Critical State: Wilders and Out
If you read just one thing … read about Geert Wilders’s trips to Hungary!
VSquare has an investigation into Geert Wilders’s trips to Hungary. Hungary paid for Wilders’s extensive security, and the far-right Dutch politician traveled with protection “under the auspices of Viktor Orbán’s elite bodyguards.”
“Given Wilders’s frequent travels to Hungary, his need for strict security, and TEK’s involvement, Hungarian taxpayers are likely paying a hefty bill so the Dutch politician can safely vacation by the Danube,” the report suggests.
The investigation also goes into the far-right politician’s connections to Hungary: his wife is Hungarian, but beyond that, he’s known Orbán since the 1990s. Wilders has also known Zsolt Szabo, another far-right politician of Hungarian descent now in the Dutch government, for as long. Wilders’s book, published several years ago, was a bestseller in Hungary (in the Netherlands, it was unable to find a publisher). And, for his anti-immigration efforts, Wilders received a Hungarian Order of Merit in 2022. Wilders spoke at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Budapest in 2024 — and that same year, his party, Party for Freedom (PVV), joined Patriots for Europe, Orbán’s party group in the European Parliament.
If You Read One More Thing: Who’s Afraid of Democracy?'
Delali Adogla-Bessa wrote about protests against illegal mining in Ghana — and the political elite’s enduring fear of an engaged citizenry.
Notable organizations called for action against illegal mining in September. After that, Adogla-Bessa writes, “Groups not heard from in years crawled out of crevices to demand that the Nana Akufo-Addo administration, which many believe to be complicit, finally show commitment to protecting Ghana’s rivers from poisoning by illegal gold mining. A local broadcaster even hosted a six-hour marathon, during which some of these groups were granted airtime to voice their calls. They care, right? Or do they merely appear to care?”
There have been police crackdowns, which, per Adogla-Bessa, is unsurprising. But “the real disappointment has been a dearth of tangible support in the face of the blatant abuses of protestors championing a call the rest of the country appeared to support.” Voting out the current political party is also not enough to stop the political class from “pillaging” the country: “We’ve always conflated elections with accountability, kicking politicians out of office with the billions they looted so they can bide their time until we get tired of the government we replaced them with. Sustained acts of protest seem to be the last resort to ensure accountable governance. Ghanaians can no longer settle for appearing to care. Moral fortitude must replace respectability so we can meaningfully challenge the political class.”
Waning Influence
For The Nation, Juan Cole writes that America’s influence in the Middle East is undercut by its hypocrisy.
Cole asserts that the US has not met its own goals in the region, writing: “Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a ‘rules-based’ international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason.” That reason, he writes, is US President Joe Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu.
He adds that Washington’s aims are further undercut by hypocrisy: “After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians.”
Deep Dive: Nazis and Collaborators
In a new paper at Political Psychology, Fiona Kazarovytska, Roland Imhoff, and Gilad Hirschberger consider the question of how Europeans consider their group’s role during Nazi occupation, and how “different role representations relate to defensive responses aimed at protecting the ingroup from threat.”
The authors cite Primo Levi who coined the term “gray zone” to describe the area of existence inhabited by those who were neither clear oppressors or clearly oppressed: “Though not responsible for initiating the Holocaust, some governments and parts of the population committed considerable atrocities as collaborators of the occupiers." Meanwhile, others resisted the German occupation regime and became victims themselves.
The authors offer the categories of group representations and perceptions: willing collaborators, who disliked Jews and wanted to help Nazis; forced collaborators, who did terrible things mainly because they were forced or threatened; and victim-heroes, who fought back and tried to save Jews.
Some previous literature assumes that “representations of the ingroup's role are susceptible to identity-protective motives,” but other literature “gives reason to question that group members will defensively modify their reconstructions of the ingroup's role.”
The authors analyzed data from nine European samples across eight countries. There were a total of 5474 respondents. They measured “emotions associated with historical wrongdoing” and “intergroup defensiveness.”
The authors offer two predictions: identity threat and identity management. In the former, to guard against threat, “group members may engage in a range of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses aimed at protecting the ingroup from threat, known as historical defensiveness.”
Yet, in the latter, “group members may not completely deny their group's historical responsibility, but at least to some extent, acknowledge willing collaboration, they may also admit associated shame, guilt, and moral fear.”
In six contexts, they found that “lay representations as willing collaborators were associated with negative collective emotions and correlated with victim-directed negativity, whereas victim-hero representations showed no such connections.”
The reaction was more mixed in the remaining three samples. In Austria, Hungary, and Poland, they observed both positive and negative correlations with defensive responses. Forced collaboration actually mirrored the pattern of willing collaboration. In other words, those who believe the Nazis forced their group to collaborate still felt shame or "moral fear."
The paper also found “consistent support for an identity management pattern in the majority of contexts. In contrast, findings in Hungary, Poland, and Austria were partially compatible with both identity threat and identity management accounts.”
The authors feel their findings add “to the literature on social representations of history and their relevance for present-day national identities.” Future research, they suggest, could go beyond the context of Nazi occupation.
Show Us the Receipts
Nicholas Frakes talked to experts who said full-scale war between Israel and Lebanon was already a reality, not just a possibility. As Israel has dealt “several major blows to Hezbollah since the pager bombings, south Lebanon and the Bekaa region have endured widespread destruction. Tens of thousands of people have fled to regions of Lebanon further north in the hopes of finding some sense of refuge away from the bombings,” Frakes wrote. Hezbollah responded with attacks that, Frakes said, only increased Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon. One expert warned that “while Hezbollah might be weakened from the recent Israeli attacks and the deaths of much of its senior leadership, Israel could lose some of its advantages with Hezbollah. The Lebanese armed group is more capable of fighting in the south against soldiers on the ground rather than jets and drones in the air.”
Michael Fox wrote about Guaraní, an indigenous Paraguayan language that still endures to this day. “Today, nearly 300,000 Indigenous Guaraní still live in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. In some of these countries, their language has influenced Portuguese and Spanish. But in Paraguay, Guaraní is spoken as an official language alongside Spanish. Most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní as their first language, whether they are of Indigenous descent or not.” Fox wrote that there are a few theories about how it was preserved, but one is that, in the 1860s, when Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay invaded Paraguay, Paraguayan women spoke Guaraní as a matter of survival and passed it along to their children.
Jeff Lundun described a play by Belarus’s Free Theatre, banned in its own country, about an Olympic basketball star turned dissident — played by its protagonist. “Katsiaryna (Katya) Snytsina was a professional basketball player in London when the Belarus Free Theatre recruited her to star in a play about her life. Snytsina, an Olympian who is originally from Belarus, has not returned to the country after becoming an outspoken critic of the Belarusian government’s imprisonment and murder of protesters after its disputed 2020 presidential election. She is also out as a lesbian, which is stigmatized in the country.”
Well-Played
No, no, no.
Go on …
Megalopolis, in theaters now.
Putting the “boo” in book.
It’s come to this.
It’s hearty soup season.
Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.