This Weekend’s Foreign Policy Must-Reads

“Moral injury is its own separate trauma with symptoms that can include feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal, regret, anxiety, anger, self-loathing, and self-harm. Last year, a study published in Traumatology found that military personnel who felt conflicted about the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of a combat situation were at an increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behavior afterwards, compared with their peers who didn’t have that same sense of ambiguity. The main difference between the two combat-induced traumas is that moral injury is not about the loss of safety, but the loss of trust—in oneself, in others, in the military, and sometimes in the nation as a whole.”

“The populist message of the [right-wing Danish People Party] has expanded well beyond attacks on immigration. The party has increasingly campaigned on the safeguarding of welfare rights and social protection, successfully placing themselves to the left of the Social Democrats in the popular imagination (despite having voted for almost all of the recent neoliberal economic reforms). This has allowed them to reach broader electorates that would otherwise be repelled by their harsh anti-immigration stance.”

“Russia may hope that letting jihadists leave the country is good riddance. Insurgent activity in the North Caucasus has certainly gone down. The chances of [Islamic State] militants returning are slim; Russia does, in fact, tightly control its borders. Yet Akhmet Yarlykapov, a Dagestan expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says the tactic is short-sighted. Russia itself is faced with a major threat from IS: it recently claimed the entire territory of Caucasus as one of its provinces.”

“Project Shield uses Google’s infrastructure — which has been bolstered greatly to keep services like YouTube and Gmail online — to protect news and human rights-focused websites from [distributed denial of service] attacks. Google allows the websites under its protection to route their traffic through its servers, which are built to withstand even the most massive of attacks, dramatically reducing the load on their partners’ web infrastructure… The initiative, which is currently accepting applications for new sites, protects any organization that is focused on news, human rights, or election monitoring, regardless of their political views.”

“For Charlie Hebdo, the small satirical weekly transformed into a global symbol of freedom of expression by the slaughter early this year of its staff, money has also been an adversary, an idea that sat uneasily with its history and causes… Charlie Hebdo, irreverent mocker of all forms of power, reportedly finds itself sitting on more than $33 million in cash, a once unthinkable sum… All the money, [Charlie Hebdo writer Patrick Pelloux] muses, complicates this rebirth. It raises, again, the question of the paper’s political allegiances. Charlie, in its self-image, is of the left, the scrappy outsider rather than the moneyed insider. It is above all of the school that believes there is a right in Western democracies to laugh at everything, to blaspheme, and to commit sacrilege. It’s an equal-opportunity, anti-clerical mocker unconcerned by bad taste.”