Alger 2020 Edition

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Iran and Cuba :
Twin Revolutions
Islamic Art of the
Arab Lands at
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art
Is Nonviolence
Enough for Leba-
non
Intuition Over-
comes Intelli-
gence: COVID-19
Mitigating the
Efforts of Drug
Cartels in Mexico
The Future is
Cancelled
Contents

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Letter from the Editor
Alger is back! Welcome to the 2020 edition of Alg-
er International Affairs Magazine,restructured from the
ground-up. I am excited to bring to you a collection of
articles written by undergraduate students at The Ohio
State University.This issue explores a broad range of
contemporary issues relevant in today’s political land-
scape.From art,to the “figurative” end of history,to a
global pandemic,this issue promises to provide a broad
range of unique insights and interesting takeaways.
Through each article,our writers have brought their own
unique perspectives,and I am incredibly proud and excit-
ed to be sharing their work with our readership.
As a graduating senior,I would like to take this oppor-
tunity to thank all of the writers and staff of Alger Maga-
zine for making this issue a reality. Despite the circum-
stance of 2020,and without further ado,I am proud to
present this year’s issue of The Alger International Affairs
Magazine!
Sincerely,
Simon Pollayil
Editor-in-Chief
Alger

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IRAN AND
CUBA: TWIN
REVOLUTIONS
Vish Anand
Iran and Cuba are on opposite
sides of the globe, speak very different
tongues, follow completely different
faiths, and have very different neighbors
and histories. However, the post-
colonial struggles that have defined
much of the third world links them
both in many ways. From nineteenth
century imperialism to twentieth century
constitutional movements to Western-
backed authoritarian rule to anti-Western
rebellions—these seemingly dissimilar
countries share a lot in common. This also
extends to the nature of their diasporas
abroad—especially in the United States—
and to the latest trends occurring in both
countries’ foreign relations.
An adequate analysis of any
nation ought to begin with her founding
and origin story—and in our case of
comparing two countries—doubly so. Iran,
or Persia as she was commonly known as
until recently, was first unified by Cyrus the
Great under his Achaemenid empire in the
sixth century before Christ. Among Iranian
nationalists, Cyrus is still regarded as an
icon and founder of Persian civilization,
and he is regarded as the first Shah in a line
of succession that lasted for another two
and a half millennia. Even in these early
pre-Islamic times, Persian civilization had
a tenuous relationship with her western
neighbors, varying from times of peace and
tranquility to war and contention. Various
Persian Shahs would contest dominion
of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Asia Minor
for hundreds of years—from Alexander’s
Greeks empire to the Roman and Byzantine
empires. This Persian rivalry with the
Graeco-Roman West would only end with
the defeat of both empires by the Arab
conquests of the seventh century. With
these conquests came the other origin
story of Iran—the Islamic religion. While
the Arabs would eventually be overthrown,
the succeeding dynasties, from the Safavids
to the Qajars, would mix both Islamic and
pre-Islamic Iranian traditions. To fully
understand the Persian nation, we must
understand how there exist two rival
nationalisms: Islamic and Iranian.
While Persia has always been
in the middle of Afro-Eurasia, or “the
World Island”, Cuba was isolated from
this core until the voyages of Columbus
and unaccustomed to the advanced state
of technology in the old-world. Because
of this, the indigenous Taino population
were quickly conquered by the forces of
Diego de Velazquez. The immigration of
both Spanish colonists and African slaves
from across the Atlantic, coupled with the
devastating effects of old-world diseases
on indigenous populations, ensured that
the Taino would be outnumbered, and that
Cuba would be quickly absorbed into the
Spanish Empire.
By the late nineteenth century,
colonialism was in full swing across the
world. In Asia, the British were expanding
from northwards from India and the
Russians southwards from Central Asia.
Lying between the two empires were
Persia and Afghanistan. The kings of both
countries during this era were heavily
influenced by the British and Russians in
Right:
Demonstrators
at one off the
many rallies that
kicked of the
Iranian Revolution
(public domain)

7
“Shortly after
the adoption of
republican modes
of governance, both
countries would find
their governments
overthrown by
Generalissimos.”
their imperial competition that was known
as the “Great Game”. In Cuba, a different set
of empires were contesting for influence.
The Spanish, who pioneered modern
colonialism in the sixteenth century, were
a declining empire who by this time had
lost most of their Latin American colonies
to independence movements led by
figures such as Hidalgo, Bolivar, and San
Martin. The Americans, in contrast, were
an imperial power on the rise, and have
been eyeing on Cuba since the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823. Cuba was one of Spain’s
few remaining colonies when the USS
Maine sank in 1898. After the United States
retaliated in a war against Spain, Cuba was
“liberated” from the Spanish and granted
independence in 1902. This independence,
however, came with strict concessions such
as the Platt amendment, which gave the
United States an almost imperial level of
supervision over Cuba.
With the start of the twentieth
century, archaic systems of governance
were beginning to show signs of wear
and tear. In 1905, a Constitutional
Revolution began which would bring Iran
a Belgian-inspired constitution with the
first parliamentary elections being held
in 1906. In Cuba, a constitution based on
the American one was adopted, with the
first presidential elections being held in
1909. In both countries, however, the ruling
governments were weak, ineffective, and
viewed as puppets to imperialist countries
by many.
Shortly after the adoption of
republican modes of governance, both
countries would find their governments
overthrown by Generalissimos. In 1921, the
military leader Reza Shah launched a coup,
backed by the British, which would make
the Pahlavi dynasty rulers of Iran. Because
of his pro-Nazi leanings, British and Soviet
Russian forces invaded Iran in 1941 to force
him to abdicate in favor of his child son,
Mohammed Reza Shah. Since the new
King was still a child, real power returned
to the parliament or majles for some time.
By 1953, the newly elected Prime Minister,
Mohammed Mosaddegh, promised to
nationalize the Iranian oil industry—
leading to an Anglo-American-backed coup
to protect western oil interests and instill
the Shah as an autocrat. In 1933, another
military leader—Fulgencio Batista—
launched a coup to become the leader of
Cuba, and he retired in 1944. In 1952, Batista
would launch another coup to bring Cuba
back to authoritarian, pro-business, and
pro-American rule. Thus, in both countries
in the early twentieth century happened
constitutional reforms that were nullified
by Western-backed coups.
With both countries firmly under
the rule of pro-Western autocrats by the
middle of the century, there existed a great
state of inequality. The governments in
both countries favored foreign business
interests—British oil in the case of Iran and
American tourism in the case of Cuba—
and benefited the local upper classes
greatly while not offering much to the
lower classes. In Batista’s Cuba, American
businesses had a free reign over Cuba.
This even extended to American organized
crime—or the Mafia—which would build
Clockwise from the
top: Guevera and
Castro at a 1959
parade in Havana
(public domain),
modern day Tehran
(David Stanley),
modern day Havana
(public domain),
Castro on a visit
to the US in
1959 (Warren K.
Leffler)

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numerous casinos and hotels in Cuba
under notorious leaders such as Lucky
Luciano. Interestingly, the Mafia brought
Frank Sinatra to perform in Cuban casinos.
This era of unofficial American imperialism
over Cuba can best be characterized by
a scene from The Godfather Part II, in
which the American mafiosi Hyman Roth
and Michael Corleone cut a Cuba-shaped
cake as part of a celebration. The brazen
corruption and puppetry of the Batista
regime would cause the masses to revolt—
and a similar situation would also happen
in Iran.
In 1956, a Cuban Communist
named Fidel Castro would land on the
shores of Cuba once again. Having been
living in exile in Mexico, Castro returned
to initiate the revolutionary phase of
his Marxist plans. Along with the iconic
Argentine Che Guevara, Castro and
his followers would go on to wage a
guerilla war against the Batista regime to
spread the Communist Revolution to the
Western Hemisphere. While Castro was
a communist, he framed his rebellion as
a nationalist one in order to draw more
support. By 1958, the rebels were successful
enough that the United States had ceased
aid to the Batista regime and many Cubans
in the ruling classes were already fleeing. In
1959, the Communists finally took over the
island of Cuba and Castro began to purge
his political opponents. One interesting
case is that of William Alexander Morgan,
an American who fought for Castro’s
guerillas against the Batista regime for the
cause of freedom and liberty. In 1961, Castro
would have Morgan hanged for treason as
the two had vastly different intentions for
a post-revolution Cuba. While Morgan and
many other revolutionaries were liberals
who had believed that Cuba would become
a liberal country with democratic elections,
Castro shocked them by revealing his true
communist intentions. Thus, while Castro
had originally framed the revolution in a
vision of anti-imperialism to attract a big
tent of both liberals and communists, he
would later betray the other parties of the
big tent in his purges in order to solidify
his own rule over Cuba. The revolution
had thus turned from a liberating to an
enslaving event. Later on, the Castro
regime would antagonize the United States
by nationalizing all American businesses
without compensation and stockpiling
Soviet nuclear weapons—which led to the
American sanctions against Cuba that are
still in effect to this day.
Just as Fidel Castro had been
leading a revolution against Batista, an
Iranian cleric known as Ayatollah Khomeini
would rise to become the leader of his own
country’s revolution against the Shah.
Khomeini had been forced into exile from
Iran in the 1960s for his dissent against
the Shah’s government. From his exile
in Iraq and France, he would distribute
audiocassette sermons denouncing the
Shah and American imperialism to his
followers who were working inside of
Iran. By the mid 1970s, popular discontent
in Iran would reach levels such that
anti-Shah protests became common.
While the groups that were protesting
were ideologically diverse, ranging from
liberals to communists to Islamists, they
had all made Khomeini the symbol of
their movement. By 1979, the protests
had reached such levels that the Carter
administration would no longer back the
regime and that Iran’s own military would
stand down and let the revolutionaries
take control. Later that year, Ayatollah
Khomeini returned to Iran with a hero’s
welcome. Soon after, anti-American
student protestors broke into the United
States embassy and took the diplomats as
hostages—and would not release them for
another 444 days—showing the world how
the radicals had won over the moderates
in Iran’s post-revolutionary struggles. In
the first few years after the revolution,
Khomeini would do to Iran what Castro
had done to Cuba—purge his political
opponents and attack other groups that
had early formed the coalition which
helped him in his revolution. Although the
revolution was supported by liberals and
communists in addition to Islamists, the
wishes of the latter two groups would not
be granted as Iran’s constitution would be
amended to permanently add the concept
of “Veleyat-e-Faqih” or Guardianship of
the Jurist, which ensured a theocratic
government under the control of the
Supreme Leader—who was to be Khomeini
“Since the origins of
both the Cuban and
Iranian regimes are
chiefly ideological—
be it Marxist or
Islamist—both
regimes believe
their raison d’etre to
include exporting the
revolution.”

9
himself. In both countries, the revolutions
which had been won on the backs of
ideologically diverse coalitions would be
hijacked by extremists who would proceed
to seize power for themselves and set up
one-party states. In Cuba, the Communist
party was made the sole legal political
party, while in Iran, the government does
not recognize political parties and requires
all political candidates to be approved by
the Guardian Council—who themselves
are appointed by the Supreme Leader.
After the revolutions in both
countries, many people who were
instrumental in the old regimes or who
otherwise would be persecuted by the new
regime for any one of many ideological
reasons chose to flee to other countries—
primarilytheUnitedStates.Duetohistorical
and geographic reasons, the majority
of Cuban Americans live in Southern
Florida—the closest part of the United
States in proximity and climate to Cuba—
and the majority of Persian Americans
live in Southern California—which is very
similar to Iran in climate. From these areas
have emerged areas such as Miami’s Little
Havana and Los Angeles’ Tehrangeles.
Because of the conditions precipitating
the migrations of Cuban Americans and
Persian Americans, these groups frequently
protest against the regimes in their
ancestral countries. For instance, Cuban
Americans are some of the strongest
supporters of sanctions against Cuba and
have traditionally voted Republican due
to its strong anticommunist stance. In the
more recent past, many Cuban Americans
have disagreed with the Obama-era policy
of warming relations with Cuba.
Since the origins of both the
Cuban and Iranian regimes are chiefly
ideological—be it Marxist or Islamist—
both regimes believe their raison d’etre to
include exporting the revolution. During
the Cold War, Cuba sent military support
to Communist forces abroad, with Che
Guevara himself fighting in Angola and
Bolivia. The Cuban government sided with
Communist factions in both Vietnam’s
and Ethiopia’s internal conflicts. Even
today, Cuba is playing a large role in
supporting the socialist regime of Maduro
in Venezuela. In Iran’s case, the revolution
was first exported to Lebanon—where the
regime lent support to Shiite groups such
as the Hezbollah in the country’s civil war
in the 1980s. Since then, the Iranian regime
has empowered its proxies in what has
been referred to as a Middle Eastern Cold
War against Gulf states’ own proxies. In
the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen,
Iran is backing the Assad government and
the Houthi rebels. Meanwhile in Iraq and
Lebanon, Iran is backing Shia political
factions that are friendly to the goals of
the Islamic Revolution. One commonality
in the foreign policy of the two countries
is that they are diametrically opposed to
the United States and allied with Russia—
which is allied with both Assad and
Maduro.
While Iran and Cuba differ in
many important ways, the commonalities
between both national experiences are
useful for understanding the increasingly
multipolar world that we live in. While the
two ideologies, a far-right Islamism and a
far-left Communism differ, the end result of
suppression and authoritarianism in both
countries remains. Just as both countries
experienced foreign quasi-colonialism
which dissatisfied the masses, dictatorial
ideologues rose to power on the waves of
resentment—with consequences that are
still affecting us to this day, such as the
effects of the revolutions being exported. In
summary, by analyzing the two revolutions
and their pretexts and results, we can see
a model for reactionary populist politics in
not just the third world, but also the first
world.

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ISLAMIC ART OF THE ARABISLAMIC ART OF THE ARAB
LANDS IN THELANDS IN THE METROPILITAN
MUSEUM OF ART
Kat Arndt
An examination of museum history, especially in designated art museums, yields
a long and complicated relationship with cultural materials. These troubled strategies
of display and contextualization are ostensibly linked with colonial motivations, if not
inherently from their conception, that are cemented in national identity. Where previously
tactics of cultural theft were used as promoetion to continue imperialistic ventures, the post-
colonial museum has since reckoned with its histories through several means. Dialogue and
access, as well as increased scholarship and the hiring of professionals from the cultures
that produced the objects or are a product of the Western-caused diasporas have since been
incorporated into museums. But underneath the larger social intricacies of museum politics
lie the fundamental ways in which objects are shown to audiences. Curatorial decisions
have cultural effects in the communities that the authority of an institution serves. Modern
exhibition histories point to several methods of narrative making and contextualization that
have largely been inactive in recognizing that the resources of permanent collections cannot
be separated from colonial histories or politics.
A case study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a model and premier
institution in the country, will allow analysis of the display histories and current realities
of the collection of Islamic artworks in particular, and serve to characterize the trend of
institutional renovation in both thought and context.
The origin of the museum device came into popularity with the library at
Alexandria during the time of Alexander the Great. The goal of the Musaeum (or Mouseion)
Above: Morgan Casket - donated
by J Pierpoint Morgan in 1917
(MET)

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Below: The interior of the MET (MET and
Howard Dale)
was similar to its institutional sibling, a
library but for the study of objects. The
values of scholarship and record keeping
were carried through this proto-museum,
a palace to house the muses. The idea
was returned to in the Enlightenment,
where the Museum became an arena of
civilization and of elevating the common
man to education. But before that populist
move, collections took the form of private
galleries, locked rooms for rulers to stash
the evidence of their wealth and power
while out on campaign or away from palace
homes. As early as the 17th century, rulers
began to open these spaces to the public,
evidence of their benevolence and an
exercise in material. Too, these collections
became increasingly globalized in the age
of exploration. Global goods, biological
oddities, and stolen cultural materials
made up a sort of cabinet of curiosities
model of collection and display. During
the French Revolution, nobles locked these
treasures away in lavish cabinets with many
locks and drawers. In the reign of Napoleon,
the Louvre became the first museum of
art, a public display of the materials of
conquest and a device of the state used to
define and showcase culture. The age of
Enlightenment inspired private collectors
to commit large portions of their treasures
to the public eye and for the public good in
numerous metropolitan and industrialized
places. A museum-building fever swept
through Europe and to America a few
decades later; cities and municipalities
demonstrated the cultural, industrial, and
philanthropic power of their donor classes.
The distinction between art and artifact
was calcified, with Europe producing
high art and non-western countries
producing artifacts that more often made
up the collections of natural history or
ethnography museums. Furthermore, at
the height of imperialism, art museums
were used as a showcase of colonial
power; where photographs did not suffice
as evidence of conquered people, the art
objects that made it in stood in as physical
demonstrations of cultural superiority.
This argument tries to avoid cultural and
historical universalizing, since African and
Islamic arts have some overlap but different
histories, the discussion of which is larger
“... where
photographs
did not suffice
as evidence
of conquered
people, the art
objects that
made it in stood
in as physical
demonstrations
of cultural
superiority.”

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“This has required
a new approach to
display and more
upfront reckoning
with the histories
of collections. The
contemporary survey
museum has since
become a forum of
discussion and a
cultural liaison...“
than the scope of this examination.
Beyond its use as a colonial
playground for the elite, the survey museum
provides cultural positionality for its
visitors. Indeed, Carol Duncan finds in her
seminal report on art institutions that, “We
can also appreciate the ideological force
of a cultural experience that claims for its
truths the status of objective knowledge.
To control a museum means precisely to
control the representation of a community
and its highest values and truths. It is also
the power to define the relative standing of
individualsinacommunity.” Inotherwords,
it is by looking upon the visual materials of
other cultures that cements the aesthetics
of one’s own culture. This is understood in
the theories of nation building discussed by
Benedict Anderson in “Cultural Roots.” His
argument, that the imagined community
emerged from lessened societal power
of sovereignty, temporal tracking, and
religious explanations of nature, reads “The
very possibility of imagining the nation
only arose historically when, and where,
three fundamental cultural conceptions,
all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic
grip on men’s minds.” He finds that print
capitalism is the driving factor in creating
these cultural positionalities. However,
theorists of museums find that cultural
authorities also aid in these imagined
identities. Then, too, museums as state
vehicles follow state models of moralizing
politics, as Arjun Appadurai writes, “States
are everywhere seeking to monopolize the
moral resources of community, either by
flatly claiming perfect coevality between
nation and state, or by systemically
museumizing and representing all the
groups within them in a variety of heritage
politics that seems remarkably uniform
throughout the world.”
Heritage politics are the
modus operandi of traditional survey
museums that showcase and cannibalize
the difference and sameness of culture.
However, now more than ever, museums
must counteract neoliberal trends of
defunding and support themselves
through populist engagement. This has
required a new approach to display and a
more upfront reckoning with the histories
of collections. The contemporary survey
museum has since become a forum of
discussion and a cultural liaison, serving to
introduce and mediate cultures and ideas
through conscious curatorial practice.
However, curation and decision making
are still misguided by a certain apoliticality
where, instead, conversation could occur.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art was conceived in 1866 by Americans in
Paris, hoping to build a rival to the cultural
Clockwise from
the top: Carpets
from the Ottoman
section of the MET
(MET), Figure 1
the Persian Room
(MET), Figure
2 Gallery E-12
(MET), Morrocan
courtyard at the
MET (MET)

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capital of the world. Opened in 1870, the
collection of the Met was sourced from
wealthy donors who had objects in their
private collections from privileged world
travel. The institution has since grown
to become a survey museum steeped in
art, scholarship, publication, and popular
culture, a steward of American art that is
closely watched by many other national
and international museums. Specifically,
in a post-9/11 America, the Met began an
eight-year process to rethink and renovate
their galleries of Islamic art (completed
in 2011); the Art Institute of Chicago,
Nation Gallery, and Louvre (among other
museums) began the process soon after.
It is this global attention and prestige that
makes the Met is an appropriate case study
to analyze permanent collection histories
of Islamic art and objects.
The donation that formed the
basis of the current collection, and that
has made up many exhibitions since, was
the Moore Collection of Oriental Glass.
From the beginning, there was little to
no distinction in what “oriental” meant,
between the Near East, Western Asia, the
Middle East, and Maghreb. If there was any
linguistic difference, Islamic art of the non-
ancient era was called Assyrian or Persian,
thoughnotseparatedbycategoryorcontext
like the current museum practice. Too, the
historic label practice does not include
much text, informational, interpretive, or
otherwise. Objects were crowded in glass
display cases, more of a show of material
wealth than for education or moralizing, as
seen in Figure 1, a 1912 postcard of Gallery
E-14, the so-called “Persian Room.”
Slowly, general museum practice and
aesthetics paired down crowded display
cases. By 1950, the galleries looked much
less cluttered, like this view of Gallery E-12
(Figure 2).
All the while, the collection
was growing through accession, and
experimental display through exhibition.
The popular 1919 Plant Form in Ornament
exhibition incorporated live plants as an
environmental staging or mode of visual
contextualization while the 1935 exhibition
of Near Eastern Costume, Oriental Rugs
and Textiles, used live models to display
what was a combination of both Islamic
and non-Islamic textiles. According to the
Met “As was the case until the 1960s, both
‘Islamic’ pieces—here, kaftans—and non-
Islamic Indian pieces—here, saris—were
often displayed together.” These kinds of
experimental modes of display often make
theirwayintomoremainstream,permanent
collection museum practice. For instance,
in terms of architectural or environmental
contextualization, a mihrab (from Isfahan,
dated 1354) was first installed into the wall
and, “served as the principal symbol of
the department from 1939 until 1975 and
remains an iconic piece.” Around 1965, the
Department of Islamic Art was established
as a separate entity entirely and began
ostensibly more conscious accessioning.
The Islamic Galleries were opened for the
first time under that name and included
the stunning new Nur al-Din Room and the
Nishapur gallery, architectural installations
that immersed visitors into a cultural
experience. For a department that was
once known as the “Division for Art of the
Islamic Near East, comprising Moorish
Spain and North Africa, Egypt Under the
Arabs, Turkey in Europe, the Caucasus,
Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia,
Persia, West Turkestan, Afghanistan, India,
Indonesia, and Indo-China” in 1932, the
Islamic Galleries of 1975 were based on
apparent religious sensibilities (contested
whenhastilyappliedtosecularobjectsfrom
similar regions) instead of the previous
geographic locality, temporal period, or
aesthetic formalism. Bilal Qureshi writes,
“The formal, art history discipline of
‘Islamic art’ originated in 20th-century
Western museums. It began as an offshoot
of antiquities departments as curators
began to notice the aesthetic links between
medieval Islamic courts stretching from

1 5
Spain to India.” The shifting definitions
of art of this nature are important to track
as scholarship continues to emerge. A Met
webpage entry from October 2001 (barely
one month after the 9/11 attacks and before
the decision to renovate) finds Islamic art
to have four linking indicators of ornament:
calligraphy, vegetal patterns, geometric
patterns and figural representation.
Further, they note: “The term Islamic art not
only describes the art created specifically
in the service of the Muslim faith (for
example, a mosque and its furnishings) but
also characterizes the art and architecture
historically produced in the lands ruled by
Muslims, produced for Muslim patrons, or
created by Muslim artists. As it is not only
a religion but a way of life, Islam fostered
the development of a distinctive culture
with its own unique artistic language that is
reflected in art and architecture throughout
the Muslim world.”
With the grand reopening in
2011, the Met again renamed its galleries,
harkening back to geography, now known
as the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran,
Central Asia, and Later South Asia. In the
NPR review of the reinstallation, Qureshi
notes, “That evolution in the study of
Islamic art mirrors cultural shifts in today’s
Muslim societies. The kingdoms that gave
rise to the workshops and artisans whose
work fills the Met’s galleries no longer exist,
and today those regions have new borders,
new crises and new economic realities.”
Navina Haidar, a Met curator who helped
plan the new space, addressed the cultural
connections (from Spain to China) around
one question: Do you think about it as the
heritage of the Islamic world, or do you
think about it as the Islamic heritage of the
world? While admittedly much better than
crowded glass display cases and mislabeled
pieces, the addition of more immersive and
staged architectural contexts, such as a
Moroccan court constructed by craftsmen
using traditional plaster and tiling methods
and the reinstallation of the Nur al-Din
Room, do nothing to address these
contemporary realities. While traditionalist
museum professionals, such as curator
Sheila Canby and (non-Met) director James
Cuno, maintain that apolitical presentation
is the primary goal of art museums, more
progressive museum professionals and
theorists argue for the importance of the
museum’s use as a forum of discussion
for the historic and contemporary issues.
Cuno specifically cites the spike in Met
attendance in the immediate aftermath
of 9/11 as evidence that museums should
be a quiet place of reflection on beautiful
art alone. On the shortcomings of the
new galleries, Haidar said, “We show
things on the basis of their artistic merit,
their rarity, their condition and their
historical importance… We try to be strictly
dispassionate about the evidence. The
only place where we allow ourselves any
passion is in the artistic joy and excitement
of something that’s beautiful and elevating
and technically accomplished.”
However, since art museums
do have such power in shaping imagined
communitiesthroughvisualcontext,should
they not use that power to increase cultural
“Do you think about it
as the heritage of the
Islamic world, or do
you think about it as
the Islamic heritage
of the world?”

1 6
cohesion and learning? Additionally,
Qureshi asks, “What’s happened to
Muslim creativity since the collapse of
these kingdoms, since industrialization,
since globalization and since our current
debates around radicalization?” The
stagnancy of the galleries, though opulent
and aesthetic experiences, does not
speak to contemporary Arab or Islamic
cultural productions. Americans already
fear immigrants, Muslims, and extremists
(often linking all of the terms as evidenced
by the last election). Though the reach
of art museums is not nearly as far as
other devices of imagined communities,
as cultural institutions they should aim
to educate through permanent collection
labels, presentation, and exhibition
making. In a recent interview with The New
York Times, new director Max Hollein said,
“If you have one of the greatest collections
you almost have an obligation to
recontextualize it in regard to the narratives
it provides. I want to make sure it’s not only
one voice but multiple voices.” Ivan Karp
finds that three ways to create a multiplicity
of voice is:
1. The strengthening of institutions
that give populations a chance to
exert control over the way they are
presented in museums.
2. The expansion of the expertise
of established museums in the
presentation of non-Western cultures
and minority cultures in the United
States.
3. Experiments with exhibition design
that will allow museums to offer
multiple perspectives or to reveal
the tendentiousness of the approach
taken
Where previously, the Met
has stayed rooted in a more traditional
approach due to a certain lack of pressure
to change from their audience base,
now the entire field has shifted as more
scholars and a myriad of global voices
chime in. Will the Met once again rethink
their 15 aging galleries? It’s only likely. Until
then, the question remains: how else can
the institution change and how will the
changes ultimately continue to influence
the cultural positionality of visitors to the
Met?
Left: Reception
Room of the Arab
Lands at the MET
(MET)

1 7
IS NON-
VIOLENCE
ENOUGH FOR
LEBANON?
Ava Barnes
As of December 2019, civil
society in Lebanon has taken a turn.
Nonviolent protests have left the capitol
of Beirut incapacitated, disrupting daily
life, but more significantly they have left
lawmakers unable to convene. Supported
by information reported in the New York
Times by Vivian Yee, these anti-government
protests have brought a quarter of
Lebanon’s population to the streets in
response to government corruption.
The people of Lebanon are united with
the common goal of preventing another
corrupt figurehead from running their
government. In response, protesters, in
the form of human chains, have blockaded
entrances of government buildings, in
order to show support for a non-political
cabinet to form their next government.
This all comes in the wake of political
discussions surrounding a set of new laws
under consideration. These laws may
grant amnesty to those guilty of crimes
including drug possession and terrorist
affiliation but also extend to past political
corruption. Although the majority of these
demonstrations have been nonviolent,
four people were shot and killed by police
officers in protest-related events. At this
time, the situation in Lebanon has reached
a volatile point and, based on the case
study Why Civil Resistance Works: The
Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by
Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, the
success of these protests is dependent on
whether or not they remain nonviolent in
the face of government violence.
In their case study, political
scientist Erica Chenoweth and author
Maria Stephan offer an enormous amount
of evidence supporting the success of
nonviolent protests compared to violent
protests. In fact, they have found that
“major nonviolent campaigns have
achieved success 53 percent of the time,
compared with 26 percent for violent
campaigns (8).” This statistic is a hard
number based on many different factors
and shows that the success rate of
nonviolent campaigns is nearly twice as
much as violent ones. By looking through
the framework provided in the case study,
the possible success of the current conflict
in Lebanon can be predicted based on the
characteristics of its protests. Factors like
internal support, prolonged participation
and gathering a broad base of support are
some of the reasons why nonviolence has
been working so far. A successful campaign
often has internal support or sympathizers
in the opposition, which “enhances its
tendency to promote disobedience”
within the regime (12). Some Lebanese
lawmakers have expressed their support
for the protesters by stating that before the
parliamentary session was postponed by
human blockades, they would boycott the
proposed laws in question. Additionally,
prolonged nonviolent protests put
pressure on the opposing regime, as well
as demonstrate the protesters faith for
their cause. At the time the New York
Times article was written, protesters had
been gathering for 34 days. Lastly, when
a nonviolent campaign is able to gather a
significant amount of support, it is more

1 9
likely to be successful. It is estimated that
at one point, one quarter of the population
was on the streets protesting. All of these
factors put enormous pressure on the
Lebanese government to recognize the
grievances of the protesters.
Although there is ample evidence
that supports the success to date of the
nonviolent nature of these protests, the
danger of violence in Lebanon cannot
be ignored. There have been reports of
skirmishes with riot police and a solider
shooting a man who was helping to block a
road, resulting in multiple casualties (Yee).
The Lebanese government has resorted
to using more violent and dangerous
strategies to quell the protesters. Although
the violence has yet to be considered
catastrophic, it complicates the situation.
Regime violence against nonviolent
movementscanbeseenasextremistactions
going beyond opposing the resistance (9).
A possible result of violent counterattacks
is a backfire of the original regime purpose.
A backfire is an unjust act, often of
violent repression, that recoils against its
originators (11). Those who may have been
sympathetic or undecided about the cause
would then be more likely to increase their
support for the resistance. This can deeply
damage the legitimacy of the government
in question. Although the existence of
violent events does not necessarily mean
the success of the protests is jeopardized, it
is more likely to lead to a shift in the power
dynamics of the regime, as supported by
the case study. In Lebanon’s situation, the
fact of violence is unfortunate, but in the
long run it may work in the protester’s favor
because of the negative effect it has on the
regime in power.
Throughout the case study,
Stephan and Chenoweth describe the
influence that external, international
powers have on success of nonviolent
campaigns. However, the article does
not mention external powers acting in
the conflict in Lebanon. Despite this
lack of information, it is still important
to understand how external forces can
affect a campaign. The international
community is more likely to denounce
a regime that acts violently, especially
against the innocent. Similarly, state
sponsorship of violent insurgencies has
been a source of conflict in foreign policy
for decades (12). International actors can
offer resources, legitimacy and other tools
a regime needs to carry out their goal: that
is why the international community plays
such a major role in the conflict between
protesters and regimes.
There are reasons why civil
resistance works, and Stephan and
Chenoweth described them well in their
case study. Due to the number of factors
to consider it is difficult to predict the
outcome of the protests in Lebanon. This
conflict is not one sided, it is not perfect
or easy to characterize. However, based on
the current conditions of the nonviolent
protests, and the information in the case
study, I believe it is safe to assume a good
chance of success for Lebanon to establish
a less corrupt government. If the protests
continue with nonviolent demonstrations
and the government responds with force,
I believe there will be a power shift large
enough to force the government to address
the grievances of their constituents. There
is a real possibility that Lebanon will see
positive change within their government.
Clockwise from
the top: Beirut
protest on
Lebanon’s 76th
Independence
Day (Nadim
Kobeissi), Women
protestors form
a line between
riot police
and protestors
(Nadim Kobeissi),
Flare shines
light on group
of protestors
(Jessica Wahab and
Nicolas Garon),
Beirut protestors
carry a sign
saying “No to
Sectarian Rule”
(Nadim Kobeissi)
“Although the
existence of violent
events does not
necessarily mean
the success of
the protests is
jeopardized, it is
more likely to lead to
a shift in the power
dynamics of the
regime...”

2 0
INTUITION
OVERCOMES
INTELLIGENCE:
COVID-19
Emily Needham
On January 21, 2020 the first
reported case of COVID-19 in the United
States appeared in Washington State. On
January 28th an infectious disease doctor
at the University of Nebraska, and former
member of the Homeland Security Council
under President George W. Bush, and
member of the National Security Council
under President Barack Obama sent an
email to a list of thirty-seven infectious
disease doctors and medical experts from
academic institutions and government
agencies. This came just a week after
President Trump had termed COVID-19 a
“a passing problem” and assured the World
Economic Forum that everything would be
fine. Dr. James Lawler’s email read: “Great
Understatements in History: Napoleon’
s retreat from Moscow – ‘just a little
stroll gone bad’, Pompeii – ‘a bit of a dust
storm’, Hiroshima – summer heatwave,
AND, Wuhan- ‘just a bad flu season’.”
This email was sent over six weeks
before the World Health Organization
upgraded COVID-19 from a global health
emergency to a pandemic. At this point,
much of the general American public was
unaware of the negative implications of
the virus, or its potential to spread across
the United States and force the country
into self-isolation; and since January 28th
over 60,057 Americans have died from
COVID-19. In just three months, leading
medical experts and governmental officials
have transitioned from forecasting a future
in which the US is overtaken by the virus, to
the reality that millions of Americans’ lives
have been uprooted and so many have died
from the virus.
With over one million confirmed
cases of the Coronavirus in the US, the
United States now has more reported cases
of COVID-19 than anywhere else in the
world. One might ask themselves could
this have been avoided? With clear evidence
of early intelligence warnings, efforts
form within the Trump administration to
caution the president against the dangers
of COVID-19, and the failure of the federal
government to quickly and accurately
collect developing intelligence within the
US once the virus spread domestically; it
is clear that the US response to COVID-19
has been a failure of intelligence. An
intelligence failure is defined as “a
misunderstanding of the situation that
leads a government to take actions that
are inappropriate and counterproductive
to its own interests.” Given the missteps
of the Trump administration in ignoring
over fifteen-years of pandemic-related
institutional knowledge and intelligence on
the potential horrific effects of COVID-19,
the situation today clearly fits the definition
of an intelligence failure.
President Trump is not the only
world leader in modern history to have
listened to their intuition rather than
available intelligence. In 1904, the French
received an intelligence report from a
German General, Le Vengeur, who was
thought to have been betraying his country
out of vengeance, by sharing a draft of the
Schlieffen Plan. The Schlieffen Plan was
the German military plan, first developed
in 1886, that set out logistical courses of
Right: An empty
World Trade Centre
terminal during
the height of the
lockdown in New
York (Anthony
Quintano)

2 3
“President
Trump relied on
his intuition and
preconceived
notions, despite
having access
to accurate
intelligence... Trump
had to be convinced
of the seriousness
of the virus.“
action for the German army in the case of a
two-front war with France and Russia. The
original plan was set to have the Germans
enter France through L’Alsace and Lorraine.
However, between 1886 and the outbreak
of World War I in 1914, the Schlieffen plan
was altered to have the German army enter
France through Belgium. The commander
and chief of the French military on the
western front during WWI, General Joseph
Jacques Césaire Joffre, had access to the
Schlieffen plan at the start of the war, and
was provided intelligence that the German
forces would in fact invade through the
Belgian front. Despite this, Joffre followed
his intuition and insisted that the German
army would enter France through L’Alsace
and Lorraine, building his entire war plan
around this assumption.
Like Joffre, President Trump
relied on his intuition and preconceived
notions, despite having access to accurate
intelligence, to shape his early leadership
throughout the COVID-19 crisis. From the
start, Trump had to be convinced of the
seriousness of the virus. After learning of
a case in China in which a twenty-year-old
woman transmitted the virus to five of her
relatives, despite the fact that she never
displayed symptoms herself, Assistant
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Dr. Kadlec set out with his team to present
the president with a plan for “Four Steps to
Mitigation.” President Trump was on a trip
to India, so Dr. Kadlec and his colleagues
waited for the president’s return before they
could present their findings in person and
advocate for social distancing measures,
however, while enroute back to the US,
Dr. Nancy Messonnier publicly warned
the American people about the effects
and danger of COVID-19. This measure
led to a plunge in the stock market, which
upset the president and led him to cancel
his meeting with Dr. Kadlec. This action
wasted vital time in the race to prepare
the country for COVID-19 and protect
the lives of thousands of Americans. By
the end of February, the president and his
administration were aware of the potential
for COVID-19 to spread across the US,
knew that the virus was transmittable in
individuals who did not show symptoms,
and some members of the administration
had even begun to draw up mitigation
plans. In this sense, President Trump had
correct intelligence like Joffree. His advisors
warned him of what would happen, and
what measures the administration must
implement to prevent an undesirable
outcome, and yet he relied on his intuition
like Joffree. In this context, mitigation is the
Belgian front and resisting social distancing
measures is L’Alsace and Lorraine. The
president chose to protect the economy
rather than follow the informed advice of
intelligence, it would take the president
three more weeks—and an additional
presentation from Dr. Deborah L. Birx (an
acclaimed AIDS researcher) and a soft
spoken individual who was able to appeal
to President Trump’s sensibilities—before
any real progress in curbing the virus
would be made. The expertise of Trump’s
advisors was his Schlieffen plan, however
rather than following the clear guidance of
the intelligence process, like Joffree, Trump
Clockwise from
the top: Masked
shopper during the
pandemic (Nickolay
Romensky), Trump
and the COVID
task force (White
House), Infected
patients being
treated in Iran
(Mohsen Atayi), An
anesthesiologist
at the end of
her shift in a
hospital in Italy
(Alberto Giuliani)

2 4
listened to his own preconceived notions.
As a policymaker, President
Trump has the distinct ability from
intelligence gatherers or analysts to take
into account the final intelligence product
that he is presented with, and then utilize
this information to make an informed
decision. This decision is based on his
view of the consequences of each policy
option, and which policy presents negative
outcomes that the president is willing to
accept having full knowledge of all available
intelligence at the time. In this sense, a
policy-maker, such as the president of the
United States, may choose to disregard
intelligence that does not support their
desired outcome. Despite President
Trump’s extensive knowledge of COVID-19
by early March, and the need for social
distancing practices, he prioritized both
his economic goals and the desires of big
American corporations over calls for the
immediate implementation of mitigation
practices, essentially forcing the critical
needs of public health to compete with the
interests of the American economy. Rather
than heeding the advice of his advisors, the
President avoided any measure to close
schools or impede the economy, instead he
took the measure to restrict travel to Europe
during an Oval Office address. While this
action may have appeared necessary to the
American public, it was not supported by
scienceandsomeofficialshavesaidthatthe
measure may have even restricted the travel
of vital doctors, and caused mass panic for
individuals to flee back to the US, therefore
crowding an unnecessarily high number
of travelers into airports across the world.
During a global pandemic caused by an
airborne pathogen, it is counterproductive
to crowd individuals in tight spaces, and
existing open-source intelligence from
the scientific community had long proved
this prior to March of 2020. Therefore,
the President’s disregard for his advisors’
advice to implement mitigation policies,
and instead instituting a much less effective
travel ban, exemplifies how the president’s
role in the intelligence process, as a leader
in policy-making, failed to properly address
the situation.
The collection of intelligence is
the first step in the intelligence process, and
is the key that allows intelligence analysts
and then policymakers to gain access to
information that can help positively shape
a situation. Without a comprehensive
approach to the collection of intelligence, a
policymaker’s understanding of a situation
maynotbefullyinformedandmaytherefore
lead to an action that is counterproductive.
Based on the definition discussed earlier,
this phenomenon falls within the realm of
an intelligence failure. Given that the Center
for Disease Control has estimated that it
only takes thirty-six hours for a pathogen to
travel from even the most remote villages
on earth to an urban American city, it is
important for governments to survey an
outbreak and gain a clear understanding of
the number of cases and the rate at which a
virus is spreading. Once COVID-19 became
a clear threat to the American populace,
the Trump administration was able to
agree upon a plan for data collection and
pandemic surveillance in mid-February.
“He prioritized both
his economic goals
and the desires
of big American
corporations...
essentially forcing
the critical needs
of public health to
compete with the
interests of the
American economy.”

2 5
However, this plan was never actually
implemented, as Health Secretary Azar
was unable to gain reliable tests from
the CDC or the $100 million needed for
funding, despite several senators offer to
work with the administration to increase
their response budget before the Office
of Management and the Budget stated
that the administration had sufficient
funds to stop the virus. By late February,
many government officials and academics
became alarmed as they realized that the
country had already lost the battle against
COVID-19, as many people across the
country were likely already infected by
COVID-19 and were unaware of this fact or
they were infected and were unknowingly
spreading the virus without showing
symptoms.
The proper collection of
intelligence can mean the difference
between winning or losing a war. In this
case, much like Germany during the first
world war, the US’s failure to properly
surveil the spread of COVID-19 has
effectively determined that the United
States lost the battle of containing the
virus. Abteilung IIIb was the German
military intelligence service that operated
throughout WWI, and at the time of the
war was headed by Walter Nicolai. While
IIIb did have several intelligence successes
throughout the war, like the United States
and COVID-19 surveillance today, Nicolai’s
failure to gain intelligence in key areas
cost Germany the war. For example, IIIb
did not gather any intelligence on the
United States, the largest arms supplier
to the Allies, until after the state officially
joined the war. This meant that Germany
was effectively unaware of the production
capacity of the United States, or the value
that the state would add to the Allie’s
war effort. IIIb also failed to collect any
economic intelligence, which left German
policymakers uninformed about the ability
of the allied powers to remain engaged
in the war. The strength of a country’s
economy determines that state’s ability to
continue engaging in warfare, and without
this key intelligence, Germany did not have
a clear understanding of how long the
state would need to last to win the war of
attrition. Finally, IIIB failed to collect any
intelligence on the development of the
tank, a new technology that was being
developed during the first world war and
would change the nature of warfare.
In the case of IIIb during WWI,
the French and the Schlieffen plan, and
the Trump administration during the
COVID-19 pandemic, all three intelligence
failures are drawn together by the element
of human cognition and the limits of
human perception. In all three cases,
the failure of intelligence stemmed from
the intuition of individual leaders. Their
failures in leadership were a direct result
from the flaw in the intelligence process,
in that it is limited by the conditions and
interpretation of human perception.
The Trump administration’s failure to
implement mitigation practices despite
early intelligence and expertise, and
the administration’s failure to properly
implement COVID-19 surveillance
measures in a timely and proportional
manner, constitute actions that have been
counterproductive to the interests of the
American people. With over one million
individuals now infected, due to the
cognitive perception of the president and
his intuition-based decision making, the
Trump administration’s handling of the
build up to the current crisis, is clearly a
case of an intelligence failure.

2 6
MITIGATINGMITIGATING
THE EFFECTSTHE EFFECTS
OF DRUGOF DRUG
CARTELS INCARTELS IN
MEXICOMEXICO
Ben Blavat
Mexico is infamous for its illegal drug market, with a high demand for heroin,
meth,marijuana, and most things in between. Cannabis, one of Mexico’s most prevalent
illicit drugs,was used by 8.6% of the population as of 2016 - nearly 11 million people -
according to theNational Survey on Drugs, Alcohol, and Tobacco Consumption. This blows
the worldwideaverage out of the water, which weighs in at the measly 2.4% found in the
United Nations’ World Drug Report. The global average of cannabis consumption is over
three and a half times smaller than that of Mexico. Though this number is shockingly high,
it falls upon a continuous trend of increased drug usage in a country dominated by cartels
specializing in the trade, and is only projected to grow.
Aside from the given medical ramifications that are caused by their drugs, the
cartels have greatly deteriorated the quality of life of Mexican citizens. Day-to-day life is
becoming exponentially more dangerous with the surge of cartel operations. When the
drug market is particularly lucrative, various actors engage in violence in an attempt to reap
the most benefits. Rival cartels, police and military officers, and even ordinary citizens are
swept up in the scramble. In early November of 2019, for example, a group of three women
andsix children was massacred by cartel members, their vehicle mistaken for that of a rival
carte.
In addition to violence, cartels are detrimental to the economy. Not only does
organizedcrime stunt the growth of developing countries, as is the common consensus,
but it can alsodamage the economy of even the most highly developed country. Such
Above: Mexican Stock Exchange in
Mexico City (Dabackgammanator)

2 7
Below: U.S. Coast Gaurd offlines hundreds
of kilograms of narcotics seized during a
patrol in the Eastern Pacific (Chief Petty
Officer Luke Pinneo)
presence effectively lowers a country’s
GDP via the loss of economic activity, due
to an increased amount of private capital in
correspondence with a lack of meaningful
public investment.
Due to the vast scale and
interconnectedness the cartels have
with Mexico, any severe, abrupt attempt
at eradicating the drug business would
not only be impossible but also morally
unsound. It would be akin to an amputation
without any stitches, bandages, or further
medical treatment. The poor would only
become further impoverished. A more
gradual, adaptable solution is the only
appropriate method towards solving this
crisis.
Currently, the Mexican
government is attempting to tackle the
issues by arresting high-level drug lords
and officials of their organizations.
Though some of their captures have been
successful, each imprisonment leads to
increased violence and cartel activity.
Last October, in Culiacán, the son of the
infamous drug lord known as “El Chapo”
was arrested by Mexican forces. The
Sinaloa Cartel fought back, turning the
city into a war zone, resulting in several
deaths and the eventual forced freedom of
El Chapo’s son. In a 2015 analysis of one of
El Chapo’s previous escapes - yes, he’s had
several - and other similar stories, including
those where the prisoner was successfully
incarcerated, journalist William Neuman
asserts that the capture of these leaders
is largely ineffective toward attacking the
larger threat. When the hydra loses one
head, others will grow back in its place,
stronger than before.
Instead of considering solely
the base facts surrounding what is known
about the cartels and who runs them in
the investigation of how to mitigate their
control, itiscriticaltoalsolookatwhenthese
crimes are at their peak. In Melissa Dell’s
2015 article “Trafficking Networks and the
Mexican Drug War,” she demonstrates that
cartel activity spikes during close regional
elections. Upon further examination, she
finds that corruption is to blame, and
posits the reason being that when a corrupt
incumbent barely squeaks out a victory
or loses an election, rival cartels are eager
“Due to the
vast scale and
interconnectedness
the cartels have with
Mexico, any severe,
abrupt attempt at
eradicating the drug
business would not
only be impossible
but also morally
unsound.”

2 9
“The Mexican
government has
had the time to
make a more
whole-hearted
attempt at
eradicating
corruption,
yet the issue
persists.”to try to usurp the territory as their own,
believing that the current cartel will be
less strongly supported and protected by
the administration. Data from the World
Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators
aggregated by the Inter-American
Development Bank support this claim;
Mexico has been progressively lax on
corruption from 1996 to 2017, mirroring the
upward trend of cartel crime.
Mexico’s current policy on
corruption simply does not cut it. For too
long, anti-corruption training programs
have consisted mainly of informing public
officials and law enforcement officers of
weak, pre-existing laws, rather than trying
to develop more effective new ones. The
Mexican government has had the time to
make a more whole-hearted
attempt at eradicating corruption, yet the
issue persists. If the Mexican government
will not crack down on corruption on its
own, whatever the reason may be, it is
possible that some additional
assistance may be required.
Daniel L. Foote, former Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of
International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs at the United States
Department of State, published a memo
on December 9, 2016 - International anti-
Corruption Day - urging countries to
consideroutsidehelp.Thetitleofthememo
speaks for itself: “Fighting Corruption is a
Global Effort.” Through cooperation and
collaboration, nations can empower and
educate each other on leading reform to
curb corruption. This has been proven to
be true.
In 2015, the Council of Europe
conductedaseriesofstudiesandfoundthat
corruption was rampant in Serbia and was
seriously affecting the nation, propagating
and facilitating the widespread activity
of organized crime. Its recommendation,
included in its analysis, was for Serbian law
enforcement officers to undergo training
through CEPOL, the
European Union Agency for Law
Enforcement Training. This universal
training covered a number of topics and
included several anti-corruption courses.
The effects of the program are highlighted
in Serbia’s continuous decline of organized
crime, as seen in the U.S.’s Serbia 2019
Crime and Safety Report.
Interestingly enough, Mexico is
one of the five countries, along with the
U.S., the Holy See, Canada, and Japan, who
acts as an observer to the Council of Europe
to gain insight from their activities. A
significant portion of the specific activities
and treaties Mexico has been involved with
have actually been surrounding drugs and
Clockwise from the
top: U.S. Coast
Guard crewman
guards 28k tons
of siezed cocaine
during offload
at a naval base
(Petty Officer
2nd Class Connie
Terrell), A
jimador, or agave
farmer, in Mexico
(Celso FLORES),
Vigilante or
“self-defense”
group in control
of the Churumuco
municipality in
Mexico (Esther
Vargas), Mexican
President Andrés
Manuel López
Obrador (Eneas de
Troya)

3 0
organized crime. This may very well be a
sign that Mexico would be willing to allow
its officers to
undergo a similar training.
There is one such existing group
that might serve as the perfect catalyst for
these programs to take place. GANSEG, or
the US-Mexico High Level Security Group,
was born with the intention to crack down
on crime. The group is not exclusive to
the U.S. and Mexico; historically, other
countries like Honduras have participated.
GANSEG has been highly successful in
dealing with migration in the past. Recently,
GANSEG has committed to allocating its
resources towards the capture of high-level
criminals,
such as those leading cartels. If their goal is
changed from focusing insight on arrests to
targeting corruption, the cartels of Mexico
may finally begin to dissolve.
On September 26, 2014, 43
students from a teaching school in rural
Mexico commandeered two buses to head
to a demonstration. They never made it
there. Unbeknownst to the students, the
buses had secret compartments, hiding
two million dollars worth of heroin under
the floors. They made a stop in Iguala
to meet up with others headed to the
demonstration, and were leaving the
city with three additional buses when
it happened. According to investigative
journalist Anabel Hernandez, who is
currently living in Italy for her safety, a drug
lord ordered members of the state police,
the Federal Police, and the army to retrieve
the drugs. They opened fire on the buses.
All 43 students from the original two buses
disappeared that night.
What happened in Iguala is
a tragedy. “A really tragic accident,” as
Hernandez phrased it. Though the events
of Iguala transpired five years ago, innocent
people are still dying at the hands of the
cartels. At the time of this writing, they
turned a city into a war zone just two
months ago. They slaughtered a family
of women and children driving up the
road from their home last month. Though
Iguala really was a tragic accident, it is
unfortunately not an anomaly, and like
many accidents, it could have been avoided
with greater government intervention.
Action needs to be taken to prevent
corruption from permeating the ranks
that of those who are supposed to protect.
Curbing corruption is the crucial first step
to eliminating cartels once and for all. If
GANSEG changes its mission to educating
and training against corruption, this goal
may finally be realized.
“Though the events
of Iguala transpired
five years ago,
innocent people
are still dying at
the hands of the
cartels.”

3 1
THE FUTURE IS
CANCELLED
Evan Davies
Twenty-eight years after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine
is a pivotal state standing athwart popular
conceptions of history yet still remains
critically understudied by American
thinkers. When taking a critical view of
the common narratives around Ukraine,
it becomes clear that the American mass
media and foreign affairs commentariat are
woefully unfit both to provide an adequate
explanation for this present crisis and to
contextualize it within a broader global
trend or history. Professor Jesse Driscoll
calls attention to the fact that five years into
the conflict a consensus still has not yet
been reached on what the crisis specifically
is. He notes that “Russians usually call it
a civil war [while] representatives of the
U.S. government emphasize the invasion.”
Taking into account these issues, this paper
seeks to identify and object to the media
narratives that have guided the West’s
understanding of the crisis, and (more
importantly) to lay out a proper historical
context and conceptual framework from
which the crisis can be understood.
For all the complexity involved
in contextualizing the crisis, the question
of what actually took place in 2013-
2014 is rather simple. The crisis, for lack
of a better word (again, refer to Jesse
Driscoll’s commentary and Tymofii Brik’s
response on the trouble with terminology
surrounding the conflict), began in
November of 2013, when President Viktor
Yanukovych abandoned a proposed
association agreement with the European
UnionandoptedinsteadtojointheEurasian
Economic Union and accept a multi-billion
dollar loan from the Russian Federation.
By early December, Maidan Nezalezhnosti
was filled with over 800,000 pro-EU
protesters (who became collectively known
as the EuroMaidan movement) demanding
Yanukovych’s resignation specifically, and
a re-affirmation of Ukraine’s European
identity more broadly. After a series of
crackdowns on the movement through
both legislation and violent police action,
Kyiv saw its worst day of violence in nearly
seventy years, with over 88 deaths in 48
hours during mid-February. During the
conflict Yanukovych had disappeared into
hiding, and by the time he re-emerged, the
Verkhovna Rada had voted — in a move
that he quickly denounced as a coup — to
remove him from the Presidency.
In the political chaos of
March 2014, Vladimir Putin ordered the
deployment of Russian paramilitary troops
to the Crimean peninsula (comprised of
the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and
the city of Sevastopol) for its occupation
and eventual repatriation. Under
occupation, the Crimean government held
an independence referendum in which
almost 97% of voters opted to break off
from the Ukrainian state and become a
federal subject of the Russian Federation.
The next month, anti-Western rebels
in Ukraine’s easternmost provinces of
Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively referred
to as the Donbas) revolted against the
Ukrainian government and (receiving
significant military aid from Russia)
created two independent but tightly
connected microstates: the Donetsk and
Luhansk People’s Republics (referred

3 3
Left: Euromaidan protestor HQ, Kiev’s
Trade Unions building, on fire after a
police raid (Amakuha)
Below: Euromaidan protestors supporting
European integration in Kiev (Mstyslav
Chernov)
to as the DNR and LNR, respectively).
Russian and American arms were quickly
funneled into the Donbas, and the military
conflict sparked by the Donbas’ secession
continues to this day.
In February of 2015, both Ukraine
and Russia signed a ceasefire agreement
after a meeting in Minsk overseen by the
heads of state of both Germany and France.
The agreement — which became known
as Minsk II — mandated the removal of
all heavy weaponry from the Donbas,
the full withdrawal of Russian military
and mercenary troops from the Donbas,
internationally observed local elections
in both the DNR and LNR, and finally an
unconditional ceasefire between all parties
involved. However, the agreement was
almost immediately (but never officially)
abandoned by both parties, with the
Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe noting 400,000 violations in
2017 alone. Furthermore, in the nearly
five years since it was signed, none of the
provisions of the Minsk protocol have been
fully implemented.
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama
proudly announced that human history
had, in fact, come to an end. Observing
that the demolition of the Berlin Wall and
the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union
signaled neoliberalism’s victory in the
great ideological struggle of the Twentieth
Century, he wrote that democratic
capitalism had entered a state of global
ideological hegemony as the singularly
dominant political system of the modern
world. While this observation is fairly apt
in and of itself , the analysis and future
projections that Fukuyama extrapolates
proved to be controversial at best and flatly
ridiculousatworst.Fukuyamatheorizedthat
the end of the Cold War signaled “the end
point of mankind’s ideological evolution
and the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human
government”. The concurrent failures of
Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika to
liberalize the Soviet Union were taking
place as Fukuyama penned his essay. The
failure of America to build a functioning
liberal “Iraqracy” in the Middle East, the
rise of authoritarian post-Communist
powers in the People’s Republic of China
“Russian and
American arms
were quickly
funneled into
the Donbas,
and the military
conflict sparked
by the Donbas’
secession
continues to this
day.”

3 4
and the Russian Federation, and the recent
global trend towards far-right nationalism
all present radical shifts in the world order
that Fukuyama’s thesis has so far been
unable to account for, yet it remains the
dominant conceptual framework through
which International Relations is studied in
the Twenty-First Century.
Most American and European
media takes its analysis directly from
Fukuyama and adopts a romantic, surface-
level lens in explaining the Ukrainian crisis
that fails to place it within the appropriate
(if any) historical context. The popular
narrative was best summarized by educator
John Green in his 2014 video on the topic:
“A tyrannical leader who ordered the
murder of peaceful protesters was chased
from power and replaced by a government
that will transition Ukraine toward free and
fair elections, and Russia responded to
that by invading Ukraine”. This framework
envisions the EuroMaidan movement as
a popular revolt of the Ukrainian people
against an oppressive and autocratic
regime, which — to a large degree — it
was. This idea most directly supports
Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis as
it presents the EuroMaidan movement
as a critical step in Ukraine’s theoretical
progression from a post-Soviet nation to a
fully Westernized country on track to join
the ranks of Europe proper.
The problem with this
conception is that it seems to presume that
Ukrainian history began in 2013 and that
the protests were a direct reaction against
the abandoning of the EU association
agreement and nothing more. While this
narrative is certainly true to a degree, it
completely lacks nuance and falls apart
when one tries to place it within a broader
historical context. Firstly, viewing the crisis
as a popular revolt against Yanukovych
fails to provide an explanation for why
Yanukovych was put into power in the first
place and cannot contend with the reality
of Yanukovych’s popular election in 2010.
Similarly, this narrative offers no reasoning
as to why Yanukovych would have preferred
to integrate with Russia rather than with
the EU, and why the DNR and LNR rebel
factions felt the need to break away from
Kyiv and embrace Putin. Furthermore, the
conception of the anti-secession camp as
a groundswell movement of the Ukrainian
people at large voicing their support for
Western neoliberalism runs counter to
the reality that many support it out of
pure nationalism and have little regard for
modern liberalism, as evidenced by the
support of both right and left fringe groups
for the cause of independence (namely
the white nationalist organization turned-
military regiment Azov, and the neo-
Stalinist Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko).
In the Summer 1993 issue of
Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington (a
former instructor of Fukuyama’s) proposed
a conceptual framework that he referred to
as The Clash of Civilizations. This thesis,
itselfadirectresponsetoFukuyama’sEndof
History, asserts that social-cultural divides
shall be the driving force for international
conflict in the post-Soviet world, rather
than ideological disputes over support for
or rejection of liberal democracy. The fact
that this framework is little more than a
naked justification for Western military
expansion and the continued subjugation
“Firstly, viewing
the crisis as a
popular revolt
against Yanukovych
fails to provide an
explanation for why
Yanukovych was put
into power in the
first place...”

3 5
narrative, illustrated most prominently by online political media outlet Vox, starts with the
fact that “Russification” efforts by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union displaced Eastern
Ukraine’s indigenous populations (most notably with Stalin’s deportation of Crimea’s native
Tatars to the Uzbek SSR) and supplanted them with Russian settlers, who grew to ethnically
dominate the East while ethnic Ukrainians remained a majority in the West. This divide
has also shaped the linguistic geography of Ukraine, as the Russian language is commonly
(if not primarily) spoken in the eastern regions, yet is seldom heard in western Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern reaches were generally supportive of Yanukovych, while
the western, ethnically-Ukrainian regions were won by his opponent Yulia Tymochenko in
2010. From these facts, the media has generally drawn the conclusion that the civil war is
the ultimate end of this continued ethnolinguistic conflict, with neatly drawn pro-Russian
and pro-Ukrainian factions, emphasizing the notion that the conflict is primarily a civil war
and that Russian intervention is a secondary concern.
This framework has almost exactly the opposite faults of the romantic narrative:
it sees the existence of Ukraine’s linguistic cleavage as a guarantor of social (and eventual
military) conflict, yet envisions the crisis as an essentially apolitical struggle between
cultures with little to no consideration of Ukrainians’ material or political concerns. These
ethnic divisions had existed in Ukraine for centuries (and American commentators often
treat the supposition that ethnic divisions will inherently lead to mass violence as a given)
so there must be a reason that the conflict broke out in 2014 rather than at any other point
in Ukraine’s twenty-three years as an independent state.
Above: Ukranian soldier in
Donbass (Ministry of Defence of
Ukraine)
of the Global South to imperial violence
has not prevented (and has in fact,
according to Noam Chomsky and others,
been a primary force behind) it becoming
one of the dominant worldviews of the
American foreign policy establishment
and commentariat. Huntington abandons
the dialectical model human civilization to
instead focus on an essentially apolitical
idea of “cultures” as driving international
politics, managing to dispense with the one
legitimately sound piece of Fukuyama’s
analysis. In doing so, Huntington shuts
himself off from any materialist or
political conception of the international
system, seeming to assert that material
realities, political struggles, individual
leaders and parties, and all the other
commonly-accepted determining factors
of international conflict are in fact second
to an ill-defined (and inherently racial) idea
of “culture”.
Huntington’s thesis has given
rise to a second popular narrative that itself
runs counter to the Fukuyama-derived
romantic narrative, and instead focuses
on Ukraine’s demographic challenges. The

3 6
Yanukovych’s abandoning of the European
Unionisuniversallyidentifiedastheinciting
incident of the conflict and, despite being
technically correct, this characterization
has its own problems. Scrapping the
proposed E.U. Association Agreement was
in fact (insofar as any single event could
possibly be) the catalyst that drove Western
Ukrainians to revolt, yet the media has
not been able to answer why the Russian-
Ukrainians (who are generally understood
to have been the aggressors in the conflict)
were not similarly brought to revolt when
the deal was first announced. The failure to
account for the complexities surrounding
the demography of a nation of forty-five
million, this conception of the crisis fails to
provide a comprehensive explanation for
the situation in Ukraine.
In 2009 British theorist Mark
Fisher published what would soon
become a seminal book of the twenty-first
century left: Capitalist Realism: Is There
No Alternative?. Fisher’s titular notion of
Capitalist Realism gains its ethos from a
line attributed to Slazoj Žižek and Fredric
Jameson “it’s easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of capitalism”.
The concept as defined by Fisher is
“the widespread sense that not only is
capitalism the only viable political and
economic system, but also that it is now
impossible even to imagine a coherent
alternative to it.” Here, Fisher argues that
the “End of History” originally postulated
by Fukuyama is not — in fact — a natural
intellectual phenomenon borne out of
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but
rather the intended result of a conscious
ideological project (of which Fukuyama
himself is a part) propagated by Western
governments and capital interests to
destroy contemporary leftism since the
1960’s. The second central idea to Fisher’s
thought, that is itself inseparable from the
project of capitalist realism, is the slow
cancellation of the future. This concept,
explained by Tom Whyman is that: “Our
culture is systematically unable to produce
anything genuinely new. From the 1960s
until the early 1990s, Fisher claims, popular
culture was characterised by regular and
often startling upheavals. But since then,
even the best artists have relied on citation,
pastiche, nostalgia. This is symptomatic
of a political context which is unable to
imagine the possibility of a better future, a
world beyond our own.”
The formation of a modern
political culture in Ukraine allowed
for a near-perfect case study in which
the process of the future’s cancellation
could be viewed in real-time. Telling the
oral history of the Ukrainian left, Denys
Gorbach explains: “in the late 1980s, the
Soviet press used to call conservatives, who
supported a more authoritarian regime
and an end to the democratic process of
perestroika, ‘right wing’ (although formally
speaking, they were communists), and the
opposition (including conservative liberals
like Boris Yeltsin)—‘left wing’.” Thus,
from the moment that Ukraine became
independent, the insurgent left (such that
it existed) was placed at an epistemic and
existential disadvantage. The deliberate
confusion of the left and right wings
served to accelerate the neoliberal
liquidation of Ukrainian society, as the
left movement — then in the very earliest
stages of being developed — would have
to seek a self-definition independent of
the traditional left-right dichotomy seen
in the rest of the world. Considering also
Left: Protestors in Kiev’s
Independence Square during the
Orange Revolution (Serhiy)
Right: Ukranian President Volodymyr
Zelensky at his inauguration
in 2019 (The Presidential
Administration of Ukraine)

3 7
that any sort of mass political organizing
was unthinkable under Soviet rule, the
nascent left would have to simultaneously
establish itself as a viable political project
and develop the democratic organizing
principles necessary for any successful
left movement. This inherent political
chaos of the populist-democratic (and in
some cases, anarchic) left of the 1990’s
and onwards allowed a singular definition
of Ukrainian leftism to take hold, almost
by default. The conception that went on
to dominate the Ukrainian left was that of
a neo-Stalinist program rejecting liberal
democracy in favor of a Soviet-style (and
necessarily, ideologically and definitionally
fluid) autocracy. Despite the emergence of
an energetic and genuinely revolutionary
left edge amongst certain youth and
student political sects, “socialism and
communism are still closely tied to ideas
such as Slavic nationalism, a pro-Russian
geopolitical orientation, the police state,
the death penalty, social conservatism,
the defence of ‘canonical Orthodoxy’,
and the wholehearted approval of the
Soviet experience.” This Stalinist camp
was an inherently reactionary project,
characterized more by cultural nostalgia
than anything else, and thus shows the
presumptive victory of capitalist realism: a
political culture so contorted that even the
purported “revolutionary” faction cannot
produce any vision of the future and
must instead look backwards. Despite the
long-term weakness of neo-Stalinism as
a political project, it did provide the most
viable alternative to neoliberalism and the
ascendent criminal state in the early days
of the post-Soviet Ukraine, with the de
facto Communist-Socialist-Peasant Party
bloc holding a parliamentary majority
through the 1990’s. Necessarily dependent
on generational politics, the Stalinists
faced a perennial and existential threat of
demographic change, as their aging voter
base decreased in political relevance. The
attempted solution to this structural issue
— which ultimately ended up destroying
the Stalinist left — was the decision of the
Communist Party (which was later banned
in 2015 ) to fully lean into collaboration with
Yanukovych, culminating in their support
for the January 2014 anti-protest laws that
accelerated the collapse of Yanukovych’s
government. Thus, the petering out of the
neo-Stalinist project left Ukraine without
any alternative political operation robust
enough to present a real opposition to
neoliberalism.
In order to properly historicize
the crisis in Ukraine and its causes, one
must first acknowledge the role of the
2004 Presidential election and the ensuing
protest movement — later dubbed the
“Orange Revolution” — in shaping the
Ukrainian political atmosphere of the
2010’s. In the run-up to 2004, the Rada was
debating exempting then-President Leonid
Kuchma from the Constitution’s two-term
limit (arguing that the Constitution did not
apply to Kuchma, based on the fact that

3 8
it was only adopted in the second year of
his presidency) in order to allow him to
seek reelection for a second time. Upon
the failure of that measure, Kuchma’s
government sought to combat the rising
popularity of his opposition through
strengthening the position of the Prime
Minister (then held by Yanukovych),
orchestrating Yanukovych’s Presidential
bid, allegedly poisoning the independent
opposition figure and former Prime
Minister Viktor Yushchenko, and finally
executing widespread ballot fraud — both
direct and indirect — in order to ensure
Yanukovych’s victory over Yushchenko.
Almost immediately after the official
results declared Yanukovych the President-
elect, reports from various international
observers including the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, the
United Nations, and the United States
identified evidence of Kuchma’s rigging
of the election through voter suppression,
voter intimidation, and deliberate
ballot miscounting. These revelations
sparked outrage amongst the Ukrainian
public, and opposition leaders including
Yushchenko and Tymoshenko lead mass
protests in Kyiv that soon spread out to
the rest of the country. The movement
organized civil disobedience through sit-
ins and general strikes for a period of two
months demanding a second election.
Within one month, the Supreme Court
ordered a second runoff election between
Yanukovych and Yushchenko, in which
Yuschenko was ultimately declared the
victor.
Despite being swept into the
Presidencywithamassivepopularmandate,
President Yushchenko and his government
failed almost entirely at instituting the
liberal democratic reforms that he first
sought to enact. Forward-thinking but
politically unskilled, Yushchenko soon
found himself reliant upon the oligarch
class that Kuchma had created and his
dismissal of the once and future Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko — who was
seen as being more true to the revolution’s
ideals — colored Yushchenko as being
yet another establishment politician in
the public eye. This dismissal further
spelled further doom for a united anti-
establishment movement by prompting
Tymoshenko to launch a second campaign
for Prime Minister through a double
offensive, taking aim at both Yanukovych
and Yushchenko. This political infighting
and its resultant erosion of the President-
Prime Minister relationship prevented
any meaningful reforms from taking place
under Yushchenko’s administration and
quickly spoiled dispersed the energy that
had propelled Yushchenko’s revolution
to victory in 2004. So distraught was the
liberal coalition that Yanukovych was
able to take the offices of Prime Minister
in 2006 and President in 2010, beating
Tymoshenko in both races.
The conquest of Yanukovych
represented — to quote Fukuyama —
“the total exhaustion of viable systematic
alternatives” to his personal brand of
liberal-conservative oligarchy. The failure
of Yushchenko and Tymoshenko to
accomplish anything of note (specifically
the dismantling of the Ukrainian criminal
state) after being brought into power with
one of the strongest popular mandates
of any political leaders that decade
discredited the democratic center and
allowed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions
to orient the country towards Russia.
The liberal revolutionary faction had
been completely unable to motivate their
coalition to turn up to the polls after years
of failure, and disenchanted Orange-
era voters were left with seemingly little
reason to continue to choose one from
a set of seemingly equivalent oligarch-
backed establishment figures. However,
Yanukovych’s announcement to back out of
the EU association agreement represented
a swift and total re-ordering not only of
Ukrainian policy but national identity, a
change too drastic and sudden for even
the most disillusioned liberals to accept.
With this move, Yanukovych had stirred
up what little revolutionary furor there was
leftover from the liberal demonstrations
of 2006, as well as provided a near perfect
target at which Ukrainians’ near-universal
dissatisfaction oligarchy and establishment
could be directed.
By 2019, three political
currents — the complete failure of the
liberals and conservatives to effectively
steer national politics, the inability of
the independent left to build a viable
political alternative in the face of popular
rejection of Yanukovych’s brand of
liberal-conservatism, and the resultant
perception of homogeneity between
the elected parties as interchangeable
parts of “the establishment” — had
quietly boiled together into an especially
precarious political atmosphere. This
inherently unstable (yet not, in any sense,
“The conquest
of Yanukovych
represented — to
quote Fukuyama
— “the total
exhaustion of
viable systematic
alternatives” to his
personal brand of
liberal-conservative
oligarchy.”

3 9
revolutionary) climate gave rise to a
new strain of libertarian-populism that
advances neoliberal governance while
nominally railing against its consequences,
similar to the existence of conservatism
as the self-rejection of classical liberalism.
This supposedly non-ideological position
received its clearest articulation in the
form of popular political comedy television
series Servant of the People (alternatively
translated as “Servant of the Nation”).
The significance of Servant of
the People as a political entity cannot be
understated.
The show achieved such
popularity and political resonance that its
lead, Volodymyr Zelensky (at the time a
stand-up comedian with no formal political
experience), had been a frontrunner in
the 2019 Presidential election as early as
six months before even announcing his
campaign. His independent and social
media-focused campaign delivered
Zelensky an impressive 73% victory over
incumbent President Petro Poroshenko
(who Zelensky himself admitted to voting
for in 2014 ). The series provided the
platform for Zelensky to establish himself,
it is the namesake for the party he formed
to extend his initial victory into success
in Parliamentary snap elections, and
many of the staff involved in the show’s
production went on to gain positions
in Zelensky’s government. Through his
social media presence and campaign
Zelensky constructed a sort of hyper-
reality (the ontological state that Umberto
Eco famously called “the authentic fake”)
wherein he appears in-costume as the
fictional President Goloborodko or
where the real Zelensky is interviewed by
Stanislav Boklan (who portrayed the show’s
fictional Prime Minister) , shattering any
conceivable possibility that Goloborodko
is anything other than a fictionalized ideal
of Zelensky himself. Thus, in this current
early stage of the Zelensky government,
the show offers the clearest articulation
of Zelensky’s thought until consequential
policy is fleshed out.
Servant of the People centers
on middle-class history teacher Vasiliy
Goloborodko who is thrust into online
virality after a video of him going on
a passionate rant against government
corruption, and is soon after unwittingly
elected President of Ukraine. The driving
narrative of the show is a chiefly populist
one: President Goloborodko attempts to
maintain an ordinary life in spite of his
political elevation, while also seeking to
take on the political establishment and
construct a government that (to repeat an
oft-used neoliberal slogan) works for the
people. Central to the show’s ideology is
that in seeking to combat the corruption
and oligarchy inherent to the Ukrainian
criminal state Goloborodko rarely targets
actual oligarchs or the levers of capital (it
is worth noting that Servant of the People
is broadcast on the 1+1 network, which
happens to be owned by Ihor Kolomoyskyi,
the second-wealthiest individual in Ukraine
), rather prefering to pin the problems of
corruption on bureaucrats and elected
representatives. The central message
and appeal of the series, as explained by
Zelensky is that “Ukrainians who want
positive changes can see a bit of themselves
in our show’s characters, [who represent a
change from the old order]. If a teacher can
become President in our TV series, maybe
a great surgeon can someday become a
Minister of Health, or a cool IT specialist
turns into the head of the information
security department.”
Thus,theshow(andbyextension,
Zelensky himself) puts forth a libertarian-
populist worldview that is coherent only in
its opposition to the “establishment”. The
now-dominant political narrative is that
Ukraine has been nickel-and-dimed by the
post-Soviet kleptocracy, leaving its citizenry
effectively politically disenfranchised
and downwardly-mobile. Yet, Zelensky
lacks any sort of class analysis and is thus
unable to develop a fully-formed critique
of the Ukrainian criminal state, and is
then left without an answer as to how
or why it emerged. In Zelensky’s mind,
the kleptocracy is simply a collection of
disconnected individual actors rather than

4 0
an overarching political superstructure;
therefore corruption is merely a result
of having the wrong people in charge.
Under this framework, two solutions
become clear: emphasizing technocratic
organizational reforms with a populist
bent that seeks to put “normal people”
into government; and the destruction of
state institutions and bureaucracy. The
political incoherence of this narrative and
its resultant prescriptions can be seen most
concretely in Zelensky’s large-scale effort to
privatizestateenterprises(infact,thelargest
offloading of government assets seen in
any post-Soviet country in recent memory
), despite privatization’s deep unpopularity
and the fact that it has historically been
considered one of the leading factors in
the development of Ukraine’s oligarchy.
Thus, when the supposed elite group that
has been dismantling Ukrainian society is
seen to be exclusive to the government and
does not extend into the corporate world
or private wealth, this populist program
becomes a tool to solidify rather than
combat corporate control of society.
Just three days before being
elected President, Zelensky gave an
interview in which he characterized Stepan
Bandera — Nazi collaborator and leader
of the 1930’s right-wing paramilitary group
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
— as “a hero for a certain percentage of
Ukrainians, and this is normal and cool.
He was one of those who defended the
freedom of Ukraine.” It is in positions
like this one (compounded by his general
political incoherence and unquestioning
support for laissez-faire capitalism)
that the true danger of the Zelensky
government lies. As an explicit nationalist,
Zelensky draws upon an inherent cultural
nostalgia, yet unlike the left he is unable to
connect that feeling to the Stalin era due
to his whole-hearted anti-communism
and commitment to the idea of a “new
Ukraine.” This vision is, in keeping with
the rest of the Zelensky program, more
or less nonsensical. Relient on cultural
nostalgia yet unable to link it to the Stalin
era, Zelensky’s idea of national identity is
inherently muddled and thus gives way to
fascist tendencies.
Further confusing his sense
of nationalism is how Zelensky defines
Ukrainian identity against Russia. For
example, he has been open to a policy
of linguistic “Ukrainization” whereby
restrictions are placed Russian-language
TV and radio programmes. At the same
time, however, he offered a symbolic
gesture to the anti-western factions of
Russian-Ukrainians by choosing Leonid
Kuchma to lead the Ukrainian delegation
in the 2019 peace talks with the DNR and
LNR. The confusion over this emergent
national identity threatens to heighten
the existing conflict by alternately
bolstering and outraging both sides.
Further exacerbating the issue, is that
the conflict is not, of course, limited to
Ukraine. As a military struggle between
Putin’s Russia and a nominally liberal-
democratic state, prolonging the conflict
directly serves the interests of the United
States. US Representative and leading
Democrat Adam Schiff, for example, has
been continuously advocating (on behalf
of multinational weapons corporations)
for continued American intervention
and escalation in Ukraine. Further, one
of the most notable moments of the
Donald Trump impeachment hearings
came when Timothy Morrison — former
Senior Director for Europe and Russia on
Trump’s National Security Council — said:
“the United States aids Ukraine and her
people so they can fight Russia over there
and we don’t have to fight Russia over
here.” International (particularly form the
American security state) influence and
interests in the Donbas conflict threaten to
exacerbate the situation, perhaps beyond
even the control of the Ukrainian state.
While the Donbas conflict
continues, it has bred a second crisis of
the far-right that Zelensky and the mass
media have been largely silent on: the rise
of the fascist paramilitary known as the
Azov Battalion. Azov is an openly white-
supremacist and Ukrainian nationalist
street militia that was officially brought
under the Ukrainian National Guard to
combat separatists in the DNR and LNR
(making Ukraine the world’s only military
to employ an open Nazi contingent).
Azov has, since being welcomed into the
military, received tactical and material
support from the American military.
Further, journalists have uncovered direct
ties linking Azov and other militant white
supremacist factions to the all levels of the
Ukrainian government, including a former
Deputy Minister of the Interior, a former
Speaker of Parliament, and wide swathes
of the newly-formed National Police. In
the immediate aftermath of EuroMaidan,
one Azov member told The Guardian that
the police “could not do anything against
the peaceful protesters on Maidan; they are
hardly going to withstand armed fighting
units,” and continued to prognosticate that
in the coming months Poroshenko would
be killed and replaced by a dictator.
Leon Trotsky described fascism
as a governing structure that emerges
“when the capitalists find themselves
unable to govern and dominate with the
help of democratic machinery,” which
seems to directly mirror the present path of
the Ukrainian state. It would, of course, be
irresponsible to say that Zelensky is a fascist
or even that Ukraine is headed towards
a fascist regime. However, the present
situation sees liberal democrats becoming
increasingly corporate and ineffectual,
seeming to cycle through the same
motions and repeat the same mistakes as
in years past. At the same time, however,
the right becomes less uncomfortable
with corruption, more disillusioned with
electoral democracy, and more willing to
engage in openly fascistic street violence.
Zelensky himself seems to heighten both of
these problems, and at this moment seems
to have little ability to divert the state from
its increasingly likely collision with the far-
right.
Right: Skyline
of Kiev (public
domain)

IS NONVIOLENCE ENOUGH FOR LEBANON?
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4 2
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