Undercurrents: The Oversight Board's Trump decision, and Merkel's legacy Audio bhorton.drupal 25 June 2021

Was Facebook right to suspend Trump? And how will Merkel be remembered?

In the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021, social media platforms took steps to remove former President Donald Trump from their websites for infringing community standards. This step was welcomed by many, but also raised serious questions about the power of social media companies to limit free speech and censor elected officials. The suspension of President Trump from Facebook was referred to the Oversight Board, an independent body of experts set up to scrutinise the platform’s content moderation decisions.  

In this episode, Ben speaks to Thomas Hughes and Kate Jones about the outcome of the Oversight Board’s inquiry into the Trump suspension, and the wider implications for content moderation on social media.  

Then Lara is joined by Hans Kundnani to assess the political outlook in Germany and reflect on the legacy of outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel.  

Tsvangirai Leaves an Important Political Legacy in Southern Africa Expert comment sysadmin 21 February 2018

The story of Zimbabwe’s ‘people’s champion’ offers a powerful example to a region in need of new political compromises.

The death of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a loss for Zimbabwe. In nearly three decades of speaking truth to power, Tsvangirai helped to change his nation and the region.

Southern Africa’s new politics

His death marks a period of transition for regional governments and opposition parties alike. The Zuma era has ended in South Africa while Mozambique, Namibia and Angola have also seen political transitions, pushing modernization agendas to appeal to young citizenries that increasingly see politics in separate terms from the liberationist struggles of the previous generation.

Regional opposition movements also face winds of change: the longstanding opposition leader in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Etienne Tshekedi, passed away in 2017, and Mozambique’s Afonso Dhlakama and Kenya’s Raila Odinga are both aging. These movements similarly need to appeal to a younger audience or risk losing relevance.

From trade unionist to opposition leader

Tsvangirai’s career is an eloquent illustration of these challenges. Born in Buhera in rural eastern Zimbabwe, Tsvangirai worked in textiles and mining before politics – diverse experience which gave him crucial exposure to the lives of ordinary people across the country. In his early years, he also worked for ZANU-PF, before leaving to forge his own political path. He became increasingly active in mining politics, rising to the executive of the National Mineworker’s Union and, in 1989, to secretary-general of the powerful Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.

In the late 1990’s, Zimbabwe was riven by questions over land, war veterans, the Congo conflict, a shrinking economy and growing doubts about ZANU-PF itself. Opposition leaders of the time could not answer them; those such as Edgar Tekere and Margaret Dongo struggled to win support beyond their local constituencies, and liberation leader Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU had been merged with ZANU-PF in the 1987 Unity Accord.

But in 2000, Zimbabwe’s ‘perfect storm’ of a divisive constitutional referendum, land redistribution and a June election made Tsvangirai and the newly minted MDC, formed in 1999, a national rival to ZANU-PF. Through subsequent national elections in 2002, 2005, 2008 and 2013, Zimbabwe remained polarized between competing visions of Zimbabwe future: ZANU-PF’s powerful black liberationist politics of identity and the opposition’s equally compelling liberal democracy agenda.

Tsvangirai’s achievement was to provide a credible alternative to liberation icon Robert Mugabe. Tsvangirai also resuscitated Zimbabwe’s tradition of urban nationalism, and was a successor to Benjamin Burombo and other mid-century Zimbabwean urban leaders. Tsvangirai would in turn be a touchstone for contemporary urban activists Evans Mawarire, Linda Masarira and others.

From opposition to coalition

The political struggle for Zimbabwe became global, with Mugabe and Tsvangirai both winning support from rival international power blocs. In March 2007, pictures of a beaten and bloodied Tsvangirai helped to galvanize support for the MDC in the 2008 elections. But the disputed result and violent subsequent run-off between Tsvangirai and Mugabe led the regional community to push both men into a coalition government, with Tsvangirai as prime minister.

Despite continuous ructions, the Government of National Unity (GNU) held, and stabilized Zimbabwe’s collapsed economy, until 2013. Although often politically out-manoeuvred by Mugabe, Tsvangirai deserves credit for getting the opposition a share of political power and for holding his nerve against many who wanted to collapse the GNU.

Tsvangirai was no saint; his complicated love life, and tacit approval of violent attacks on party dissenters, do him no credit. More importantly, the MDC neglected its grassroots supporters during the GNU, and paid the price in its comprehensive 2013 electoral defeat. But although diminished, Tsvangirai remained Zimbabwe’s most popular opposition politician, and the MDC’s new leaders will have quite a task ahead of them, even if they have been planning since his courageous 2016 public admission of colon cancer.

The MDC after Tsvangirai

Nelson Chamisa, one of the three MDC vice presidents, has now been appointed as acting president by the party’s national committee. Chamisa inherits a fractured and fractious party, and one which has also fallen out with the Tsvangirai family. The other two vice presidents, Thokozani Khupe and Elias Mudzuri, have also set their sights on party leadership.

At 40, Chamisa, an orator with grassroots appeal, has a huge task. With general elections due by July, he has to unite the party, counter Zimbabwe’s rising ethno-politics, prove himself as leader of a broader opposition coalition and take on a resurgent President Emmerson Mnangagwa and ZANU-PF.

Electorally, the opposition’s strongest card has always been the urban vote and the economy. But Mnangagwa has fast forwarded a comprehensive economic reform and internationalist agenda. This, and Mugabe’s exit, have forced Chamisa, Joice Mujuru and other opposition leaders to play catch-up. Zimbabwe’s elections, the first since 2000 without Mugabe and Tsvangirai as contenders, will be of global interest as the country navigates the new political dynamics.

The people’s champion

Morgan Tsvangirai’s resilience earned him respect from friends and foes alike, with Zimbabwe’s President Mnangagwa and Vice President Constantino Chiwenga visiting him at home a few weeks ago. A former nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Tsvangirai, popularly known by his totem of ‘Save’ and also called mudhara [the old man] deserves national hero status. He will certainly be remembered as the ‘people’s champion’, and a pioneer in bridging the generational and ideological fissures that have shaped Southern Africa’s politics.

With their leader now gone, the turbulent MDC will undoubtedly be hoping for a ‘remembrance vote’ in his memory to carry them through the elections. But beyond that, his story offers a powerful example to a region in need of new political compromises.

Gorbachev's complex legacy is beyond the popular belief Expert comment NCapeling 3 September 2022

The last major figure with a decisive Cold War role, Mikhail Gorbachev was not as bad as Putin’s Russia portrays him, but also not as heroic as the West thinks.

Arguably the worst year of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis was 1983, with three major incidents which escalated East-West tensions – and any one of them could have led to a full-scale war.

The first was the Korean Airline KAL007 being shot down by an SU15 fighter aircraft for straying into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers and crew. Then came the identification of signals from Soviet satellites as being incoming US intercontinental ballistic missiles – Colonel Stanislav Petrov, going against all protocols, thankfully decided to report them as a false alarm before he could be sure.

The third was perhaps the most dangerous, being the misinterpretation of a live-fire NATO exercise which was believed by some in both East Germany and Russia to be a front for an imminent attack.

All three incidents occurred in the few months following the infamous March 1983 ‘Star Wars’ speech by US president Ronald Reagan, in which he talked about nuclear arms control and laid out the US case for a ballistic missile defence programme.

At that time Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the youngest serving member of the USSR Politburo, known to be a favourite of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, and it is highly likely he had been aware of these close calls and was part of discussions within Kremlin decision-making circles.

A changemaker both inside and outside the USSR

Following the deaths of Andropov in 1984 and his replacement Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, Gorbachev’s appointment as general secretary of the Communist Party saw him immediately begin to change the Soviet Union from within – and also change relationships with the major Western powers, especially the US, Germany, and the UK.

His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were primarily aimed at internal reforms but translated into a major reset of international relations and international security. During his six years as leader, Gorbachev initiated many arms control negotiations which resulted in treaties and increased both the transparency and the confidence between the USSR and the US.

These included the 1986 Stockholm Accord which emanated from the Helsinki Process and allowed for the observation and inspection of large-scale military exercises, the 1985 resumption of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks which lead to START I, and the 1987 INF Treaty in which the USSR ‘out-yessed’ the US – the most open and transparent disarmament treaty in terms of notification and verification measures ever agreed.

There was also a reciprocal moratorium on nuclear weapons tests starting from 1985 – which laid the groundwork for the 1996 CTBT – the 1991 Chemical Weapons Convention, and the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

The most dramatic moment of all was when Gorbachev and Reagan met at a summit in Reykjavik and came close to deciding to eliminate nuclear weapons – but the initiative failed to reach agreement, mainly because Reagan could not drop his commitment to ballistic missile defences and Gorbachev could not accept the offer of joint development.

Nonetheless, all these nuclear arms control treaties led the way for their descendants which have kept nuclear weapons in check ever since and are still in place in the form of the New START agreement.

But despite these outstanding achievements, Gorbachev had blind spots – such as enabling rather than destroying the USSR bioweapons programme, unlike the US which had dismantled its own bioweapons offensive capability by 1973.

And it is now known that, despite negotiating the Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia withheld information on new chemical weapons agents – Novichoks – which have since been used to lethal effect by Russia in Salisbury and against figures opposing the current regime.

His misguided faith in a Soviet future

Gorbachev was markedly different to his predecessors as secretary general. He was neither as decrepit nor as hardline, and he understood from the outset that the Soviet Union was, by the 1980s, finally dying.

Using the intellectual abilities of Aleksandr Yakovlev, he forced through the reforms which simultaneously captured the imagination of the free world and liberated his countrymen and women.

But although he built solid relationships – even friendships – with the world’s major heads of state and improved the USSR’s human rights, releasing dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, but many – especially Ukrainian dissidents – continued to languish in camps.

The greatest disappointment in Gorbachev’s legacy was he completely believed the USSR could be reformed and still survive as an entity while others, such as Boris Yeltsin and Ronald Reagan, understood it had to be dismantled.

This shortcoming is especially uncomfortable as today’s Russia continues to insist it has a given right to control other former Soviet states, to the extent it is willing to destroy them if they do not concede.

Author Harold Holzer discusses Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the President's lasting impact on modern American politics and nostalgia (Meredith Bragg). Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

What fueled the frenzy that sent so many to their deaths in colonial America? And how did Americans reckon with the aftermath of the panic? --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer & Scriptwriter: Michelle Mehrtens Video Editor: Sierra Theobald

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