reflectivepundit

Going Back to the Middle Ages to Overturn Roe v. Wade

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Every woman and every man appalled by the prospect of stark limitations to or prohibition of abortion rights as spelled out in the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s radical opinion should read the document. While news reports and commentary following the release of the draft by POLITICO summarize the opinion and the actual consequences of the expected majority ruling, the details in Alito’s arguments and justifications are interesting. Most of all his claim that the Court must be “guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation's concept of ordered liberty…”

For history and tradition Alito does not merely rely on the U.S. Constitution and the fact that the Founders’ document does not spell out abortion rights. He relies on and cites from English Common Law in sketching the long history of males condemning abortion as punishable murder. Here are some examples from Alito’s and most likely soon the Court majority’s opinion:

• Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.

• Sir Edward Coke's 17th-century treatise likewise asserted that abortion of a quick child was “murder” if the “childe be born alive” and a “great misprision” if the “childe dieth in her body.”

• In 1732, for example, Eleanor Beare was convicted of “destroying the Foetus in the Womb” of another woman and “there-by causing her to miscarry." For that crime and another “misdemeanor,” Beare was sentenced to two days in the pillory and three years’ imprisonment.

Noting that the American colonies followed the lead of English Common Alito writes that “the few cases available from the early colonial period corroborate that abortion was a crime.”

So, if you do not like the coming overturning of Roe v. Wade, its, history, stupid—English Common Law and the failure of the Founding Fathers to grant abortion rights in the Constitution.

Following the news about Alito’s draft opinion last night, there were spontaneous protests in front of the Supreme Court and elsewhere. It was not surprising to see not only women but also men defending the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.

Addressing women, Alito writes, “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

On this point, Alito is right.

Pro Choice women have electoral and political power—and so do Pro Choice men. They and others who could have their established rights repealed by the New Far Right in the near future have still the opportunity to use the ballot to counter the reactionary forces.

The next, most important battle ground will be the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House. If all three institutions are controlled by the GOP following the 2024 elections, federal legislation along Alito’s opinion will follow. Not only with respect to abortion rights.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and the Weak Links in the Western Bloc

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The much-praised unity of the European-North American bloc since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has in reality weak links. The weakest is Hungary, a member of both the EU and NATO. The country’s newly reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a long-time admirer of Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin and a constant critic of EU and NATO leaders in Brussels.

Emboldened by his election victory last Sunday, Orban used his acceptance speech for a rhetorical slap in the direction of Brussels. And three days later, this Wednesday, he broke with the EU’s refusal to pay for Russian gas and oil with rubles. “If the Russians ask for it, we will pay in rubles,” he told reporters. While other neighbors of Ukraine facilitate NATO weapon transports into the embattled country, Hungary has refused to cooperate.

One wonders, whether Hungary is such an important part of EU and NATO that Orban can violate the European Union’s agreements, laws, and court rulings designed to strengthen democracy. After all, Orban destroyed Hungary’s developing democracy and replaced it with so-called illiberal democracy, a benign code for autocracy. While the democratic institutions are still in place, they are completely controlled by Orban and his Fidesz party.

Yet, along with Poland, which was before the Ukraine invasion moving to become a full illiberal democracy as well, Hungary receives the highest payments from the European Union.

As for the United States and NATO, things are not going well either: 63 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday, Tuesday, against a non-binding resolution in support of NATO. And that in the face of the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine.

These are the main points of the resolution.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) reaffirms its unequivocal support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an alliance founded on democratic principles;

(2) calls on the President to use the voice and vote of the United States to adopt a new Strategic Concept for NATO that is clear about its support for shared democratic values and committed to enhancing NATO’s capacity to strengthen democratic institutions within NATO member, partner, and aspirant countries; and

(3) calls on the President to use the voice and vote of the United States to establish a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters.

Why in heaven did close to one third of the GOP conference vote “no?”

They took exception to the following provision in the resolution’s full text:

“Whereas democracies across the alliance face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism [emphasis added]…”

The naysayers, close to one third of the GOP conference, rejected the highlighted part of the above sentence because they perceived it as a criticism of Hungary and Poland by the Liberal Left. After all, hard-core Trumpian GOPers admire those countries’ illiberal democracies and strive to introduce their authoritarian models right here at home.

These GOPers are fans of strongmen. And, of course, of one particular would-be strongman who does not support NATO and endorsed Orban's latest candidacy.

NATO and EU should enlist Ex-Chancellor Merkel as Peace-Maker

By Brigitte L. Nacos

As the Ukrainian military and civil defense units fight the invading Russian military effectively, Vladimir Putin’s decision to place his military’s nuclear forces on high alert heightens the threat of his use of nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian theater of war—and perhaps beyond. In this critical situation, all efforts must be made to find a peaceful solution. And the best person to enlist for what seems a mission impossible is in my view Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, She  speaks Russian fluently und knows Putin better than any other Western politician. Her ability to reason like the trained scientist she is would be a good basis of discussions with the usually rational but more recently highly emotional Russian leader.  

The unity displayed by NATO and EU and allies in other parts of the globe in their swift opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine must have come as an unprecedented shock to Putin. The Russian president must have underestimated how effective President Biden’s repair of the U.S.-European relationship has been. He reversed his predecessor’s efforts to destroy NATO as we know it and weaken the EU and thereby strengthened Western democracies so that they now can resist Russian expansionism forcefully without direct participation in the military hostilities.

Two weeks into this war, the Ukrainian military and civilian Territorial Defense Forces have stalled Russia’s plan to occupy its neighbor. The unprecedented sanctions against Russia have isolated the country cutting it mostly off the global markets. This has already resulted in hardship for the Russian public.

As Thomas Friedman writes in today’s New York Times, “Russia has no good way out [of this war]…” And that is the problem. Not only for Putin but for the Western alliance against him. Strongman do not want to accept defeat, cannot accept a loss. That’s bad enough, as we learned following the 2020 presidential election in the U.S., in a country in which the institutions of government still work as supposed. But in an autocracy with a sole ruler on top there are no built-in restrains. Thus, the danger of Putin’s end game that may include the deployment to weapons of mass destruction.

The frequent and long phone conversations between Putin and various Western leaders are signs that there may be room for actual negotiations. But that would need a most skilled negotiator.

Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel would be the best possible choice!

The goal must be to find a solution that guarantees Ukraine’s independence but at the same time offers Putin a way out with the ability of justifying the war and its end result as something positive to his people  

One Picture Says More Than a Thousand Words

Mr. Putin and his Advisors in Monday (Feb 29^th) Meeting

Source: Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: The first World Wide Web War Is a Double-Edged Sword

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, every generation has utilized well-established and often brand-new communication technologies.

In the last fifty years or so, the breakthrough of live TV coverage over long distances resulted in news coverage of dramatic events that the whole world could watch. The horrific assault on members of Israel’s national team at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich was watched by an estimated audience of 500 million people around the world. The satellite coverage of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square catapulted CNN into a premier international all-news network. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Al Qaeda’s leadership boasted that the size of the global news audience had set a new record. Carefully orchestrated by the Pentagon, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was reported “live” by news teams embedded in military units.

And now, as Thomas L. Friedman writes in today’s column in the New York Times, people around the world watch “World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web.”

Friedman is right, individuals with smartphones capture the cruelty of war, upload images of horror and bravery on TikTok and other social media platforms, and make all of this available to people around the globe. The gatekeepers of traditional news organization or the censors of authoritarian regimes are being bypassed in the social media world.

But whereas the pure multitude of pictures and video clips captured by Ukrainians on their smartphones writes a new chapter in war reporting, the same platforms are available to professional propagandists. In the current conflict, Russian propagandists spin the news in both traditional and social media in carefully tailored narratives that counter the episodic images of smartphone photography. And the Ukrainian authorities may spin as well.

In sharp contrast, the uploaded images and sounds of smartphone owners present brutality and violence in multi millions of snippets in social media. It is a double-edged sword: raw and unfiltered images on the one hand and one the other hand a complete lack of contextual information that would allow  assessments of the snippets on the screen.

I have been told in the last several days repeatedly that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a “media war” or was asked whether that is the case.

The conflict is a real war on real land and in real airspace. In spite of the attention to the compelling images on TikTok and other social media platforms, I prefer the war coverage by the well-trained journalists of the best traditional news organizations. They provide the context that TikTok and YouTube do not.