives, outlook and risk profile,” the corporation asserts.
When it comes to insurance, of course, the risk management involves real human beings.
Industry: We Just Want to Offer the Lowest Rate
“Federal law prevents health insurers from using genetic information in underwriting policies and in setting premiums, but the prohibition doesn’t apply to life, disability or long-term care coverage,” the Washington Examiner notes.
The insurance industry has stated that it doesn’t find sites like Ancestry to be a valuable source of information in setting rates.
“Those things have nothing to do with mortality or your health,” Dr. Robert Gleeson, a former medical consultant for the American Council of Life Insurers, told Forbes in October 2022. “We don’t know the reliability of that information or the accuracy of the test.”
Yet Gleeson wants consumers to know they have nothing to fear from DNA testing.
“Many people are afraid that life insurers want to use genetic tests to rate or decline applicants,” Gleeson adds. “That’s the furthest thing from the truth. Life insurers want to sell as much life insurance to as many people as possible at as low of a rate as possible.”
The Forbes Life Insurance “Advisor” article is noticeably friendly to the insurance industry but still warns consumers to use caution when submitting to commercial DNA testing.
“If you’re considering buying life insurance and you’re also thinking about doing an at-home genetic test from a direct-to-consumer provider such as 23andMe, apply for and buy life insurance coverage first,” the financial news site observes. “There’s no need to raise red flags if you don’t have a negative family medical history.”
Such scenarios are precisely what Delaware legislators are trying to stop.
“Under the proposal, life insurance companies would not be allowed to ‘request, require, or purchase’ information obtained from a direct-to-consumer genetic testing business,” The Center Square writes. “The measure would further ban using the information for ‘canceling a policy, setting premiums, or paying claims without additional actuarial justification.’”
In the days of private equity cross-ownership on a broad scale, there is more reason than ever for American consumers to be aware of the volume of highly personal information they give to large corporations and how that material may be applied in consumer transactions.
- About the author: Joe Schaeffer, Political Columnist with LibertyNation.com is a veteran journalist with 20+ years’ experience. He spent 15 years with The Washington Times, including 8+ years as Managing Editor of the newspaper’s popular National Weekly Edition. Striving to be a natural health nut, he considers staring at the ocean for hours to be an act of political rebellion.
- Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation