That question of whether we will be left behind has stalked this American election. Democrats claim that they are all for old alliances–though of course it was the Democrats under Obama who first signaled they were becoming disinterested in us and wanted to think about Asia instead. Today, the more Trump-leaning Republicans now openly pride themselves that they, in the words of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, “don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” They claim it’s time to think about “America first.”

But what’s at stake here is not just a geopolitical choice between Europe or Asia–a choice that has been debated in Washington for a hundred years. It’s not just a choice between being outward looking or isolationist–a choice that has been debated in America even longer. There’s something else at play, namely, what sort of country America is and what kind of country it wants to become. Giving in to Russian autocracy in Europe is intertwined with giving in to autocratic tendencies at home. The outer and the inner are co-dependent. It’s not just “us” America is leaving, it’s leaving a version of itself. 

I am not unbiased. I grew up in the provinces of the American project. I was born in Ukraine. My parents were political dissidents arrested for advocating freedom of speech and human rights in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s they were exiled, moving first to London, then Munich and Prague. They moved because my father worked in all three places for Radio Free Europe–the US Congress funded stations that aimed to help end the Soviet dictatorship–and he moved as RFE changed its headquarters. Our journey was literally inseparable from America’s mission. In this context America was intertwined with ‘the good’: in the sense of being the Superpower that here, in the region I knew best, aligned itself with basic dignity, truth and self-determination. Across the world–from Latin America to South Asia to the Middle East–America’s track record is often pernicious and often justifiably maligned. But in standing up to Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union it became more than just another shithole Superpower. It could claim to be good too–or at least better than the autocratic alternatives. 

It was the historian Anne Applebaum who first pointed out to me, on a podcast series we worked on for The Atlantic, that this projection of ‘good’ power had a transformative impact inside America as well. Being in an alliance that claimed to support democracy made America more democratic; tamed its own traditions of autocracy. You can see this in the dynamics around the civil rights movement. Part of the impetus for enacting anti-racist legislation was to ensure that America’s self-declared Cold War position as the leader of the free world also aligned with what it did at home. 

In the 1950s, Soviet propaganda was successfully hammering America for being dishonest: backing democracy abroad while oppressing African-Americans at home. America’s allies were dismayed too. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case at the Supreme Court, which rolled back segregation in schools, the Department of Justice filed a brief arguing that the law should be changed not only for domestic reasons, but also because racist laws were causing “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Earlier, in 1947, the Harvard professor and leading civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois capitalized on America’s claims of promoting freedom around the world, post World War II, as a way to raise the issue of its lack of human rights towards African Americans at home.

Imagine an alternative history in which America had aligned itself with totalitarian powers in the 20^th Century–Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Or what if the US had just not taken a strong position against them. It may not have copied their systems fully–but it would also have removed part of the impetus for ruling elites to deal with their own autocratic practices.

During the Cold War, Washington defined itself in opposition to the Kremlin. This in turn could have some positive consequences domestically. Now, however, what you hear in both Moscow and Washington can sound all too similar.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule I lived in Russia, and saw how Communist ideology was replaced with a new propaganda playbook. First you seed doubt in the very idea of truth, spreading so much confusion and conspiracies people don’t know who to trust. Then, you obliterate any notion of there being a difference between good and bad with an extreme relativism and a triumphant cynicism. And in this moral and epistemic wasteland you create  propaganda that legitimizes the nastiest emotions: conspiratorial, paranoid identities, and a politicized, theatrical religiosity that has less to do with ethics and everything to do with supremacist groups belonging and the desire for submission to authority and controlling others. And finally, you use all of this as an excuse to engage in strategic kleptocracy, so that the purpose of running the state becomes corruption.

Ever since Putin first fine tuned this strategy, versions of this practice have been sprouting up around the world. Moscow may have lost the global ideological race in the Cold War, but it looks increasingly like it might be on the winning side this time.

Donald Trump has always been the obvious manifestation of the American strain of this phenomenon. But while Trump embodies a post-truth, post-values worldview, it’s left to those around him to rationalize it. JD Vance is the most eloquent. Vance is a successful writer, whose memoir was lauded by liberal critics. He is one of the finest debaters in America. Everyone who meets him says he is clever, pleasant and witty. In many ways he now plays the role that Putin’s eloquent, shape-shifting courtiers played in Moscow. When Trump spread blatant falsehoods about immigrants “eating cats and dogs”, Vance argued that evidence didn’t matter and that it was right to “create stories” if they get “media attention” for what he termed the sufferings of Americans. A total disregard for evidence was reframed as a higher calling–and makes possible all sorts of rollbacks of rights and truths. It makes placing immigrants in detention camps easier. It makes denying the results of elections possible.

Vance’s explanation of why America should abandon Ukraine is also telling. Twice now Vance has made the point that there are no “good sides” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “fairy-tale mindset” to apply categories of  “good versus evil.” Each side is to blame: Russia was wrong to invade, he argues, but Ukraine has corruption problems. Everything is relative.

It’s the sort of extreme moral relativism that Moscow’s spin doctors have long perfected. It goes against what most Americans, and what most Republican voters, think. Evangelicals especially are supportive of Ukraine. But by obliterating the confrontation of good versus evil in Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, it gives an excuse to erode the sense of right or wrong at home too. This is not about us, it’s about the US.

So where does that leave those of us who still need America? Of course it’s long past time that Europe, or more realistically North Eastern Europe, arms itself and learns to fight. The Ukrainians have shown us how to do it. But  there is no way to avoid America’s role in this fight. It’s still the only superpower that can on occasion wield a blow against evil–if it can still recognise evil.

Part of the work will be the business of skilful and grubby diplomacy. There are many reasons why America–even a triumphantly cynical, utterly relativistic America–should stand up to Russia. Economically, it keeps their main trading partner, the EU, secure. Militarily, it degrades an adversary and keeps the main enemy, China, wary of adventurism. Diplomatically, it creates a global coalition of partners. And just showing American primacy and resolve brings vast benefits including everything from trust in the US dollar to the desire of “swing countries” like India or Saudi Arabia to play along with Washington.

But if we acknowledge that the drama here is not just about its own foreign interests, but also about the battle within America itself, then the field for action becomes bigger. Standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in Russia is part of standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in America. Standing up to bullying, hate and lies in Russia is about standing up to bullying, hate and lies in America. Standing up to Russia’s mafia state turned mafia Empire means standing up to the potential of a mafia state in America.

For those of us who were raised in the provinces of the American project but now dwell or engage with its core, the aim can’t be to simply scrape and beg for security. America made us. And many of us are now literally Americans or integrated into the American conversation. Sometimes those who have come from the periphery see the issues clearer than the capital. If the center has lost its purpose, then it’s up to those who have come from the provinces to help remake it.

The post How to make M.A.G.A. mean ‘Make America Good Again’ appeared first on Coda Story.

My former colleagues are in prison. For many months my friends and I have found it difficult to get any attention from world media. Now something has happened that caught the attention of the biggest news agencies — but I wonder how long it will last. Is there any way to hold the attention? I feel like we’re all hostages here — and it’s scary. Now everything, any crime, has become possible here.”

I received this message from a friend in Belarus this summer, a couple of days after the nation’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko used a MiG fighter jet to ground an international commercial flight as it crossed "his" airspace and hauled off a Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend who had been living in supposed safety in Lithuania. A few days later the captured journalist, Roman Protasevich, appeared on state-run TV with visible marks of torture and confessed to treachery in scenes reminiscent of Stalinist show trials.

There was some outrage in what we like to call the international community; the words "hijacking" and even "terrorist act" were used. And then, as my friend feared, all was forgotten. Lukashenko faced mild consequences, such as a ban on the Belarus state airline flying into Europe. His message to anyone who dared to oppose him was more potent: I can do what I want to you, anywhere you might be.

I struggled to answer my friend’s plea. For a single event to be remembered it needs to be sustained by a bigger story that it flows into. Anyone who has played a memory game will know that you remember discrete things by putting them into a sequence where they take on significance as part of a larger whole. Likewise in media and politics, one scene only has power as part of a larger narrative.

But Lukashenko’s outrageous crimes haven’t clicked into a greater chain of meaning. And it’s not just Belarus. From Burma to Syria, Yemen to Sri Lanka, we have more evidence than ever of crimes against humanity — of torture, chemical attacks, barrel bombings, rape, repression, and arbitrary detention. But the evidence struggles to compel attention, let alone consequences. We have more opportunities to publish; we aren’t limited by geography; our audience is potentially global. Yet most revelations or investigations fail to resonate. Why?  

A connected narrative breaks apart

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably. 

But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”

In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.

This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.

Together all these elements sustained attention. And when the West’s own sins were revealed, such as the CIA’s program of Cold War covert assassinations and coups in the 1970s, it meant there was an existing framework through which to capture the attention and outrage of the Western public.

There was what one might call a "grand narrative" that informed and enveloped everything from the behavior of states to literature and art to how people understood themselves. It was bound up with enlightenment ideals of "progress" and "liberation," where facts and evidence were something to be respected, confirmed or refuted by rational argument or verifiable evidence. Even the Soviet regime was locked into a language and worldview where rights – the rights of colonized peoples and the economically oppressed primarily — could at least matter theoretically. They even signed human rights pledges, which allowed Soviet dissidents to demand the Kremlin’s leaders "obey their own laws."

In this contest of grand ideas, with each side proclaiming its ideals as superior, space was opened for dissidents to demand that the powers live up to the ideals; in the periphery, these ideals were invoked to demand support by liberation movements, colonized by one camp or the other.

The grand narratives, of course, had their problems. They often privileged victims of rival ideologies while leaving continent-sized blind spots. Priests murdered in Poland by the Communists would get more attention in Western media than priests killed by U.S. allies in El Salvador. The Red Army crushing rebellions in Budapest and Prague was covered with infinitely more intensity than the crushing of British anti-colonial rebellions in Kenya.

Yet, “the checks written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world —marked 'international humanitarian law' — are bouncing” says David Miliband, the former British foreign minister and present head of the International Rescue Committee. We have entered what he calls the Age of Impunity: “A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything.”

The collapse came partly from within. The language of rights and freedoms was hollowed out by leaders who misused it, leaving husks empty of meaning. The Soviet regime shredded the language of economic justice and equality — so that even today the mere mention of the term "socialist" is anathema to many in the former Communist bloc. In the West the lofty language of freedom and tyranny was deployed in the service of unprovoked wars and was sullied by war’s inevitable consequences. In 2003, President George W Bush had deliberately connected the battles of the Cold War with his vision for the Middle East ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq promising that “democracy will succeed” and “freedom can be the future of every nation.” Instead, the invasion brought civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths; it enhanced Iran’s power and turned Syria into the fulcrum of a new authoritarian axis. Among people in rich democracies, it engendered cynicism, souring them on their own self-identity. Words imbued with powerful meaning in East Berlin and Prague lost their purpose in Baghdad. Images did too.

Along with this rot from inside was the attack from outside. The great leitmotif of contemporary Russian and now Chinese propaganda is that the desire for freedom and the fight for rights leads not to prosperity but to misery and bloodshed. Russian propaganda channels like to splice shots of people-powered revolutions in Syria or Ukraine together with images of the ensuing conflicts in those countries, as if the war was the inevitable product of revolts, rather than the response by dictatorships to crush them. Unlike democracy — the not-so-subtle message goes — dictatorship is strong and stable.

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two journalists: Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, from Russia. And if we look at their work closely, we see something interesting emerging.

Maria Ressa’s plight could have been utterly esoteric to the world. She is a journalist under attack from the Philippine government for criticizing the extrajudicial murders committed under President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalists are attacked every day across the world, and in the Philippines are regularly killed without drawing much attention overseas. Even the mass killings Maria (who serves on Coda Story’s board of directors) reported on, with thousands killed by pro-government gangs, rarely merit a global headline. Yet Maria’s story held attention. How?

When she dug into what was happening to her, Maria saw that there was something in the form of Duterte’s attacks, his use of troll armies and cyber militias to intimidate, besmirch, and break his opponents, that was both new and universal. He was not merely imposing censorship, he was overloading social media with noise, so the truth was blotted out, distorting reality. Maria made the issue not just about the Philippines but also about Facebook, the harms of social media, the lawlessness of digital disinformation. Her campaign, and the way she told her story, led not just to the Presidential Palace in Manila, but also to Silicon Valley, to every election distorted by online manipulation, to every conflict fueled through digital hate campaigns, to every woman or minority bullied or harassed on social media, to any parent worried about what’s happening to their kids online. Her story became vital for any lawmaker and civil servant thinking about how to regulate this new frontier. It updated how we think about freedom of expression in the digital dimension, forcing tech companies to at least admit that inauthentic coordinated campaigns were not legitimate speech but a form of censorship. One real person saying one unpleasant thing is fine. But when a handful of trolls pretend to be thousands of non-existent people saying the same thing, that is something different.

And Maria’s research joined up countries that had never been put into the same sequence. No one has ever thought about Russia and the Philippines together. Their dissidents don’t meet. They were on different sides in the Cold War. But now these two capitals of online manipulation became part of one coherent story. Maria looked to investigations by Russian journalists to understand what was going on in her own country, began to see Russia and the Philippines as one frontline of digital authoritarianism.

And Russia was one of the birth places of another seemingly local issue that became a global narrative. When Russian activists and journalists first tried to tell the world, in the early Putin era, about how their regime was based on stealing money from state assets and laundering it in Western countries, most shrugged. Who cares? It might be bad for Russia, but it made London and New York richer, and the Kremlin weaker. It took a decade of slow, painful arguments and evidence-gathering to show that corruption in Russia and Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East was not just a local tragedy. It affected us too. It was also a way to infiltrate and undermine democracies, compromise our foreign policy, suborn politicians, fund far-right politics. It created an elite that used the influence and leverage to start wars and get away with it, because Western countries were now dependent on the corrupt investments. It was creating a world where the global rich were living with another set of rules, free of domestic justice anywhere, and that, in turn, was fueling the inequality and anger that undermined people’s faith in democratic institutions. And the enemy was not just in the Kremlin, but also among the middlemen and money launderers in respectable offices in New York and London.

It was a challenge to show that the tragedy of a hospital in northern Russia, pillaged by bureaucrats buying property in London, was also something that people in the Pentagon should care about. Today corruption (or to be more precise kleptocracy and money laundering) has become a central security agenda for the new U.S. administration. But it took years of work to unearth the links that lie buried beneath the noise of news and the narcissistic gaze of social media, and to make something seemingly tangential a story that runs through all our lives. 

So that is the task: to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever, and whose larger significance is yet to be discovered. Before, the grand narrative of democracy used to pass over us, like a plane that you could board from a platform called "human rights." Now we work with shovels. Prodding on a mound that seems just an anomaly in one corner of the garden, but upon excavating and pulling, its rhizomes lead us to the garden next door. This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created — they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together. And this new journalism needs to do more than just draw new lines and connect new audiences — it needs to dig out the contours of the discussion which offers the solution to the issues it unearths, offering its audiences a chance to transform from passive players to participants in the formulation of a future.

For though the old story of "waves of democratization," of easily defined and relatable "declarations of human rights" has faded, people still risk their lives and livelihood to protest and fight for….well, for what? We have had, in recent years, seen more protests across the world as at any time for decades. From Hong Kong to Tbilisi, Sudan to Chile. And, of course, Belarus. Belarus which was always dismissed as happy with its degenerate dictator, satisfied with the compromise between stability and rule of a single man. And then suddenly, impossibly, the whole country rose up. Not just urban liberals but pensioners and factory workers. 

But unlike in 1989, we don’t think of all these protests across the world together. Don’t see them as part of one inevitable, coherent History. The rights they demand are very different. The regimes they fight against don’t necessarily abide by old distinctions between democracies and dictatorships. And yet something still itches away at people. Some sort of underlying urge, a need that can’t be satisfied. What connects all these different movements? What will we find in our process of excavation? Maybe, lurking underneath is something coherent, all the tendrils leading to a whole, something alive, huge, all-remembering, global, terrible — preparing to give the epic troves of evidence, the terabytes of data recording crimes against humanity and abuse, a purpose, and a meaning.

The post Memory in the age of impunity appeared first on Coda Story.

This was in the Soviet Union, during the late 1970s, in the frosty years of the Cold War. Public letters addressed to the West were a desperate form of resistance: if one could raise enough noise among the powerful perhaps they could lobby for a political prisoner’s release; if there was enough public outcry, maybe the Soviet leadership could be shamed into softening a sentence.

Forty years later, as I sat down to write a similar letter in the face of a regime’s intimidation, I found myself at a loss. Though I face none of the dangers that my parents did, I also had no idea who and what to appeal to — or how. Who was I to address the letter to? Which powerful people will help a dissident? Are the rights fought for so bitterly in the 20^th century still meaningful? What can a letter ever hope to achieve?

As punishment for doing her job well, Maria Ressa now faces trumped up charges of tax evasion. She risks imprisonment.

The letter I wanted to write was in support of the journalist Maria Ressa and her pioneering news site “Rappler,” which has won millions of readers in the Philippines since it started up in 2011. Rappler have been attacked for their thorough reporting on the extrajudicial killings carried out by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte.

As punishment for doing her job well, Maria now faces trumped up charges of tax evasion. She risks imprisonment. Rappler may vanish entirely. We have seen this pattern repeated worldwide: the regime picks a victim, makes an example of them, and thus breaks the whole industry.

As I looked for guidance on how to write a letter in support of Maria I dug out one of the most famous letters by a Soviet dissident: Andrei Sakharov’s, published in the New York Times in 1977. Sakharov addressed his letter directly to then-US President Jimmy Carter:

“Dear Mr Carter, it’s very important to defend those who suffer because of their nonviolent struggle, for openness, for justice, for destroyed rights….our and your duty is to fight for them. I think a great deal depends on this struggle — trust between the people, trust in high promises and the final result — international security.”

It was not an empty appeal. The letter was written in the run-up to a US-Soviet summit in Belgrade, organized to assess the USSR’s implementation of human rights accords it had signed up to the previous year in Helsinki. American leaders sometimes raised human rights concerns at the highest level, which at the very least could be used to show that the US system was superior to the Soviet. Individual political prisoners could be released in exchanges. In the 1970s an increasing number were allowed to leave the USSR. The US built trade deals with the USSR which factored in an improvement in human rights as part of the negotiation.

And today? The blatant murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside his own country’s consulate in Turkey has been shrugged off as an irrelevance by Donald Trump. Not only does this US President no longer regard it as important to fight for “destroyed rights,” he presides over a climate where attacks on journalists have become commonplace. Last year, Freedom House — an organization originally set up to help the US promote democracy in unfree societies — downgraded America’s  “freedom of expression” ranking, citing: “Fake news and aggressive trolling of journalists.. [that] contributed to a score decline in the United States’ otherwise generally free environment.”

As the US becomes more like the governments it used to censure, they are emboldened to continue on the same path.

As the US becomes more like the governments it used to censure, so they become emboldened to continue on the same path. This is especially true in the Philippines, a country with which the US has clout.

Sakharov saw the “struggle” for rights and freedoms as intrinsically connected to something larger — “international security.” Today, we see political black holes emerging across the world, where there are no values any more, where the powerful only observe rules that suit them, indeed where a sign of being powerful is the ability to impose any norms you want.

The Donetsk People’s Republic, the ISIS caliphate, the bombing of civilians in Aleppo and Yemen and the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are all such black holes, spaces where regimes revel in rejecting the idea that there are universal ideals to adhere to in the first place.

The murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is a black hole opening up in the middle of a diplomatic mission. Human rights and humanitarian norms have been undermined many times before, but now no one seems to even care if they are caught, as if their very notion is non-existent. In 1977 the Soviet Union had at least notionally made a commitment to them and would be upbraided for failing on to uphold them. “Respect your own laws” was the clarion call of the dissident movement. Now disrespecting laws is the point.

Alongside the question of who to address a letter to, there is also the issue of what exactly one is defending. Sakharov’s letter assumed the rights and freedoms he invokes to be self-evident. At one point in the letter he begins to list them, citing “freedom of belief, and information, freedom of conscience, freedom of the choice of the country of living.” And then, he adds a casual “etc” — assuming everyone understands what he means.

Today those “rights” can be harder to define. Rappler, for instance, was first targeted by a vicious online mob, smearing their reporters with false accusations of bias and that they were acting for covert interests. Next, staff were intimidated with death and rape threats, and there were calls for Maria, the editor, to be arrested. At one point, Rappler was being hit with 90 negative online messages every minute. The timing and structure of the attacks suggests they were not organic but organized, channeled through coordinated fake accounts.

The playbook is similar across the world: these digital mobs first attempt to destroy journalists’ credibility to turn people against them. This paves the way for an arrest. But while the aims are old, to intimidate and silence critics, the method is new. Online mobs allow the government to claim a degree of deniability. Before the KGB used to come for you. Now it’s anonymous accounts on Twitter. Who is responsible? If before, it was oppressive regimes censoring critics fighting for freedom of speech, now it is the online mobs who claim they are the ones exercising the right to freedom of speech themselves. Democrats have always campaigned for uncensored expression, they argue: well here it is!

For state-sponsored trolling needs to be seen for what it is: a new form of human rights abuse.

“Do you know the truth about the plight of religions in the USSR?” Sakharov writes towards the end of his letter. This “do you know the truth” question is indicative: in the 20^th century it was assumed that if the facts came out, they would have an impact. What is so striking today is that we have more facts than ever before about the blatant abuse of humanitarian norms, from Syria to Yemen. We can even observe, on social media, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. Yet this knowledge does not even ensure outrage, let alone a response. But if getting the truth out doesn’t mean anything, what is the point of writing letters in the New York Times?

But even as the old architecture of power and meaning has dissolved, there are new ways to try and make a letter matter.

First of all: there are new loci of power to lobby. In the case of Maria Ressa they are most obviously the social media and tech giants, on whose platforms these coordinated hate campaigns are being waged. Users of Facebook, Twitter and Google are entitled to security. It is the duty of these platforms to protect their users, against harassment, threats of violence and coordinated smears affecting their fundamental rights.

For state-sponsored trolling needs to be seen for what it is: a new form of human rights abuse. As the brilliant human and digital rights researcher Camille Francois has laid out in a study she lead on the subject, state-sponsored trolling is an attack on freedom of expression, silencing the victim through harassment, abuse, hate speech and purposeful disinformation. It is censorship though noise. “We observe the tactical move by states from an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance,” writes the philosopher Tim Wu, “which sees speech itself as a censorial weapon.”

States who in any way empower such campaigns are responsible, under their international human rights obligations. Even if they do not run them directly, if they instigate and fan the flames, they are to blame. The Magnitsky Act, originally drawn up by the US to penalize Russian human rights abusers with financial sanctions, is increasingly being adopted by other countries, and with a wider target list. Could this be a model for targeting those responsible for assailing human rights online?

“We observe the tactical move by states from an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance, which sees speech itself as a censorial weapon.” 

Philosopher Tim Wu

Indeed, the more one looks at it, today’s interconnected world has far more levers with which to influence a government such as Duterte’s than were available during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was all but hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Compare that to the Philippines today, which has the highest social media usage in the world, and is closely integrated into global markets.

The question remains how to get the message out? Letters have lost their dramatic value. In 1977, it was a heroic achievement for Sakharov just to make himself heard in the outside world from his exile in the Russian provinces. “Telephone communications with the West are blocked completely, and no telephone conversations reach me,” he wrote to the Times. Today, communication is so easy it can be meaningless. A letter in a mainstream newspaper no longer has the same unique status.

But there are social media campaigns. Automated fake accounts can be countered with persistence and genuine enthusiasm by real people. The secret is for movements and individuals around the world to start seeing that a crisis far away is also their problem: a journalist trolled and terrorized in Manila is attacked with the same methods and the same technology that is used in the US.

As Maria Ressa herself put it: “Our problems are fast becoming your problems. Boundaries around the world collapse and we can begin to see a kind of global playbook”

The campaign to support Maria Ressa started off using the hashtag “Hold the Line.” The question is: which line?

For Sakharov, the line between democracy and authoritarian politics was drawn along the borders of human rights. Digital rights can be a similar line today. For that to happen, democracies need to overhaul our information space with the same boldness that was shown in drawing up the Helsinki Human Rights Accords in the 1970s. Clear norms are needed, establishing people’s rights online. Protecting them against online abuse is the first step.

It is also important to clarify how data is used, so that when a citizen logs on, their personal information is not used to covertly manipulate them, secretly playing on their fears or fuelling anger. To be empowered digital citizens people need to know how and why they are being targeted with content and by whom, and why algorithms provide them with some content and not others.  

This new social contract around digital rights can become the standard for real democracy, the “line” between different systems. In that sense Sakharov’s words are as true as ever: “I think that a great deal depends on this struggle—trust between the people, trust in high promises and the final result—international security.”

The post Defending journalists in an era of ‘destroyed rights’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The use of (dis)information to undermine the enemy is as old as the Trojan Horse. Back in the 6th Century B.C., the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu was already advising that the ideal form of attack would see you defeat an enemy purely psychologically, without landing a physical blow. Today, the information revolution allows for an unprecedented number of ways to influence and subvert other countries.

But while theorists and practitioners across the world are experimenting in ways to weaponize information, for some, the term “information war” has gone beyond psyops (psychological operations) to become a grand myth which explains away the world. Indeed, one of the most damaging ideas an information war can plant in the mind of the enemy is the idea of an information war itself.

Information war has long obsessed Russian geopolitical analysts looking to explain the failure of the Soviet Union. They assert that the country collapsed not because of its terrible economic, cultural and social policies, but because of “information viruses” planted by Western security services through Trojan-Horse ideas such as freedom of speech (Operation Glasnost) and economic reform (Operation Perestroika). Alleged secret agents in the Soviet establishment who posed as so-called modernizers, allied with a DC-dictated fifth column of anti-Soviet dissidents, supposedly oversaw the dissemination of these “viruses.”

For a long time, such theories were not in the Russian mainstream. But as the Kremlin searched for ways to explain its losses in the 21st Century—such as the 2004 and 2013 Revolutions in Ukraine or the 2011 protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow—“information war” became a convenient way to cover up for policy failures.

In a 2012 article called “Russia and the Changing World,” Putin elaborated about how he perceives such “soft power”—namely, as “a matrix of tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence;” a device used “to manipulate the public and to conduct direct interference in the domestic policy of sovereign countries.” He rejected as “unacceptable” the work of “pseudo-NGOs and other agencies that try to destabilize other countries with outside support...”

Others were more specific. Describing the Arab Spring in a 2014 piece for The Military-Industrial Courier, General-Major Vasily Burenok, president of the Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences, wrote that “In North Africa, the main aim [of the West] was to inspire a civil war and sow chaos.” Meanwhile, in Ukraine, he claimed, Western “colonels” tried to “reformat” Ukrainian thinking during the Maidan revolution of 2013. The internet and mobile communications allow for new intensity and power in this “non-material” warfare, he observed.

And Moscow has acted accordingly. Over the past two years, since war with the West has become the Kremlin’s main message, Russian officials have alleged information wars to explain everything from anti-corruption reporting about Putin’s money to investigations into Russia’s Olympics doping programs.

Does the Kremlin really believe in these wars? Are they merely a convenient cover? Or are they a case of projection?

In Soviet times, the Kremlin ran an extensive operation to subvert the West through what were known as “active measures.” An estimated 15,000 KGB employees worked, in the words of former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, to “drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America.”

Putin, as a former KGB officer, is, of course, well aware of this history.

Whatever its motivations, paranoia has become Russia’s foreign policy, with the Kremlin setting up its own fake NGOs and international propaganda-outlets; buying up political actors and supporting extremist groups; enabling hackers, troll farms, rent-a-mobs and corrupt businesspeople to destabilize democracies and eat away at Western alliances. “At its most effective, the Kremlin does not invent new issues. It tries to fan the flames of existing problems such as corruption, anti-EU and anti-NATO sentiment, low-quality media, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories.”

One noticeable aspect of the Kremlin’s approach is support for European far-right parties which then support the Kremlin’s foreign policies. The National Front in France, for example, has received funding from Kremlin-connected sources. Another is the use of disinformation to obscure Russian responsibility for such mistakes as bringing down Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Donbass or for bombing a United Nations aid convoy in Syria.

Disinformation (“dezinformatsiya”) was also an important part of Soviet active measures, but the media environment within which it spread has changed. The Soviets tried to prove their fake stories were actually true. Today, the fakes are sprayed into the chaos of social media and conspiracy websites, adding to the lack of trust in mainstream media and to the overall confusion of so-called post-fact societies. This amounts to not so much an information war, as what some analysts describe as a “war on information.”

At its most effective, the Kremlin does not invent new issues. It tries to fan the flames of existing problems such as corruption, anti-EU and anti-NATO sentiment, low-quality media, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories.

But responding to such tactics also carries the risk of replicating the Kremlin’s information-war mythology and seeing all domestic problems as products of an “information war.” This poses dangers.

For one, democratic leaders can use the claim of information warfare as an excuse to attack viable opposition. In February 2016, for example, Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius alleged, with no proof, that strikes by the Trade Union of Lithuanian Teachers are influenced by Moscow. He apologized a day later, saying that he’d only meant to signal the pro-Putin proclivities of the union’s Russian counterparts.

Others can use the claim of an information war to go after the press. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called a New York Times editorial criticizing his lack of reforms part of Russia’s “hybrid war” against Ukraine, while his interior minister, Arsen Avakov, labels independent Ukrainian journalists who do not toe the government line “liberal-separatists.” (Many of the journalists have received death threats.)

In Ukraine, there are also attempts to bring in new legislation which would allow for censorship under the cover of defending against “information aggression.” The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media criticized the proposed bill for potentially preventing media from acting as a watchdog on government. The Ukrainian parliament has not yet voted on the proposed change. “Ultimately, whoever wages it, an ‘information war’ is a model used to explain the world which actually explains nothing.”

Such legislative tactics actually play directly into the Kremlin’s hands. Moscow’s aim is to sharpen the divisions in societies, to stir discontent and alienate communities. Those divisions can be severe.

In EU-member Latvia, for instance, one recent study by the Latvian Defense Academy found that 41.3 percent of some 1,715 respondents who speak Russian at home believe that “Russian intervention” to defend their “rights and interests” is “necessary and justified.” Initiatives by Latvian politicians to test Russian-language teachers for “loyalty” and to expel Russian-speakers might only help sharpen these divisions.

Ultimately, whoever wages it, an “information war” is a model used to explain the world which actually explains nothing. This doesn’t mean the West should ignore the challenge of Active Measures 2.0, but it needs to find its own way of evaluating them and its own language for combating them. Democracies are in a double bind: How can they respond to the Kremlin without becoming like it?

This article was published in partnership with bbcrussian.com. Click here to read this article in Russian.

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The Russian doctrine of information war is not concerned with ideology. It is a way for the state to confuse, dismay, delay and divide. Ideas are of interest in so far as they serve a tactical purpose.

The Kremlin’s post-2012 conservative stance, which has created an environment whereby TV hosts call on citizens to “burn the hearts of gay men,” is a case in point.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay. Being openly gay in macho Russia has never been particularly pleasant (think of attitudes to “fags” and “benders” in the UK and US in the 1970s), but gay-bashing was never a top topic and was based more on boorishness and ignorance rather than any religious position. As anyone who has ever lived in Russia knows, social culture there is hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn’t.

To understand why marginalizing gay people work for Putin it’s worth going back to the beginning of the campaign. In 2011-2012, Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. The opposition rock group Pussy Riot’s controversial “punk prayer” in Moscow’s central cathedral came as a Godsend to the Kremlin, allowing it to shift the national conversation away from corruption to its own definition of values. On TV, Jerry Springer-like shows ranted about witches, God, Satan and anal sex. Europe, which had been used by Putin’s opposition as a cypher for the rule of law and transparency, was now labeled “Gayropa.” Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

Domestically the ploy only half worked. Though the Kremlin managed to change the agenda, Putin’s ratings kept on falling (it would take military victory in Crimea to boost them). Internationally, however, it has been far more successful. Unlike in Russia there really are powerful, ideologically driven anti-LGBT movements in the US and Europe, and these groups now see Putin as an ally and help undermine the Western coalition against the Kremlin’s belligerent foreign policy. The idea that Russia is a genuine defender of conservative moral values, and that these values have some sort of geopolitical expression, helps bolster Putin’s status and feeds into the idea Russia has some sort of inherent zone of influence, that countries such as Ukraine are part of its “civilizational block,” and are destined to be in the Kremlin’s orbit. Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

In practice, of course, Russia is economically intertwined with the West. Russian TV is an odd hybrid: “Gayropa” rants by Kremlin hosts such as Dmitry Kyselev are followed by ads for Western brands and Russian franchises of Western TV formats, and these all represent potential pressure points for LGBT rights campaigners.

As this hybridity suggests, the increased frequency with which anti-gay messages crop up in Russian media is not due to an inherent culture, values, or ideology. When Western liberal intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy describe the war in Ukraine as a fight between “conservative” Russia and “liberal Europe,” they would do well to remember that they are in fact walking right into the Kremlin’s narrative trap.

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