Introduction to the 'Hacked World Order'

Cyber security and its appending concepts - among others cyber weapons and cyber space - is no more a new idea, but the ways in which to approach the conundrum it creates is still work in process.

The Hacked World Order by Adam Segal initiates a discussion about the various aspects involving the cyber security nowadays, which browses both the technical aspects and the diplomatic implications of the new realities. And, as usual in the case with the researches with a generalistic outreach, it doesn't offer enough insights into the specificities of any of the topics but at least outlines the main topics that can be eventually researched throughout later.

The cyber world of tomorrow may be guarded by a large coalition which involves both private and state actors, from the companies in Silicon Valley to the newly created state institutions in charge with such issues. The collaboration mechanisms and technical ways of control aren't settled yet and not necessarily in favor of the free trade of information (see the case of state-filtered Internet in China and most recently the complete blackout for a couple of days during the mass protests in Iran). But both state and private actors are both perpetrators and victims of cyber attacks and a smooth mechanism aimed at protecting the state and its individual citizens in terms of privacy and freedoms is unrealistic.

A cyber world based on trust is possible only in a global political system based on trust. Edward Snowden revelations regarding how the USA through the NSA is practically have the capacity of keeping under tight control everyone, regardless of the importance from the security point of view (although the real time capacity of processing those humongous amount data is highly problematic if not impossible) broke the fragile trust between old time allies. Coalitions of likeminded countries are possible, but trust doesn't operate as long there is the temptation of cheap and relatively risk-free information gathering. The new army of electronic spies has other rules and moves faster than, for instance protection system aimed to guarantee the human rights.

The Hacked World Order offers a couple of directions and concepts to follow further - for example how the cyber issues are integrated into the everyday flow of foreign relations and international treaties. Not all chapters are equal and some are just reproducing well-known cases such as the Stuxnet virus. The information used is solid although there are rarely clear conclusion regarding an issue or another. Maybe this is how the cyber world operates at the intellectual level.

Note: I've listened to the audio version of this book.

Rating: 4 stars

'The Elite Charade of Changing the World'

The modern elites seem to be broken. The fundament of those elites and their reproduction principles seem to be widely rejected. But this rejection means also directing votes towards anti-elites, populist candidates, such Donald Trump of America, who in fact altough a counter-elite is nevertheless also part of the upper - money-fuelled - class. 

Anand Giridharadas' Winners Take All. The Elite Charade of Chaging the World is focused on the American case - with its high concentration of wealth and prestige among the elites - but it can easily serve as a guide for any other developed country. 

The situation, according to Giridharadas: the gap between the upper and lower layers of the society only gets bigger; winners know the problem but want to preserve their status quo; instead of trying to change the system, the member of the elites are trying to rather redistribute their wealth through charities instead of putting more efforts into redesigning the system completely. 

Is it a sign of a failure of participatory democracy? Or rather there is a need to reinvigorate citizenship? Or to improve the level of trust into public intellectuals whose ideas seem to be often subsidized by the same members of the establishment they are supposed to criticize?

The book is very interesting for the detailed landscape offered and the overview of various aspects related to the lack of balance of the system of distribution of wealth and power nowadays. It questions this system by simply displaying its failures. But when thoughts are changed into commodities - part of the ways in which the system reproduces itself at the intellectual elites level - it is hard to hope in a due change.

This book is a warning of how far things are in terms of resistance to genuine change. The fact that the priviledged few are throwing up some crumbles of money to the many unpriviledged is sometimes a simple PR spin that doesn't bring social justice, it rather confirms an inequality status. In the American case, donations for charity involve tax exemptions therefore paying for generous causes is done for a very specific non-charitable reason. 

It is a good start if you want to understand the map of intentions and interests among elites nowadays. How the change may actually occur is a topic for another book, maybe.

Who are 'The Arabists'?

I went familiar with the writings of Robert D. Kaplan through his Balkan travelogue Balkan Ghosts - part of it I translated for a feuilleton published by a newspaper I was working on, in a time when the Balkans were on interest, although deeply misunderstood - which I've largely found relativistic, sensationalist and written in a very simplistic way. It rather has the style of blog posts, at a time when there were no blogs around, written fast, to cater an audience hunger for colourful descriptions and easy explanations of century-long conflicts. Those were the times...

Kaplan is a favorite of many South-Eastern European leaders who happily invited for an insightful chat, especially when they hope to have their name mentioned in his next travelogue, wrote also about South-Eastern Asia and went embedded with US troops in Iraq. He has the knowledge and the right connections for obtaining direct reliable information but don't expect his writings to be academically insightful. You might get the shape of things, but the content must be filled with something different if looking for a solid picture.

About The Arabists, which traces the roots of the Foreign Services elites in the Middle East, I had no idea it exists, until browsing a collection of books about this part of the world. The book was written at the end of the 1980s and republished. What is fantastic about this book is the big number of references and interviews regarding various diplomatic appointees in various positions in the Middle East. Not few of them were children of methodist protestant missionaries sent by their churches to converts Arab populations to Christianism in the 18th-19th century. In some places, like in what used to be called the 'big Syria', which included Lebanon of today, those missionaries clashed with the French representatives represented by the Catholic Church. Children of those missionaries were eventually born in the Middle East, spoke Arabic, returned in the State and were included in the white Protestant elites. They entered the Foreign Service but eventually their interest decreased and went to explore other 'exotic' part of the world, like Africa.

The Protestant religious activism shaped at a great extent the political activism and Arab nationalism, including through the university network created, such as the American Universities - in Lebanon and Cairo, that still remain important institutions of high education in this part of the world. Americans themselves prefer to study there for a full immersion into the elitist version of the local societies and for improving the language. The intellectual life was developed under the Protestant spell. For instance, the first Arabic printing press in Syria was brought by American missionaries to Beirut from Malta in 1834. 

But who really are those 'Arabists'. According to Robert D. Kaplan since the early 1950s onwards, there were two definitions that will exist side by side. One, for the use of the Foreign Service and the Protestant missionaries, referred to 'someone who spoke Arabic well and had substantial living experience in the Arab world'. The other one, public and according to the author embraced by the 'Jewish public' was: 'Someone who loved Arabs, often because he hated Jews'. The latter acception prevailed sometimes in the US diplomatic approaches to the Middle East peace process, including through the policies of the American embassy in Tel Aviv - very knowledgeable in Arab affairs, speaking the language, but not Hebrew (which is spoken in only one country, anyway). I might add that the current pathos of the US administration towards Israel is often based also on a religious basis, the neo-evangelical missionarism which is equally toxic and anti-Semitic in its origin.

However, that 'love' for the Arabic speaking realm has some limits, many of them. It did not have the state-building outreach of the Brits - who, like Lawrence of Arabia or Gertrude Bell were genuinely believing that they can change the course of events and the geopolitical configuration of the region. Many were just too desillusioned with their Western bubble and were looking for an exotic connection to the outside world. They pretended not only to 'understand the Arabs' but they assumed that their disgust toward the unreliable political elites and corruption would in fact help the local societies to change. More often those diplomats chose to change their location when apparently things were not following their designs.

Following the end of the Cold War, when the local - especially Republican - American elites lost their grasp of the realities as the binary US/Russia (which generously got involved in the elite building in many places in the Middle East, Syria being one of them) conflict ceased to exist. The life of the Arabists fell the victim of the 'rampant shallowness and careerism and the sterilization of embassy life. The Foreign Service, after all, mirrors the society from which it draws it recruits, and these recruits are consumed with status and advancement and less concerned with the subject of their expertise that their predecessors were'. 

Robert D. Kaplan avoids making any conclusion. But it is enough to read only for one day the flows of news regarding America's adventures in the Middle East to see how low the standards sunk. It can't get any lower. 

'Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum'

Identity is a nightmare. Either you belong to the majority, therefore in a position of power, or to a minority/migration community, identity is self-explanatory. You have to permanently confirm who you are and request others to subscribe to the group narrative. Request by force, if necessary, as often happened in national states in the last decades. 

Germany is a special case within the European context, given the post-war pressure towards 'behaving' in a more inclusive way and the identity split in two states. Did it matter in the end, when it comes to the national identity? Adding the term 'Heimat' - that German country defined by the 19th century philosophy which means more than a geographical determination - to a ministry - 'Ministerium des Innen für Bau und Heimat' - plus the sometimes physical aggressive outburst of the far-right in some parts of the country - Sachsen is a notorius example, but unfortunately not the only one - requests a different answer.

What does it mean to live in the Heimat? Authors with foreign-sounding names, some with a different skin colour, many born in Germany and with a German passport are sharing their so-called 'multicultural' experiences in Germany - and one in Austria - in a remarkable volume edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.

At certain extents there are the experiences of everyone having lived here, with a non-German name, a slight accent, which looks different, doesn't have blonde hair and blue eyes. How many times I had to answer the obsessive 'Where are you from', from people I've met only for a couple of seconds. How my Indian friend, on a train to Leipzig, was stared at by a family whose child asked her mother: 'She can't be German, isn't it?' and answered 'Of course not'.

Indeed, this Heimat is a nightmare. The essays are collected under individual labels: Work, Sex, Identity etc. Although at least since 2001 there are institutional structures created which confirm that Germany is a 'Einwanderungsland' - country of immigration - the institutional racism (in schools,  police, other state structures including Finanzamt or Burgeramt) is growing. How fast the 'integration policies' went and at what extent they failed it is another discussion, but reading those essays makes a 'tour de force' displaying how deep is discrimination and racism thinking into the everyday life and local mentalities.

The answer is not to 'go back from where did you come from' as me and many others 'migrants' in Germany are often told. The answer to be persistent and courageous enough to not let such voices become the majority.