sábado, 12 de agosto de 2017

The Rise of the East: and the perils of new conflicts - Gideon Rachman

Novo livro, de acordo com o Zeitgeist:

Easternisation

War and Peace in the Asian Century

Easternisation by Gideon Rachman
Buy this eBook
US$ 28.19
Selected as a Book of the Year by Evening Standard

The West’s domination of world politics is coming to a close. The flow of wealth and power is turning from West to East and a new era of global instability has begun.
Easternisation is the defining trend of our age – the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations and the great questions of war and peace.
A troubled but rising China is now challenging America’s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers – including Japan, North Korea, India and Pakistan – have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power.
We are at a turning point in history: but Easternisation has many decades to run. Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century.
Random House; August 2016
320 pages; ISBN 9781473521162
Read online, or download in secure EPUB
Title: Easternisation
Author: Gideon Rachman

Ministerial da OMC em Buenos Aires (12/2017): papers de doutorandos

Chamo a atenção para este anúncio de conferência aberta a doutorandos e mestrandos interessados em comércio internacional:
https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ac44df64ebfd49bfa33c0ef9c/files/4993a425-c344-4417-b4d8-ca5fb481c121/Call_for_Papers_WTO_11th_Ministerial_Conference_Think_Track_esp_.pdf

THINK TRACK MC11 
“Pensando en una gobernanza global del comercio internacional para el Siglo XXI: desafíos y oportunidades en vísperas de la 11ª Conferencia Ministerial de la OMC”
Buenos Aires, 12 de diciembre de 2017

CONVOCATORIA PARA PONENCIAS Y PROPUESTAS DE PANEL
Instituciones organizadoras: Gobierno de la República de Argentina, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), Instituto para la Integración de América Latina y el Caribe (INTAL), Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales (CARI), Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Master of Laws in International Economic Law and Policy (IELPO LL.M.) de la Universidad de Barcelona, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Instituto para el Derecho y la Justicia Internacionales (IILJ) de New York University School of Law (NYU), Georgetown Law.

CONTEXTO
La Argentina será sede de la Conferencia Ministerial de la Organización Mundial del Comercio por primera vez los días 10-13 de diciembre de 2017 (CM11).
En un contexto de incertidumbre sobre el futuro del comercio internacional, la Argentina está convencida de que el camino a seguir es un sistema multilateral robusto, y que es necesario traer la OMC más cerca de la gente. En la próxima CM11, Argentina quiere ayudar a facilitar un multilateralismo renovado, y la comunidad académica está en una posición única para analizar los desafíos que la OMC enfrenta y las oportunidades que se presentan.

En este contexto, el Gobierno de la República Argentina ha lanzado la iniciativa “Think Track MC11”, destinada a apoyar actividades académicas en el ámbito del comercio internacional que puedan contribuir al éxito de la CM11. Como parte de esta iniciativa, con el apoyo del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) y el Instituto para la Integración de América Latina y el Caribe (INTAL), y junto al Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales (CARI), la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), el Master of Laws in International Economic Law and Policy (IELPO LL.M.) de la Universidad de Barcelona, el Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, el Instituto para el Derecho y la Justicia Internacionales (IILJ) de New York University School of Law (NYU), y Georgetown Law, el Ministerio de Producción organizará una conferencia titulada
“Pensando en una gobernanza global del comercio internacional para el Siglo XXI: desafíos y oportunidades en vísperas de la 11ª Conferencia Ministerial de la OMC” 
el 12 de diciembre de 2017. 

La conferencia promoverá la presentación y discusión de diferentes perspectivas sobre la CM11 y el futuro de la organización.

CONVOCATORIA PARA PONENCIAS Y PROPUESTAS DE PANEL
Las Instituciones Organizadoras lanzan una convocatoria para ponencias y propuestas de panel con miras a contribuir a la Conferencia sobre la base de tres temas principales:

I. Pensando en la gobernanza global del comercio internacional Los participantes son invitados a discutir el escenario del comercio internacional y a abordar los desafíos y oportunidades de cara al futuro, incluyendo el rol del multilateralismo, la evolución de los acuerdos comerciales regionales, la influencia de la política en el sistema comercial internacional, entre otros.

II. La OMC llega a la mayoría de edad A medida que se aproxima el 23° aniversario de la OMC, las propuestas de reforma abundan. Los participantes son invitados a presentar opiniones e ideas para mejoras de la OMC como institución, tales como cambios en su marco institucional, incluyendo la solución de diferencias, y sobre si la OMC debe lidiar con algunas de las cuestiones más apremiantes en la economía internacional (desarrollo, cuestiones ambientales, deuda y finanzas, entre otras), y cómo.

III. La Conferencia Ministerial de Buenos Aires Las discusiones se centrarán en la agenda para la 11ª Conferencia Ministerial y sus posibilidades de éxito, incluyendo los temas nuevos y sus desafíos, el progreso de las negociaciones, el legado de la Ronda Doha, entre otras.

PROCEDIMIENTO
Presentación de resúmenes Estudiantes de posgrado e investigadores jóvenes interesados en presentar trabajo original en la Conferencia deberán enviar un resumen o sinopsis del artículo propuesto detallando
i) el título;
ii) un resumen de 500 palabras o sinopsis;
iii) cinco palabras clave;
iv) CV actualizado.

Las propuestas de panel deben incluir:
i) 3-5 ponentes (que pueden incluir, inter alia, académicos, profesionales, funcionarios gubernamentales, abogados) que se comprometan a viajar a la Conferencia;
ii) título y resumen de la discusión de los tópicos;
iii) información personal de los ponentes;
iv) moderador propuesto.

Los resúmenes y propuestas de paneles deben ser enviados el 15 de septiembre de 2017 a más tardar, en inglés, español o francés a: a.cuevas@ielpo.org.
En caso de enviarse un resumen o propuesta en español o francés, deberá incluirse una versión en inglés.

Selección
Un comité académico compuesto por especialistas de renombre en el área de comercio internacional seleccionará los resúmenes y las propuestas de panel más relevantes de acuerdo a los criterios siguientes:
a) El carácter apropiado para las metas y los tópicos de la Conferencia;
b) Originalidad, creatividad y potencial para contribución a las discusiones;
c) Relevancia para el contexto de las negociaciones dentro del marco de la OMC y la CM11.

Las Instituciones Organizadoras notificarán su decisión sobre la aceptación de resúmenes y propuestas de panel para el 9 de octubre de 2017.

Envío de artículos y documentos de trabajo Los estudiantes e investigadores cuyas propuestas de artículo hayan sido admitidas para presentar en la Conferencia deberán enviar sus artículos completos o documentos de trabajo de hasta 18.000 palabras para el 1 de diciembre de 2017.

Los documentos de trabajo serán aceptados siempre que constituyan borradores completos y extensivos.

FINANCIAMIENTO PARA PARTICIPANTES
Las Instituciones Organizadoras desafortunadamente no podrán cubrir gastos de traslado o alojamiento para todos los participantes. Sin embargo, un número limitado de becas parciales estará disponibles para gastos de traslado y alojamiento de algunos participantes.
Se dará prioridad a estudiantes de posgrado y doctorandos que no puedan obtener apoyo por otros medios y a académicos de países en desarrollo y menos adelantados.
Aquellos que deseen solicitar una de estas becas deberán enviar una carta personal a.cuevas@ielpo.org (Asunto: “Solicitud de ayuda financiera”) declarando el motivo de la solicitud de beca, junto con una carta de recomendación de un supervisor.

sexta-feira, 11 de agosto de 2017

Encontro de estudos de defesa do Centro-Oeste: PUC-GO, Goiânia, 17-19/10/2017

Estudiosos de questões de defesa, segurança nacional, estratégias militares do Cerrado central: preparai-vos para este encontro:


É com enorme satisfação e orgulho que lançamos o edital e o site do II Encontro Regional da Associação Brasileira de Estudos de Defesa Centro-Oeste (II ERABED Centro-Oeste). O evento resulta de uma ampla parceria interinstitucional, idealizada no final de 2015, e será realizado entre os dias 17 e 19 de outubro de 2017, em Goiânia, nas dependências da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás.

Em nome da Comissão Organizadora, gostaríamos de convidar a todos os interessados, professores, pesquisadores, profissionais e estudantes, para participar e submeter trabalhos ao II ERABED Centro-Oeste. Nós, da comissão, estamos trabalhando para providenciar um evento de eleva qualidade acadêmica e para recebê-los bem na capital goiana.

E, por fim, convém registrar um agradecimento especial a todos os parceiros que apoiam o II ERABED - Centro-Oeste: Associação Brasileira de Estudos de Defesa (ABED), Centro de Estudos Estratégicos do Exército (CEEEx), Escola Superior de Guerra - Campus de Brasília (ESG-Brasília), Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa-Pandiá Calógeras, do Ministério da Defesa (IBED/MD), Instituto de Relações Internacionais e Defesa (InfoRel) e as instituições de ensino superior das regiões Centro-Oeste e adjacentes, como a PUC Goiás, UFG, UnB, UFGD, UFMS, Unemat, UFU, entre outras.

Todas as informações estão (ou estarão) disponíveis no site www.erabedco2017.com e as dúvidas poderão ser esclarecidas pelo e-mail erabedco207@gmail.com.

Atenciosamente,

Comissão Organizadora II ERABED Centro-Oeste

quinta-feira, 10 de agosto de 2017

Geopolitics in Latin America, old and new - Detlef Nolt, Leslie E. Wehner (2015)

I have just downloaded this interesting paper:

Detlef Nolt, Leslie E. Wehner: 
Geopolitics in Latin America, old and new
Routledge Handbook of Latin American Security
London: Routledge, 2015
Accessed on 9 Aug 2017

https://www.academia.edu/34179647/Geopolitics_in_Latin_America_old_and_new




quarta-feira, 9 de agosto de 2017

Tribunais de direitos humanos - Ian Buruma (NYRBooks)


Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?
The New York Review of Books,

The Memory of Justice

a documentary film directed by Marcel Ophuls, restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation
available on HBO
AFP/Getty ImagesNazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II standing to hear the verdict in their trial, Nuremburg, October 2, 1946. Albert Speer is third from right in the back row of defendants; Karl Dönitz is at the far left of the same row.

1.

The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words:
We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.
How well humanity lived up to these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director, Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.
Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.
Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”1 Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.
This is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified. Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in 1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?
Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.
It is true that Ophuls does not interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the benefit of the doubt.
There seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic, since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by another voice.
Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite, cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.
Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.
Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

2.

Far from being a moral nihilist who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg. Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever it happens.
Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US, where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish, later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”
After its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.
Much has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now, geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the cellar.”
Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor. She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.
When Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.2
Perhaps the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their father in any of the above.”
Dominique Nabokov: Marcel Ophuls, Neuilly, circa 1988
It was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,” said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.” Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.
The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.
German families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.
This is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.
Nostalgia for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to. He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood movies.
One of the most unforgettable examples of the Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed (another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin. While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father decided to move west instead of east.

3.

In the second half of The Memory of Justice, the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in My Lai.
On the French side, stories about summary executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962) are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he, Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken by a sovereign state in its own colony.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles were right. About this he had little doubt.
Looking back, Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure. The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.
In fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.
If The Memory of Justice has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery of the Nazi crimes.
Then again, pace Rosenberg, Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia, simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls, had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral implications.
Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943. My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer. Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and stands for.
This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.
Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known (2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence, he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt called a “criminal lack of imagination.”
Perhaps the US in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering civilians with drones.
For Germans living under the Third Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.
  1. “The Shadow of the Furies,” The New York Review, January 20, 1977; see also the exchange between Rosenberg and Ophuls, The New York Review, March 17, 1977.  
  2. The most notorious case was that of Surgeon General Ishii Shiro of Unit 731, the biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, who tortured countless people to death in Manchuria in the course of his experiments. He was shielded by US authorities from prosecution as a war criminal in exchange for data from the experiments. 

Desarmamento nuclear - voto de A. A. Cançado Trindade na CIJ-Haia

FUNAG edita o livro "The Universal Obligation of Nuclear Disarmament" 


A Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão (FUNAG) publica a obra “The Universal Obligation of Nuclear Disarmament” de Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade, professor e juiz da Corte Internacional de Justiça (CIJ). Trata-se de edição, em inglês, do livro "A Obrigação Universal de Desarmamento Nuclear", com prefácio do embaixador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, ex-Alto Representante das Nações Unidas para Assuntos de Desarmamento, e apresentação do presidente da FUNAG, embaixador Sérgio Eduardo Moreira Lima.  

O livro está disponível para download gratuito na biblioteca digital da Fundação.

 

Crimes econômicos do lulopetismo - Fellippe Hermes (Spotniks)

Estes são apenas alguns dos incontáveis crimes econômicos do lulopetismo, e muitos são na verdade  e principalmente crimes comuns, como descobrimos desde o Mensalão.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida


BRASIL

Abrimos a caixa-preta do BNDES e estes foram os 8 fatos mais bizarros que encontramos

Felippe Hermes

Spotniks, 8/08/2017


No Brasil, até o passado é imprevisível.

Atribuída ao ex-ministro da Fazenda Pedro Malan, a frase é um resumo de como as contas públicas costumam ser tratadas por aqui. Governo após governo, esqueletos são escondidos no armário e sujeira é jogada para baixo do tapete, tudo para preservar a propaganda oficial.

Na propaganda que estávamos acostumados a ver até pouco tempo atrás, o pré-sal traria uma revolução ao país, injetando R$ 120 bilhões na educação em dez anos e outras centenas de bilhões na saúde. O crescimento da economia estava garantido, graças aos investimentos da Petrobrás e seus fornecedores, que ultrapassavam a barreira de R$ 1 trilhão. Para quem se acostumou a ouvir estes números fantásticos, junho de 2017 mostrou-se um verdadeiro balde de água fria. Foi neste mês que metade do petróleo extraído no país passou a vir do pré-sal.

A previsão de produzir quatro milhões de barris por dia tornou-se apenas miragem. Produzimos apenas 15% mais que no início da febre do óleo. O resultado? A Petrobrás inteira vale hoje R$ 178 bilhões, cerca de 10% menos que o dinheiro injetado pelo governo e pelos acionistas na maior capitalização da história da bolsa brasileira (quando corrigido pela inflação).

Descobrimos, neste meio tempo, que o Fies – outro programa revolucionário – escondia uma inadimplência de 50%, e seu custo saltou de R$ 600 milhões para R$ 11 bilhões, entre 2013 e 2015; ou que empréstimos subsidiados a grandes empresas custaram no mesmo período nada menos do que R$ 223 bilhões; ou que fraudes não auditadas no INSS somam hoje uma fatura de R$ 6 bilhões, apenas em uma modalidade de benefício, o auxílio-doença.

Todos estes números fazem parte de um mesmo escândalo, ainda adormecido: o governo se negou durante anos a incluí-los na contabilidade oficial. Varreu a sujeira para debaixo do tapete e manteve-se fiel à própria propaganda.

Graças à Lava Jato e às demais investigações da Polícia Federal, hoje sabemos que os planos infalíveis para fazer o país prosperar eram na verdade planos infalíveis destinados a fazer prosperar partidos, políticos e alguns poucos privilegiados que mantiveram relação próxima ao governo e ao Congresso.

Na última semana, o mesmo Congresso decidiu abrir a caixa-preta daquele que, pelos números, é de longe nosso maior esquema conhecido, o do BNDES (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social), parte fundamental do crescimento monstruoso de empresas como Odebrecht e JBS. A CPI ainda está em fase inicial, mas adiantamos aqui algumas das descobertas que estão por vir.

1. Entre 2003 e 2016, os grandes empresários receberam R$ 1 trilhão do banco, contra R$ 372 bilhões de todos os programas sociais.

Quando se trata de propaganda oficial, poucas coisas ganharam tanta relevância nos últimos anos quanto os programas sociais. Do Bolsa-Família ao Minha Casa, Minha Vida, passando ainda por Fies, Pronatec, Ciência Sem Fronteiras, etc., quase tudo era uma prova legítima de que o governo estava de fato empenhado em mudar a realidade dos mais pobres.

Na outra ponta, o mesmo governo empenhava-se em garantir financiamentos generosos para um grupo seleto, de pouco mais de 1.000 empresas do país, cujo faturamento passava dos R$ 300 milhões. Sozinhas, estas empresas – que representam 0,00002% das empresas do país – ficaram com 67% de todo o financiamento concedido pelo BNDES. O custo? R$ 1 trilhão em subsídios totais.

Na prática, cada um dos 85 milhões de brasileiros atingidos por algum programa social, recebeu ao longo do mesmo período uma média de R$ 437 por ano em benefícios.

Pequeno detalhe: cada um destes 85 milhões de brasileiros paga mensalmente 53,9% da sua renda em impostos para subsidiar o outro grupo.

2. 80% do lucro gerado pelo programa ficou com os bancos privados.

Com boa parte dos recursos do banco tendo origem no caixa do governo federal, por meio de emissão de dívida pública, o BNDES ainda encontrou um problema para repassá-lo às empresas: o banco não possui agências e sua capacidade de distribuir os recursos é limitada.

Foi aí que grandes bancos privados entraram em cena. Do total de recursos liberados, cerca de 91% se deu através das chamadas operações indiretas. Em outras palavras, o BNDES pegava dinheiro com o governo, repassava-o aos bancos privados e estes realizavam as operações finais.

Todo o risco da operação, realizada com juros menores do que a inflação no período, ficava com o próprio BNDES, enquanto o custo real de captação do dinheiro ficava com o governo. Na parte dos lucros, porém, a coisa mudava de figura.

Apenas no PSI, o Programa de Sustentação do Investimento, que liberou R$ 359 bilhões entre 2008 e 2015, os bancos privados lucraram R$ 8 bilhões, contra R$ 2 bilhões do banco público.

Em inúmeros casos, a taxa de juros praticada pelo banco chegou a ser de 0%, contra 1,5% nos empréstimos de maior risco (valor que se somaria aos 5,5% que o banco era obrigado a pagar ao governo pelo empréstimo dos recursos).

Na prática, o governo criou não apenas um “Bolsa-Empresário”, mas também um “Bolsa-Banqueiro”, com lucros altos e risco zero.

3. As obras realizadas pela Odebrecht no exterior geraram um prejuízo de R$ 1 bilhão por ano aos trabalhadores.

O porto de Mariel, em Cuba, tornou-se a grande estrela das críticas feitas ao financiamento do BNDES a obras no exterior. Trata-se não apenas de apoio a uma ditadura com sérios problemas de violação dos direitos humanos, mas também uma das operações mais privilegiadas já realizadas pelo sistema financeiro mundial.

Para emprestar os recursos à Odebrecht, que construiria o porto, tivemos de aceitar como garantia de pagamento por parte do governo cubano a renda obtida pelo país em exportação de tabaco, além de garantir que os juros se manteriam rigorosamente abaixo dos praticados mundialmente em operações do tipo e atrelar o valor da operação ao peso cubano, e não ao dólar, como seria o padrão.

Como estas, outras 3.000 obras foram realizadas com dinheiro brasileiro, sendo 85% delas feitas pela empreiteira Odebrecht.

Ao contrário das obras realizadas localmente, o banco utilizou recursos do FAT, o Fundo de Amparo ao Trabalhador, para financiar as obras. Ao todo R$ 55 bilhões tiveram este destino.

Graças à diferença entre os juros praticados lá e a inflação aqui, os trabalhadores brasileiros tiveram um prejuízo de R$ 11 bilhões com as operações, ou cerca de R$ 1 bilhão por ano.

Com cerca de 35 milhões de contas ativas no FAT, ligado ao FGTS, o prejuízo médio de cada trabalhador chegou aos R$ 314, apenas com obras como a linha 4 do metrô de Caracas na Venezuela, hidrelétricas na Nicarágua, estradas em Angola e inúmeras outras.

4. As quatro empresas que mais receberam dinheiro do banco no período estão no centro da Lava Jato.

Com a prisão do ex-presidente da Petrobras Aldemir Bendine, a JBS torna-se hoje a única entre as quatro maiores beneficiárias pelo banco a não ter seu presidente ou ex-presidente preso. Eike Batista, que cumpre prisão domiciliar, e Marcelo Odebrecht, condenado a mais de 19 anos de prisão, concluem a lista.

Dentre todas as empresas, nenhuma recebeu tantos recursos quanto a estatal. Foram cerca de R$ 35 bilhões para financiar o ousado plano de investimentos da companhia, em especial obras em refinarias como Abreu e Lima e o pré-sal, além da construção de sondas pela empresa Sete Brasil, formada por um consórcio de fundos de pensão e bancos privados como BTG, Santander e Bradesco.

Segundo se sabe hoje, pelas investigações da força tarefa da operação Lava Jato, foi nestas obras que ocorreram a maior parte dos crimes contra a Petrobras, cujos protagonistas foram as maiores empreiteiras do país.

A maior delas, a Odebrecht, beneficiou-se não apenas indiretamente, como também diretamente ao obter linhas de financiamentos para negócios tão distintos quanto a produção de cana-de-açúcar e etanol e submarinos nucleares. De fato, a Odebrecht – assim como a EBX de Eike Batista – tornou-se uma especialista em tudo.

Onde quer que houvesse uma oportunidade de conseguir um financiamento público e prestar um serviço ao governo, lá estava a empreiteira.

Das empresas de Eike financiadas pelo banco, a Eneva, de energia, e a Prumo, de logística, mudaram de mãos, sendo vendidas para controladores estrangeiros, como o nome já deixa claro (perderam o famoso X colocado pelo empresário nas empresas originais).

O mesmo destino aguarda boa parte do império construído pela família Batista na JBS. Hoje, da empresa de iogurtes à empresa de celulose, quase tudo está à venda.

5. 90% dos recursos do banco são direcionados a empresas que geram 16% dos empregos do país.

Empreender no Brasil não é nada fácil. Gastamos quase oito vezes mais tempo para preencher burocracia e pagar impostos do que a média dos países ricos. Ainda assim, temos quase duas vezes mais empresas que os Estados Unidos.

O motivo desta distorção é bastante simples: no Brasil, empreender e montar o próprio negócio – seja ele um mercadinho ou uma caixa de isopor para vender bebida na praia – pode ser a alternativa entre não ter renda alguma ou conseguir sobreviver no fim do mês.

Há 48 milhões de brasileiros nestas condições, o que na prática significa que há mais patrões do que empregados no Brasil e, na sua maioria, patrões cuja remuneração não chega sequer a dois salários mínimos. 36% deles recebe entre R$ 0 e um salário mínimo no fim do mês (incluindo aí boa parte dos 1,8 milhão que quebram todo ano). Apenas 12% recebe mais de cinco salários mínimos.

Ainda assim, quando decidiu alavancar a economia, o governo decidiu que o melhor a ser feito era alavancar aqueles que, em condições normais, poderiam se financiar por meio de bancos, ou ainda da bolsa de valores.

O resultado é que, desde que os desembolsos do banco começaram a explodir, o número de empresas que abriu capital na Bovespa despencou.

Pense rápido: sendo você um grande empresário, qual a melhor alternativa para captar grana para o seu negócio? Vender parte das suas ações, cumprir regras rígidas de gestão e dar satisfação a acionistas minoritários, ou pegar uma grana em um banco público, gastar como quiser e ainda pagar um valor menor do que a inflação pelos empréstimos? O resultado é uma piora bastante elevada nos padrões de governança de médias e grandes empresas.

A gestão que todo grande empresário gosta de defender como alternativa às crises constantes do governo foi severamente afetada por estas políticas. Tudo isso com a conivência dos representantes empresariais, é claro.

6. As grandes empresas apoiaram estas medidas e você pagou o pato.

O clima de revolta com possíveis aumentos de impostos tem sido canalizado com bastante eficiência por entidades como a FIESP, a Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo. O grande problema é o que está em falta, tanto na política quanto na elite brasileira: coerência.

Para Benjamin Steinbruch, dono da CSN e atual vice-presidente da FIESP, o país precisaria de três BNDES para dar conta do recado.

Apoios enfáticos ao que algumas revistas chegaram a chamar de choque de capitalismo não foram nenhuma novidade. Em 2012, o então presidente do BTG, André Esteves, chegou a chamar de revolucionária a medida promovida pela presidente Dilma Rousseff de conceder portos, aeroportos, ferrovias e rodovias à iniciativa privada, tudo financiado com dinheiro do mesmo banco público do qual o BTG foi um dos maiores entusiastas, uma vez que tornou-se um dos 70 agentes repassadores de créditos.

Grandes empresas, como a hoje falida Oi, tiveram crescimento vertiginoso com o crédito amigo e retribuíram com elogios às medidas adotadas até então.

7. Todas as famílias e pequenas e microempresas brasileiras foram forçadas a ficar com menos de 20% do crédito total no país.

Que o Brasil não é um país habituado à poupança também não chega a ser nenhuma novidade. Exatamente por isso, os financiamentos crescentes que impulsionariam o lucro dos bancos tiveram como base a emissão de dívida pública.

Somando os três maiores bancos públicos do país, cerca de 53% do crédito existente passou a ser gerado pelo estado brasileiro, com quase 60% sendo subsidiado, seja para grandes empresas ou para o agronegócio. Durante uma década, praticamente todo mundo que sabia lidar com a tal da burocracia pôde buscar um subsídio pra chamar de seu e jogar a conta pro colo do contribuinte.

Ao todo, empresas e famílias economizam 18% ao ano, em relação ao PIB. O governo gasta 3% a mais do que arrecada e estrangeiros colocam outros 3% do PIB em investimentos. Some tudo e o resultado é uma taxa de investimentos que dificilmente passa dos 18%

Desde que começamos a impulsionar nosso crescimento via crédito, o investimento em máquinas e equipamentos do país não chegou a sofrer grandes alterações.

Saímos de um investimento de 18,3% em 2008, para 18,4% em 2015, com uma pequena diferença: nos endividamos em 15% do PIB para fazer isso.

Ao todo, dos R$ 4,4 trilhões da dívida total brasileira hoje, nada menos do que 20% teve como finalidade financiar e subsidiar empresas.

O resultado é que, para muitas empresas, tornou-se mais lógico não investir recursos próprios e alocar este dinheiro na compra de dívida pública. Desta forma, poderiam lucrar 6% já descontada a inflação, e ainda assim investir, já que sempre poderiam contar com a mão amiga do mesmo governo que lhes pagava polpudos lucros.

Ao todo, 72% do crédito do país hoje é destinado para financiar o governo, enquanto grandes empresas abocanham quase um terço do crédito restante, deixando menos de R$ 1 em cada R$ 5 de crédito existente no país para micro e pequenas empresas e famílias que decidam trocar de carro ou simplesmente comprar um celular parcelado.

8. Você, seus filhos e seus netos ainda pagarão a conta pelo menos até 2060.

Cerca de sete anos foi o tempo necessário para o PSI – Programa de Sustentação do Investimento – ser iniciado e abandonado pelo governo federal. Com as novas discussões sobre o fim da taxa de juros praticada pelo banco, abaixo das taxas de mercado, e a criação de uma nova taxa, que remunere de acordo com os juros praticados pelo próprio governo – a TLP – a expectativa é que os efeitos do programa sejam diluídos, ao menos no curto prazo.

O certo é que, independentemente do que se mude daqui pra frente, tal política deixou um saldo negativo nas contas públicas que, pela previsão mais otimista, terminará de ser pago em 2060.

Com juros de 5,5% ao ano, os empréstimos do tesouro ao banco se estendem por décadas, em uma condição pra lá de generosa. Ainda que R$ 100 bilhões tenham sido adiantados em 2016, o saldo ainda permanece e será rolado até 2060.

Enquanto os recursos do próprio banco continuam sendo rolados, com novos empréstimos, a conta segue pesando, e segundo o próprio governo estima, serão R$ 323,2 bilhões.

Apenas em 2017, o custo será de R$ 31 bilhões, valor superior aos desembolsos do Bolsa-Família, duas vezes maior que os investimentos em saneamento básico, maior do que os gastos com universidades públicas e quase dez vezes o gasto com equipamentos hospitalares para reaparelhar o SUS.

Trata-se definitivamente de uma herança que, na melhor das hipóteses, serve de aviso para toda vez que o governo chegar e disser que tem uma solução para salvar o país. Na hipótese mais realista, uma conta que se somará às próximas tentativas de fazer enfim chegar o país do futuro, tudo capitaneado por um presidente que nos prometerá maravilhas e que certamente não estará aqui quando a conta chegar.

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Livro Marxismo e Socialismo finalmente disponível - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

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