To set the stage for Orbán’s rise, we start with what happened in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  

The pace of political change in the early 1990s was dizzying, and the forces propelling democracy seemed unstoppable: old political barriers between East and West collapsed; free markets sprang up everywhere and democratic elections were held; a divided Germany was reunited; the Soviet Union dissolved; Europe expanded; and a new global economy seemed to be taking over the world.

These changes caused one optimistic observer to predict that democracy would be the final form of government.  But there were other forces at work, less visible at first, but leading to a very different kind of change. Some effects of the changes listed above included: international companies moving their factories out of Europe to Asia; neoliberal shock therapies cutting social spending in the new democracies of Eastern Europe; social services that had been provided by the old regimes were replaced unevenly by capitalism; corruption broke out as state assets were privatized; economic inequality grew between the new class of oligarchs benefiting from privatization and everyone else; bank bailouts and lending crises shook the financial system; then came the massive flow of refugees into Europe from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa. 

All this led to the rise of xenophobic politics – first in Hungary, then across Europe. It was a populist pushback against disruptive and disorienting changes.

This is when the assault on democracy began, and for seven years I was in the middle of it, in Hungary, where I was president of Central European University.  I saw first-hand how a politician like Orbán could manipulate a populist rebellion in order to take over a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state. 

When my term ended in 2016, I returned to the U.S. – just in time for the first election of Donald Trump.  Friends joked that maybe I had carried the Hungarian anti-democracy disease back home.  

Hungary has been a laboratory for reactionary populism, years before it spread to the rest of Europe and to the U.S. The 2008 financial crisis hit Hungarians harder than most Europeans and Americans, and many began to feel no better off than they had been under communism. By 2014 a European Commission poll showed that 70% of Europeans distrusted their elected governments – up from only 25% in 2002.  In Eastern Europe people were feeling left behind by the loss of jobs, stagnating incomes, austerity programs and cuts in social welfare – all products of the economics of globalization.  

Hungarians, some have argued, have a deep-seated victim mentality – the product of centuries of invasions by Mongols, Turks, Russians, Austrians, Germans and Soviets – and Hungarian civil society was stunted by outside domination.  On top of that, the country was deeply divided between a majority rural population that spoke only Hungarian and a cosmopolitan minority who were the dominant elite.  

This set the stage for an anti-democratic politician, and in walked Viktor Orbán.

Ironically, Orbán had been a hero of the democracy movement that overthrew the old regime. He had good organizing and rhetorical skills, which he used to stimulate Hungarians’ sense of victimization. He attacked the European Union as “the new Moscow”. He railed against refugees, calling them “a threat to Christian civilization”. He campaigned on the memorable slogan, “make Hungary great again,” and he promised Hungarians that he would rescue them from migrants and foreigners and people of other races and religions. He created a new identity politics by offering the vision of a “Great Hungarian Nation” as a way to prop up a worn out and disintegrating society.  

Orbán boasted that he would build a new form of government, which he called “illiberal democracy” -- an Orwellian term he invented to justify turning his election into a weapon to attack democratic institutions. He maneuvered a narrow electoral victory into a supermajority in the parliament, and paved the way for rewriting the Hungarian Constitution:

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”

Orbán took over the media through government regulation, censorship, and financial pressure -- and today he controls 85% of the average Hungarian’s sources of information.  

He undermined the judiciary and the rule of law by expanding and packing the Constitutional Court, forcing independent judges to retire, cutting back the Court’s jurisdiction and drastically revising the Constitution.

He built a governing base out of a new oligarchy of corrupt businesses who benefited from noncompetitive government contracts, with funding from Europen Union grants to Hungary as a new member state.  The grants totaled nearly 30 billion euros before they were finally suspended when Hungary was held by the European Court of Justice to be violating the EU’s rule of law requirements. 

Orbán attacked Hungarian civil society -- branding organizations that received any support from the US or Europe as “foreign agents”, conducting harassment investigations of critics, and taking away the academic freedom of universities.  

I was running an international university whose mission was to revive academic freedom in Eastern Europe. During the Obama presidency, when the US promoted academic freedom, I was able to protect CEU from Orbán and expand its academic programs.  But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he endorsed Orbán, and Orbán took the gloves off and started attacking universities, forcing CEU out of the country and taking over others by censoring and dictating what they could teach.

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and he’s had an especially large influence on Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”  

Orbán has developed a playbook that’s now kept him in power for 15 years, and his playbook is the foundation for Trump’s Project 2025.  Here are Orbán’s rules for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state – rules that Donald Trump is now working to implement in the U.S.:     

One: take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all dissent.

Two: build your base by appealing to fear and hate and branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.    

Three: use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate -- especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: centralize your power by destroying the civil service.  

Six: redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree.

Seven: eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. 

Eight: rely on your oligarchs to supervise the economy, and reward them with special access to state resources.    

Nine: ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: get the public to believe all this is necessary, and resistance is futile.

The scope of Orbán’s influence reaches across Europe.  

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies. 

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook, but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.  

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.  

In Germany the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government.  Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20% of the vote, and polls show that 71% of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past. 

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model.  A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.  

So, what lessons can be drawn from all this? 

One lesson is that populist movements are having a big impact on democracy.  They start as reactions to destabilizing events, like economic or cultural upheavals, and they demand change and democratic reform. It’s important to listen to these movements, to understand their demands, and to show how democracy can give people the ability to shape and adapt to change. Meanwhile authoritarians like Viktor Orbán may seem attractive at first but inevitably suppress people’s voices and freedom, and promote corruption and economic inequality.   

Responding to populism can be done by building coalitions for economic fairness on issues like healthcare, education, taxes and public spending.  There are historical examples of this, like the American Farmer Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers and black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century.  Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

A second lesson is that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook the national flag is hijacked by the authoritarian leader.  The flag of a democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, of a society built on human rights and freedoms and international alliances and humanitarian values. When these soft power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up -- to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Xinping and Vladimir Putin who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. 

A third lesson is that the ultimate goal of an authoritarian leader is to weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Orbán’s playbook demonizes anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” This stigma is then enforced by targeting opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties like denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, criminal penalties like prosecution. The result is a hollowed-out shell of democracy – like Orbán’s Hungary.

What about the U.S.?  The US is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism.  It’s thirty times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and its diversity is the source of its economic and cultural strength. The US has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.  Donald Trump won less than fifty percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls. 

This is not a mandate for hollowing out American democracy.  

National polls show that 70% of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.  Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, it’s essential, and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees, and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country, who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy. 

Defending democracy is a long game. For two and a half centuries Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law. These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025, because citizens across the country are beginning to resist authoritarianism. To succeed, authoritarianism requires big government, and Americans have long been opposed to big government. 

Building resistance is hard work and sometimes may seem futile, but every small act counts and many small continuous acts can make a profound difference in resisting an authoritarian regime.  Six decades ago, in South Africa at the height of apartheid, the original Robert F. Kennedy eloquently predicted what would be achieved by resisting authoritarianism:  

“Each time a person stands up, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.”

A version of this piece was first published in Rappler.

Image credits:
Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the Oval Office. May 13, 2019. Washington, DC. Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban on the sidelines of the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17, 2023. Grigory Sisoyev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
Xi Jinping and Viktor Orban. Liszt Ferenc Budapest airport, Ferihegy, Hungary.May 8, 2024. Vivien Cher Benko/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

The post The Orbán precedent appeared first on Coda Story.

As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

The post How Democracies Die: The Script for a Three-Act Play appeared first on Coda Story.

Having spent most of my life watching Putin's Russia take shape, I recognize familiar patterns in American politics today. There is a theory, expressed only half in jest, among some who analyze Donald Trump—as he undermines traditional alliances and creates havoc within the federal government—that he must be a Russian asset. I understand what they mean. Trump consistently parrots Putin talking points, and Russian state media celebrates Trump with unusual enthusiasm. As American presidents, whether left or right, are rarely cheered in Russia, one might suspect some kind of collaboration.

But there is a simpler explanation: Trump and Putin are remarkably similar men who naturally understand each other. No conspiracy required—Trump would feel right at home in Moscow.

This isn't to suggest moral equivalence. Trump, after all, has not waged a genocidal war claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. He aspires to dictatorship but hasn't succeeded in achieving it—yet. He hasn't killed his political opponents or nationalized major companies to enrich his friends. Given America's robust institutions, he is unlikely to ever have the opportunity to do these things. In any case, he likely doesn't harbor such aims—he seems much more jovial than Putin.

Still, the parallels between them are unmistakable:

Both men emerged in the moral ambiguity that followed World War II's short-lived moral clarity. They share a worldview in which only large, feared countries deserve respect. Trump famously told Bob Woodward that “real power is… fear.” In both domestic and foreign affairs, neither operates appears to believe that promises matter or that empathy should guide decision-making. While many politicians behave similarly, few presidents so openly belittle neighboring countries and their leaders as Trump and Putin routinely do.

Both men consider loyalty—even feigned loyalty—to be the only true virtue. Trump's pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists demonstrates his adherence to this principle. Unlike in his first term, when staffers frequently defected or expressed dissatisfaction, Trump now trades competence for loyalty in those he employs, exactly as Putin does. 

Just observe JD Vance's transformation. During Trump's first term, he was a clean-shaven intellectual on a book tour who compared Trump to Hitler. Now, he resembles a Central Asian heir to the throne and his almost comically masculine posturing mimics his boss’s style. This shapeshifting ability shouldn't surprise anyone who read Vance's memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he described his childhood talent for adapting to different father figures. "With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it,” Vance wrote, “I pretended earrings were cool... With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of 'girlieness,' I had thick skin and loved police cars." For men like Trump and Putin, loyalty isn't optional, it's existential, and Vance has mastered the art of becoming whatever his current patron requires.

Both Putin and Trump harbor a profound distrust of democratic institutions. Trump's fixation on the "stolen election" of 2020 mirrors Putin's trauma from his failed bid to manipulate the 2005 Ukrainian election to his advantage. For both men, personal political losses were transformational. In Putin’s case, every challenge to his authority has turned him into a different, usually worse, person. 

It may seem paradoxical that a man who never faces competitive elections changes with each successive term, but it's true – and each iteration is more dangerous than the last. Trump too has changed since his last term. He may still be erratic, may still be a lying, megalomaniacal, overconfident salesman. But those of us who have seen authoritarian evolution up close recognize a fundamental transformation. Trump’s rage at institutional betrayal has calcified into conviction, into a doctrine founded on distrust. The trauma of defeat in 2020 didn't just wound Trump's ego; it convinced him to view the entire democratic apparatus as illegitimate. This shift, this hardening of his position should not be underestimated.

Another thing Trump and Putin have in common is that both believe corruption is universal. I recognize in Trump a mindset common in Russia—indeed, it's fundamental to how power operates in Moscow. Trump doesn't just call opponents "crooked” as a joke, he seems to genuinely believe that graft, and graft alone, motivates everyone. For Trump, corruption is not merely personal enrichment but is the only effective means of governance, of exerting control. This approach makes dealing with Putin convenient—negotiations are simpler when you believe everyone has a price. But I’ve seen in my country how such transactionalism ultimately backfires, creating whole new avenues of institutional corruption that involve orders of far greater magnitude than simple personal enrichment ever could. 

Apart from an intrinsic understanding of corruption, both Trump and Putin also understand, crave and deliberately create chaos. Whether through war, nuclear threats, dismantled treaties, or bureaucratic upheaval, disorder provides leverage. When Elon Musk is tasked with destroying the civil service, the goal is to make government employees more pliable for whatever comes next. The damage, of course, will extend beyond Trump's tenure—after he leaves office, American civil servants will have lost their trust in the entire American system, the whole edifice of government, and it won’t be easy to restore that faith.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality.

Many American observers now hold out hope that constitutional guardrails and democratic institutions will do their job. These observers believe checks and balances will contain Trump's excesses until the midterms or the next presidential election bring relief. They're not entirely wrong—America is certainly better positioned to withstand authoritarian creep than Russia was in Putin's early years. 

America's independent judiciary, free press, federalized power structure, and long democratic tradition provide genuine protective layers that Russia lacked. But I've also seen how institutions crumble not through frontal assault but through slow erosion, as bureaucrats, judges, and legislators become complicit through fear, ambition, or simple exhaustion. 

When I read pundits like Ezra Klein argue we shouldn't believe Trump's threats because his power is more limited than he pretends, I recognize a familiar pattern of wishful thinking. Klein suggests that since Trump lacks congressional control and broad public support, his power exists mainly in our collective imagination of it. This analysis assumes Trump operates within the traditional boundaries of American politics. But that's precisely what authoritarians never do. Those who dismiss Trump's ability to transform America make a fundamental error of perspective. They judge his capabilities by the system's rules, while he succeeds by dismantling those very rules. 

Trump has few constitutional powers, true. But autocrats rarely acquire power through constitutional means—that's precisely why they want to become autocrats: to avoid this hassle. They find cracks in the system—a corrupt judge here, a sycophantic legislator there, a couple of overworked bureaucrats willing to look the other way.

Worse, those who can most effectively prevent state capture are least equipped to recognize it. Trump isn't trying to subdue coastal liberals and activists; he’s going after unelected civil servants, military officers, and corporate stakeholders. Whatever their qualifications, these aren't people prepared for civil disobedience—that's not in their job descriptions. They advance their careers by executing orders without overthinking them, not by questioning authority. Whatever resistance they might offer has been further diminished by Musk's crusade against the "deep state."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who can resist often voluntarily surrender. Many Republican congressmen, whatever their real feelings and opinions, have meekly knelt before Trump's throne. Autocratic systems actively select for the unprincipled and obedient. Compare Trump's second administration to his first—adverse selection is already evident.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality. 

So far, Trump has twice won the most competitive elections on the planet, and Musk is officially the world's richest man, having built businesses few thought possible. JD Vance, in addition to becoming VP by 40, wrote a bestseller at 31. They all have a history of making their ideas come true. If you think the world isn't crazy enough to follow them further into the abyss, you might want to reconsider your assumptions. In my part of the world, at least, it's always been just crazy enough.

Even though nearly every statement Trump makes is false, he remains deeply true to those falsehoods. His fictions, which share so much with those invented by Putin, have given both men control of their nations’ narratives – false or not. So, when evaluating Trump's threat, consider Pascal's wager: If we spend four years on high alert over dangers that never materialize, we've endured unnecessary stress. If we relax and let his worst ambitions come to fruition, we face a potential catastrophe. The first scenario is clearly preferable.

Americans often ask how ordinary Russians can support Putin's regime. Perhaps now you're getting a clearer picture. The path from democracy to autocracy isn't marked by tanks in the streets but by the slow erosion of norms, the replacement of competence with loyalty, and the methodical exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities.

Trump has given us plenty of advance warning. Authoritarians announce their crimes long before they commit them. Even the most unprincipled men hold deep convictions and manifest character traits that rarely change. That's not advanced political theory—it's Russian History 101. The question remains, though, now that we know – what are we going to do?

The post The Shadow Puppet: A Russian’s Warning about Trump appeared first on Coda Story.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

The post How the West lost the war it thought it had won appeared first on Coda Story.

When he declared last week that Ukraine should "secure what we're giving them with their rare earth and other things," he inadvertently exposed a bitter truth: gauzy Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn’t apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

It was a lesson I learned for myself, reporting from Georgia in 2008 as Russian tanks rolled towards my hometown.By the time a ceasefire was called, Russia had invaded and seized 20% of Georgian land, the territory of America's most loyal non-NATO ally in the region. And Georgia had suffered a wound that would prove fatal. Just months later, Hillary Clinton, Obama's newly minted Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button in Geneva. 

Despite the recent Russian aggression, there was Lavrov, laughing and joking with Clinton about a mistake in the transliteration from English to Cyrillic of the word “reset.” Every Georgian, Kazakh, or Ukrainian who had experienced Russian colonialism first hand, knew that what he was really chuckling about was the fact that Moscow had just gotten away with murder. 

Trump has exposed a bitter truth: gauze Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn't apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine was positioning itself to be a key player in the global green technology transition. The country's vast deposits of lithium and various minerals - including 22 of the 34 minerals that the European Union deems to be “critical” – promised a pathway to genuine economic sovereignty. But that future was stolen by Russia's invasion, with a significant percentage of Ukrainian minerals now under Russian control, including half of its rare earths reserves. 

The mineral deposits that remain – resources that could finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction – are now being demanded by Trump as collateral for military aid. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy leapt at the offer: “let’s do a deal,” he told Reuters about Trump’s conditions, “we are only for it.” Zelenskiy’s desperate need for continued American support means he has little choice but to bargain away Ukraine’s resources. Even if it raises the grim colonial specter of the U.S. and Russia sitting across the negotiating table and carving up Ukrainian wealth amongst themselves.

Trump's approach eerily echoes Victorian-era colonialism. When Cecil Rhodes declared in 1902 that he would "annex the planets if I could," he expressed the same ruthless resource-extraction mindset that now drives Trumpian foreign policy. Both men share a vision of power measured in territorial control and resource ownership, backed by military might.

In his first term, Trump was frequently described as an isolationist, unwilling to continue to fund American military adventurism abroad, unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other countries, unwilling to shelter migrants, and unwilling to abide by international agreements and institutions. Back then, the label was suspect, a badge of convenience. Already in the first weeks of Trump’s second term, the label has become absurd. 

But Trump's mineral-for-weapons proposition, crude as it is, strips away decades of Western illusions. It acknowledges what leaders in Washington and Brussels long refused to see - that countries in Russia's shadow have never had the luxury of true independence. 

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue. It’s a pattern that requires the West to bury its head in the sand after each example of Russian aggression. For instance, after Russia's cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, Western leaders dismissed it as an anomaly. And then, after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, they rushed to "reset" relations. Six years later, after the seizure of Crimea, they still spoke of finding diplomatic solutions. Each time Putin tested the West's resolve, he emerged more emboldened, his every action treated as an aberration rather than as part of a coherent imperial strategy.

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue.

The medieval assault on Ukraine in 2022 seemed, finally, like a wake-up call. For a moment, it appeared that politicians in Europe and the United States understood that Putin wanted to rebuild a Russian empire. But the moment didn’t last long. Even as Putin openly declared his imperial ambitions, even as he openly dismissed Ukraine's right to sovereignty, Western leaders continued to search for off-ramps and resets that existed only in their imagination.

Joe Biden's tactics - treating the conflict as a crisis to be managed rather than a war to be won - became the final chapter of the West’s failed post-Cold War politics. Each delayed weapons delivery, each hesitation justified by the fear of escalation, reflected a familiar priority: stability with Russia over the right to sovereignty of its neighbors.

Those underground deposits in Ukraine tell the story: a large portion now lies in territories controlled by Russia or too close to the front lines to be mined. No wonder, Zelensky is courting Trump’s interest in its rare earth deposits. The choices facing Ukraine's leadership and people remain what they've always been - a series of impossible decisions to be made in the shadow of an empire that has never accepted their right to decide.

“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe's values," a Ukrainian soldier told me in 2015. His words haunt me now as we enter this new, cynical era. Deep beneath Ukraine's soil lies both promise and peril - deposits of minerals that could fuel either independence or a new era of colonial extraction. The familiar irony for Ukraine is that these resources, which make sovereignty viable, must also serve as collateral in a great game between colonial powers.

Now that the magical thinking and pretense is over and the hard calculations begin, the only certainty is that the cost will be borne, as always, by those who do not have the privilege of being able to harbor illusions and magical thoughts in the first place.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Donald Trump’s imperial dreams appeared first on Coda Story.

AfD has become a serious threat to Germany’s political establishment, with its leader Alice Weidel even leading the race  in one recent poll to become the country’s next chancellor. Weidel, a once obscure figure, enjoys the very loud and prominent support of Elon Musk, who interviewed her for over an hour on X last month and appeared at an AfD rally via video link last week to tell the crowd that there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt. “ He exhorted AfD supporters to “be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” 

Many AfD members have in the past called for an end to Germany’s “cult of guilt” over the Holocaust. And Weidel herself, while endorsing that phrase, has said German politics should not be about its past but about “confidence and responsibility for the future.”

When Musk told thousands of Germans they need to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, I reached out to Erica Hellerstein, a brilliant reporter who has spent months investigating Germany's complex relationship with historical memory. In 2023, her story for Coda dived into  the little-understood opposition to Holocaust remembrance inside Germany. 

"What's interesting to me is seeing that view migrate from the fringe of German society to one of the most powerful shadow politicians in the US," Erica told me.

"Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents," Musk declared to cheering AfD supporters, just hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Musk’s own grandfather was reportedly a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist in South Africa - another country that, like Germany, has been celebrated for its post-conflict reconciliation efforts.

To understand today's shifting power dynamics, you have to understand how leaders manipulate our view of the past. The battle over historical memory has become one of the most potent weapons of modern authoritarianism, though it often goes unnoticed in daily headlines. Whether in school textbooks, political speeches, or family stories, the rewriting of history isn't really about the past at all. It's about who gets to control the future. 

No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, who has written the playbook that authoritarians around the world are now following: Close the archives. Rewrite textbooks. Silence historians. Transform perpetrators into heroes.

What makes this tactic so effective is how stealthily it works at first. The rewriting of history begins in intimate spaces - in family silences, in selective remembrance, in subtle shifts of narrative.

We sent Erica to Germany in the wake of America's racial justice protests because we wanted to understand what Europe's model for historical reconciliation could teach a nation grappling with its own buried past. What Erica uncovered was revealing: even as Germans publicly embraced their culture of remembrance, many maintained a studied silence about their own family histories during the Nazi era - much like the buried stories of racial violence she found reporting across the American South. It was in these intimate gaps between public commemoration and private amnesia that she found the seeds of today's shift.

"Silence distorts memory..." wrote Erica Hellerstein in Coda nearly three years ago. She had traveled to Germany to report on its lauded culture of remembrance. Now with Elon Musk telling Germans to move on from their guilt, Erica's prescient piece reminds us why we must interrogate the horrors of history so as not to repeat them in the future. READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

"I don't think it's particularly surprising that someone with Musk's particular brand of grievance politics would gravitate to the AfD's brand of grievance politics," Erica told me, "but it does make me wonder if it will give license to other authoritarian movements to more vocally reject movements to reconcile with the past."

It’s already happening: Argentina's new president Javier Milei is actively whitewashing the country’s brutal period of dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. And in Hungary, historical revisionism has been essential to Viktor Orbán maintaining his grip on power.  While, in the United States, conservative politicians continue to rail against the 1619 Project and any attempt to teach accurate history in schools.

In Russia, where 70% approve of Stalin's role in Russian history, nearly half of young people say they've never heard of the Great Terror. Years before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine we saw how the Putin regime began to implement its meticulous, systematic erasure of Soviet crimes: “cleansing” history books, culture, music, film, media.  By rewriting the past, Putin's regime cleared the way for future atrocities. When he finally declared Ukraine's statehood a historical fiction in 2022, the groundwork had been laid over decades of perpetuating carefully constructed historical myths. 

Now, as Musk amplifies a view that was once barely whispered in German living rooms, we're seeing  the results of the same erosion of historical memory burst into the mainstream. It’s evident in the support for extreme right wing groups across Europe,

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how it weaponizes a very human impulse - the desire to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about our past. As one Gulag survivor told us, of wrestling with this challenge in Russia: "How do you hold people accountable when there are millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards... These millions were also our people."

This selective amnesia creates exactly the kind of buried tension and grievance that authoritarians exploit. From Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Mississippi to Munich, we see how silence about the past can pave the way for power grabs in the present. When Musk aligns himself with Germany's far right, he's not just making an inflammatory speech - he's giving global legitimacy to a movement that understands what Putin has long known: controlling society’s memory is the key to controlling society.

Today, as we witness what Erica calls "the global ripple effect of this kind of embrace of a once-taboo interpretation of history," I'm struck by how the grand sweep of politics often begins in the quiet spaces of our homes. 

The stories we tell our children, the silences we maintain at family gatherings, the questions we dare or don't dare to ask about our ancestors - these intimate choices extend outward, shaping not just our personal narratives but our collective future. 

As Erica put it: “I think it’s so important to start with our family stories - because over time, memory gaps can mutate into memory wars.” And so, perhaps our most important task begins at our dinner tables: facing up to the stories we've been afraid to tell.

The post To control the future, rewrite the past appeared first on Coda Story.

Lê has been glorified as the living torch of Vietnam. Still today, city parks, streets, schools, and hospitals throughout the country bear the name of the teenage exemplar. Lê’s place in history seems beyond reproach.

The only problem is that Lê never existed. Although the depot did indeed explode, the story of Lê’s martyrdom was entirely fabricated as a tool of wartime propaganda. In 2009, professor Phan Huy Lê, an established historian, Communist Party member, and former President of the History Association of Vietnam, published his evidence of the invention of the hero. Many other renowned scholars joined the effort to expose the truth on personal blogs and social media channels.  

Phan revealed the fabrication was made at the request of Professor Trần Huy Liệu, the then Minister of Propaganda of Northern Vietnam, who fabricated the story of the teenager Lê Văn Tám. The concocted icon served to facilitate wartime propaganda, and once the country was at peace, Phan argued that the truth needed to come out. 

The domestic media, now controlled by both the Ministry of Information and Communications as well as the Ministry of Public Security (both led by generals), was silent on the debate surrounding the authenticity of the figure of Lê. Institutions across Vietnam that are named after this fictional hero remain unchanged today. And while historians and others in the know followed the revelation, most people in Vietnam were none the wiser. In 2009, it was hard to find sources of information beyond official, state-run media and on this point they were unanimous.

In a country with one of the fastest growing internet economies in the world, with almost 80% of its population on social media, Vietnamese youths have alternative ways to learn about different narratives of the past.

It wasn’t until a decade later that the winds began to shift. In 2017, Phan's announcement was published in international outlets, such as BBC Vietnamese and RFA Vietnamese (deemed by the Vietnamese government as “enemy" channels and blocked in Vietnam). Also, by that time, Facebook had arrived on the scene and changed the way Vietnamese people received and shared information.

A historian-cum-Party member based in Hanoi who spoke on the condition of anonymity and had been in contact with Trần Huy Liệu confirmed Phan’s position. However, state media remain silent.

“In fact, historians had long discussed the fabrication of Lê Văn Tám before Phan's statement”, said the anonymous historian. “There are many concocted ‘Lê Văn Táms’ that I can’t tell now, otherwise I would get into trouble.” 

Now and then, Party mouthpieces still publish articles that defend the existence of the hero as an “indisputable fact”, and discredit the claim made by Phan. News on state media is considered official news. Versions of stories that are not in line with Party direction will be automatically considered as “fake news”. The CPV has a monopoly on the historiography of Vietnam: they control the publication of history textbooks and reference books for all levels of education, they dictate the content of history museums, and celebration of Party-centered events in mainstream media. Yet, in a country with one of the fastest growing internet economies in the world, with almost 80% of its population on social media, Vietnamese youths have alternative ways to learn about different narratives of the past. 

Communist heroism and heroic communism

The creation of such heroes lies front and center of the identity and legitimacy of the CPV. The CPV decides who, when, and what is to be venerated or vilified. CPV-honored heroes include those fighting in defense of Party-led battles, and mothers whose sons died on the front line. 

General Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911-2013) stands as an iconic figure, a so-called “hero of the people among the people of heroes”. Revered by historians both within Vietnam and abroad, Giáp's leadership as the commander-in-chief during the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 serves as a symbol of military triumph for the CPV over the French, marking the end of French colonial rule in Southeast Asia. British military historian Martin Windrow, the author of “The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam”, referred to the battle as "the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in a pitched battle”. 

Each year, during their annual celebrations, the CPV proudly recalls this historic victory, hailing it as an earth-shattering and world-shaking testament to the unwavering determination and unity of the Party and the people. 

In a twist of fate, it was not the government that initially announced Giáp's passing in 2013, at the age of 102. Instead, it was social media, in particular Facebook, that became the first platform to break the news, followed by BBC Vietnamese. The year 2023 marked the 10th anniversary of his death, but domestic media barely mentioned the late hero, considered as one of the foremost military strategists in the 20th century. 

Thành, a mechanical engineer from Hanoi and a Party member, held deep admiration for General Giáp (a close aide of Bác Hồ (Uncle Hồ Chí Minh) whom he affectionately referred to as “Uncle Giáp”. Though he had never met the hero, in 2013 Thành planned to visit the general's house on Hoàng Diệu street in Hanoi to pay his last respects to the venerated history teacher-turned-military leader. But he was not able to make the visit in the end. A few days after Giáp's passing, an overwhelming number of visitors all over the country flocked to Hanoi to bid farewell to the general during the state funeral that was live broadcasted nationwide–a privilege reserved only for a few national leaders. Domestic media reports featured photos of tearful admirers of all ages and from all walks of life. 

“I wish General Võ Nguyên Giáp would be mentioned in our history textbooks", the teenage participant said.

Thành, now 65, was taken aback as his then 16-year-old son remained nonchalant about the passing of General Giáp, despite widespread discussion of the event. His son was completely clueless about the late general, which made Thành upset. “I was stunned since he [Thành's son] did not know about such a great hero. We are all indebted to him", said Thành. 

It took Thành some time to realize that his son's lack of knowledge about General Giáp was not solely the teenager's fault. The general’s contributions had been omitted from official history textbooks, despite the glorification of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Thành said that his friends shared similar stories about how their own children had barely heard of the late general. 

That said, young people were not totally unaware of the omission of the general. In 2014, at the popular quiz show “Conquest” for secondary school students broadcast nationwide on a state-owned channel, one participant raised the issue on screen.

"I wish General Võ Nguyên Giáp would be mentioned in our history textbooks," the teenage participant said. 

The teenager received a thunderous applause, but no change was made. Former versions of national history textbooks at primary, secondary, and high school levels published by the Vietnam Education Publishing House, under the Ministry of Education and Training, have failed to mention General Giáp's name, despite a promise to do so in 2013. 

The Ministry of Education and Training has licensed five publishers to join forces in publishing national textbooks; a top-down move known as socialization of national textbooks, yet the CPV is still the final overseer of the content. 

As of 2020, new textbooks have been published. But the name of Giáp–the maker of history as the CPV has always asserted–is nowhere to be seen in any version. The government perhaps no longer felt the need to include any of his writing in the literature textbook. The top-down amnesia, the coercive deletion of memories to trigger collective forgetting, still persisted. 

Yet, the party is far from homogenous. It has always been divisive, albeit always putting forward a face that is meant to appear united, both in the past and present. None of the five publishers led by Communist Party members responded to requests for comment.

The hero-offending scandal

In 2018, Daniel Hauer, an English teacher based in Hanoi, made headlines in Vietnam with a series of videos in which he criticized his Vietnamese colleagues at several English language centers for their mispronunciation and misuse of the English language. However, little did Hauer expect that his joke on a Facebook comment in January 2018 about the late General Giáp would bring him so much trouble. The American teacher, who spoke fluent Vietnamese and had a large local following at the time, was accused of dishonoring the architect of the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 and defaming the entire country.

As the country's football team, for the first time ever, made it to the finals of the Asian Cup, a Facebook commenter said that they would get a tattoo of the Vietnamese flag if the national football team emerged victorious. In an exaggerated jest, Hauer said that this was a minor commitment compared to his own pledge to get a genital piercing resembling General Giáp following a recent gold medal win by a Vietnamese athlete.

Hauer was reportedly summoned to meetings with various central state agencies, including the Ministry of Information and Communication. Hauer was ordered to pay a fine of VND70-100 million ($3,100-$4,400) for violating the internet management law. 

Hauer later apologized to Giáp's family and the people of Vietnam, explaining by video in Vietnamese that he did not intend to offend them and that the incident boiled down to cultural differences. 

The Vietnamese government has effectively used this law to restrict free speech and control the narrative of historical events in the country. According to the 2023 Press Freedom Index by Reporters without borders, Vietnam ranks 178 out of 180 countries, above China and North Korea. And Vietnam is currently the world's third biggest incarcerator of journalists.

One comment on the widely read Vnexpress reads, in English: “You've [Hauer] never ever respected Vietnam and Vietnamese people. You insulted millions of us. You said that you felt sorry and that you didn't know Vietnamese culture, such a liar! Better go back to your own country. We Vietnamese people don't welcome you any more. I don't want to say curse words that you usually say in your videos to you”.  

According to several domestic media reports, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to deport him due to his insults towards the late General. The English-language centers Hauer was working with reportedly terminated his contracts. 

The CPV was quick to punish anyone daring to offend its hero,  however much that hero might already be sidelined. Even a small offensive post could result in severe consequences. In the case of Hauer, it was the rare occasion that netizens and the CPV spoke with the same nationalistic voice: both were impatient to punish an American citizen who dared to insult a Vietnamese hero. It is unclear whether Hauer eventually had to leave the country or not. However, the incident made clear that a foreigner could face penalties for disrespecting a national hero, which is a criminal offense under the 2015 Vietnamese Penal Code. Article 8 of the 2018 Law on Cybersecurity prohibits acts such as distortion of history, denial of revolutionary achievements, undermining national solidarity, and blasphemy on online platforms. The Vietnamese government has effectively used this law to restrict free speech and control the narrative of historical events in the country. According to the 2023 Press Freedom Index by Reporters without borders, Vietnam ranks 178 out of 180 countries, above China and North Korea. And Vietnam is currently the world's third biggest incarcerator of journalists.

History at school: a minor subject 

The Hanoi-based engineer Thành recalled that he had been frustrated with the way history was taught in schools when he was still a student in the late 1970s, during war-time. While he enjoyed reading about feudal history, things came to a head when it came to studying the history of fighting against the French and the Americans, known internationally as the Indochina war and the Vietnam war. 

When reflecting on studying history at school, Thành noted that "it was boring because we knew that the truth was not entirely told." 

For example, Thành said that he and his brothers did not volunteer to fight the war. They were mobilized or even forced to become soldiers, but were required to write letters expressing volunteerism and patriotism.

“We were asked to fight. We did not want to do so", said Thành. 

Minh, a retired history teacher at a Hanoi secondary school, said that she barely read up on what she had been asked to teach. 

“I only followed the teacher’s guidebook", said Minh, who also admitted that there was no need for additional sources since “it is best to just stick to the guidebook by the Hanoi Department of Education and Training to be on the safe side.”

“At secondary schools, students are expected to note down what teachers lecture", said Minh.  “If we do not adhere to official guidelines, parents might complain that we are not teaching the right thing”.

Every year, Vietnamese domestic media reports on the declining interest in history among young people, along with their poor performance in history during major national high school graduation examinations. For several years in a row, history grades have been among the lowest. 

History has long been relegated to a "môn phụ" (minor subject) or "môn thuộc lòng" (a subject of rote learning) or “môn đọc chép” (a subject of dictation). Unlike their colleagues teaching math, literature, and foreign languages, who can earn money by teaching after-school classes, history teachers do not have the opportunity to provide tutoring, the main source of income for most Vietnamese teachers at public schools, many of whom are overworked and underpaid. 

“History teachers, as well as teachers of other minor subjects, receive less gifts on National Teachers Day and are generally less respected by parents and students"

“History teachers, as well as teachers of other minor subjects, receive less gifts on National Teachers Day and are generally less respected by parents and students", said Minh. 

In 2022, the Ministry of Education and Training proposed making this subject entirely optional. Various reasons have been cited to support this proposal, including monotonous pedagogical approaches, limited job opportunities for history majors, and the perceived "unimportance" of the subject.

However, netizens, especially public intellectuals, were quick to point out that the politicization of the subject is the elephant in the room. History curricula must always highlight the Party spirit. 

Hải is a party member and lecturer in international history at a prestigious university in Hanoi, and believes that teaching of history is exceedingly Party-centric. Once, he found in his daughter’s lecture notes that the reasons for the failure of rebellions and uprisings in the early 20th century against the French colonizers was due to the lack of Party leadership, unlike Party-led movements later on.

Hải told his daughter to change the lack of CPV leadership into “strong enemy”, since one cannot blame every defeat of an anticolonial uprising on the absence of the CPV, which did not come into being till 1930. His daughter followed his advice, only to be told by her teacher that her response was incorrect. 

“My daughter then told me not to meddle in her studies”, said Hải, who admitted from that day on that he would let daughter provide whatever answer his own teacher had expected so that her grade would not be affected. 

“I do not expect history teachers to know much. They were rote learners themselves,” said Hải, explaining that in the 1980s, only academically weak students would choose to enrol in universities to become teachers. And at that time, only low scoring students would choose to major in history. 

After all, Confucian culture was imposed in the education system. A student, especially a teenage one, is not supposed to deviate from standard responses provided in the lecture notes, which follow teachers' books issued by the Department of Teacher and Training. 

Phượng, from Huế city, was selected as one of the gifted students in the subject of history to represent her school at the national level competition. She was granted the privilege of waiving other subjects to focus solely on preparing for the competition for almost an academic year.

The teacher responsible for coaching her provided a list of sensitive subjects that would not be tested. War and revolution are the key parts of each and every exam. The role of the CPV is the most central question in every single competition edition. And for the world history section of the exam, politically sensitive events in China are not to be studied or tested for the competition either. 

"For example, we cannot talk about the fall of the Soviet Union”, said Phượng, now already a college student. 

According to Party propaganda, the fall of the Soviet Union is attributed to the Union's erroneous reform policies, the sabotage of the West and most importantly, the betrayal of the reactionary Gorbachev who allied with the West to overthrow the regime. In short, it has little to do with Communism as a whole. Gorbachev exemplifies what the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties describe as Communist party members who embrace “self-evolution”, moral degradation, and undermine the party from within. 

According to Party propaganda, the fall of the Soviet Union is attributed to the Union's erroneous reform policies, the sabotage of the West and most importantly, the betrayal of the reactionary Gorbachev who allied with the West to overthrow the regime.

“No state policy could be considered a mistake or misstep,” added Phượng. Phượng was informed by “highly paid trainers” who have been familiar with competition prompts for a decade that while the limitations of certain state policies could be pointed out, one cannot criticize the government. In the history book, the disastrous Maoist land reform in the 1950s modelled upon that of China was described as a Party's rare mistake that was already corrected. On the whole, the Party was always right. Unjust deaths and denunciations are not to be discussed.

Associate Professor of Information and communication sciences, Thanh Phuong Nguyen-Pochan, at The Catholic University of the West in France, consider the rewriting of official history “a very significant protest practice on social-digital networks”, especially the rewriting of history by the VCP’s “organic intellectuals”, i.e. the intellectuals of the regime who contest the current political system. 

“In my current research on the Đồng Tâm land dispute in 2020, I have identified several publications that recall past experiences (which were concealed or omitted by official historians) to criticize the socialist land tenure system and the authorities’ attitude towards farmers,” said Dr Pochan. 

“In my opinion, history can be rewritten by dissident opponents as well as by 'loyal opponents' from within the regime”, said Dr Nguyen-Pochan. “It reflects internal conflicts rather than external challenges to power. In other words, it seems to me that within the VCP, some people are beginning to realize the importance of restoring the truth about the past in order to better manage tensions in the present.”

The challenge of talking about history

For Dr Nguyen-Pochan, those really willing to discuss histories on social media remain in the minority. 

“From my own experience, very few people I know in Vietnam are aware of or interested in debates on ‘sensitive’ (political) topics on social networks,” said Dr Nguyen-Pochan. 

The disinterest in history does not just stem from top-down restrictions of information. In fact, young people are reluctant to explore and engage with national history that is full of pain and injustices. In the restrictive academic and media landscape, many Vietnamese people have learned to practice self-censorship. 

The term "reactionary forces" or "hostile forces" are often used by the CPV to describe individuals or groups of advocates for democracy. Nowadays, the term "reactionary" has become a common label for any content that the government deems harmful to its legitimacy and reputation. As an example, the BBC Vietnamese website, VOA, RFA, even online fora of public intellectuals who are Party members, have been labeled as "an reactionary outlet" and blocked in Vietnam.

Vietnamese people have every reason not to trust any signs of loosening grip on the freedom of expression. Between 1955 and 1956, a group of Party-friendly writers and artists in Northern Vietnam sought to convince the Party of the need for greater artistic and intellectual freedom. Because they published literary and artistic works that departed from the prescribed Party-centric version of literature, the dissident movement came to be known as the Humanity and Masterworks affair (Nhân văn giai phẩm). What happened later on resembled Mao’s political purge: all writers were denounced and jailed. This left intellectuals-cum-party members remained shocked and silent.

In pro-communist narratives, Vietnam is proud of its resistance to foreign aggression which culminated in victory or liberation of American-occupied Saigon on April 30, 1975.

For Professor Keith Taylor from Cornell University, the history of southern Vietnamese has never been respected by powers in Hanoi who considered southerners “as less authentically ‘Vietnamese’ than are northerners.”

“Southern history is a problem for the Hanoi version of history, which is based on the myth of the unity of the Vietnamese people. Diversity challenges the authority of the Party-State,” said Professor Taylor. 

After the Fall of Saigon, civilian and military officials of the Southern regime were sent to reeducation centers to embrace socialism. Historian cadres from Northern Vietnam were sent to educational institutions in the South to renovate the system. 

The Republic of Vietnam (1954-1975), founded by staunchly anti-Communist and anti-colonialist Ngô Đình Diệm, is notably absent from public display in museums, and if mentioned, is often portrayed with condemnation and contempt as traitors and colluders with colonizers and imperialists.

Hương, a Vietnamese tour guide working in Buôn Ma Thuột, which was formerly part of South Vietnam, said that she is only allowed to tell the version provided by her affiliated institution. 

"I only knew that Americans might have used the prison for something," said Hương.

Hương said that as a licenced tour guide, she must introduce the state-enabled version of history to visitors, known as sử chính thống (the official history).

“There is no official record of Đắc Lắc [province] between 1954 and 1975 under Diệm. I must wait for the above to tell me what I am allowed to tell visitors," said Hương. 

Journalist Bình, whose parents lived under the Saigon republican regime, said that his parents told him to “just read the history textbooks for fun”. 

“It is different from what we [Southerners] actually experienced”, said 23-year-old Bình. 

Bình’s uncle worked for the Southern regime, which allowed his extended family to live in the lap of luxury. But the fall of Saigon made them lose everything. Due to their large number of children, they were unable to board the plane for the U.S. Bình ’s uncle was then sent to “re-education”, a Communist term for imprisonment.

“Fleeing the enemy" means running away from foreign invaders for Northerners. For us, it meant fleeing the Communist", added Bình. 

Albeit curious, Bình never had a chance to talk at length about his uncle's experiences. Sufferers of violence in the Communist regime are generally silent so that their descendants can survive and succeed in the new “socialist" system, yet Bình learned about them via social media. 

Propaganda and censorship go hand in hand. As for other history books, any section that defends, extolls, or favors the collapsed Saigon regime or American puppets shall be modified or even suspended from publication.  

In pro-communist narratives, Vietnam is proud of its resistance to foreign aggression which culminated in victory or liberation of American-occupied Saigon on April 30, 1975.

Chí (not his real name), a staff member of a major publishing house in Đà Nẵng, told a story of a book by a young Vietnamese historian about the modern history of Đà Nẵng city, which was under the Southern government from 1955 to 1975. The book did not explicitly commend the Saigon regime, but it depicted many positive aspects of the society, with pluralistic press and dynamic literary landscape.

“It took the book so much time to be approved and circulated", said Chí. 

Still, some teachers also feel compelled to teach beyond what they are told to.

Hanoi-based university lecturer, Hải, found a way to expose his students to events that were not mentioned in any textbook. As a Party member who is in charge of different international programs, he just felt the need to inform students of different perspectives. Using euphemistic language is one of his strategies, though Hải acknowledges “it is hard to teach beyond bias and barriers”.

When explaining the founding of ASEAN, which was originally established as an anti-Communist bloc in Southeast Asia, Hải found himself obligated to relay the official version to his students: "ASEAN is about regional integration." 

However, he also believed it was crucial to acknowledge the bloc's original efforts to halt communism, though he could not say so openly. Instead, Hải emphasized that the founding members of ASEAN initially held unfavorable opinions of the Soviet Union, which put Vietnam at a disadvantage when the country initially sought to accede to the bloc. 

“You can't hide a lot because youths would check on the Internet", said Hải. 

Hanoi-based engineer Thành admitted only getting to know a different version of Vietnamese history thanks to his interest in watching Youtube videos about Vietnamese history in recent years. “I can only learn about the past now that I am retired and pretty economically stable", said Thành. “In the past, I had little time and energy to care". 

Thành also said that he only recently came to know through the Internet that there were different political parties in the 1930s and 1940s rather than just one CPV fighting the French. In addition, the Tet Offensive in 1968, when North Vietnam and the Communist forces in the South launched an untoward attack against South Vietnam and the US forces, which had been taught to students as a resounding victory for the North, was eventually a military loss. South Vietnam, which he knew as a puppet government, was indeed an internationally recognized state in the national territory of Vietnam. 

Thành has now learned to screenshot his mobile phones whenever he reads a politically sensitive story, as it might be “deleted shortly”. Meta has so far yielded to the CPV’s demands to remove content that is deemed inimical to the Party. He and his friends  also learned to use VPNs to read the BBC and VOA in Vietnamese, which has been blocked in Vietnam.  ​​

Silence on war with China was broken when in 2014 an oil rig incident was a wake-up call for Hanoi and a reminder of the fragile comradeship with Beijing, with whom Vietnam fought a bloody war in 1979. Vietnam has been more vocal in defending its territorial claims over the Paracels and Spratly islands, known in Vietnamese respectively as Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa, in the South China Sea, known in Vietnamese as the Biển Đông (East Sea).  

The occurrence of political incidents has prompted a new chapter in the teaching of history in Vietnam. Schools across the country have since had to add a module on territorial waters of Vietnam. Any individual or organization that publicizes a map that does not include the two archipelagos would be subject to a heavy fine. The Sino-Vietnamese border war in 1979, the Paracels in 1974, as well as the skirmish in the Spratly islands, are no longer unspeakable in the mainstream media.

Learning our own history overseas

As more and more young Vietnamese choose to study abroad, light is being shed on Vietnam's distorted or deleted history.

Associate professor of History and Asian studies Nu-Anh Tran, from the University of Connecticut, who teaches Vietnamese students in the US and Bangladesh, realized that many of her Vietnamese students who received pre-university education in Vietnam studied history based on rote learning with little or no exposure to primary sources. However, when abroad, they were interested in engaging with history in a more complex way.

“When we got to the 20^th century, I covered some sensitive topics like the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) - that is sensitive in Vietnam, not in the US... or Bangladesh!” she said. “My Vietnamese students had heard of these topics but didn't know much, so they found it interesting. They were aware of the sensitivity, but they were very intelligent and mature in handling such topics.”

One student, Leo, who asked to be referred to by his French name, went to France to begin his MA study program on International Relations in 2015 after finishing his first degree in Hanoi. Leo recalled the time when his perceptions of history completely changed. “In my books, French authors referred to Vietnam and France as such. Book authors never wrote “our enemy or our army", said Leo. 

As more and more young Vietnamese choose to study abroad, light is being shed on Vietnam's distorted or deleted history.

But what Leo learned about Vietnamese history went far beyond classrooms. Leo recalled a moment from Christmas 2015 when he was walking around Lyon during the holiday season and unexpectedly encountered a woman. Despite not knowing him, the woman, who spoke with a distinct South Vietnamese accent, began shouting at him, accusing him of "being the son of a Northern Communist." This encounter left Leo wondering how a stranger from the South could harbor such animosity towards him, and more importantly, how come Communism was so much detested and decried. 

“That was the moment I started to make sense of the North-South division”, said Leo. 

Leo took part in a voluntary project aimed at helping descendants of boat people who had fled the Communist regime in the 1980s to trace their grandparents' migratory experiences from being stranded at sea in the wake of the fall of Saigon to finally making it to France. He was responsible for translating videos from Vietnamese to French. Despite having finished the translation, Leo dared not watch the actual videos, because the stories of migration were ”too harrowing”.

“I thought the boat people were betrayers,” said Leo.” It turned out that they were victims too”.

Leo's grandparents and parents lived through harsh realities in Northern Vietnam. His grandfather was denounced as a rich landlord during the 1950 Maoist Land Reform. Then the exchange rate reform during the Renovation in 1986 left his family financially devastated overnight. Despite the pain caused by these events, his family did not hold resentment towards the government and still worked hard to become civil servants.

Leo is grateful that he has been exposed to different versions of history through his education in France, though, understanding its complexities is never tantamount to countering the Party's discourses.

“Not many can afford to criticize historical wrongdoings”, Leo said. “After all, we still need to live with the incumbent regime.”

This reporting is sponsored by the Bruno Foundation, set up by journalist and writer Martin Walker. Walker is a celebrated international reporter, historian, and author of the popular Bruno detective series. Bruno’s eponymous protagonist has a distinct awareness of justice, intrigue, and tenacity – traits the Bruno Fellowship encourages.

The post The myth and the hero: the writing and rewriting of Vietnam’s history appeared first on Coda Story.

Much debate has focused on the many complex causes of the famine. One of the main factors, of course, was war. Britain had declared war on Germany on behalf of its colony India—enraging many nationalist Indian leaders who had not been consulted. After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, Britain was also at war with Japan.

For the masses of rural Bengalis who were struggling to survive in impoverished India, war had already touched their lives. Inflation had made the price of rice—Bengal’s staple food—soar. Once Burma fell to the Japanese in early 1942, Japan’s cheap rice ceased to be imported.

Even before this, the rice supply was greatly curtailed, as hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in Calcutta (now Kolkata) made their way to and from the Asian front fighting the Japanese. They, along with  factory workers in wartime industries, needed to be fed. They had priority status because of their role in the wartime effort.  

With the fall of Burma, the Japanese were on the border of Bengal. Having seen the Japanese’s rapid advance across Southeast Asia, colonial authorities feared that if Japanese forces were to invade British India, they would commandeer local food supplies and transport to fuel their incursion. The empire needed to be defended, so drastic action was taken. Boats from thousands of villages along the Bengal Delta were confiscated or destroyed. So, too, was rice. This was called the “denial” policy: to deny the enemy access to supplies. Not surprisingly, this scorched-earth policy strained the already fragile local economy. Without their tens of thousands of vessels, fishermen could not go to sea, farmers were not able to go upstream to their plots, and artisans were unable to get their goods to market. Critically, rice could not be moved around. The price of rice thus spiraled even further, and it was hoarded, often for profit. Then in October 1942 a devastating cyclone hit one of the main rice-producing regions, and crop disease destroyed much of the rest of the supply.

A famine code was initiated by colonial authorities to prevent mass starvation, but it was wartime, and few abided by it. Famine was never officially declared in Calcutta by the regional government or colonial authorities in Delhi, which would have compelled imperial authorities to send aid to the countryside. In fact, the word “famine” was not allowed to be reported in newspapers or pamphlets because of colonial “Emergency Rules” passed during the war. Britain feared that knowledge of the extent of hunger could be used by its enemies.

However, Indian journalists, photographers, and artists defied the censor. Chittaprosad Bhattacharaya was one. He traveled around Midnapore district using ink to sketch victims of the famine. The images are detailed and harrowing, of bodies being eaten by animals, humans who no longer look like humans. But the artist affords them dignity, writing their names when he could, and giving a sense of who they were, what they did, and where in Bengal they came from. He published the pamphlet in 1943 as “Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapore District.” Nearly all 5,000 copies were immediately confiscated by the British.

It was at this time, too, that Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned Statesman newspaper, was in Calcutta. As head of one of the largest English-language newspapers in India, Stephens faced a supreme moral dilemma: was his job to patriotically support the colonial authority during the war and not report on the famine? Or was his duty to tell his readers the truth about the horror unfolding on Calcutta’s streets, the famine that was sweeping across Bengal?

Stephens made his decision on August 22, 1943. He used a loophole in the censorship rules and published photographs showing emaciated people, close to death, on the streets of Calcutta. Papers soon sold out. It wasn’t long before news of the catastrophe unfolding in British India reached London and Washington. The famine in Bengal was now impossible to contain.

And this is where we get to the heart of the bitter controversy about the Bengal famine: the role of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and whether, once he knew about the famine by the summer of 1943, he did all he could to alleviate it. There are questions over whether his views on Indians—documented particularly by his Secretary of State for India Leo Amery—affected his response to the disaster. Discussions center on whether Churchill and the war cabinet could have released more shipping to send food aid, in the middle of the war, when they were fighting on many fronts. It’s an incendiary debate. Google the words “Bengal famine,” and you’ll see just how divisive the subject is.  

While people argue over the causes of the famine and Churchill’s response—both of which are important and necessary to explore—it has obscured discussion of the three million people who died. Three million. Think about that number. My work has been to excavate the stories of the last remaining survivors who have rarely been asked to tell their own stories. Eighty years on, it is a race against time to record them. There are eyewitnesses, too, who recall the cry of phan dao—asking for the starch water of rice, not even rice itself. They still recall with horror the scenes they saw, their helplessness, and sometimes the guilt they felt over not being able to alleviate all the suffering.

In Britain, the Bengal famine of 1943 is little known. Nor are the other famines that took place during the hundreds of years of Britain’s presence in India. It is an ugly chapter in Britain’s colonial history, one that mars the nation’s righteous narrative of fighting Axis powers. A deeper reckoning with the country’s imperial past has begun, however. The Imperial War Museum in London recently opened new World War Two galleries, and a small corner is dedicated to the Bengal famine, framing it within the context of the war. As of yet, though, the teaching of the Bengal famine does not figure in English students’ curriculum.

In India and Bangladesh, the memory of hunger remains and is relevant in policy-making. The story of the Bengal famine is told in literature and film, sometimes by eyewitnesses, but it has seldom been told by the survivors. One man, 72-year-old Sailen Sarkar, has been trying to record testimonies, pen and paper in hand, of those who endured the worst. Yet there is no official archive in India or Bangladesh for them—as there has been for those who lived through the partition of India, which took place four years later, in 1947, an event that arguably overshadows the famine in collective memory. War and colonial authorities are to blame for the absence of any official commemoration of the famine, but while Indians starved to death on Calcutta’s streets, other Indians never wanted for food, carrying on their lives as normal. Others profited from the situation. For some, this is difficult to acknowledge, even after all this time.

It’s over 80 years on now, and the interview of eyewitnesses compiled for the podcast Three Million has started a conversation in Britain. Within families it is emerging that people were witnesses or British families had ancestors who saw those distressing scenes too. It is a shared history, albeit a difficult one. But we are just at the beginning of coming to terms with it, and seeing it as part of Britain’s imperial presence and our war story. In India and Bangladesh, the famine is remembered as a legacy of Empire, but the survivors’ stories have been almost completely overlooked.

The British left India in 1947. Today, in 2024, we are still just beginning to learn what it meant individually, generationally, and collectively, as well as why it happened, and what were the forces responsible. There is one gaping hole that is probably too late to recover meaningfully, and its absence from the archive will be forever felt: the millions who were lost and survived the famine of 1943, one of the most devastating events of the 20th century. 

Three Million can be heard on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Niratan Bewan

Niratan was married at the age of eight or nine. She believes she was around nineteen at the time of the famine. She was living in Nadia district in a village called Durgapur. 

After the cyclone and floods (in October 1942) everyone stopped eating rice. On good days, we would get boiled red potatoes for lunch. We used to forage greens from the ponds and canal sides and from the forests nearby and eat those as well, boiled and with salt. We were at least better off than many others. We had a bigha or two of land. The men worked on that land, and sometimes on the landlord’s land too. Those were one-anna, two-anna days. Like I said, we were better off than many others. At least we had something saved up. That’s why, even without rice, we had boiled aairi, boiled musoor dal or bhura to eat. It was a kind of grass seed that we threshed until we got little balls like sago and then boiled. That’s what bhura was.

In those days, the children who were born suffered a great deal. Mothers didn’t have any breast milk. Their bodies had become all bones, no flesh. Many children died at birth, their mothers too. Even those that were born healthy died young from hunger. Lots of women committed suicide at that time. Many wives whose husbands could not feed them went back to their father’s houses. If they weren’t taken back, then they killed themselves. Some wives ran off with other men. When their husbands couldn’t feed them, they went with whichever man could. At that time people weren’t so scandalized by these things. When you have no rice in your belly, and no one who can feed you, who is going to judge you anyway?

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen was nine in 1943, living in Santiniketan with his grandparents, 100 miles north of Calcutta. He’d been sent there from Dacca to avoid potential Japanese bombings. 

A couple of my friends and I were told that there is a man who is being teased by some nasty kids. And so, we went there and tried to intervene. He was enormously emaciated, starving for many weeks, and he arrived in search of a little food for our school. Clearly he was not in good shape, mentally. And that is often the case when there is starvation. I hadn’t seen anyone really starving like that before where I would even begin to wonder whether he might suddenly die.

Amartya wanted to do something to stop the suffering. He asked his grandmother if he could give them rice. 

I asked “how much can I give?” So she took her cigarette tin and said up to half of it you can give but if we try to share a larger amount among all the hungry people that you will see in our street, you will not be able to cope with feeding them all. I gave it to people, sometimes even violated the rule of going beyond half a tin. It was a situation of nastiness of a kind that I had never encountered before.

One of those who came to the house was a young boy — just a few years older than Amartya.

He’d walked from his village. His name was Joggeshwar, and he was given some food.

He was an enterprising young boy from a very poor family from an area called Dumkar, that’s about 40 miles. And he said that unless I escape, I’m not going to get any food. And by that time, he was totally exhausted. He sat underneath a tree, with a little utensil and some food and ate it with the greatest of relief. And then he stayed a few days. And then he stayed on. He was a very good friend of mine. Very good friend. Yeah, he lived with us to the age of 88 when he died I think.

Pamela Dowley Wise

Pamela was sixteen and a member of the British colonial class. She lived off the busy Chowringhee Road in a large white art deco building, full of Indian servants. 

The house was an English sort of house, beautifully built and everything. We entertained people there because it had a lovely veranda where we’d have lovely meals and things like that. The Victoria Memorial is where we used to go because of the grounds. We used to have evening picnics there and we would have sandwiches and all things were done very properly, you know.

She remembers Calcutta filling up with Allied soldiers. She became friendly with some of them, as her parents would have an open house for British soldiers. She often took British soldiers by rickshaw to the local market and helped them barter. 

They couldn’t speak Urdu — and I could. And so if they wanted to buy something, I would go with them and bargain for them and help them to buy things. I remember [...] American and British soldiers were in our home and they used to come have dinner with us. And afterwards, we’d play the piano and sing the old songs, and happy days they were.

During the summer of 1943, the city of her birth completely changed, though her life of picnics at the Victoria Memorial, eating in restaurants, and going to her private club was unaltered.

There was no place you could go where you didn’t see dead bodies and vultures, it was revolting, actually. Because the vultures used to come down and eat these dead bodies. No, I mean, you couldn’t say I’m not going to the Victoria Memorial because there are dead people everywhere. There were dead people all over Calcutta. And when they died, they seemed to stay there. 

It was dreadful, dreadful. Yes, poor things. There’s nothing we could do about it. Because it was so vast, you see, but that’s what happened.

The post The Unveiling of a Horror appeared first on Coda Story.

Swapan became an economic migrant in the early 1970s—first traveling from Calcutta to Hamburg, then on to the oil fields of Kuwait. It’s too late now, but I never asked my father how he made it from India to Germany, how, coming from an average, that is to say relatively impoverished, background, he could afford the plane fare. But by 1975, he was in Kuwait, where he met my mother’s older sister, and through her met my mother, then 24 and a graduate student in Bombay. It was in dull, frictionless Kuwait, with its multinational oil corporations, its American fast food chains and improbably vast supermarkets that my father found the work, the tax-free income and stability, he wanted for his growing family.  

In Kuwait, my parents, now financially comfortable, built a rich cultural life, staging Bengali poetry readings, putting on plays, marking religious festivals. For them, their escape from India could only ever be partial—the grip exercised by language, culture, people, and nostalgia was too strong. (I couldn’t have realized it as a child, but the Bengali world in which they immersed themselves was a fantasy. Decades later, when I watched Satyajit Ray’s coruscating Calcutta trilogy, I began to understand what life before migration must have been like for my father: a sclerotic city, the frustrations of young jobless men, the smug Indian elite in colonial-era clubs aping the mannerisms of their British “betters.”) My parents were beholden to their history, but for their children, my sister and me, they chose a course unimpeded by history, by context. The perhaps unintended effect of their design, their choice to send us to a British rather than Indian school, was our near total detachment from Bengali and their linguistic world. They were fixated on the idea that the Anglophone West was where their children would make their futures. What that meant in practice was that while we were witnesses to their culture, we weren’t participants.

I didn’t know it then but my parents, perhaps without consciously knowing it themselves, were reading from a colonial script. They sang songs written by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali renaissance man—artist, poet, scholar, and Nobel Prize-winning icon of the Indian independence movement—but enrolled me in piano lessons. My mother was trained in Bharatnatyam, an Indian classical dance form, but my sister learned ballet. It wasn’t until I read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind that I recognized their behavior, understood the choices they had made. The effect of imperialism, he wrote, is to make the colonized “see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves.” If my parents could not entirely distance themselves from India, they could certainly create that space for me. But what kind of space was it? After all, we lived in Kuwait, not in Britain. While my education may have distanced me from India, it hadn’t brought me any closer to England. Instead, I was marooned in no-man’s land. I may have been born 30 years after the British left India, I may have lived on the other side of the Arabian Sea from India, my parents may have wanted me to make my life in the West, but I was still bound to India and its colonial past. I wear that history like a birthmark, like a livid stain on my calf. 

Mother tongues

Growing up in Kuwait, I learned two things about India that seemed essential: one must be able to identify one’s “native place” and one’s “mother tongue.” My native place certainly wasn’t Kuwait—as the child of expatriates, Kuwait was merely purgatorial, a place to endure before I moved on—while Bombay, where I was born, felt intimidating, removed. I left the city before I was two months old, experiencing it only in vivid bursts during school holidays—experiencing it, in other words, as a gawping outsider, a stranger with privileged access. Somewhere between them, my native place was an imaginary homeland, a ramshackle, cobbled-together country that had no room for any other citizen. 

A stranger with privileged access… that was also how I felt about my relationship with Bengali. It was my mother tongue, I suppose, though I never learned to read nor write it—that we did in English. Instead, I learned Bengali by osmosis, by hearing it around me. And in time I could speak it myself, after a fashion, holding conversations that, while fluent enough, immediately marked me out as a foreigner. My mother, as a result of being a native of polyglot Bombay, spoke other Indian languages—Gujarati and Marathi in particular. Both are languages that I could literally describe as my mother tongues and both are languages that I do not speak; I understand more or less everything that is said but cannot respond in kind, at once an insider and also irredeemably an outsider.

For my parents and their friends, English served a professional function and their relationship with it was suitably unemotional, uninvolved, disinterested. The meaningful parts of their lives were conducted in Bengali, the language in which they dreamed, they sang, they quarreled, and, as Bengalis will, in which they talked and talked and talked … and talked. Except with us, their children, with whom they sometimes switched to a stiff English, like they might do to be polite when a foreigner crashes their party. Growing up, Bengali’s rhythms, its soft, rotund soundscape were intimately familiar, yet out of reach. 

It’s a peculiar condition to have to explain this failure to belong to a place, to a tongue. Thiong’o, writing about his life in Kenya, makes the distinction between the Gĩkũyũ he spoke as a child and the English that was thrust upon him at his colonial school. “The language of my education,” he writes, “was no longer the language of my culture.” If the “bullet was the means of the physical subjugation,” Thiong’o recognized, language “was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” 

African writers, Thiong’o argued, were making a choice when they wrote in the colonizer’s language. They chose to enrich English, say, or French, at the expense of their mother tongues, effectively shrinking their own mental universe while expanding colonial dominance. The masters my parents were serving when they chose to effectively disinherit me from my linguistic birthright were not literally the British, but the colonial legacy was present in global systems of capital and trade. India may have become independent, but Indians like my parents remained convinced that achieving fluency in the colonizers’ ways was the surest path to worldly success.

And they were right. My itinerancy, more optimistically described as my cosmopolitanism, has helped secure a place among the global bourgeoisie, that spectral class that moves ceaselessly from city to city, living more or less the same way in each, a comfortable income a buffer against any discomfiting encounters with geographic and cultural specificities. Life as a blur of iPhones, Netflix subscriptions, and Boba tea orders.  

English, of course, is the common language of this globalized class. In India, where I have lived with my wife and children for about a dozen years, speaking English as my first language makes me a member of a tiny elite—about 300,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion, according to the last census (2011). Over 120 million Indians speak English as either a second or third language. English, even now in India, is the preserve of the educated, the urban, the middle class and upper caste; and the more easily, idiomatically, and naturally you speak English, the more privileged you likely are. It’s an uncomfortable truth in postcolonial India that the speakers of the colonizer’s language have clung so fast to the trappings of power and continue to wield influence out of all proportion to their actual number. But it’s an equally uncomfortable truth, as I’ll discuss later, that in today’s Hindu nationalist India, English is a vital bulwark, a defense of pluralism against the imposition of a single Indian language on a country with dozens of mother tongues.

English arrives in India

Eight decades after independence, is English still freighted with colonial baggage? Admittedly, it’s a load that sometimes seems impossible to fully shrug off. For an entire century before the British assumed direct control of India in 1858, large swathes were controlled by the East India Company, a private corporation backed by the British authorities. The East India company colonized large parts of southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, and had its own gigantic armed forces, largely made up of Indian footsoldiers. By the early 19th century the East India Company was essentially a proxy for Britain’s control over India, moving beyond commercial opportunities and into civic responsibility, including the religious and scientific education of Indians. 

In his notorious “Minute on Education, 1835,” Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Whig politician and historian, a believer in historical progressivism, who admitted to having “no knowledge of either Sanscrit [sic] or Arabic,” laid out this educational program. Balancing his lack of knowledge with a surfeit of arrogance, Macaulay argued that his inquiries had satisfied him that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Fully shouldering the white man’s burden, Macaulay wrote that it was necessary for the British parliament to “educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue.” That said, given the size of India’s population and the impossibility, Macaulay admitted, “with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people,” he recommended the creation of brown sahibs, a set of FrankenIndians—“interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern… Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” It was to this grotesquely manufactured class that Macaulay proposed it be left to “refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

From Macaulay’s “Minute” in 1835, to my bedroom in Kuwait 150 years later, time appeared to have both sped by with all the clamor, chaos, and event of a runaway train—and stood utterly unmoving. My parents, or rather their parents and grandparents, were not among “Macaulay’s bastards,” as that class of English-speaking Indians came to be (no doubt affectionately) known. But it is thanks to Macaulay’s bastards and their descendants, fattened on colonial privilege, that my parents imbibed the worldview that English was the path to prestige and success. And it is because of Macaulay’s bastards that the miasma of Macaulayan privilege, a fetid cloud of wealth and presumed cultural supremacy, still hangs around English speakers in India. So here I was, a nominally Indian child in 1980s Kuwait, an Indian child whose Indianness was taken for granted, but whose self was almost entirely shaped by the English language. Of course, that “almost” is key. As English-speaking subalterns around the world have learned time and again, the particularities of individual backgrounds and the shibboleths of an “international” education mean less than skin color, names and the other external facts of identity.

But for me then, my path had been set. A path that began all the way back with Macaulay’s bastards and left me feeling alienated and disoriented, sensing that, appropriately, I had no mother tongue and no motherland. 

Establishing national languages (or not)

From its very conception, India made for an incoherent nation state. Nations are a European notion, in which communities can be imagined and unified around a shared language, culture, and “national” ethos. It was India’s very incoherence—its multiplicity of languages, stories, religious values, and customs—that the makers of the Indian Constitution understood as symbolic of the new nation. It made sense then, that India has no “national” language, no single tongue that unites the whole country. Instead, the Indian Constitution recognizes 22 “scheduled” languages, including the likes of Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam; the last census calculated there are over 100 non-scheduled languages and many hundreds of dialects. Both Hindi and English were classified by the Indian Constitution as “official” languages, as in the languages through which the federal government communicates. 

In the early days of independence, English was an administrative language for India, a link between its many regional languages. Despite the makers of the constitution acknowledging India’s linguistic variety, they believed that universal literacy in a standardized national language brought people together in common cause. Plans were made to move the nation toward Hindi. The Constitution hedged its bets, indicating the possibility of English being phased out after 15 years and Hindi being promoted as India’s link language. India’s Constitution was adopted in 1950; by 1965, Hindi could theoretically have become the national tongue. 

Different leaders pushed for different alternatives. Mahatma Gandhi wanted an amalgamated version of Hindi and Urdu, called Hindustani, to be the national language, but he was essentially in agreement on Hindi’s claim to be the lingua franca of a newly independent India. Meanwhile, the Sanskritized Hindi that became, in the Constitution’s fence-sitting term, an “official” language of India, raised hackles. Tamil is an older language than Sanskrit and continues to be spoken in India, while Sanskrit ceased to be anything but an ecclesiastical language over 2,500 years ago. Why, Tamil speakers reasonably asked, should Hindi be the language of new India and why should south Indians be expected to learn it? The focus on Sanskritization—Sanskrit largely being the language of priests and scholars—also suggested a notion of India as essentially a Brahminical project, a new country that would reinforce old Hindu hierarchies of caste. 

Tensions flared as the 1965 date approached. There were protests nationwide. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where the majority speak Tamil, anger over “Hindi imposition” devolved into violence and rioting. And so parliament, cognizant of the strength of feeling, continued to use English as an official language alongside Hindi, enabling swathes of India to opt out of using Hindi altogether. With English established, in any case, as the de facto global language of science and commerce, the utilitarian argument for preferring the use of English over Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking parts of India was strong and the language debates were largely shelved. The nationalist desire to turn away from English, the language of the colonizer, was blunted by the polyglot reality of the new nation.

Besides, the experience of India’s neighbors provided sufficient evidence of the dangers of language chauvinism. In Pakistan, which Britain carved out of India in 1947, the attempt to make Urdu the national language led to war. Pakistan was intended as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslim population who, advocates argued, might be suppressed in Hindu-dominated India. But the eastern and western parts of the new country spoke different languages. West Pakistan spoke Urdu—Hindi is essentially the same language as Urdu, except that Islamic Persian and Arabic influences have been “cleansed” from the former and Hindu Sanskrit influences emphasized—but in the east, they spoke Bengali, a language with its own formidable history and literature. As Pakistan sought to impose Urdu as the sole federal language (as part of a process of Islamization), the eastern half of the country agitated. After eight years the government relented and in 1956 gave Bengali equal status. Still, it was the language movement that catalyzed East Pakistan’s eventual separation from West Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

As Pakistani authorities were trying to contain rising tension in the east by recognizing Bengali as an official language, the independent government in Ceylon, a teardrop-shaped island deep in the south of the Indian subcontinent, introduced the so-called Sinhala Only Act of 1956—a purportedly anticolonial piece of legislation that replaced English with the language spoken by the country’s Buddhist majority. Except that the act deliberately left out Tamil, the language spoken by a minority that played a significant role in the administrative and cultural life of Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972). The Tamil-speaking minority became rapidly disenfranchised. Resentment festered, and by 1983, the Tamils and Sinhalese had embarked on a debilitating, decades-long civil war, a bloody conflict made more dreadful by state-sponsored massacres, suicide bombings, sexual violence, and the recruitment of child combatants.

English's next challenge and challengers

From the moment India became an independent country, the strongest challenge to the stubborn primacy of English came from Hindi. That argument has only grown louder. Compared to the less than 300,000 people who, according to the 2011 census, speak English as their first language, some 528 million Indians speak Hindi as their first language (though this subsumes several regional languages across north India). 

Leading this charge in the current generation is Narendra Modi, India’s current populist, authoritarian, and sectarian prime minister, who believes, in a decolonized India, English should have long made way for a single, authentically Indian national tongue. Modi, famously, is the son of a chaiwala, a curbside tea-seller, and has narrativized his rise to the very top of Indian society as a rebuke of the stranglehold on power of the English-speaking elite. He frequently describes the prizing of the English language in India as a colonial hangover, the product of a “slave mentality” and, more sinisterly, as a deliberate attempt by the Indian elite to keep less-privileged Indians in their place. (His argument does not recognize that the English-speaking elite have largely lost their political power; though their presence remains in the bureaucracy, civil society, the judiciary, and the media.) 

Modi owes his ideological underpinnings to VD Savarkar, the foundational Hindu nationalist thinker. Savarkar saw Hindi as an extension of Hindu India, a language that should be shorn of Persian and Arabic influence, while reemphasizing and extending its Sanskrit roots. From his teachings, a voluntary Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization emerged, modeled on European fascists. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, spread across the country, from tiny rural hamlets to teeming metropolises. Opposed to Gandhi’s syncretic, pluralist vision of India, the RSS believed India was and should be a Hindu nation, a mirror image of Pakistan, conceived as a Muslim nation. Today the RSS presides over the Sangh Parivar, a “family” of right wing Hindu nationalist organizations, which includes Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

Not unlike in America with its red states and blue, in present-day India, there is a regional divide. While Modi has no serious electoral challenger, his popularity is concentrated in India’s so-called Hindi belt. The southern states are far better developed than the larger, more populous Hindi-speaking states in the north and center of the country, but it is the Hindi heartland that controls electoral politics. That enables Modi’s BJP to obtain huge parliamentary majorities even while it receives scant support in other states. 

With electoral mathematics against them, southern states cling fiercely to regional political parties to defend their interests and to maintain cultural independence from the north. Modi’s talk of slavery and decolonization cuts little ice in the south, where submitting to Hindi’s national aspirations would feel more like a colonial imposition than the use of English as a pan-Indian link language. For many in this region, adopting Hindi does not match the pragmatic value of learning English as a means to better-paid employment and access to international markets. Instead, it is the repeated assertions of Hindi’s claim to be India’s national language that are rebuffed as “imperialism.” In these contexts, English, as used in India today, is cast as an anticolonial choice, a means of keeping Hindi at bay.

A global context to anti-globalism

A common polemic heard everywhere from Putin’s Russia to Erdoğan’s Turkey and Modi’s India is that Western “values” undermine and subvert the values, particularly family values, of more traditional societies. The effete, self-hating English-speaking elite, in the eyes of Modi supporters, have done just that in India—undermined patriotic pride in being Indian, and treated Indian values as unsophisticated and embarrassing. The argument goes that the cringing of Westernized elites at the self-assertion of Hindu nationalists is a result of elites having forsaken their mother tongues for the language of neoliberalism.

I admit to being at least partially guilty of the charge. I am undeniably the misshapen, misbegotten product of colonialism and globalization, educated and prepared for a world in which a certain group was free to flit across boundaries of country and class as the blissfully ignorant servants of late capitalism. And I now equally undeniably find myself adrift in a world that has withdrawn, settling behind those once permeable boundaries, a world that is suspicious of unfettered movement, where a British prime minister with no sense of either irony or self-awareness can say, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” 

This parochial contempt is not just reserved for the cosmopolitan, globalized elite—it is even more evident in the virulent disgust reserved for migrants. Donald Trump says he wants immigrants from “nice” countries like Switzerland, not “shithole” countries; Britain wants to send asylum seekers to Rwanda; Giorgia Meloni once wrote that Italy should seek immigrants as “compatible as possible with our own national community”; Amit Shah, Modi’s henchman and arguably the second most powerful man in India, called Muslim illegal immigrants “termites.” Shah, in his capacity as India’s Minister of Home Affairs, has also promised a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan… as long as they are not Muslim.

What are the values expressed in these comments and attitudes? What is it that Modi stands for that distinguishes him from the Westernized elites he scorns as un-Indian? Chief among these elites is the long dead Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and the father and grandfather of two more Indian prime ministers. Nehru was India’s postcolonial poster boy, gloriously articulate in the colonizer’s language yet with an implacable belief in what independent India had to offer to the world. In his afterlife he has become the bête noire of India’s Hindu nationalists, who hold him and his devoutly secular worldview responsible for all the ills that have afflicted independent India. One of my favorite book titles by a Hindu nationalist is Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders. It is a mark of the author’s even-handedness that he chose not to find three more major blunders to pad the list out to an even 100. 

For Nehru, India’s emergence from the darkness of colonial rule was an opportunity to offer an alternative to the European model of the rapacious nation-state. If nations by their very nature are exclusive, drawing up borders and carefully tending to a sense of their own exceptionalism, India was intended to be a radical experiment in inclusivity. Indians could be bound together by difference rather than sameness. 

By contrast, the Hindu nationalist idea of India is ungenerous, seeking to replace unruly diversity with brute majoritarianism. Hindu nationalism itself, rather than being of the soil, is entirely beholden to European bigotry. Nehru, unable to mitigate the pervasive influence of religion in India and prevent religious violence, may have failed to deliver on his secular ideals. But, alarmingly for some of us, the sectarian Modi and his BJP are making good on theirs.

Lingua franca, lingua future

For years, I used a sense of my lack of a mother tongue and, as a consequence, my lack of a motherland as a self-pitying crutch. I was estranged from India by English, by my confident idiomatic use of a language that shouldn’t have been my idiom.

Living in Modi’s India now, though, with children who, like me, are English-speaking, I’ve never been more determined to insist on my language as intrinsic to my Indianness. Why can’t my Indian children, born in India, claim English as their mother tongue? Why should their mother tongue being English mark them out as still colonized, though we are long post our colonial era? Contrary to Groucho Marx, I long to belong to a club that would have someone like me as its member. And India’s constitutional promise, that strong nations can accommodate all manner of difference, seems like an invitation to the club. Modi wants to shake those convictions, upset those constitutional foundations. When he talks of decolonising India, he really means to straitjacket it. His Hindu nationalism, with its stifling uniformity, is colonialism by another name.

Modi has worked hard to push through his narrow, sectarian agenda, he has attempted to manifest the nationalist slogan “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. For a decade, Modi has had little opposition as he has set about remaking a polyglot, pluralist India into a restrictive religious state. The thing is, India was not intended to be a “homeland” for Hindus, as conceived of by the RSS. It was intended to be a model of how a nation could be founded on diversity, on shared values of plurality and making allowances for cultural, linguistic and religious differences. For me, despite India’s glaring flaws, its ideological commitment to difference is inspiring. And it’s exactly that commitment that Modi wants to undo. 

Perhaps language will be the rock on which his Hindu nationalist project will finally founder. Maybe English, once the calling card of the postcolonial Indian elite and a marker of status, will not be so weighed down by cultural privilege as tens of millions of Indians turn to English as the language of global commerce. Maybe English will become a practical means to preserve as many Indian languages as possible, so that one Indian language cannot assert supremacy over others, so that one way of being Indian is not legitimized over others. For me, English once signified my alienation from India, my inability to be authentically Indian. Now that attitude strikes me as profoundly misguided. There are innumerable ways to be authentically Indian, including claiming English as your mother tongue, and to say otherwise is to betray India’s most foundational postcolonial promise—to unite over difference, not be divided.

Postscript: While exit polls suggested Narendra Modi’s BJP would sweep the Indian elections, when results were announced on June 4, the party had failed for the first time in a decade to secure a parliamentary majority. Modi was forced to rely on coalition partners to become prime minister for a third consecutive five-year term, albeit with a much weakened mandate and ‘allies’ who had previously criticised his aggressive Hindu nationalist politics. The BJP’s most startling defeat came in the vast north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh -- a sign perhaps that even in the Hindutva heartland, voters are tiring of Modi’s divisive rhetoric.

The post My mother tongues appeared first on Coda Story.

Blindness can be seeing too much of things, just as much as seeing too little.

My grandmother, who was the counterweight to my mother’s perennial absence, asked if I wanted to begin staying at the hospital that day or start my stay the following day.

To fix my eyes, in the summer of 1972 I was sent to England. I was seven then. My father had to be at the Munich Olympic games with the Iranian contingent and my mother was an absence that I never questioned. One day my grandmother and my older brother took me to the hospital where I was to remain that summer. What I recall of the place were the nurses, who seemed like nuns to me; they were always serious and laughter was not in their vocabulary. I dreaded the place from the moment I set foot in it.

“How long will I be here?”

“Oh, just a few days.”

“Then I’ll start today,” I said. It was a boy’s stab at courage and wishing to get the nightmare of loneliness in the hospital of a foreign country out of the way as quickly as possible.

But days turned into weeks at that hospital. And there were times when in the deficiency of my child’s logic I asked myself if I should have bought that extra day for myself away from this dreaded place.

Yet the dread came in waves. Sometimes it wasn’t there at all and I didn’t mind so much being at the hospital. The reason was an Arab boy whose bed lay next to mine, though not in an actual room but a wide, corridor-like area of the hospital. I wish I recalled his name. Since I do not, I will call him Khalid.

How Khalid and I came together is something I’ve thought about for decades. That first day the administration of the hospital gave us a tour of the floor I was to stay at. As we were passing the corridor where Khalid lay in bed, alone, with a longing and a fear that I was fast coming to identify as my own in that place of sickness, our eyes met. I didn’t know then that we could not speak each other’s languages. But the language of fear is universal and something snapped in me as we moved on from Khalid and the corridor into an overly large room where there must have been twelve or more beds. On each bed lay a British boy, staring dead-eyed at us. My skin color was far closer to theirs than it was to Khalid’s; nevertheless, something in the avalanche of that paleness of theirs seemed threatening to me.

And I also had a question which I never asked. Why was I being offered the possibility of a bed in this room while Khalid had to sleep in the corridor? It seemed unfair. What was even more odd was that I, a mere kid, was being allowed to choose where I’d stay: with the British boys or with Khalid.

My grandmother said, “Do you want to stay in this room or stay with that boy back there?”

I swallowed hard and said, “I’ll stay with that boy.”

There was a pause. That long sickroom seemed to grow in size, and if I am not mistaken the nurse who accompanied us looked at me strangely. As if I had failed some kind of a test.

Khalid became my brother. It took all of an afternoon for that to happen. To this day I don’t know what his sickness was and why he was there. We were often in trouble, doing the things none of those British boys would dream of doing. The apparent unfairness of the corridor, as opposed to a ‘real’ room, was the ticket that allowed us to roam the hospital at will. We haunted its stairways, smiled and laughed when the nurses scolded us, with words we did not understand, for not staying in our beds. Our language was the language of brotherhood. I spoke no Arabic and he obviously spoke no Persian, and English was not yet ours to share. We spoke with gestures. With hand signs and the hungry eyes of boys who grow in each other’s estimation with every new mischief they accomplish together. Sometimes we would stick our heads in the room of those British kids and each of us, I’m certain, knew what the other was thinking: “Thank God we are not the prisoners of that room!”

My grandmother would visit every few days. One day she came with my mother’s brother, Uncle Ali, who was a surgeon in Switzerland.

“The staff tell me you and this Arab boy misbehave. They say they might be forced to change your bed to another place.”

There was a television. Where exactly that TV was located I’m not sure now, but its presence is inscribed in the inmost recesses of my memory. A small, fat thing which that afternoon everybody was staring at and listening to intently, even as they were telling me that Khalid and I might be separated.

Something had happened at the Munich Olympics. Something serious. People had been killed. People were about to be killed, and I would be lying today if I said that I knew back then what or who or where Palestine was and what or who the Israelis were. Khalid and I, in trouble with the adults, looked at each other confusedly and I wanted to somehow convey to him that my father was actually there, right there in that TV at that moment, in Munich. And that I was not worried about my father because he was strong and I wished he would soon come here so Khalid could know just how strong he was.

Some days later they operated on my eyes and this time real blindness came. Maybe it was my child’s sense of the expansion of time that imagines the days of post-surgery blindness as weeks and months. In truth, it was probably only a few days. Days of utter darkness with bandages over both my eyes and nearly no movement.

Khalid wanted me back. He wanted us to roam those hallways like before and get in trouble together. When my grandmother and brother and uncle came to visit, their talks always inevitably turned to Munich. In the stillness and desolation of blindness I imagined what if my father came back from that apparently ill-fated city and my blindness would not let me see him again, ever.

Khalid was bored without me. He would come and poke at me and say things I didn’t understand. I wasn’t in the mood. I was not hurting, but I could not see. And the not seeing made me sulky. Khalid was still Khalid, but I had somehow been reduced. I told him to lay off me in the best non-language we had between the two of us. But he would not listen. He wanted his friend back.

One day I complained about him to either my grandmother or uncle, I don’t recall which one. And soon, that very day in fact, Khalid’s corner of the corridor turned quiet. I sat in the shadow of my blindness and my betrayal of him and wondered where he had been taken. Was it my complaint that had sent him away? Or was it that he had been sent to whatever surgery he was in line for? The long stretch of dark days of not seeing, with Khalid no longer there, turned my world into a torment that only those who have committed betrayal know something about. I had betrayed our brotherhood by telling on him. Khalid was no longer there and I would have to search a lifetime to find him and beg his forgiveness. I would look for Khalid when years and years later someone first recited to me the love poems of Ibn Zaydun in the original Arabic, and I would look for him in the eyes of lost comrades on the battlefields of Mesopotamia. And perhaps, just perhaps, I felt him nearest when on a spring evening in the Sadr City quarter of Baghdad a gentle old man whom I had been talking to, casually and with no sense of bitterness or resentment, said these words to me in my own language, “It’s just that the blood of you Persians runs a little cold, Mr. Abdoh. Doesn’t it!”

Often I’ve wondered why I have never remembered Khalid’s name. You would think one would at the very least remember the name of someone they’ve thought about for so many years. Someone who was really nothing to them, but also everything. Nowadays I know why: I don’t remember Khalid’s name because I never called him by his name. Nor did he ever call me by mine. In our special brotherhood of that summer of ’72 in London, the absence of words – in Arabic, in Persian, in distant English – did not require our names. So we never used them. We used instead a language much more intimate, that of touch and laughter and exquisite youthful mayhem. I don’t recall ever seeing two Khalids with my pre-surgery, problematic eyes during our hospital stay. I only recall seeing one Khalid, whom I betrayed, and whose name I will never remember.

The post On brotherhood and blindness appeared first on Coda Story.

The history of Russian occupation in Georgia dates back more than 200 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it won its independence but separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia refused to acknowledge the new Georgian state and went to war. In 2008 Russia sent the military into South Ossetia and Abkhazia to shore up control and today twenty percent of Georgia remains under Russian control. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s complex history with its eastern neighbor is deeply rooted in centuries of Russian colonialism and expansionism. In this photo essay, award-winning Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz documents the people of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan at times of upheaval—in the throes of protest, dissent, and strife, and as they try to hold on to their identity in the face of modern Russian imperialism.

The post What makes a nation? appeared first on Coda Story.

It had been a long journey by car from the Liberian capital of Monrovia: more than twelve hundred miles through tropical forest, savanna, and desert, and the eight-man team still had far to go. From the journal he kept, it’s clear that Fanon was mesmerized by the landscape. “This part of the Sahara is not monotonous,” he writes. “Even the sky up there is constantly changing. Some days ago, we saw a sunset that turned the robe of the sky a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red the eye encounters.” His entries move freely between rousing expressions of hope and somber reminders of the obstacles facing African liberation struggles. “A continent is on the move and Europe is languorously asleep,” he writes. “Fifteen years ago it was Asia that was stirring. Today 650 million Chinese, calm possessors of an immense secret, are building a world entirely on their own. The giving birth to a world.” And now an “Africa to come” could well emerge from the convulsions of anti-colonial revolution. Yet “the specter of the West,” he warns, is “everywhere present and active.” His friend Félix-Roland Moumié, a revolutionary from Cameroon, had just been poisoned by the French secret service, and Fanon himself had narrowly escaped an attempt on his life on a visit to Rome. Meanwhile, a new superpower, the United States, had “plunged in everywhere, dollars in the vanguard, with [Louis] Armstrong as herald and Black American diplomats, scholarships, the emissaries of the Voice of America.”

Yet in the long run, Fanon believed, the African continent would have to reckon with threats more crippling than colonialism. On the one hand, Africa’s independence had come too late: rebuilding and giving a sense of direction to societies traumatized by colonial rule—societies that had long been forced to take orders from others and to see themselves through the eyes of their masters—would not be easy. On the other hand, independence had come too early, empowering the continent’s narcissistic “national middle classes” who “suddenly develop great appetites.” He writes: “The deeper I enter into the cultures and political circles the surer I am that the great danger for Africa is the absence of ideology.”

Fanon recorded these impressions in a blue Ghana School Teachers Book No. 3 that he had picked up in Accra. It is now stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, a research library housed in a former monastery in Normandy that sheltered partisan fighters during the Second World War. To take it in one’s hands sixty years later and leaf through the pages is to inspect the thoughts of a dying man: Fanon did not yet know he had leukemia, or that his life would end in 1961 in a hospital in Maryland, in the heart of the American empire he despised. On the road in West Africa, he was open, thoughtful, and intrigued by the continent from which his ancestors had been carried on slave ships to the French colony of Martinique.

In Mali he imagined himself home, among his Black brothers, yet he remained a stranger. He had come as an undercover agent of a neighboring country in what he called “White Africa”: Algeria, then in the seventh year of its liberation struggle against French rule. The aim of his reconnaissance mission was to make contact with the desert tribes and open a southern front on Algeria’s border with Mali so that arms and ammunitions could be moved from the Malian capital of Bamako through the Sahara to the rebels of the Front de libération nationale (FLN).

The head of Fanon’s commando unit was a major in the FLN’s military wing, the Armée de libération nationale (ALN). He was a “funny chap” who went by the name of Chawki: “small, lean, with the implacable eyes of an old maquis fighter.” Fanon was impressed by the “intelligence and clarity of his ideas” and his knowledge of the Sahara, a “world in which Chawki moves with the boldness and the perspicacity of a great strategist.” Chawki, he tells us, spent two years studying in France but returned to Algeria to work his father’s land. When the war of liberation launched by the FLN began on November 1, 1954, he “took down his hunting rifle from its hook and joined the brothers.”

Not long after, Fanon, too, had joined “the brothers.” From 1955 until his expulsion from Algeria two years later, he had given sanctuary to rebels at the psychiatric hospital he directed in Blida-Joinville, just outside Algiers. He had provided them with medical care and taken every possible risk short of joining the maquisards in the mountains—his first impulse when the revolution broke out. No one believed more fervently in the rebels than the man from Martinique. He had gone on to join the FLN in exile in Tunis, identifying himself as an Algerian and preaching the cause of Algerian independence throughout Africa. Every word that he wrote paid tribute to the Algerian struggle. But he could never really become an Algerian; he did not even speak Arabic or Berber (Amazigh), the languages of Algeria’s indigenous peoples. In his work as a psychiatrist, he often had to depend on interpreters. Algeria remained permanently out of reach for him, an elusive object of love, as it was for so many other foreigners who had been seduced by it—not least the European settlers who began arriving in the 1830s. He would be, at most, an adopted brother, dreaming of a fraternity that would transcend tribe, race, and nation: the kind of arrangement that France promised him as a young man and that had led him to join the war against the Axis powers.

France betrayed its promise, but even as he turned violently against the colonial motherland, Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution. Nearly six decades after the loss of Algeria, France still hasn’t forgiven Fanon’s “treason”: a recent proposal to name a street after him in Bordeaux was struck down. Never mind that Fanon had bled for France as a young man, then fought for Algeria’s independence in defense of classical republican principles, or that his writing continues to speak to the predicament of many young French citizens of Black and Arab descent who have been made to feel like strangers in their own country.

In 1908, Georg Simmel, a German Jewish sociologist, published an essay called “The Stranger.” The stranger, he writes, “is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today—and stays.” This was Fanon’s experience throughout his life: as a soldier in the French army, as a West Indian medical student in Lyon, as a Black Frenchman, and as a non-Muslim in the Algerian resistance to France. Simmel suggests that even as the stranger arouses suspicion, he benefits from a peculiar epistemological privilege since “he is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from any more organically embedded persons.” Listening to such confessions was Fanon’s trade as a psychiatrist, and it was in doing so that he decided to throw himself into the independence struggle, even to become Algerian, as if a commitment to his patients’ care and recovery required an even more radical kind of solidarity, a marriage to the people he had come to love.

The twentieth century was, of course, full of foreign-born revolutionaries, radical strangers drawn to distant lands upon which they projected their hopes and fantasies. Yet Fanon was unusual, and much more than a sympathetic fellow traveler. He would eventually become the FLN’s roving ambassador in Africa—his complexion a decided asset for a North African movement seeking support from its sub-Saharan cousins—and acquire a reputation as the FLN’s “chief theoretician.”

This he was not. It would have been highly surprising if such an intensely nationalistic movement had chosen a foreigner as its theoretician. Fanon’s task was mostly limited to communicating aims and decisions that others had formulated. But he interpreted Algeria’s liberation struggle in a manner that helped transform it into a global symbol of resistance to domination. And he did so in the language of the profession he practiced, and at the same time radically reimagined: psychiatry. Before he was a revolutionary, Fanon was a psychiatrist, and his thinking about society took shape within spaces of confinement: hospitals, asylums, clinics, and the prison house of race, which—as a Black man—he experienced throughout his life.

Fanon was not a modest man. He struck some of his contemporaries as vain, arrogant, even hotheaded. Yet to his patients he could hardly have been humbler.

What he saw in their faces, and in their physical and psychological distress, were people who had been deprived of freedom and forcibly alienated from themselves, from their ability to come to grips with reality and act upon it independently. Some of them were mentally ill (in French, aliénés); others were immigrant workers or colonized Algerians who suffered from hunger, poor housing, racism, and violence; still others suffered from performing the dirty work of colonial repression. (Fanon treated French soldiers who had tortured Algerian suspects, and wrote with remarkable lucidity and compassion about their traumas.) What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul. This anguish, for Fanon, was a kind of dissident knowledge: a counternarrative to the triumphal story that the West told about itself.

In a 1945 essay on Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, Ralph Ellison observed that racial oppression begins “in the shadow of infancy where environment and consciousness are so darkly intertwined as to require the skills of a psychoanalyst to define their point of juncture.” Fanon was a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, but he read deeply in the literature of psychoanalysis. His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, when he was twenty-seven, was an attempt to reveal the shadow that racial oppression cast across the lives of Black people. In his later writings on Algeria and the Third World, he powerfully evoked the dream life of societies disfigured by racism and colonial subjugation.

“History,” in the words of the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, “is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” Fanon had a rare gift for expressing the hurts that history had caused in the lives of Black and colonized peoples, because he felt those hurts with almost unbearable intensity himself. Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the minds of the oppressed—or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders. To be a Black person in a white majority society, he writes in one of his bleakest passages, was to feel trapped in “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a new departure can emerge.”

Yet Fanon himself had a fervent belief in new departures. In his writing, as well as in his work as a doctor and a revolutionary, he remained defiantly hopeful that the colonized victims of the West—the “wretched of the earth,” he called them—could inaugurate a new era in which they would be free not only of foreign rule but also of forced assimilation to the values and languages of their oppressors. But first they had to be willing to fight for their freedom. He meant this literally. Fanon believed in the re- generative potential of violence. Armed struggle was not simply a response to the violence of colonialism; it was, in his view, a kind of medicine, re- kindling a sense of power and self-mastery. By striking back against their oppressors, the colonized overcame the passivity and self-hatred induced by colonial confinement, cast off the masks of obedience they had been forced to wear, and were reborn, psychologically, as free men and women. But, as he knew, masks are easier to put on than to cast off. Like any struggle to exorcise history’s ghosts and wipe the slate clean, Fanon’s was often a confrontation with impossibility, with the limits to his visionary desires. Much of the power of his writing resides in the tension, which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.

Fanon made his case for violence in his final work, Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), published just before his death in December 1961. The aura that still surrounds him today owes much to this book, the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and one of the great manifestos of the modern age. In his preface, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice.” An exaggeration, to be sure, and an inadvertently patronizing one: Fanon’s voice was one among many in the colonized world, which had no shortage of writers and spokespeople. Yet the electrifying impact of Fanon’s book on the imagination of writers, intellectuals, and insurgents in the Third World can hardly be overestimated. A few years after Fanon’s death, Orlando Patterson—a radical young Jamaican writer who would later become a distinguished sociologist of slavery—described The Wretched of the Earth as “the heart and soul of a movement, written, as it could only have been written, by one who fully participated in it.”

The Wretched of the Earth was required reading for revolutionaries in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. It was translated widely and cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran. From the perspective of his readers in national liberation movements, Fanon understood not only the strategic necessity of violence but also its psychological necessity. And he understood this because he was both a psychiatrist and a colonized Black man.

Some readers in the West have expressed horror at Fanon’s defense of violence, accusing him of being an apologist for terrorism—and there is much to contest. Yet Fanon’s writings on the subject are easily misunderstood or caricatured. As he repeatedly pointed out, colonial regimes, such as French-ruled Algeria, were themselves founded upon violence: the conquest of the indigenous populations; the theft of their land; the denigration of their cultures, languages, and religions. The violence of the colonized was a counter-violence, embraced after other, more peaceful forms of opposition had proved impotent. However gruesome it sometimes was, it could never match the violence of colonial armies, with their bombs, torture centers, and “relocation” camps.

Readers with an intimate experience of oppression and cruelty have often responded sympathetically to Fanon’s insistence on the psychological value of violence for the colonized. In a 1969 essay, the philosopher Jean Améry, a veteran of the Belgian anti-fascist resistance and a Holocaust survivor, wrote that Fanon described a world that he knew very well from his time in Auschwitz. What Fanon understood, Améry argued, was that the violence of the oppressed is “an affirmation of dignity,” opening onto a “historical and human future.” That Fanon, who never belonged anywhere in his lifetime, has been claimed by so many as a revolutionary brother—indeed, as a universal prophet of liberation—is an achievement he might have savored.

The world in which we live is not Fanon’s, yet he has become even more of an intellectual and cultural icon in recent years. In a postcolonial world, nostalgia for the ostensible clarities of the national liberation era is, to be sure, one of the reasons for this. Fanon wrote some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle, and, what’s more, he lived the life of a revolutionary. He spoke to racial injustice, the exploitation of the poor world by the rich world, the denial of human dignity, the persistence of white nationalism. And his insistence that liberation is a psychological as well as a political project echoes contemporary calls for “decolonizing the mind.” But what imbues Fanon’s writing with its distinctive force, its power to move readers born long after his death, is its mood of revolt, protest, and insubordination.

These qualities are visible in his face. In the few photographs of him that exist, Fanon rarely looks to be at ease. (To be Black in the West, he believed, was to experience a permanent sense of being out of place, of being seen through such a distorting prism of fears and fantasies as to be rendered invisible as an individual.) He was often described as an écorché vif, an ultrasensitive soul, someone who’s been “flayed alive.” Even as Fanon assumed his responsibilities as a professional militant, even as he assumed the airs of a leader, even as he became ever more feverish in his vision of Third World liberation, his writing continued to tremble with the anger and passion of a young man seeking his rightful place in a world built to deny him one. This is the spirit of Fanon, the intransigent grain of his voice.

He did not use a typewriter or a pen; instead, he dictated his texts, pacing back and forth, his body always in motion as he composed. “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” he exclaims in the “final prayer” of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was an atheist; praying to a higher authority would have struck him as ludicrous. And why pray to his body? Did Fanon have some sort of mystical belief in the wisdom of the flesh? Not at all. He was asking his body not to show him the path of enlightenment but rather to rebel against any inclination toward complacency or resignation. The body, in his view, is a site of unconscious knowledge, of truths about the self that the mind shies away from uttering, a repository of desire and resistance. Fanon’s relationship to reality is fundamentally one of interrogation: “Anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything other than a perpetual questioning won’t see a thing—neither gratitude nor hatred.”

Yet Fanon’s manner of interrogation was not that of a skeptic. “Man,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, is not simply a “no,” but “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” His work is a celebration of freedom, and of what he called “disalienation”: the careful dismantling of psychological obstacles to an unfettered experience of selfhood that opens onto a broader project for the mental well-being of oppressed communities. His commitment to disalienation is especially poignant in his psychiatric writings, which became available to the wider public only in the last few years. Here we see Fanon the reforming doctor, determined to mitigate his patients’ suffering and to welcome them into the human community from which they have been exiled. But Fanon came to believe that reform was not just inadequate but also a lie—that, short of a revolutionary transformation, he would be complicit as a practicing psychiatrist in the culture of confinement that sequestered Algerian bodies and souls. He was not wrong. But the political choices he made in the world outside the hospital were more troubled, and sometimes required a denial of the “man who questions”—a tactical surrender of freedom that did not escape his notice or leave him without regrets. Being a fellow traveler in Algeria’s independence movement—the great “yes” of his own life—made him a participant in a continental rebellion against colonialism. But the lived experience of the Algerian struggle was seldom harmonious, much less cosmic.

What’s more, in Fanon’s case, that experience generated nearly as many illusions as illuminations. I admire Fanon—his intellectual audacity, his physical bravery, his penetrating insights about power and resistance, and, above all, his unswerving commitment to a social order rooted in dignity, justice, and mutual recognition—but my admiration for him is not unconditional, and his memory is not well served by sanctification.

Fanon once said that all he wanted was to be regarded as a man. Not a Black man. Not a man who “happened” to be Black but who could pass for white. Not an honorary white. He had been all those men, in the eyes of others, but never just a man. He wasn’t asking for much, but he might as well have been asking for the world—a different world.

“The Negro is not,” Fanon wrote. “Any more than the White man.” What he meant was that one isn’t born a white man or Black man, just as one isn’t born a woman: one must become one, as Simone de Beauvoir argued. In an odd way, the celebration of Fanon as prophet fixes him in an essence as surely as his race does. It treats him as a man of answers, rather than questions, locked in a project of being, rather than becoming.

Through force of circumstance Fanon came to see his work and his life as inextricably intertwined with revolutionary decolonization. But he was also impressionable, and his sense of his own identity was often quite labile. “‘A man without a mask’ is indeed very rare . . . Everyone in some measure wears a mask,” the psychiatrist R. D. Laing reminds us. Still, it is striking how many masks Fanon assumed in his short lifetime: French, West Indian, Black, Algerian, Libyan, African, not to mention soldier and doctor, poet and ideologue, dismantler of myths and creator of myths. Some of these masks were imposed by circumstance, but others were the product of his own imagination, his passionate search for belonging, and, perhaps, his hope of becoming the “new man” he envisioned for the future of the developing world.

The American poet Amiri Baraka described James Baldwin, who was born a year before Fanon, as “God’s Black revolutionary mouth.” What Baldwin was for America, Fanon was for the world, especially the insurgent Third World, those subjects of European empires who had been denied what Edward Said called the “permission to narrate” their own histories. More than any other writer, Fanon marks the moment when colonized peoples make their presence felt as men and women, rather than as “natives,” “subjects,” or “minorities,” seizing the Word for themselves, asserting their desire for recognition, and their claim to power, authority, and independence.

This was the beginning of a new world, the world in which we are living now, where formal colonialism has almost entirely crumbled but where inequality, violence, and injustice, exacerbated by the greatest epidemic in a century, remain the diet of much of the world’s population, especially among the people whose conditions preoccupied Fanon. “The old is dying, but the new is not yet born; in the interregnum, a whole variety of morbid symptoms emerges,” Antonio Gramsci wrote. Fanon, a medical doctor, was a trenchant diagnostician of those symptoms. He saw very clearly that people suffering from the traumas of racism, violence, and domination were not likely to reinvent themselves overnight—and that they had no choice but to continue fighting, if only so that they could continue breathing. The struggle for human freedom and disalienation was a constant battle between the wound and the will. Fanon bet on the latter, but his work is also a devastating acknowledgment of the former, even though pessimism was a luxury he could not afford. He had witnessed torture and death; he had languished in the zone of nonbeing. But he always placed himself on the side of life, and of creation.

The post The revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon appeared first on Coda Story.

It was during those slow, meandering rooftop conversations that ventured into every aspect of our lives—from crushes and struggles with identity to global politics—that I was handed the gift of a Senegalese lens to re-examine and better understand my own story. 

I grew up in the nation of Georgia, where as a child I lived through the violent collapse of the Soviet Union and learned—primarily from my parents—that instability and chaos were a small price to pay for the triumph of Georgia’s centuries-long struggle for independence. Among many contradictions that laced my childhood was the fact that I learned Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, from my half-Polish, half-Armenian mother, who would force me to read War and Peace in the original, but also insisted that my formal education be conducted in Georgian—and that I was to never trust anything that came from an appointed authority, especially one in Moscow.  

It was not until I sat on that Dakar rooftop that I thought of my mishmashed identity as a byproduct of colonialism. Just like me with Russian, Khadim loved all the opportunities that French, the language of his historical oppressor, had unlocked for him. Like me, he had a native-level appreciation for the language of a country he’s never lived in, and a nuanced understanding of a culture he was never part of. But unlike me, he was acutely aware of the price he had paid for that access. “I never thought of Russian in the same way that Khadim thinks of the French, but I think I also have a love-hate relationship with it,” I wrote in my journal that particular evening. “It is weird how it represents oppression and opportunity at the same time.” 

My old journal documents my awe (or was it envy?) at the deep awareness that Khadim and his friends possessed when it came to understanding how the historic legacy of French colonialism in West Africa affected their personal journeys. It is a record of my delight over the similarities I discovered between the Senegalese saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, and the Georgian orthodox saint and healer Father Gabriel, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the Soviets after he set a 26-foot portrait of Lenin on fire in 1955.

Today, “colonialism,” with all of its many prefixes and subcategories, often feels like an overused term: there is neo-colonialism and tech-colonialism, post-colonialism and eco-colonialism, settler colonialism and internal colonialism. I could go on—the list is so long, it feels tedious. And yet, no other word at our disposal can quite capture the historical continuity of domination and oppression that is the root cause of so many of the world’s current troubles. 

Every one of us is a carrier of a colonial legacy, either as a victim or the beneficiary—or sometimes both. Colonialism is the system of oppression that our world is built on. As we obsess with decolonizing everything from our schools to industries and corporations, it is useful to remember how easily our understanding of colonialism can be manipulated unless we first decolonize ourselves. 

My story is both typical and telling. My parents may have cherished Georgia’s freedom from Moscow, but somehow I had still bought into a widely accepted myth that the Soviet Union was an anti-colonial power. Both at my Soviet school, and later at university in the United States, I was taught that colonialism was something that Western countries did to Africa, Asia, and the Far East. It was only when I went to Senegal and stumbled upon the depth and ease with which I was able to relate to the anti-colonial part of the West African identity that I began to realize that I, too, was a product of “colonialism.” Until then, the struggle of non-Russian Soviet republics for independence was compartmentalized in my mind as something qualitatively different from the plight of formerly colonized people elsewhere.

Like the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States and the reckoning with anti-Black racism that followed, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 triggered a profound reconsideration of colonialism, including demands for restructuring and amends, from across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire;  a backlash from Russia itself followed. 

From Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Poland, activists, academics, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were suddenly digging up long-hidden stories of oppression, deportations, ethnic cleansing and “Russification” policies that the Kremlin had imposed on them over the centuries. Their stories were different, but the point they were making was the same: Russia’s war in Ukraine was a quintessentially colonial conflict, part of the centuries-long cycle of relentless conquest and subjugation.  

Across Russia’s former empire, this struggle to break away from subjugation has defined generation after generation. Today in Georgia, the children of those who in 1989 protested against—and helped end—the Soviet Union are out on the same streets, protesting against the current government’s attempts to take their country off its pro-European course and bring it back into Russia’s fold.

“Do not fear! We will win honorably,” read one poster held up by three women who joined tens of thousands of protesters in May 2024 on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The words are more than a hundred years old and belong to Maro Makashvili, a young Georgian woman who wrote them down over a century ago just as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution helped end Tsarist rule in Russia. For Georgia, the revolution meant freedom from two centuries of domination by  its northern neighbor and, finally, a chance to write its own story.

Few know that in those years, Georgia emerged as one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, a place where women could vote and minorities were granted rights. Young Maro Makashvili watched it all and documented Georgia’s ambitious experiment with democracy in her diaries. The experiment ended, abruptly and tragically, when Bolshviks invaded Georgia in 1921, annihilating the country’s intellectual and political elite, violently forcing Georgia into the USSR and rewriting the country’s history to fit the Soviet narrative. 

“To me, Maro Makashvili lives on in every beautiful, strong, smart, young woman protesting in the streets today,” said Tiko Suladze, a Tbilisi resident who held up Maro Makashvili’s portrait at the recent anti-Russian, anti-government demonstration.

The sentiments Makashvili described in her diaries during this time talk of freedom for women—and her whole country. These are ideas that resonate today with those living in the trenches of the long war against Russian imperialism. Ukraine is its current and bloodiest epicenter, but its frontline stretches across Russia’s vast former empire. You wouldn’t know it, though, listening to mainstream media in the West that explain the war through the prism of a geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington and, inadvertently, diminish the actual struggle of people on the frontline. This happens, in part at least, because we have a narrow definition of what colonialism is.

The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors. While Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top. In 2022, while dropping bombs on Kyiv, Vladimir Putin launched an audaciously counterintuitive campaign that positioned him as the global anti-colonial hero. The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that thematic priorities for state-funded films in 2022 included promotion of “family values,” depiction of cultural “degradation” of Europe, and films on “Anglo-Saxon neo-colonialism.” 

Piggybacking on the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements, and banking on people’s genuine disillusionment with the double standards of American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States. 

The tactic worked. In 2023, I found myself at a small conference in Nairobi that brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the African continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor, and myself. The conference was hosted by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German foundation affiliated with the country’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The foundation, which despite its association is independent from the CDU, is a big player in media development in Africa. And it was concerned about the growing spread of Russian narratives across the continent, which prompted them to organize the conversation. 

In the room in Nairobi, there was plenty of sympathy toward Ukraine and plenty of concern about clearly malicious disinformation campaigns undertaken by influencers across Africa. But there were also compelling explanations as to why Africa is currently finding Moscow’s messages more persuasive than those being pushed by the West.  

Ukraine, my African colleagues explained, was perceived as a “Western project.” Delivered primarily through Western diplomatic and news channels, the Ukrainian message in Africa was met with resistance because of the West’s perceived refusal to account for the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. “You may call it whataboutism, but it is grounded in real questions that no one has answered,” one African editor said. Russia’s message, on the other hand, “lands well and softly,” Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg, told me at the time. The challenge for her team, she explained, was to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine caused the invasion.

During my trip to Nairobi, one of the editors shared an unpublished op-ed sent to him as an email from the Russian Ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maskimychev. It read: “If you look at the leaders of the Soviet Union, you will find two Russians (Lenin, Gorbachev), a Georgian (Stalin), and three Ukrainians (Brezhnev, Khruschev, Chernenko). Some colonialist empire! Can you imagine a Kenyan sitting on the British throne? Make no mistake, what is currently happening in Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.” It is an effective message that lands equally well with many Western intellectuals who continue to argue about the rights and wrongs of NATO enlargement and not the fact that a sovereign country has the right to break away from its colonial masters. 

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities. 

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

“To this very day, the core of decolonization for me is about being able to learn and tell your own full story in your own words and being able to follow the narrative of your choice,” argues my friend, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi, whose book Russian Colonialism 101 is a succinct record of one part of Russia’s colonial adventures: invasions. “This means being able to dissect what is authentic in you and what is programmed by the colonizer.”   

But the process of deconstructing your own narratives can be a fraught and deeply uncomfortable experience. Take well-meaning Western academic institutions, for example, which have traditionally taught history and the languages of Russia’s former colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus within their Russian studies departments. The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in American universities, where professors started debating how to teach imperialism and colonialism in Russia. 

Because of the invasion and Western sanctions, some Russian language studies programs could no longer send their students to Russia, and many reached for an easy solution: send them instead to places where Russian is spoken because it’s the language of the oppressor. It is only now that I learn about Americans coming to Georgia to learn Russian that I feel simultaneously angry at the colonial behavior of supposedly liberal arts institutions And embarrassed that at age 20, I did not once question the decision to go to Senegal to study French. 

It is impossible to paint a singular portrait of colonialism. But it is possible and necessary to listen and respect each of their voices. It is only through listening to the multitude of oppressed voices—from Gaza and Yemen, Georgia and Ukraine, American reservations and former slave plantations—that we will begin to understand the systems of oppression and patterns that run through it.

“Colonialism is about trauma first,” says Maksym Eristavi. “The trauma of your identity being violated, erased, reprogrammed. The trauma of losing your roots, figuratively and quite literally. The goal of the colonizer is to make you feel small and isolated. To ensure that you think that your arrested potential is your own fault.”

“At last my poor country will be blessed with freedom,” the young Georgian Maro Makashvili wrote in her diary in 1918. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, occupying the country for the next seventy years, thousands of Georgians were killed. Among them was Maro. Today, Maro Makashvili is a national hero. But unless her story becomes part of the global anti-colonial narrative, oppressors—in Russia and beyond—will continue to win.

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I knew Ramadan would start on June 28 because someone in the cell before us had carved a calendar into the wall with their fingernail. Late at night, after the task of watching over the other prisoners was assigned, someone else in our cell was selected to scratch off the old day. Everyone would bicker among themselves for the chance to erase another day of their sentence, but since I believed that I would be in there for life, the calendar didn’t interest me much. I’d often forget to mark it when it was my turn.

On the eve of Ramadan, my shift as watchman began at 1 a.m. This time, I remembered to update the calendar and saw that someone had added a small drawing of a crescent and star just above the date. My heart pounded—I worried that I’d been spotted. I took a quick glance around the room. No one who’d already spent a year labeled “dangerous”—and tortured for it, as I had been—would have dared to draw this. Only someone rounded up after May 2014 could have been so bold. With my heart pounding in my chest and the buzzing eyes of the video cameras aimed at me, no matter where in the cell I was, I rarely had the chance to formulate any thoughts, let alone write them on the wall.

I was arrested on August 19, 2013, in Kashgar, more than two thousand miles west of Beijing. I was born in the capital of Uyghur culture, and I was shaped by it. The city taught me to love books, knowledge, and righteousness, and it was there that I stood proudly behind the lectern of a Chinese university as an instructor. But now, this city had become my prison. That August, officers from the Chinese security forces came to interrogate me. They accused me of opposing the spread of the state language by teaching Uyghur preschoolers their mother tongue. Apparently, I was indoctrinating children in the spirit of separatism. During the interrogation, I was informed that the preschool I’d founded amounted to preparation for an Uyghur state, and that the lectures I’d given on linguistics in different Uyghur cities were incitement to terrorism. According to the officers, my crime was having studied in the United States under a Ford scholarship between 2009 and 2011. I was told that I was a CIA agent sent to break up “Xinjiang.” 

In the 1980s and ’90s, it seemed as if Uyghurs—a long-oppressed, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority group—were on their way to greater freedom within the Chinese system. It had become easier to use our own language to publish books, produce movies, and practice Islam. But the fist closed again, and the protests calling for an end to our persecution were harshly punished. Our fear returned. 

I left to study linguistics in the United States so that I could learn how to keep our language and culture alive. In the past, it had been natural: young people learned from elders in mosques, during traditional communal gatherings called meshrep, and in our large, multigenerational homes. But then meshrep was banned, and in many places minors were forbidden by the Chinese Communist Party to enter religious buildings. Meanwhile, poverty in the countryside was taking its toll on families. Young adults migrated for work in bigger cities where the Han money was, and children were forcibly sent to assimilationist, Mandarin-language boarding schools.

By the time I was locked away, it had become clear that the reform and opening that had transformed Uyghur society in the ’90s would not be returning. I was lucky enough to be let out because international academic and human rights organizations demanded my release. But there are not many like me. In 2017, convinced that all Uyghurs were terror threats, China rounded up more than a million of us—including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people native to the region—and put us into prison camps. In these camps, prisoners are “reeducated,” forced to denounce their identities and declare themselves Chinese. Torture and rape are rampant. Forced labor in factories and cotton fields is systematic. Death by deliberate neglect is common.

Since 2019, China’s claimed the camps have been closed. Many have been, but only because the Xinjiang government arranged a wave of mass sentencing to take their place. Today, Uyghurs receive sentences of five, fifteen, or twenty years—and sometimes even life—for such “crimes” as owning a Qur’an, speaking to family members living abroad, or refusing to drink alcohol. A lost generation of children has been functionally orphaned and now lives in state residential schools, where physical abuse is the norm and the Uyghur language is strictly forbidden. 

I could not have known how bad things would become when I chose to leave the United States and return home. 

My arrest was a foretaste of the crackdown of 2017, when the mass disappearances started, but I had no illusions about the risk of going back. No, I found myself staring at the scratched-out calendar in that prison cell because I had felt a calling to return to Kashgar, the city I loved. I had a calling to go back with my wife and daughter and build a language school and cultural center for Uyghur people, a place where we could practice our faith and speak our language. 

On the plane from Chicago to Beijing, my daughter hit it off with the other passengers. The trip took more than twenty hours, but for Mesude, who had been living in America for years, it was like a game. She spoke English with confidence and had the mannerisms and ease of an American. When we finally got to Beijing, a student was supposed to meet us at the airport. But I’d forgotten where we were supposed to meet. I opened up my laptop to check, but it was dead. I couldn’t find an outlet anywhere in the stately airport, and the employees at the information desk were of no use. 

Eventually, I summoned the courage to ask airport security if there was a place I could charge my laptop. Instead of answering, they demanded to see my ID. “Dad, why does this man hate you so much?” Mesude asked me in English. 

The cop could tell from looking at our faces and listening to our accents that we were Uyghur. “Since when do people from Xinjiang speak Human?” he asked, sneering. “And he’s even taught his kid English!” I took Mesude’s hand and left. I’d lived in Beijing ten years earlier, and every time I saw such ugly expressions of contempt, I wanted to reject their “glorious” civilization. I’d long since learned I couldn’t defend myself against them, and so I chose to stay quiet. 

An Uyghur like me could not get basic human respect in Beijing. Not as a student, as I’d been years before, and not now, with a family and two graduate degrees. If we had been in America, I’d have taken the cop to court for racial discrimination. But in China, it wasn’t worth the time or trouble to try to report him. The law here didn’t recognize the value of a person’s dignity. My daughter stared at me, the question still written on her face. I lowered my gaze and changed the subject. 

Mesude had spent most of her life in America, where everyone was from somewhere else. But even in China, we Uyghurs are treated like foreigners. And until recently, we were. China calls our homeland Xinjiang—“New Frontier.” Our language is a sister to Uzbek and cousin to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. For centuries, our land was located on the eastern edge of Turkestan, known today as Central Asia—not on the western end of China. We were conquered in the 1700s by the Qing, an expansionist dynasty that had seized control of Beijing. In the northern reaches of our homeland, a Mongol people called the Junghars resisted Qing expansion, so the Qing annihilated them. In their old pastures, the Qing founded a capital for the domain, naming it Dihua—“Civilization.” On the advice of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong conquered the young East Turkestan Republic in 1949 to secure access to the region’s oil reserves and created special incentives for Han settlers to move in. In the beginning, the communists decried “Han chauvinism,” and even restored Dihua’s original name: Urumqi. But Han chauvinism endured. On the “mainland,” people guard their wallets and pinch their noses when we pass by. To them, we’re pickpockets and terrorists, kebab sellers and drug dealers. If there’s anything good about us, it’s how much we love to sing and dance. 

Once we were out of the airport, we couldn’t get a hotel room. Some hotels told us there were vacancies over the phone, then changed their minds when they saw our faces. Others said yes once they’d seen us, but when they looked at our IDs, told us there was an order from the higher-ups not to let in people from Xinjiang. Our Beijing-quality clothes, our English, and our smooth Mandarin could hide what we were at first, but the 65 at the start of our ID numbers would give us away. I’d gotten used to this treatment, but I couldn’t stand to see the exhaustion on my wife’s face or the confusion in my daughter’s eyes as we carried her on our backs from hotel to hotel, answering her unending questions. I was humiliated. Relief finally came late in the afternoon, when we found a room close to the rear gate of the University where I’d once studied. 

As we lay in bed, the kids from the elementary school next door left to go home. In front of the building, women were selling freshly hatched chicks, shouting “One yuan! One yuan!” Children gathered around, waving coins in the air. As they came to pick them up, some of their parents bought them chicks. My daughter looked at the students for a moment, then asked, “Daddy, do all those kids know how to take care of them?” 

Her confusion was justified. They were children, they couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone chicks. In America, Mesude had been disappointed when we wouldn’t let her have a cat. There were so many formalities: to get a pet, you had to fill out an application with a shelter so they could make sure that you weren’t on the list of known abusers, that you knew how to take care of the animal, and that you could pay for the insurance. My daughter had been too young to look after a pet, and neither I nor my wife had had any experience with animals, so it wasn’t an option. My daughter was surprised at this “business” of irresponsibly and mercilessly selling fragile baby animals. She couldn’t stand to see kids her own age treating terrified, defenseless chicks like stones they’d picked up on the road. 

When, at last, we made it back to Urumqi and its Uyghur neighborhood, I was surprised to see a blue police booth in front of our building. Inside it sat a dark-skinned Uyghur officer ready to inspect anyone trying to enter. She hadn’t been there when I’d left. The differences between Uyghur and Han regions had grown in the two years I’d been gone. In the places where the Han live, skyscrapers had sprung up. The streets were lined with ads showing stylish Chinese women wearing Zara, Nike, Adidas, Levis, and other foreign brands. But on those streets and in the malls and markets of Han areas, any Uyghur who tried to get past the iron-barred gates was pulled aside to have their bags searched. 

The first friend I caught up with met me in a restaurant on Consulate Street. He seemed on edge, routinely glancing around as though looking for someone. There was no clear connection between any sentence he said and the next, but I understood what he was really telling me when he suggested that I return to America after the summer and stay there for my doctorate or something else, as long as I didn’t stay here. I spent the next few days catching up with other acquaintances and looking around Urumqi for the right place to open up my school. I’d already posted online about my plan, and word traveled fast, so I didn’t have to explain much. They all said it was pure fantasy, and they were certain that nothing would come of it. 

I sped through the week looking for funders, collaborators, and people to help me handle the bureaucracy. Instead of offering support, my friends reacted with shock and stern warnings. Everyone said the same thing: “There’s nowhere left in Urumqi.” The Old City, where Uyghurs had lived for hundreds of years, was now nicknamed “Gaza.” Anyone who managed to escape this prison was considered a hero. And here I was coming back. 

I had been in the United States during the worst riots of July 2009. But my wife and daughter were still in Urumqi. I watched from Kansas as two Uyghurs from my hometown were beaten to death. Han workers at a toy factory in the southeastern Chinese city of Shaoguan had accused them of raping a Han woman, and a lynch mob assembled against the factory’s Uyghur employees. Videos of the violence spread quickly online, and on July 5, protests erupted in Urumqi. Uyghur students demonstrated with Chinese flags, demanding justice from the government. When the protest was violently suppressed, it turned into a riot. Uyghurs attacked Han and destroyed the shops they’d opened in our neighborhoods. Then the army came in and stood by for days as Han attacked Uyghurs. No one knows for sure how many died—at least over a hundred—and thousands of Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. 

“Don’t go outside,” I said to my wife over the phone. “Just stay at home.” For a few days, she did. Our daughter fell asleep to the sound of gunfire. That call was the last time I’d speak to her for nine months. The government shut off the internet, and international calls couldn’t get through. After I lost contact with my wife, I began to panic. Luckily, one of the other Chinese Ford Scholars at Kansas University was a former People’s Liberation Army officer. We’d already grown close, and when I told him what had happened, he promised to help. A week later, he put me in touch with army contacts who’d been deployed to Urumqi. Each time, I was given a different number to call. The people on the other end arranged to make sure my wife was safe and have food delivered to her apartment.

For days, my wife and daughter were trapped at home. Once, Mesude heard the sound of army helicopters circling the city, then a man’s voice down by the door to the building. She jumped up and ran to look outside, thinking her father had come back from America to save her. She opened the window and waved, shouting for me. The soldier she’d heard whirled around to aim his rifle at her. 

It was worse on the streets. One day, when they finally ventured outside with Mesude’s grandmother, they were spotted by Han rioters, who chased after them. Another time, Mesude and her mother fled onto a bus, and the mob surrounded them, banging on the windows. Mesude crawled under a seat, sobbing.  The bus driver sped to the police station, but the rioters followed behind. In full view of the police, they boarded the bus and began to beat the passengers. My wife was hit on the head and lost consciousness. She woke up in a hospital. It was overcrowded with people who were gravely injured, and she received no attention. The patients were kept inside by guards, but she snuck past them and returned home. 

Because of the communications blackout, I didn’t hear of any of this as it was happening. I was wracked with fear. One afternoon, hardly knowing what I was doing, I tried to walk to Walmart for groceries, but quickly lost my way. The streets of the suburban neighborhood confused me, and after a couple wrong turns I ended up wandering around in a cul-de-sac. I think I walked back and forth several times. Finally, a man called out to me. “What’s up?” he said from behind the truck he was working on in his driveway,  “Can I do something for you?” He was strong-looking, with bright red hair and a Midwestern accent. “I’ve lost my way,” I said.

“Okay, no worries. I can help. Where are you from?”

“The northwest part of China.”

“Ah.” The man paused. “I heard about that. Isn’t something happening there? I read about it in The New York Times.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s my city.”

“He gave me a hug, introduced himself, and invited me in for coffee. His name was David. We talked for a bit more, then he asked if I was hungry. It had been a while since I’d set out for food. “Yes,” I said. He heated us up a pizza and we ate together on his porch. I told him about my family, what I knew about the riots, what Ürümchi was like.

Eventually, I mentioned that I’d been on my way to Wal-mart. He immediately offered to drive me. I remember I bought some apples. After I was done, he told me that it wasn’t good to be without a car in America – he’d let me have his bike so I could get around.

“Pain is like an infectious disease,” he told me before we parted. “If you stay sad, it’ll affect people around you. Besides, it’s not good to hold onto it. If you feel alone, you can always call me.” 

For a full year, I didn’t know what had become of my family. I wasn’t able to talk to them. It would be more than a year before I could get them safely to Kansas to join me. And then another three years before I decided to return to Urumqi.

Now that I was back in Urumqi, I heard the terrible stories of people rounded up for questioning during the riots. It was almost as if they were competing with each other to offer up the bloodiest tale. I saw such suffering in people’s eyes, felt such hopelessness in their words that it became hard to breathe. After the July riots, the feeling of tragedy stuck around and Urumqi never again felt safe. Uyghurs there understood that whatever had protected them until that day could no longer be trusted. As we took the elevator down to leave our apartment, everyone kept glancing up at the camera in the corner, standing as far away from me as they could. I realized they thought I was under watch. That was the day I decided to leave the city. 

Besides, the only people in Urumqi willing to hear me out about my school were just interested in setting up English classes or making some money and putting up ads in Uyghur. I was constantly asked how to make it to America, how to get European residency, or how to become a Turkish citizen. People had stopped bragging about where their homes were, instead boasting about the foreign countries to which their kids had fled. Anyone who said, “My son’s living abroad,” really meant, “My son’s in a place where he won’t be beaten down.” I kept thinking of a proverb I’d heard old people say: “If you’re safe in your own place, you’ll see color in your face.” Everyone around me looked sick.  

People had gotten sick of their realities and were desperate to get out. Some left so that their children would grow up Western, without the defect of Uyghurness. Some who thought Uyghurs had no future in China left to find foreign countries that might agree to take them. Some people believed that China’s supposedly high-quality and “bilingual” education was actually just a way to turn Uyghurs into obedient good-for-nothings, and so they yearned for the developed education systems of the West. They chose to become refugees rather than live without the freedom to raise their children fully in Uyghur culture. In 2011, more than twenty Uyghurs left for Kansas. Until that year, I never knew of more than four in the whole state. A wave of more than a thousand others ended up in European refugee camps and eventually were granted asylum—more than the number who’d fled there after the communists conquered East Turkestan in 1949. Others equated their journey out of China to the pilgrimage of the Prophet Muhammad, who’d left his own home in Mecca for freedom in Medina. 

If you managed to get out, people called you a winner. Once, when I was talking with a friend, I brought up a merchant we’d known whose business had failed. But when I mentioned that he’d gone on to settle in Turkey, my friend was amazed. “Wow,” he said. “He really made it in the end.”

So I decided to leave Urumqi and return to my hometown of Kashgar. I was excited to take a semester or two off to spend more time with Mesude and teach her to speak Uyghur. Going back to Kashgar was like reuniting with an old friend who I’d not seen in years. The covered, snaking streets. The neighborhoods crammed with old two-story houses. The ancient mosques—although now, they were unlocked only during prayer time. The sprawling markets in the shade of willows that teemed with men’s doppas—our traditional skullcaps—and women’s headscarves. You could see the seasons change by the front steps of the Heytgah Mosque, where people sold cold yogurt drinks or tea from a steaming samovar. 

Nearby were restaurants and pottery shops that old Kashgar families had run for generations. The sound of the city was music. The dumpling makers sang as they counted out orders: “Oh! One manta! Two manta! Three manta!” The bowl makers and blacksmiths kept the beat with their hammers as the call to prayer echoed down narrow alleys where each craft had its own market. In the coat bazaar, the instrument bazaar, or the hat bazaar, there were hundreds of the same item for sale, handmade in every color imaginable. Even after the government evicted Kashgaris from the Old City to tear down the ancient buildings and replace them with replicas for tourists, the soul of my hometown survived. In Kashgar, you never heard the gunshots or screams that kept people in Urumqi on edge. Urumqi was a gray city of security fences, where cops set up surveillance stations on your street, and you could get carried off with a black sack pulled over your head. I thought Kashgar could never become like that.

But even Kashgar had changed. Before I left, I’d barely heard the word hijrah, or sacred migration, outside Qur’an readings at the mosque. But now, back home, it was constantly coming up in conversation, and people there meant something different by it than in cosmopolitan Urumqi. During Friday prayers one week, the imam denounced a book that called for Uyghurs to live abroad. It said they should move to Muslim countries where they could practice their faith freely and raise their children in it, and that God would reward them for living in the lands of the caliphate. None of this was true, the imam said, because after the Prophet liberated Mecca, he announced the end of migration as a religious duty. In 2004, I’d heard words like these on the virtue of migration from an Uyghur who helped students find schools in Malaysia. He’d get excited and say, “Going to Malaysia to study is just like going on hijrah” He collected payments from many students and ran visa scams with Han-owned language schools. I was furious with him. 

The imam went on about those who thought that sending their children abroad to countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt was hijrah. He said that if a child hasn’t grown up in a family and society that provides him with an Islamic education, sending him to study even in Mecca won’t ensure he lives a moral life. I wondered what could drive someone to call even the most rudimentary work abroad hijrah and indebt themselves to Han smugglers to get there. 

He said that just leaving for another country wasn’t hijrah and that besides, it was wrong to recommend it either way. He spoke of the Uyghurs who’d been duped by smugglers and left to die in the forests of Vietnam and the rice paddies of Thailand. But since the imam devoted an entire sermon to this, people’s desire to leave must’ve truly been strong.

Back when it seemed that China would keep granting freedom to the Uyghurs, we began to reconnect with the rest of the Islamic world. Young Uyghurs went to study at Al-Azhar in Cairo, traders split time between Kashgar and Uzbekistan, and businessmen set up shop in Istanbul. They brought back the Turkish language, Bollywood, and a new, stricter vision of Islam. When the Chinese government began to tighten the leash, suddenly fearful of what it had allowed us, many saw piety as a way to fight back. Some women traded the traditional Uyghur headscarf for full veils, and mullahs denounced our traditional music and dance as un-Islamic. The Chinese Communist Party called this “Talibanization” and tried to stamp it out. 

Now, after the bloodshed on the streets of Urumqi, the Uyghur masses were in deep shock and terrified for their safety. Intellectuals who knew where things were headed fell into despair. Those who could leave, did. Choosing to stay meant I had more in common with those who took refuge in religion or even with the naive who told themselves things would go back to normal. 

Why would I choose to return, knowing about the surveillance, detentions, and slander that awaited me? Let my daughter push me away if it meant she’d stay Uyghur. Let my daughter shine, as I had, thriving in Uyghur misfortune. Only in this way could she become Uyghur. What worried me most was my daughter calmly analyzing our disaster from a distance. Even if my daughter spoke Uyghur, as long as she didn’t know what was happening to our people, she wouldn’t really be Uyghur. I reminded myself that as horrible as life was in Kashgar, having her grow up in America would cut her off from who she was. I chose to raise her in the same conditions that had made me Uyghur. 

But things in Kashgar didn’t go as I hoped. Within two weeks, I started to regret coming back. It wasn’t just hearing so much hopelessness, nihilism, and apathy from the people around me. On the first phone call I made, the sound began to echo. I tried buying phones from a couple other brands, but no matter whom I called, I heard my own voice played back to me. People told me that it sounded like my voice was coming from another room and that they’d also hear their own voice bounce back at them. Not only that, but all the people opening language schools who I’d been hoping to collaborate with in Kashgar believed I had been blacklisted and even that I was being followed. In the end, I couldn’t find anyone who’d agree to work with me. Meanwhile, my daughter could barely speak Uyghur and struggled having anyone to talk to in English besides my wife and me. 

Despite it all, I managed to open the school. We quickly reached full enrollment, and others started similar programs in other cities. For a short time, it seemed that the government might leave me alone—the state-run local news even began filming a profile on me. But it couldn’t last. Strangers called to deliver vague threats and warnings. I began to prepare for the worst. No one was surprised when the police showed up at my house and invited me back to the station. 

I was in prison from August 19, 2013 to November 27, 2014, though for all I knew, it would be forever. In a quick show trial, I—along with two friends who helped run the school—was convicted of “fraudulent fundraising.” There was never any doubt about the real reason we were targeted—I was forced to wear the yellow vest of a political prisoner at all times. 

In Chinese prisons, society follows its own rules. Strength keeps you safe, and violent criminals sit at the top of the hierarchy. Political prisoners, set apart by their special uniforms, lie at the bottom. But every prison was different. In some, the guards were a constant presence, always threatening a beating. Köktagh prison was run mostly by the inmates. Each cell had a boss and underlings picked out by the guards—the second-in-command in mine was a Hui named Hai Xiaoyang. He was cruel, though in ways I was used to by that point. For no reason, he made other prisoners sleep on the floor. I bided my time, waiting for a chance to change him. One day, I interpreted between him and an Uyghur prisoner. Xiayang was surprised by my Chinese proficiency and asked me who I was. When I mentioned my time in Beijing, America, and Turkey, the sneer on his face was replaced by curiosity. 

I began to teach English to Xiaoyang. Instead of spending all day, every day, sitting cross-legged in my cell, I got to move my arms and legs a bit. He’d already known a bit of the language, and since he was still young, he picked it up easily. To start, I prepared some short texts for him to memorize. Once I’d taught him sentences about daily life in the cell and the names of the objects within it, I wouldn’t let him speak to me in Chinese. Within a month or two, he could read and understand English texts up to a half a page long. Since I was such a devoted and approachable teacher, he stopped saying “no” to me in other matters. Gradually, his insults and curses toward the other Uyghur prisoners stopped too. I passed him readings on the importance of compassion, equality, respect, freedom, and justice. 

One day, he said to me, “I admit it, I was wrong. I won’t do anything to hurt Uyghurs. I’ll never be that evil.” He fell silent. “Not just us,” I said. “Anyone.” Xiaoyang was the grandson of a mullah, but his mother was Han. He’d spent his childhood feeling ashamed in front of adults and learned to keep his distance from other people.

For over a year, I grew close with people like Xiaoyang. It’s possible, I discovered, to be friends with someone who beats you. Many of the common criminals I got to know were young Uyghurs already hardened by the cruelty of life in Xinjiang. There was Memetyüsüp, the Uyghur orphan who’d killed the Han pedophile given custody of his sister. Gheyret, the heroin addict, had been brought in at eighteen for stealing a piece of jade. He’d found God, and I was tortured for teaching him how to pray during Ramadan. Yaqupjan came in clutching the amulet his mother had made for him. On his first day in prison, our cellmates tore it from his hands. 

 They let me go as abruptly as they’d arrested me. One evening, I was rushed out from prison and driven to the Urumqi municipal court. With the invisible motions I’d picked up in prison—a slight bend in my back and a flick of my hand—I prayed for the patience and health of friends who I was now leaving behind. But I also forgave our oppressors. They were victims of a broken system. Even the man who’d arrested me in Kashgar, the one who’d torn off my clothes. Even the cops who forced me to dance like a monkey and crawl on all fours like a donkey in front of dozens of people. Inside the car as we drove away, one of the officers asked the others, “If these people ever get us, won’t they do the same things?” Everything they’d subjected me to melted away. Well done, I thought. God forbid that our legacy ever be sinking to the level of you and your government. If we did what you’ve done, would we be any different from you? This is how animals behave. What human being would ever bite back at the animal who’d bitten his leg? I still remember how, in my evening prayer after I was released, I threw away my anger alongside my filthy prison slippers. 

A few weeks before I left America, I’d debated my decision on the phone with a trusted Uyghur scholar. He advised me to stay. I began to defend my choice, but the conversation was cut short. I’d been counting on his support. Without it, I felt much less sure of what I was about to do. After that, I stopped asking people I knew in America what they thought, and many of them didn’t even realize that I was going to leave. Some even offered to help me find a job. Uyghurs who’d made it to America would never think of going back. I worried that if I mentioned my plan to them, they’d talk me out of it, so I never brought it up. 

Going back was my wife’s idea. One day, when she went to see some Turkish friends of ours, the conversation turned to the parts of life in the United States they found frustrating. Mesude couldn’t take it. “Why are you saying bad things about America? I love America!” she said. Everyone was shocked. Not long after, she announced, “I’m going to marry Jason.” I laughed so hard I couldn’t speak. Jason was a Black boy from her preschool.  

Mesude was four years old and beginning to learn how people were different. In her understanding, there were parents and kids, girls and boys, men and women, small and big. There were also, she said, American and Uyghur. Within all of these, she thought of herself as a kid, a girl, small, and American. My daughter had first learned she was Uyghur when she was trapped during the riots at home, when she was chased in the streets, when the bus she boarded with her mother was surrounded by men,  armed and grinning, when she saw those Han grown-ups coming to hurt her. 

When she first arrived in America, she was still terrified of riding the bus. But life in America helped her forget she was Uyghur. Within a year, she even forgot how to pronounce the word. America was hers, and she wouldn’t have us criticizing it. I thought of her growing up in America, becoming foreign to her own people. I knew that if I returned, I could be surveilled, detained, or worse, but these were risks I took for my daughter. 

The first person I had to tell about my decision was my thesis advisor. She’d spent two years guiding me in my research and had helped me secure a stipend to support myself through the completion of a PhD. “Are you sure?” she replied over email. Afterward, I spent a long time handwriting a letter explaining myself and, to thank her for the untiring kindness she’d shown me, delivered it along with five or six books I’d brought from East Turkestan. I never got a response. 

My wife and I spent the final days of that May packing everything we wanted to bring back. But the preparations were easy compared to the conversations. My friends joked about my new life in America, and I wouldn’t correct them. Yet I couldn’t refuse when a childhood friend called me up as we were emptying our apartment and invited us to visit his new house in Nebraska. We stayed for two days. He and I spoke late into the night. He tried to talk me out of leaving, and as I listened to what he had to say, I couldn’t bear to disagree. I agreed to stay. In the morning, we woke up to perfect weather. “It’s such a beautiful day,” I said as I opened up his windows. “Yeah,” my friend replied. “Because you’re not going back.” My heart sank as I remembered what I’d told him. I kept up the lie until the day before our flight, but he must have been able to tell that I’d made up my mind. “In case you’re still thinking about leaving,” he said, “if you try, I’ll come to the airport to arrest you myself. I’ll lock you up in my basement for so long your visa will expire and you’ll have to just stay there.”

Sometimes, when I had second thoughts, it strengthened my resolve to remember that Mesude had forgotten how to pronounce the word Uyghur. For our first six months in America, we spoke in Uyghurche, but later, even if we pushed her, she’d only reply to us in English. She used to love long phone calls with her grandparents, but as her ability in the language weakened, she’d refuse to join in our conversations. Once, when we were calling people back home, she threw a fit over something small and wouldn’t talk to us. 

I bit back my anger and asked what was wrong. “Why do you keep talking about things I can’t understand?” she asked. And she was right. The world we spoke about in our long conversations with people back home was an Uyghur one, built on the Uyghur language. But what my American daughter saw, learned, and felt took shape in her mind in English. Even though we lived in the same house, Mesude was in her own English world. Our daughter loved us and wanted to share a world with us, but she knew that the one inside her head was beautiful, and she wouldn’t allow it to be conquered. Still, staying in America would mean losing her. 

I felt that an Uyghur who couldn’t stand with her father at Eid prayers in the mosque wasn’t really an Uyghur. Neither was one whose heart stood still at the service’s seven takbirs. If my daughter couldn’t go with her mother in matching black headscarves on Laylat al-Qadr and Eid al-Fitr to weep among relatives at her grandfather’s grave, if the sound of the Qur’an’s surahs and ayats couldn’t set her trembling, then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. If she didn’t stop me on my way home from the mosque and ask, “Daddy, what do they say there? What does it mean?” then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. Life in Kashgar would be harder for all of us, but I owed it to my daughter. Returning was my hope, my right, my pleasure, and my good fortune.

Translated by Avi Ackermann.

The post I risked prison to keep the Uyghur culture alive appeared first on Coda Story.

That was my very first insight into a lesson I’d learn again and again in my life: Good journalism is vital for people who need it.

The world has changed a lot since I sat in that kitchen. The Iron Curtain no longer divides geographies, but its digital successor cuts straight through our communities, polarizing us from within. From Manila to Minneapolis, societies are divided on many of the same issues: changing identities, economic inequity, climate change and lack of reckoning over past injustices, to name just a few. Modern-day authoritarians no longer need to jam shortwave radio signals or shut down journalism organizations (although plenty of them still do). Instead, they flood our digital information systems.

From Budapest to Washington D.C., rising authoritarian populists now share a playbook of digital, legal and narrative tools that they use to manipulate and abuse people’s legitimate grievances. At the heart of their strategy is the same age-old quest for money and power, but their tactics are new, often innovative and designed to confuse, distract and sow doubt. Noise, not just fake news, is the greatest weapon in their arsenal.

Journalism’s existential quagmire

For journalism, this new political reality spells an existential quagmire. Today, a journalist’s ability to grab attention, get through the wall of censorship and deliver vital information that helps people navigate their complex reality is more important than ever. But in our world of algorithmic flooding, where so many are overloaded to the point of zoning out of the news, it’s also becoming an almost impossible role to fulfill.

In the summer of 2024, I arrived at Stanford to take up John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship, convinced that in our digital information era, noise had become the new censorship, and that it was existentially important for journalists to figure out how to punch through the noise and focus people’s attention on stories that matter.

The question of how journalists can be part of the solution instead of complicit in the flooding of information has preoccupied me for years.

My career as a BBC foreign correspondent began with a freelancing gig in West Africa in 2000. By then in the United States, cable news had already created a demand for more content over better stories. But the British broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel was only three years old, and most correspondents in the field were left to focus on stories they published in regularly programmed bulletins, rather than constant live updates.

A few years later, as I became a staff reporter, that dynamic began to change: More media organizations went online and social media entered the scene. Lured by the new horizons of unprecedented, seemingly limitless reach, media companies, including the BBC, jumped on the bandwagon. By 2014, social media emerged as a key distribution platform for all information, including news.

As I went back and forth between covering the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen and the war in eastern Ukraine, my editors started asking me to do regular Facebook Lives along with the rest of the field reporting. Like many of my colleagues, I grumbled. Not because of the extra work, but because the effort inevitably took away from the actual job: talking to real people, finding sources, getting information that those in power were trying to hide and putting stories together in a way that respected their complexity while making them easily accessible to the wide audience.

But what we reporters wanted didn't matter. Human information consumption habits were changing. The distribution channels most of our audiences were migrating to were not designed for complexity and nuance.

I left the BBC because I felt that as a journalist I was no longer effective. I could no longer fulfill that role that I saw on display in my childhood kitchen. The stories I was doing were being stripped of impact, not because they were not important, but because they were competing for dwindling attention spans with everything else in the digital world. Because they no longer lived in the context of an editorial flow or a news program but had instead followed audiences to the bottomless pit of internet algorithms.

Coda: Connecting the dots

But what if there was a better way of using the internet? The BBC, along with the rest of the mainstream media, I thought, was too focused on feeding incremental pieces to its 24-hour news channels and their hyperactive social media platform cousins. I wanted to connect the dots and explain why things mattered, and I wanted to figure out how to use technology to create sustained narratives, to break away from incrementalism, to show context, complexity and nuance that people need to understand the world they live in.

My research showed that audiences wanted that too, and that led to creating Coda Story, a newsroom that focuses on reporting the roots of global crises and connects the dots between local communities and global trends. Coda launched in 2017 as a crowdfunded reporting project and by 2022, it was a bustling newsroom, with a bunch of awards in the bag, a loyal audience, an impressive portfolio of mainstream media partners and a unique thematic approach that was designed to create context and continuity. Our editorial model rejected the noise, focusing on the “why” and “how” instead of “what” and “when.”

We worked hard to get away from the reactive instincts of the news industry, to stop being a slave to the artificial 24-hour news cycle. Our model enabled us to find evergreen stories often missed by others and identify patterns that explained the root causes of big crises before they hit the headlines. Using thematic lenses (e.g., war on science), we deployed journalists to identify stories bubbling under the surface. Again and again, our approach was validated as patterns we detected and focused on, be it certain conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxer movements, surveillance trends or disinformation narratives, would inevitably burst into headlines like they did when Covid paralyzed the world or when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And yet, proud as we were of our model, it was also becoming increasingly clear that producing good journalism was no longer enough.

Our journalism was excellent, but our distribution channels were profoundly, irreparably broken; social media platforms kept rolling out newer and better algorithms for targeting. They favored hate over reason, shouting over discussion and gossip over journalism. Then came advances in AI and the volume of noise spawned the information pollution crisis into stratospheric proportions, making it even harder for journalists to compete for our century’s most precious commodity: human attention.

The incrementalism of our information consumption has broken our conversations and fragmented our societies. Information pollution amplifies humanity’s every crisis, be it wars, racism, inequity, climate or dysfunctional politics. The noise stands in the way of every solution.

There is no singular — or easy — way out of this mess, but the past year as JSK Fellow at Stanford gave me space and time to think about how, if at all, journalism can help. Spoiler alert: I think it can. I am coming away with three practical insights, and, in the spirit of Stanford’s culture of experimentation, a plan to test them through Coda’s work in the next year.

Radical collaboration

The first is radical collaboration. The year at Stanford changed my understanding of who the allies and foes of journalism are and left me convinced that in order to survive in the age of AI, newsrooms — and especially small newsrooms that have been so important to diversifying the media landscape — need to profoundly rethink collaborations. My instinct is that the only way for non-mainstream newsrooms to survive is by building vast, yet agile and cross-disciplinary networks for sharing audiences, content, revenue and expertise.

For Coda, this translates into a two-circle approach to radical collaborations. In our inner circle are other journalists, organizations and individuals, with whom we are going to build closely knit (in some cases merger-like) partnerships that will enable us to share insights, audiences, capacity and revenue.

In the outer circle are much more broad, agile and most importantly cross-disciplinary partnerships that bring different industries into the conversation to feed our journalistic output.

We are currently working with artists, philosophers, historians and select influencers, in ways that aim at bringing them into the process of both production and distribution of stories. Our hope is that the partnerships we are currently testing will generate completely new kinds of media products, services and experiences for the audiences who are curious about the world, yet dissatisfied with what media offers.

Rethink distribution

The second insight concerns distribution. We are in the process of rethinking ways we distribute our journalism and we are making a new commitment to distribute for relationships, not just scale. The reason why distribution is so key is because in the digital age, medium has truly become the message. Over the past decade, media has grown overly dependent on social media and tech platforms. That has come at a huge cost.

It is time to change the power dynamic and stop relying on the middleman. From now on, for us at Coda social media is just a marketing tool, the rest of our distribution will focus on a mix of channels that allow us to build new feedback loops and genuine relationships with our audiences from in-person events to creative online storytelling.

Reimagine growth to scale for impact, not traffic

The third insight is around impact and how we understand and measure the impact of our journalism beyond the number of illusionary views or clicks. In the case of Coda, our impact — that will now inform both our audience and editorial strategies — will focus on attaining narrative change around issues that we cover (after all, every real-life change starts with a new story). As we scale our impact, we will also test new mechanisms of getting and learning from feedback.

Scaling for impact, testing radical, multi-disciplinary collaborations, rethinking distribution and experimenting with new channels that focus on building relations are three ways we can make sure that our journalism punches through the noise, reaching and engaging people who need it.

For the past six years, our readers like you have made our work possible. We are grateful and we hope that with us, you’ll stay on the stories that matter.

Coda is, of course, still a tiny outlet, but we have a huge ambition to lead by example and catalyze a much needed ecosystem change. What’s driving us isn’t really all that different from what made me want to become a journalist all those years ago: a deeply rooted belief that journalism that breaks down walls is a lifeline that our societies both need and deserve.

If you are interested in exploring any of this in more detail, or in teaming up, please get in touch! I’m on antelava@codastory.com.

This piece was originally published as a Stanford University’s John S.Knight Fellowships post.

The post Rising above the noise appeared first on Coda Story.

"I was trying to film, and the riot police officers just pushed me, and they forced me out and they tried to take away my camera. And this is not a rare thing anymore. It's very normal to just attack journalists," said Georgian journalist Mariam Nikuradze at the Coda-organized event “Georgia at the crossroads” on May 19.

The online discussion brought together a range of voices to examine the local dynamics and global significance of the unprecedented crackdown on dissent in Georgia. Speakers included:

• Anne Applebaum, historian (U.S.)
• Tornike Gordadze, political scientist and former minister (Georgia)
• Egor Kuroptev, political expert and media manager (Russia)
• Gia Japaridze, professor and academic (Georgia)
• Hanna Lubakova, journalist and researcher (Belarus)
• Peter Pomerantsev, author and journalist (U.K./U.S.)
• Tamara Arveladze, activist and founder of Shame Movement (Georgia)
• Mariam Nikuradze, journalist (Georgia)
• Nino Japiashvili, editor at Radio Tavisupleba (Georgia)
• Slobodan Djinovic, founding member of Otpor and founder of CANVAS (Serbia)

“Georgia at the crossroads” was organized in partnership with ZEG Fest, Stranger’s Guide and our local media partner in Tbilisi, Radio Tavisueba. Watch the recording of the full conversation below and stay tuned for more events like these in the future.

The post Georgia at the crossroads: Why the country’s mass protests matter far beyond its borders appeared first on Coda Story.

Historical debates are unusually important in this case, especially between Europe and its former colonies. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party has long identified itself with the Palestinian cause, due in large part to South Africa’s history of apartheid. Germany said its role in the Holocaust obliged it to intervene on Israel’s behalf, describing the South African case as the “political instrumentalization” of the Genocide Convention. That move elicited a swift rebuke from South Africa’s neighbor Namibia, whose Herero and Nama communities were victims of the genocide perpetrated by Germany between 1904 and 1908, three decades before the Nazi Party grabbed power. 

To understand what’s happening at the ICJ, I spoke with A. Dirk Moses, professor of international relations at the City College of New York and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Studies. His book, “The Problems of Genocide,” explores the history of the concept and its shortcomings in preventing states from harming civilians. 

Israeli officials have said that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is morally equivalent to the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, which killed about 25,000 people. The confirmed death toll in Gaza is now roughly the same. What do you make of Israel’s justification?

It's clearly Israeli policy to run that line with the Americans and the British and say, “You did this during the war in fighting the Nazis. We're also fighting Nazis, so, ergo, we can do the same.” That language is prevalent through [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s speeches. The implication is clear: “The Palestinians are the Nazis and they committed genocide on October 7. We're just defending ourselves in the same way as the Allies did in World War II. It wasn't pretty, a lot of German civilians were killed, but these things happen in war.” 

They're trying to avoid the narrative structure where the Israelis are the perpetrators of genocide and are then somehow related to the Nazis by process of association. Associating oneself with Allied bombing does not place you on the side of angels, however, as we now recognize that much — or at least some — of the Allied bombing of German cities like Dresden would be now classed as war crimes. These officials more or less admitted, “Well, we’re committing war crimes but not genocide in what we do in Gaza.”

A senior Israeli lawyer at the hearing said, “The Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population. The convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.” What’s the reason for this distinction? 

Firstly, I think the Israeli lawyer accurately depicted the intention of many state parties when the convention was negotiated, but we’d have different views on the context. Legally, there’s no hierarchy between crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide. But in public opinion, there is — and genocide is seen as “the crime of crimes.” The liberal view is that that's a good thing, that we need this exceptional crime for these most exceptional cases. My view is that this is an extremely problematic situation because "that which shocks the conscience of mankind" — language traditionally used in these humanitarian documents — is something that needs to resemble the Holocaust in order to truly shock us and therefore to trigger the genocide charge. But if the Holocaust is considered unique or exceptional, then, by definition, how many cases are ever going to approximate that? In other words, you define genocide out of realistic existence.  

The aim of the [U.N.] delegates — and they said this, if you read the transcripts of 1948 — in creating this very high threshold of exceptional violence is precisely so states can engage in the kind of warfare that Russia is engaging in, that Israel is engaging in and that America engaged in in Korea in the early 1950s, where they killed 2 million North Koreans and later killed millions with bombing and Agent Orange in Vietnam — and not be prosecuted for genocide. 

The delegates made a very strict distinction between military intention and genocidal intention. The military intention is to defeat, whereas genocidal intention is to “destroy as such.” That “as such” in the [U.N. Genocide Convention] definition means to destroy a group solely because of that group's identity attributes. I call this a nonpolitical reason because the group doesn't have to do anything — it just is. They’re being attacked just for being Jews, for example, not for anything they’ve done. The archetype of genocide is a massive hate crime, whereas the military or security intention is that you attack a group or members of a group that are engaged in a rebellion or an insurgency, like Hamas. 

The Israeli logic is quite consistent with traditions of international thinking: “We're engaged in a security operation and we're entitled to self-defense, and we're not attacking Palestinians as such just for being Palestinian. What we're trying to get at are these Hamas fighters, which have commingled themselves with the population or underneath it in the tunnels. If civilians get in the way, that’s regrettable, but international law allows proportionate collateral damage.” States have gotten away with this reasoning for most post-World War II conflicts.  

Shortly after the hearings began, the world began to take sides. Germany’s already offered to join Israel’s defense, which Namibia — its former colony — has condemned as hypocritical. How is there such disagreement over what constitutes genocide? 

Genocide is a legal concept. Although its archetype is the Holocaust, the purpose of it is to be applicable broadly. But it has an archetype, or an ideal type, known as the Holocaust. Because of this, and because the Genocide Convention was born at a particular time and place with one case in mind, the Holocaust is in the background when people use the concept of genocide. It's entailed, even subconsciously. You can't accuse Israel of genocide because it's the successor victim nation of the biggest genocide in world history. By definition they can't commit genocide. 

There’s a standoff between Global South and Global North in this respect. The Global South has always linked genocide and colonialism, whereas in the Global North, they haven't. Why would they resist the link? Genocide is tethered to the image of the Nazis there. France, Belgium, Britain and Germany were colonial empires, so the last thing they want to do is to say they have genocidal histories. They say: "It was only the Germans who had genocidal history, and now the Russians because of Ukraine, but the rest of us have clean hands historically. Yes, there were some dark sides to our colonial empires, but they were motivated by high-minded humanitarian ideals, bringing progress to people." Whereas people in the Global South, like Namibians, think that's just window dressing on the vicious, extractive, violent project of colonialism. They'll say there were colonial empires in Africa and the Nazis were a colonial empire in Europe — a very radical one, but nonetheless in the same flow of history. So you've got big framing contestations going on here, which you alluded to in your first question.

What's happening in Israel in a sense is the unfinished business of decolonization. In this case, the Indigenous people are still there — a lot of them — and resisting, some of them violently, notwithstanding the Israeli self-understanding that they are the real Indigenous ones. But that's not unique in world history. Name me a nation state in which there wasn't tremendous founding violence. Australia? The United States?

The dilemma for Israel with Gaza was that the refugees from [the Nakba in] 1948 were just pushed across the border. It means they want to come back. Gaza is not home. Neither is the Sinai, obviously. Right-wing Israelis realize that, which is why they want to deport Palestinians from Gaza. 

By bombing orchards, trees and agricultural territory, which have no military value, they are making northern Gaza uninhabitable — by design. I've seen the reports. It is also leading to famine because people can't feed themselves. Israeli forces are corralling people in the south to create a humanitarian catastrophe so that pressure builds up on the international community to do something. At the moment, the political pressure hasn't built up to that extent. Egypt won’t let in Palestinians and neither will other states. But what about in six months’ time, when we’ll have mass starvation if Israel doesn’t abide by the ICJ measures? Given the campaign against [the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees known as the] UNRWA and reports about the rate of aid entry, experts are predicting famine before too long. And right-wing Israeli politicians are openly calling for starvation as an incentive for Palesitnians to “voluntarily emigrate.” There'll be global outcry and pressure applied on Egypt. Because they're a debt-ridden country, their debts will be forgiven. "We'll pay for the city in the Sinai," say the Americans. Then you get the solution that Israel wants, which is to empty Gaza, or at least "thin it out." 

Do you think the archetypal status of the Holocaust drives states to speak in certain ways in order to have serious attention paid to formative national tragedies?

Exactly. In the public consciousness of international law, you have a hierarchy with genocide at the top, so obviously victim groups want to go for the gold standard. This is appalling because crimes against humanity are themselves extremely serious. That’s why they were a major indictment in the Nuremberg trials — they covered what is now called the Holocaust. Genocide wasn't one of the indictments at Nuremberg, it was crimes against peace, aggressive warfare, crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

I’m curious about your idea of “permanent security.” In the current war in Gaza, does this concept apply? How?

Security is legitimate. Permanent security is illegitimate. It's a utopian idea of absolute safety. What makes permanent security aspirations so problematic is that that can only be achieved by violating international law, by indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. To make sure that groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad can never again pose a threat to Israel, the only solution is to remove the population, the entire population, which, of course, is what Israeli government ministers are saying.

The well-known book by Tareq Baconi, “Hamas Contained,” shows how there was a modus vivendi between the Israelis and Hamas. We know that Netanyahu was allowing in money to strengthen Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. The last thing Netanyahu and the majority of the Israeli political class since the second Intifada [between 2000 and 2005] wanted was a functioning Palestinian state-like entity in the West Bank, lest it merge with Gaza into a single state. If Hamas is a monster, its “success” in Gaza is partly a creation of Israeli policy. 

As a scholar of genocide, what do you make of the ICJ case? 

Now that we have the court’s judgment on provisional measures, I think it’s overall a win for South Africa, as it finds their claim plausible that genocide is taking place. 

The U.S. and Germany had claimed that the case was meritless, but the decision referred to clear examples of incitement to genocide from the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, President Isaac Herzog, and then-Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz which had been pointed out by independent experts and members of working groups affiliated with the U.N. Human Rights Council. The court is suggesting these officials should be punished. It will be interesting to see the reaction in Israel.

The court avoids the issue of armed conflict by focusing on genocide. Instead of mentioning South Africa’s request for a ceasefire, it says “The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts” listed in the Genocide Convention, which implies that its armed forces are committing them, namely: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

I see international lawyers interpreting this omission in different ways — either that Israel should cease its campaign other than in directly repelling attacks, or continuing its campaign while allowing in humanitarian aid and reducing civilian casualties. Ultimately, the court is suggesting that Israel’s campaign could be genocidal and thus that it needs to cease those modes. This is an extraordinary judgment whose consequences we are yet to fully understand.

The post Israel and the ‘crime of crimes’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Over the past year, Coda journalists have reported from over 13 countries on how history, identity and memory are being instrumentalized by politicians, tech companies and even angry parents. The resulting stories explored the ways in which the past is being used to serve present-day political agendas, influencing voters and drumming up popularity.

No doubt these trends will continue in 2024, a year that is slated to see major elections held in India, Russia and the U.S. Narratives around historic victimhood and belonging are already at the center of national campaigns and will be topics that our reporting team continues to watch closely.

But before we leave this year behind, take a look at our top stories from our history coverage in 2023:

1. Over the past year, reporter Erica Hellerstain closely followed educators in the U.S. as they found themselves caught up in the ongoing clash of ideologies over history, racism and LGBTQ rights. In Arizona, an “empower hotline” for parents to report “inappropriate” teaching dialed up pressure on already overstretched public school teachers. In Missouri, librarians feared prosecution under a new law criminalizing some books in school library circulation. New restrictions on college education in Florida copy-catted bans already in place in Hungary and Poland.

2. To try and justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials have turned to high school textbooks, revising the curriculum to teach students about why it was necessary to wage war on the neighboring country. Starting this fall, the government cut its selection of approved textbooks down to a single, rewritten volume for 11th graders, with a similar narrowing of state history curriculum into a unified textbook planned for next year across lower grades. The new textbooks quote President Vladimir Putin’s claim about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine and argue that the country should not exist. This level of direct political influence in Russian education hasn’t been seen since Russia was part of the Soviet Union.

3. In Australia, a decades-long, state-sponsored campaign is reinventing the history of the country's involvement in the First World War. As mulitculturalism has grown and calls to reckon with Australia's history of colonial violence have increased, the government has put large sums of money towards WWI memorialization programs as a way to assert a militarized vision of a strong Australia proud of its ties to imperial Britain.

4. In Turkey, guardians of historical memory clashed with Disney over a TV series about the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In August, officials opened an investigation into the streaming company for pulling out of the much-hyped series planned for the 100th anniversary of the founding of Turkey. The controversy underscored the challenges facing U.S. giants such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney when tapping into the global entertainment market.

5. The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. However, Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language, and some minority groups in the western part of the country have become collateral damage. Members of Ukraine’s historical Romanian-speaking community feel that despite their support of the Ukrainian state in its war against Russia, they are being edged out of public life. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

6. Germany’s ban on most protests in support of Palestinians has sparked a national crisis, raising questions about what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history. The crackdown has fueled a passionate discussion about how Germany’s culture of taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust is coming into conflict with basic democratic rights of assembly and expression.

The post Year in review: How memory wars have shaped global headlines appeared first on Coda Story.

Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his "heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens."

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin's foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

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It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

The post The Kremlin revises a textbook to dictate future understanding of Russian history appeared first on Coda Story.

The series was set to air on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, October 29, when Ataturk became president. Instead, Disney said that the show will be released as two films: one to be shown on the Turkish free television network Fox, which Disney owns, and another to be released in theaters at a later date.

Turkish media and government officials blamed the Disney+ cancellation on Armenian lobby groups in the U.S., encouraging a popular backlash in Turkey against the company. Organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America have expressed concerns that the series would gloss over Ataturk’s purported role in the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers in 1915 — actions that are widely recognized as a genocide, including by U.S. President Joe Biden.

The clash between the guardians of Ataturk’s historical memory and Disney — which was founded 13 days before Ataturk became president in 1923 — underscores a complex challenge for U.S. entertainment giants. They have to figure out how to produce content for global markets while some governments look to enforce their own views of history. 

In Turkey, Ataturk stands as a singular figure uniting Turkey. His image adorns walls everywhere, from barbershops to offices to fancy hotels. Prominent Turkish artists, journalists and politicians announced they would cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Singer-songwriter Mustafa Sandal wrote to his one million Twitter followers: “I canceled it. Now it's your turn! No Atatürk, no us!”

“I suspect that any film, even the most hagiographic film of Ataturk, would end up being dredged over the coals by the Turkish media simply because it could never be hagiographic enough,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University.

When the journalist Can Dundar made a documentary in 2008 depicting Ataturk as a heavy drinker with a fear of the dark, two university professors filed a formal complaint with an Istanbul court requesting an investigation into Dundar for “eroding Ataturk’s respectability.” Publicly insulting Ataturk in Turkey is a crime. Turkey’s top mobile telephone operator, Turkcell, canceled its sponsorship of the film.

Ebubekir Sahin, the chairman of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, a state agency in charge of regulating broadcasting that opened an investigation into Disney, wrote on Twitter that Ataturk is Turkey’s “most important social value.”

Ataturk is widely revered in Turkey, but not always for the same reasons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has sought to make Turkey a more religious and conservative society, has been selective about Ataturk’s legacy, downplaying his militant secularization of the country while praising his consolidation of the state and his fight against Western colonization in the Islamic world, according to Eissenstat.

There is a long history of U.S. media productions about Turkish history erupting into explosive debates, attacked by the Armenian diaspora or by Turks, according to Nicholas Danforth, a senior non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

In the 1930s, a film about the Armenian genocide was canceled after Turkey applied pressure on the U.S. State Department and MGM Studios, the maker of the movie. In 2002, the director of “Ararat,” a film about the Armenian genocide, was targeted with threats that Armenians in Turkey would be harmed as a reprisal for making his film.

The battle over cinematic portrayals of Turkey’s role in the Armenian genocide played out most prominently in 2016, when a film called “The Promise” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was only shown to a handful of attendees, but it received tens of thousands of one star ratings on IMDb, the film rating platform, followed by tens of thousands of ten star ratings, as Turkish nationalists and pro-Armenian groups flocked to the site to control the narrative.

No serious academics are willing to give genocide denial the time of day anymore, says Danforth. But, he said, there is frustration among historians about attempts to place all the blame at Ataturk’s feet. “There's plenty to criticize about Ataturk, but for very specific historical reasons, making him a stand in for all the crimes of Turkish nationalism is misleading as well,” Danforth said.

This is not the first time Disney has been caught between a state and a diaspora over accusations of whitewashing a genocide. Its remake of Mulan in 2020 was subjected to a boycott because it was filmed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is committing what the U.S. Department of State and parliaments in the U.K. and Canadia recognize as a genocide against the Uyghur people. In the credits, the movie gives special thanks to multiple Chinese government entities in the region, including to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan where several re-education camps have been identified.

Warner Bros’ blockbuster film “Barbie” caused a stir because, in one scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a child-like drawing of a map of the world. Next to what is supposed to be China is a dashed line that the Vietnamese government says is a representation of the nine-dash line, a maritime boundary that China claims marks its ownership of the South China Sea. The film was banned in Vietnam as a result. Meanwhile, the same map also depicts England as bordering Asia.

The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has divided the executive ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies, upended marketing plans and rattled prop masters. In the 2019 trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket, even though they had appeared in the original 1980s film. Fans complained. The flags were reinstated. The movie was banned in China.

The Chinese government has been ramping up pressure on the American film industry since the late 1990s, according to Chris Fenton, a film executive and former president of DMG Entertainment, a global media company headquartered in Beijing. As China’s market leverage grows, the Chinese government has become more forceful in demanding compliance with its views.

The Pentagon has expressed alarm. In July 2023, it announced that it will not share bases, ships and equipment with productions that allow the Chinese state to censor content in a way that advances China’s national interests.

Yet despite a desire behind closed doors to push back, Fenton said there is no coordinated effort within the film industry to counter China’s efforts to control content. 

Conservatives in the U.S., frustrated by the Barbie movie map, which they see as legitimizing China’s position in the South China Sea, have attacked the film for undermining their values. Political commentator Ben Sharpiro began a scathing 40-minute review of the film by setting fire to Barbie dolls. In late June 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated the U.S. national news cycle when he accused Disney of putting “sexualized content” in its programming for children.

“The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children is preposterous and inaccurate,” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger responded, adding, “The last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.”

Disney+ was launched in Turkey last year as part of a global expansion into 42 new countries. Losing access to Turkey, with its population of over 85 million people, would be a blow to those plans. Disney+ has an estimated 50,000 subscribers in Turkey, compared to Netflix’s estimated 2.6 million, according to FlixPatrol.

Turkey is moving away from the West, disentangling itself from decades of alliance structures and huge defense contracts, according to Selim Koru, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“This is an American entertainment company pretending like these things are more or less as they were maybe 20 years ago,” he told me. “That a founding father of this deeply divided country is sort of an easy or manageable subject for a historical drama produced by a foreign company.”

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The messy episode highlighted the Catholic Church’s dwindling influence in the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, the Vatican has steered clear of condemning Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance similar to the positions of Brazil and China. After a meeting with the Pope in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “any peace proposal must originate from Kyiv, not from the Vatican, China or elsewhere.” 

The Vatican’s limited role as a mediator in the conflict reflects the Pope’s geographical priorities. Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals last week from Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Malaysia. The Pope also promoted Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, who served as a papal ambassador to Ukraine and Belarus, which could be seen as a nod to the challenges of the war. The headline promotions, however, were bishops based in Hong Kong and Israel, where the Catholic community is small.

While previous pontiffs, such as John Paul II, threw their support behind Western powers in times of crisis, John L. Allen Jr., a journalist with the Catholic news website Crux, has written that the changing demographics of the Catholic Church mean that the concerns of Europeans and North Americans are becoming less pressing on the Vatican’s agenda. The majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in Latin America, with the African continent seeing the biggest increase in Catholic congregations. And the Pope “gives great importance to relations with other continents such as Asia,” said Massimiliano Valente, an associate professor of contemporary history at the European University of Rome.

The Vatican infuriated the Ukrainian government last summer by suggesting that Russia’s actions might have been driven by “NATO barking at Russia’s gate.” In another interview, soon after, the Pope said the war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked.” 

According to Nona Mikhelidze at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy, the comments present Ukraine “as a mere pawn.” The Ukrainian government has also questioned the Church's assumptions about Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelenskyy’s advisor, said in June that the Vatican needs to have a “sound understanding of this war.”

Across the region, the influence of the Vatican is being challenged. In Poland, where 91% of people identify as Catholic, the Polish Catholic Church — one of the most powerful institutions in the country— has been at loggerheads with Pope Francis over liberal reforms such as decentralizing power. Next door in Lithuania, Catholics have called for an “inquiry on sexual abuse in the church,” as survivors continue to come forward in the Baltic nation.

The Vatican’s position in Belarus, a nation that acted as a staging ground for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has also been criticized. In a country where Catholic priests are being jailed or exiled for speaking out against Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Vatican has taken a conciliatory tone. The papal ambassador, Ante Jozic, has celebrated the Belarusian government and parroted a line favored by Lukashenko that Minsk could hold peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

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In response, India’s national council overseeing the curriculum claimed that the revisions were a routine exercise intended to ensure that material was introduced at the “appropriate stage.” It did not explain how the textbooks were edited or by whom.

Much of the current debate in India is similar to debates that have taken place for over a decade in the United States, over intelligent design for instance — which argues that the world was created with intent and is dubiously presented as an alternative to evolution theory — and how politicians and state legislatures shape what is taught in public schools.

In 2018, a minister in the Indian government said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong” because “nobody, including our ancestors, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.” A year later, the same politician said that he didn’t “want to offend people who believe that we are children of monkeys but according to our culture we are children of rishis.” A rishi is a Hindu sage or saint.

Controversy over textbook revisions in India are mostly about excisions from history, political science and sociology textbooks, as political parties in power seek to influence curriculums at both state and national levels. Science textbooks, however, have generally been spared. Indeed, an amendment to the Indian Constitution made in 1976, lists among the “fundamental duties” of every Indian citizen the obligation to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”  

On June 15, 33 Indian political scientists who have contributed to school textbooks wrote to the director of the national education council to demand that their names be removed as authors because “this creative collective effort is in jeopardy.” The omissions and deletions, they argued, had violated the “core principles of transparency and contestation.”

They had taken their lead from Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palsikar, eminent academics — Yadav is now a politician — who had complained just days earlier that the textbooks they had worked on, “once a source of pride,” were now a “source of embarrassment.”

I spoke to Palsikar on the phone and asked him about the politicization of Indian schooling and the intent behind textbook revisions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Following the spate of recent changes to textbooks, you've withdrawn your name as an author. Why did you do that?

When the most recent round of edits began last year, I warned that students wouldn’t benefit from these sorts of selective redactions. The edits subverted what Yogendra [Yadav] and I were trying to do when we contributed to the textbooks. We had to distance ourselves from the whole exercise.

The deletions are specific and seem to fit the governing party’s agenda. Though the official reason for revising textbooks is that the Covid pandemic has forced a reassessment of course loads, would you agree that there is an ideological motivation behind the revisions?

Yes, this is what we've been saying in our public expression of protest. If you closely follow the majority of the changes being made to textbooks in sociology, history and political science, they are being made to appease a certain political mindset. The revisions are ideological and partisan. They’re intended to satisfy the agenda of the ruling party. 

We don’t know who the people are who are making the edits, even though the textbooks display the names of prominent academics as authors and editors.

Yes, you’re right. Our names are on the books although we had nothing to do with the revisions. Students who read these books will think we’ve made these changes. That’s a lack of transparency. It appears as if our names are on the books to legitimize the process. We helped prepare these books back in 2006. We faced some objections and protests for political reasons, but no changes were made to our work. Now changes are being made to suit the demands by certain groups, and the national council that produces and monitors the textbooks is not being transparent. 

Do you think that the textbooks are being edited to appease the government’s “Hindu-first” nationalism?

‘Appeased’ is a mild way to put it. The edits are increasingly aggressive. In my view, the next step will be to overhaul the syllabus completely and to rewrite these textbooks under a new education policy. 

When you helped write the textbooks, there were strong passages about anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984 and anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Studying these riots were a part of the curriculum. But the public conversation about such issues now is so polarized.

Textbook writing and curriculum formation have always been very contentious issues. What we tried to do was remain as objective and factual as possible in our treatments of controversial, hotly disputed topics, such as riots or the suspension of civil liberties. Our thinking was that these are textbooks for 12th grade students. They’re going to be voters. We wanted to introduce them to debates in Indian political history and contemporary Indian life without being partisan. We thought that a model had been created in which you appointed experts and let them treat the subject with autonomy.

In 2006, we were shielded from any direct state interference because there was a monitoring committee between us and the government. There was some discomfort in government circles, but we didn't face a backlash as long as the facts were accurate. My colleague Yogendra Yadav has written about a meeting we had with the education minister at the time. ‘You do your job,’ he told us, ‘and the government will do its job.’ Nobody asked me to change anything in the text.

Do you think you would have the same autonomy under the Modi government?

It's a hypothetical question, so my answer is presumptuous. But I would argue that these recent redactions show that the national education council has lost its autonomy. I don't have any experience of working with this present government, so I’m basing my assessment on my observations of the pressure I believe is being put on the media and on academia. This government is interfering far too much. It is trying to control culture, and I doubt if I would be allowed to work on textbooks now with the autonomy I had in 2006.

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Since coming to power in 2015, the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice party has been accused of subverting democracy by stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, seizing control of state media and targeting women’s reproductive rights. But what brought Polish people out to the streets — in the largest demonstration since the 1980s — was a new law that will set up a government commission to investigate alleged Russian influence in Poland between 2007 and 2022.  

The proposed nine-member commission will have the power to investigate individuals suspected of being unduly influenced by the Kremlin, and hold open hearings into their conduct. 

Opponents of the legislation argue that it is intended to punish opposition politicians ahead of pivotal parliamentary elections this fall. The legislation has been compared to McCarthyism, a purge of individuals suspected to be under socialist and communist influence in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s.

It's not just Poles who are infuriated by the Russian influence law. It has also rattled allies in the United States and the European Union who have relied on Poland, a NATO member, to act as a key transit hub for military aid to Ukraine since early 2022. In a statement, the U.S. State Department said that the law “could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The EU, which was already in a bitter feud with Law and Justice over Poland’s democratic backsliding, took legal action against the Polish government, saying the commission violated EU law.

Perhaps in response to such criticism, Polish President Andrzej Duda proposed significant amendments to the law just days after signing the bill. Following parliamentary approval, current members of parliament will no longer be able to sit on the commission, and the commission will no longer be given the power to ban people from holding public office. An appeal process against the commission’s decisions will also be instituted. Still, opposition politicians argue that while the worst effects of the law have been mitigated, its undemocratic spirit remains intact, with opposition politicians being smeared as Putin’s puppets.   

The proposed commission is an example of how the Polish government has used the fallout from the war in Ukraine to mask its undemocratic maneuverings at home. “We’re seeing two Polands, the good Poland, which is supporting Ukraine, and the bad Poland, which continues to demolish the rule of law,” said Jakub Jaraczewski, a research coordinator at Democracy Reporting International, a think tank in Berlin. “The war in Ukraine has allowed the Polish government to cast themselves as the good guys.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Law and Justice party has increased its standing on the world stage and cemented Poland as a European power. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden visited Warsaw, where he praised Poland for its staunch support for Ukraine and its commitment to democratic values. “Thank you, Poland,” he said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing.”

One reason why Law and Justice continues to appeal to swaths of the Polish electorate is its successful redrafting of history to justify its illiberal agenda. By using the memory of malign Russian influence in Poland, the Polish government is casting itself as the country’s protector. 

While the party evokes history and Russia’s war in Ukraine to justify controversial anti-democratic legislation, it has to tread carefully around another historical memory seared in the national psyche.

On July 11, Law and Justice will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bloodiest day of the Volhynian massacres. Located in northwest Ukraine, Volhynia was once a part of Poland. Between 1943 and 1945, armed Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered whole villages full of Polish people in a bid to prevent a post-war Poland from asserting sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority regions. Over 50,000 Poles were murdered. In retaliation, Poles killed an estimated 10,000 Ukrainians. 

The Volhynian massacres have hung over Polish-Ukrainian relations since the end of communist rule. While Poland declared Volhynia a genocide in 2016, consecutive Ukrainian governments have stood firm on their position that there is a need for reconciliation and forgiveness on both sides. Ukraine has always rejected the claim that the events in Volhynia were a genocide.

In March 2023, the head of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, said during a visit to Warsaw that Ukraine would work with Poland to accept “the truth, no matter how painful it may be.” It appeared to be a way forward for Poland and Ukraine. But, aware of national sensitivities, particularly in an election year, a spokesperson for Poland’s foreign ministry chastised the Ukrainian government soon after for failing to understand “that the issue of Volhynia is very important for Poles.” He went on to demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “should take more responsibility” and apologize for the massacres. Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland described the comments as “unacceptable” in tweets that were later deleted. 

“There is a problem between Polish historical memory and Ukrainian historical memory about Volhynia,” Jan Pisulinski, a professor of history at Rzeszow University in eastern Poland, told me, referencing Ukrainian historians who claim that the massacres were not perpetrated by Ukrainian nationals but were instead peasant killings. “But,” he added, “the Law and Justice party’s so-called historical policy is disappointing because it is manipulative in how it serves the contemporary interests of the government.” 

It is unlikely that the Polish government will soften its position as the anniversary approaches. It’s an occasion that will be watched by Russian propagandists who have previously used Volhynia to try to drive a wedge between Poland and Ukraine. Earlier this month, I met Marta, who was standing outside the Ukrainian embassy in central Warsaw to express solidarity following the June 6 blast that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam. She told me that in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she didn’t believe the Volhynia massacres needed to be commemorated in the same way this year. “My grandfather,” she told me, “hated Ukrainian people because of Volhynia, but now we need to stand against Russia and leave the past in the past.”

The need to stand up to Russia, argue the Polish protestors who gathered in Warsaw in early June, cannot come at the cost of Poland’s hard-won democracy. At the protests, the people I spoke to expressed no fear of Russian influence, only anger toward the Polish government. 

Grzegorz Schetyna, a former leader of Civic Platform, Poland’s main opposition party, told me that it was “key to stand together with other democratic opposition parties at this march.” He was confident that the momentum of the protests could be bottled and used to unify Poland’s traditionally chaotic opposition before the general election, which is expected to be held in October. 

“We are going to these elections to win and to right human wrongs,” former Prime Minister Donald Tusk shouted into the loudspeaker under the searing sun that day. Tusk, critics say, is the primary target of the government’s urgent efforts to investigate “Russian influence” because he is the biggest threat to Law and Justice retaining power.

Despite the impressive turnout on June 4, not all the demonstrators were convinced it would be enough. “Poland is here,” Tusk said. “No one will silence us!” But Paul, a 71-year-old from Warsaw, told me he wasn’t so sure. “Support for the other side is too big,” he said with a shake of his head before disappearing into the crowd.

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Threlkeld, a history professor at Denison University in Ohio, teaches a seminar for first-year students focused on how American history has been taught through the centuries, parsing textbooks to explain how national narratives evolve. The course dissects some of the country’s most notorious battles in the great culture war over historical memory — from the 1990s-era clashes about how to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the conservative uproar in the mid-2010s over a U.S. history course framework emphasizing the country’s legacy of racism. The last few years of her course have coincided with a new front in America’s culture wars: how this legacy is discussed in public schools.  

Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. In the same period, universities and colleges have become a key battleground for conservative lawmakers intent on codifying an “anti-woke” view of history in the classroom, with nearly two dozen states introducing bills targeting history instruction and diversity training in higher education. 

Threlkeld’s students have been studying these fights in real time and reflecting on the future of a country afraid of its past. I spoke to her about what they make of this fraught political moment and the continuities between history wars of the past and present.

When you started teaching this class nearly a decade ago, what was the dominant history war captivating the public? And do you see any connections between that feud and what people are fighting over today?

Starting around 2010, the College Board decided to revisit the AP U.S. history framework. So they brought in historians and teachers and all the kinds of people you would expect. And it was a multi-year process that was all done by the College Board. And then in 2014, they released the revised framework around which schools could design the AP courses that fit with what they do in those districts. The right-wing reaction was exactly what you would expect, which was, ‘Why are these people listed and not these people?’ 

So for those first few years of teaching this class, I was able to show my students these reactions and to show them the responses from the College Board and the responses from school districts and ordinary teachers who were dealing with this in their classrooms every day. I could tell that students had never really thought about the politics behind all of this because they're just in class. They're just learning what they're being taught. One of the experiences that stays with me most strongly from this class is just seeing students realize how political history is.

Many students can probably study a specific battle over a textbook and not understand that history itself is often contested and politically weaponized. How do you explain this concept of history wars to your students? How do they react? 

It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years. The thing that I have done the last few times that I have taught the course is just to give them one of these bills. The last time I taught this course was the fall of 2022. And in the spring of 2022, the Ohio House of Representatives had proposed one of these ‘divisive concepts’ bills. So we talked through the process of how these bills work, and I just gave them the text and said, ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ And that was more powerful than anything I had tried before. 

Some of the other things I had done before were giving students two very different textbook excerpts of the same event and talking about why these excerpts would be so different. Even then, getting them to understand the political stakes always took more time. But with these bills, all I have to do is hand them the text of one, and they're just immediately thinking, ‘What is going on?’

Do students buy lawmakers’ rhetoric that these laws are intended to protect them from harmful and divisive concepts? 

Their first reaction is usually disbelief that anyone thinks that there are topics in U.S. history that high school and college students shouldn’t learn about. They are very thoughtful when it comes to thinking about younger children. But by the time students get to their age — 16, 17, 18 — they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there is something dangerous in learning about slavery or learning about racial discrimination of any kind. And some of them who come through this course and start to understand how little they know about American history, some of them are angry that they weren't taught the things that they're learning.

We do have some really interesting discussions about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic. Because they pick up on a lot of that rhetoric, too, that the purpose of public education is to make students patriotic citizens. And so, I do always get a couple of students who ask things like, ‘Well, how can I learn all these terrible things that the United States has done and still be patriotic?’ And I think that's an incredible question. Where a lot of them come to by the end of the semester is that they need to know these things in order to be patriotic. That being ignorant is not patriotism.

I grew up in California, but I have reported from and lived in the South. And while I was there, I learned that students were taught a very different version of Civil War history — including one that glorified the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ mythology of the Confederacy. For me, learning about the regional and geographic differences in U.S. history education was very eye-opening. Taking this a step further, I wonder what this course is like for students who aren’t from the U.S. Have they drawn comparisons to places they come from?

I love it when international students in this class feel comfortable enough to start talking about their experiences. At Denison, we have a lot of students from Vietnam, a lot of students from China, a lot of students from India. And when they do start to open up and start to reflect on the kind of history they were taught in high school, it's clear that they do understand how much of what they learn is controlled by the state.

I'm thinking about Vietnam in particular because I had this one really smart, thoughtful student in my class this past fall who was from Vietnam. And he was very conscious of the fact that in Vietnam, history education has been tied very closely to reunifying and rebuilding the country over the last 50 years. 

And so he was actually able to talk in a way that I don't think most 18-year-olds can about the political uses of history in that nationalist context. And for some of my students who are from the U.S., I could see the wheels turning in their heads, when they start to realize, ‘Oh, this stuff serves a political purpose. And what might be the purpose it's serving in my state? Let me think about that.’

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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For 40 years, Dragos Olaru has been paying his respects to the great Romanian cultural figures buried in his home city of Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine. With its decorative tombstones and earthy paths, the cemetery on Zelena Street is the resting place of ethnic Romanian artists, activists and intellectuals who defined their culture and defended it when outside powers encroached upon it. Although he met none of these figures — his “friends,” as he calls them — before they passed, Olaru feels he knows them intimately in death. He tells me that he is continuing their work.

He is also trying to protect these Romanian graves from actual destruction. Local Ukrainian authorities have decided to exhume the remains lying beneath some 200 of the tombstones on Zelena Street — which they say are unidentifiable — and then auction the plots. But Olaru sees the campaign as a way to “Ukrainize” the cemetery.

“They are doing this to remove the traces of us,” he told me, as we passed the grave of Romanian philologist and revolutionary Aron Pumnul, who advocated for the Romanian language to be written using the Latin alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, in the mid-19th century.

The fate of the Zelena Street cemetery is just one incarnation of wartime tensions between Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians, the country’s second-largest linguistic minority after Russian speakers. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, respect for the rights and interests of Western ethnic minorities waxed and waned as the new country struggled to fortify its self-image in the face of ever-present Russian influence. But the 2014 Maidan Revolution marked a turning point, providing a new impetus to protect the Ukrainian language and establish it as the country’s lingua franca. The subsequent ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war between the Ukrainian government and Russian proxies in the eastern Donbas region left Ukrainians with an urgent need to define their day-to-day relationship with Russia and Russianness, and in turn, to define what it means to be Ukrainian.

The full-scale invasion in February 2022 brought a fierce embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. Yet while this hardening of Ukrainianness is clearly intended as a way to distinguish the country from its aggressor, minority communities in western Ukraine have become collateral damage. Linguistic policies aimed at strengthening Ukrainian are edging Romanian out of the public lives of many native speakers. And other moves, ranging from the exhumation of remains in the Zelena Street cemetery to political allegations against Romanian religious leaders, have left some ethnic Romanians unsure of their position in Ukrainian society.

Although Dragos Olaru was aggrieved by the events in the graveyard, which he sees as a mean-spirited move against Romanian culture, he still supports the Ukrainian state. “Putin is the biggest enemy of the world,” he said. I later learned that his nephew was serving on the front line in Bakhmut, more than 700 miles away on the other side of the country.

Ukraine has been home to ethnic Romanian, Hungarian and Polish communities since territorial lines were redrawn following World War I and World War II. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 400,000 Romanian speakers became Ukrainian citizens, becoming a part of the nascent state’s heterogeneous social fabric. Through much of the 1990s, Ukraine was also consumed by economic turmoil, the result of hyperinflation coupled with rampant cronyism. Conversations about national identity were often relegated to the back burner as Ukrainians worked to keep bread on the table. When the economy stabilized in the early 2000s, the trickle-down effect was limited, and the country’s oligarchs continued to grow their power and wealth. Russia was ever watchful, supporting the campaigns of Russia-friendly politicians who would prevent the country from swaying too far west, toward the European Union and NATO. Whenever identity questions did arise, these lawmakers were eager to frame Ukraine in the context of Russia by highlighting the historical bond between the two countries. 

In Ukraine’s west, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian minority communities lived their lives largely in their own languages, often benefiting from the policies of Russia-backed politicians who, at Moscow’s behest, sought to protect the Russian language with moves that tended to benefit other minority languages at the same time. When pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych passed a language law in 2012 that gave minority languages, namely Russian, the status of a “regional language” in areas where 10% or more of the population did not speak Ukrainian, it was seen by opponents as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian. But the measure found support among minority language speakers in the west of the country.

Following the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s language issue took on a new urgency, and policymakers passed a series of laws to formally establish the use of the Ukrainian language in various aspects of public life, ranging from media to education to the legal system. In sum, these laws effectively dismantled Yanukovych’s 2012 language law. Its fate was finally sealed in 2018 when the Ukrainian Constitutional Court deemed the law unconstitutional. People who supported these changes argued that they would create a more cohesive Ukrainian society and lead to necessary improvements in the country’s struggling education system. 

But the wave of legislation set off alarm bells for Ukraine’s Polish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities. These communities largely understood the motivations for the changes but also saw them chipping away at their own languages and traditions and at the practical bridge that their languages offered to living and working in the EU. Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest stepped in, routinely chiding the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect minority rights. Supporting their pleas for a more considerate approach to the Ukrainian question was a report from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, that said that a 2019 language law passed in Ukraine “failed to strike a fair balance” between promoting the Ukrainian language and “safeguarding minorities.” 

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly argued that the changes were not an attempt to erode minority languages but rather an effort to buttress Ukrainian identity and introduce a sense of cohesiveness to everyday affairs across the country. And much of day-to-day life continued to play out in languages other than Ukrainian, including in Russian. Even today, while Ukrainian is the official state language according to the constitution, Russian is still the first language of approximately 20% of Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. 

But Russia’s incursions continued. In a 2021 speech that foreshadowed the invasion of Ukraine months later, Putin denounced the Ukrainian language laws and promoted the false claim that Russian proxies in the Donbas “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.” The speech highlighted the extent to which Putin sees respect for the Russian language as a key component in the bond between Ukraine and Russia — and as a pillar in Russia’s political strategy toward Ukraine.

Months after the first Russian tank crossed into Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the Kremlin used Ukraine’s language policies as part of a robust disinformation campaign to justify carrying out what has become the greatest land invasion in Europe since World War II. “The Russian language is banned in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the BBC in April 2022.

When it comes to Ukraine’s language battles, the most sensitive issue for Romanians is education. The village of Petrashivka lies an hour south of Chernivtsi, a stone’s throw from the Romanian border. There I met Gheorghe and Mihaela Lupu, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated their careers to running the Petrashivka Secondary School. Nearly all classes for the school’s 314 students are taught in Romanian.

“We speak Romanian, but we are Ukrainian,” Gheorghe, the school’s director, told me. The presence of both languages and nations is evident at Petrashivka. As we walked through the school corridors with their lace curtains and reddish-brown wooden floors, the couple told me about Ukrainian and Romanian government support for their work. A grant from Bucharest allowed them to buy new tables for the Romanian history classroom. Next door, in the Ukrainian language classroom, a TV, chairs and other materials were brought in with support from Kyiv. When we stuck our heads into the classroom, the students greeted us eagerly. The teacher prompted a 12-year-old girl, Anastasia, to recite a poem she had written about the war. “I pray in my thoughts,” she said with zeal. “Bring peace on the earth, God! Have mercy on us, God! Save us from this war.”

Gheorghe said that parents were happy that their children could speak both languages fluently, as it opened up more opportunities for future studies in Ukraine and Romania.

This transition has been in the works since Ukraine’s 2017 adoption of an education law that set the country on a path for public secondary schooling to be conducted in Ukrainian. Heralded as a move to align Ukraine’s school system more closely with European standards, the law gives space for EU minority languages like Romanian to be taught as a second language. But for the students of the Petrashivka Secondary School, nearly all of whom speak Romanian at home, the implementation of the education law will be a significant change.

When I asked how they felt about the language change, the teachers were hesitant to share their thoughts. Gheorghe offered only this: “If the change is state law, we will do it. We live under Ukrainian law.”

Their acquaintance, Iurie Levcic, was much more forthright. Back in central Chernivtsi, sitting in the Bucovina Art Centre for the Conservation and Promotion of Romanian Traditional Culture, which the 54-year-old man runs, Levcic described what he sees as the quiet dissolution of Romanian culture in Ukraine. 

“They want to assimilate us, they try a total assimilation, starting with the schools,” he said. He excoriated the Zelenskyy government, arguing that officials were unwilling to meaningfully engage in dialogue with the Romanian community.

Levcic is not alone in his distrust of the Zelenskyy government. The current situation has also angered politicians in Romania, who feel slighted by Kyiv’s position on the minority issue despite Romania’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing war. Tempers flared in December 2022: The Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on national minorities to fulfill one of the conditions necessary to start negotiations for EU membership but did not take on board fully recommendations from the Venice Commission on the protection of minorities. Condemnation from Bucharest was swift and cemented the idea that, although Romanian speakers were not necessarily being targeted by Kyiv, they had become an afterthought in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Adding insult to injury, the move came months after Zelenskyy made a speech before the Romanian parliament, in April 2022, in which he promised to “start a dialogue” on a “new comprehensive agreement that guarantees the absolute protection and development of our national minorities” — a reference to the approximately 46,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in Romania. He reiterated this position to the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in January 2023, after the two heads of state had a call on the issue. A read out from the call said Zelenskyy “expressed his full openness to identifying solutions, so that the Romanian community in Ukraine benefits from the same rights enjoyed by the Ukrainian community in Romania.”

Back in Chernivtsi’s City Hall, Iryna Tkachuk, the head of the city's education department, took a more political stance. She defended the upcoming implementation of the education language law, arguing that it would ensure “minority speakers could have full access to university level education in Ukraine.”

The affinities of ethnic Romanian religious leaders have also come under scrutiny as Ukraine strives to shed its cultural ties with Russia. In Chernivtsi, many Romanians still worship in the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although the Church claims it broke off communications with Moscow in May 2022, months after the invasion, and denies being influenced by Russia, Ukrainian political leaders have trained their focus on church figures, keen to identify and sever any remaining ties to the Kremlin.

Sitting inside the Ascension Church on the outskirts of Chernivtsi, clad in black robes and a matching puffer coat, Father Pavel Paulencu told me he feels a crisis setting in. He worries it is only a matter of time before the authorities arrive at his door. 

“I’ve had people ask already why I’m doing a mass in Romanian in Ukraine,” he said. Ethnic Romanians make up 60% of his congregation, and Romanian is the language of priority for services. “I told them to go and read the history,” he said with a heavy sigh. “In church, it should not be politics, just God.”

Anxiety in Kyiv about ties between the Romanian religious community and Russia have been brewing for some time, but they reached a boiling point in late 2022, when Ukrainian Security Services (known as the SBU) raided the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as part of a series of searches across the country. The SBU Telegram account reported that law enforcement officers found Russian passports and pro-Kremlin literature among the belongings of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina clergy. Soon after, citizenships of 13 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — including from the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese — were suspended by presidential decree. In response, a Romanian cleric threatened to sue President Zelenskyy. The U.N.’s human rights office said that the nationwide SBU searches could “undermine the right to freedom of religion.”

In April 2023, a resident of the Chernivtsi region was arrested on suspicion of burning down a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Milieve. In early May, prosecutors in Chernivtsi submitted to a court an indictment against the local Banchen Monastery, claiming that an assistant abbot helped men of draft age illegally cross the border. Ukraine’s wartime rules prohibit men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

The anxieties behind these actions by law enforcement have been exacerbated by the war. But they are not new. In 2019, politically-driven tensions within the Church led to a schism and to the establishment of the similarly-named Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which today has the full support of the Zelenskyy government. The schism was a blow for Putin, who sees the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates as the centerpiece of his notion of a “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the idea that all Russian and Russian-identifying people should be united. But for Ukraine, establishing a church independent of Moscow was seen as a move to not only distinguish the country from Russia but also to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to influence certain clergy. 

In the eyes of the Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church harbors a threat. But for the average ethnic Romanians, what’s happening to the Church is yet another way in which Kyiv is imposing upon their lives.

In a country traumatized by Russian war crimes, where people are struggling to survive each day, the space for debate on issues such as language and national identity is limited at best.

On the streets of Chernivtsi, one hears a steady mix of Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian languages, with most Russian speakers skewing older and Ukrainian ones younger. Although the war has hardened attitudes toward Russian speakers, there is no outward animosity toward the lyrical sounds of Romanian in daily life. 

And while the language issue has riled up politicians and activists, most Romanians I spoke to seemed more focused on ensuring that their families survive the war. Chernivtsi has been spared from Russian rockets, but the war remains ever-present. Ukrainian flags dot almost every door. Every morning, the city takes a brief moment of silence to honor the men and women on the frontline. And in a new graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the groundskeepers can be seen digging graves for the bodies of soldiers, returning home from the frontlines for the last time.

The post As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind? appeared first on Coda Story.

Joined by the presidents of Poland and Israel, it was the first time a German head of state took part in a commemoration of the uprising. Tensions between Poland and Germany, however, fermented on the sidelines. 

Before the ceremony, the Polish culture minister, Piotr Glinski, who is also the deputy prime minister, circulated a report tabulating Polish wartime losses to President Steinmeier. Poland has demanded $1.3 trillion in World War II reparations from Germany. For Glinski’s Law and Justice party, it was an opportune moment to press its claims that Germany is disrespecting Poland by refusing to engage with its call for reparations and to appeal to an electorate struggling with inflation and fearful of the war in Ukraine next door. For the government’s detractors, it was a schoolboy gesture staged to draw votes ahead of Poland’s parliamentary election this fall.

 The Polish government’s willingness to stress test the country’s public relationship with Germany may be part of an election strategy, but, behind the scenes, the real relationship between Poland and Germany continues to grow stronger. This throws into question the effectiveness of Poland’s efforts to muddy Germany’s reputation as a model for successfully reckoning with its past.

The two countries are becoming more economically intertwined. Poland is Germany's fifth-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade is reported to have grown by 14% in the last 12 months. Germany makes up around 20% of foreign direct investment in Poland.

It’s an economic closeness that is light-years away from the stark rebuke of German-Polish business dealings often seen in Poland’s state-controlled media. “On the governmental level, we see a real cold era, but, at the same time, German investors are coming to Poland, and more Polish companies are based in Germany,” said Agnieszka Lada-Konefal, an expert in Polish-German relations. In December 2022, Mercedes-Benz announced plans to invest over $1 billion in an electric van factory in Poland. But while the economic relationship is good, it could be better: Lada-Konefal added that Poland’s ongoing battle with the European Union over the country’s democratic backsliding has spooked some German investors.

While Poland’s government has said it is willing to wait out Germany’s current position on the reparations issue, the majority of Poles want to push the relationship into the future. According to the German-Polish Barometer, an annual polling project that has examined the relationship between the two countries since 2000, 64% of Poles in 2021 wanted to disconnect from the past.

Poland’s government is often accused of distorting the past. It has tried to center Polish heroism and sideline Jewish victims by arguing that the majority of Poles tried to protect Jews from Nazi forces.

Germany has taken the position that all financial claims from World War II were resolved in 1953, when Communist Poland said it would not pursue reparations at the behest of Moscow. This position was settled again, the German government says, in the Two-plus-Four Treaty of 1990, which led to the reunification of Germany. Poland counters that earlier calls for reparations were ignored. 

Calling for reparations may play out as a key tactic for the Law and Justice party in the Polish parliamentary election expected later this year, allowing it to take votes from the far-right Confederation party. “Only the very hard part of the Law and Justice electorate really want to hear anti-German slogans, and the party needs to give something to this group,” said Lada-Konefal. In Polish elections, addressing the concerns of small groups of the electorate can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. 

Germany’s hesitation to send lethal military aid to Ukraine has reinforced Polish perceptions of Germany as being too soft on Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Poland said it was disappointed by the immediate German response. And despite Germany signing off on historic military aid packages for the Ukrainian armed forces, Poland’s government continues to argue Berlin is not doing enough to protect Europe from a Russian threat. “The ambiguity around the German position on initial support for Ukraine and perceived sympathy towards Russia has affected the relationship,” said Maria Skora, a research associate at the Institute for European Politics, a policy research center.

Among the German public, Poland can be an afterthought in German politics, said Monika Sus, a visiting professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. “In general, there is a total lack of knowledge in Germany on Poland,” she said. “There is an education problem on modern Poland, especially when you compare this to the general understanding of France in Germany.” 

In late May, Poland’s embassy in Berlin criticized the German government for issuing teacher training material that portrayed a fictional Polish mother as a “devout Catholic” and a person who “hates gays.” Speaking to Polish media, Poland’s ambassador to Germany, Dariusz Pawlos, said the material “reproduces anti-Polish stereotypes and harmful generalizations.” Despite Law and Justice presenting LGTBQ rights as an attack on so-called traditional family values since coming to power in 2015, a growing number of Poles in all categories, from young to old, are in favor of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage, according to a June 2022 poll.

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Suddenly, we are Australians at war on the Western Front in 1918: Shells fly overhead with flashing lights, while the room shakes with the kaboom of bombs and machine guns. Actors shout and fall across the screens, their blood flying out in cartoonish spatters. The surround screens position us in the center of the action, a soldier in the trenches. Over on the right, a man fires off his prop machine gun, his face contorted like a boy playing soldiers.

A booming voice comes over the speaker, warning us about the unequaled horror of gas attacks. Darkness — then a fixture opens up on the floor, filling the room with smoke. It rapidly clears, and soon we are watching the brave Australian soldiers defeat the Germans, guided throughout by the military genius of the handsome Australian general John Monash. After an upswell in the music, the French prime minister is congratulating those brave Aussies for turning the tide of the war. We knew that you would fight a real fight, the heavily-costumed Georges Clemenceau declares, but we did not know that, from the very beginning, you would astonish the whole continent. The lights come back on and the doors slide open. The Aussies have won the war, saving the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, from tyranny.

The Monash Centre is more than just a vivid historical fantasy. It is the culmination of a decades-long, state-sponsored conservative campaign to reorient Australian national identity — one aimed at shifting Australian public memory towards a triumphant set of narratives about war. 

The Centre isn’t a popular destination. It’s hard to get to. Almost all professional historians have disavowed it. And it cost the Australian government a fortune to build. Naturally, I decided I would have to go and see it.

Buying history

When the renowned military historian Bruce Scates was invited to advise on the Monash Centre, he was cautiously hopeful. Scates had published widely on WWI and advised the Australian government on numerous projects. The government at the time had been dedicating increasing sums of money to the commemoration of WWI, loosely timed around the centenaries of Australia's involvement in battles at Gallipoli (now in Turkey) and on the Western Front — particularly at the French town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Villers-Bretonneux is important to Australians. In April 1918, all five Australian divisions — alongside forces from Britain and the French Empire, most notably Morocco — successfully recaptured the town in order to help slow Germany’s spring offensive. In the years following the war, an Australian connection remained in Villers-Bretonneux. Australian school children donated money to the rebuilding of the war-damaged town, while family members of deceased Australian soldiers — many of whom were buried in nearby cemeteries — came to pay their respects. Villers-Bretonneux became Australia’s European war commemoration hub. An Australian National Memorial was erected there in 1938 and expanded in 2014 with a massive budget and a crack team of advisors — Scates plus six other top historians.

“I thought the possibilities were enormous,” Scates told me. “Firstly, this was the most literate fighting force in the world: These men and women have left behind an extraordinary testimony. And I hoped, given the amount of money that was spent on the Centre, we’re talking about 100 million Australian dollars [roughly $67 million], we could do a lot with those stories throughout the exhibition and make a really powerful statement about the human cost of war. But that didn’t happen.”

Gradually, Scates realized that the parts of the Australian government responsible for designing the Monash Centre were uninterested in presenting a realistic version of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front. “They were working to manufacture a certain view of the war, one that was seen as politically desirable and had nothing to do with the actual telling of history,” he said. Suggested material about the causes or costs of war was continually edited down or removed. In meeting after meeting, Scates watched government officials steer the museum towards jingoism. “The assumption was: ‘We’re paying for this museum, so we will buy the kind of history that we want to hear,’” Scates said.

Scates and three other historians resigned in protest, but the Centre carried on, eventually opening in 2018 to great fanfare, boasting that it uses extensive “immersive and emotive elements” to “deliver a compelling visitor experience.” This appears to be accurate. According to one of the Centre’s contracted designers, Russell Magee, “We’ve observed people walking out crying on a daily basis and that’s what we wanted to achieve.” 

The Monash Centre may have missed its projected visitor targets by around 50% in the first year, but it has become a touchstone for conservative cultural politics in Australia. And it remains a monumental presence in the cold, rainy countryside of northern France. It is a lasting tribute to the chauvinism and steady militarization of Australian public memory over the last two decades and a clear articulation of the right-wing project — driven, above all, by the Australian Liberal Party and Australia’s Department of Veteran Affairs — to reshape Australian memory politics and national identity.

Celebrating war

I came to Villers-Bretonneux on a rainy spring day to see for myself this monument to the memory culture that has dominated Australian public life since I was a child. That culture has tended to center on Anzac Day, the national public holiday on April 25 that takes its name from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), which, despite both nations having recently acquired independence from Britain, supported the British army in WWI. 

The date was chosen to reflect the anniversary of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, when Anzac soldiers joined British and French Imperial forces in a combined attack on the Ottoman Empire. Although the campaign was a disaster in military terms, with the Anzacs withdrawing after months of terrible suffering, the bravery and togetherness shown in defeat inspired Australians in the latter half of the 20th century to claim Gallipoli as an emblem of the young nation’s identity. Since the 2000s, state-sponsored commemoration has been moving away from the losses at Gallipoli and toward Australian victories on the Western Front, including the battle at Villers-Bretonneux that also happened to occur on April 25.

The Monash Centre is located about a mile and a half outside Villers-Bretonneux, a quiet town that still wears its Australian connection with pride. The town hall has kangaroo decals on its facade and an Australian flag alongside the French tricolor. 

I walk north among stony green fields until the Australian National Memorial looms into view. The Monash Centre has been dug into the hillside so as not to disturb the view of everything else. There are hardly any other visitors, but the grounds are crowded with half-erected marquees, portable toilets and half-unpacked tables and chairs. Workers shout to each other as they prepare for a massive Anzac Day ceremony, which will be broadcast live to Australia in 10 days.

During the interwar period and after World War II, Anzac Day was a relatively somber affair, primarily aimed at people who lost loved ones in the conflicts. As the 20th century proceeded, WWI commemorations shrank as ever fewer veterans were alive to participate. But it also retreated on account of the cultural shifts, beginning in the 1960s, that saw progressive Australians looking to distance themselves from a military history with Britain and instead to rally more around multiculturalism.

This cultural shift, however, began to reverse course in the late 1990s, when the incoming conservative prime minister, John Howard, made WWI commemoration the focus of his cultural program. Opposed to recognizing Australia’s history of colonial violence and dispossession, Howard rejected what he called the “self-laceration” and “guilt” of prior governments. “In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem,” boasted an editorial in the conservative newspaper The Australian on Howard’s first Anzac Day. The federal government initiated a wave of massive state funding for education and memorialization programs, all of which focused not on independent Australia's successful defense against fascist Japan in WWII but on the country's achievements while fighting for the British Empire in a distant war that is widely considered avoidable and wasteful.

Howard also injected a celebratory tone into WWI commemorations, which had previously prioritized sober mournfulness. The idea that Anzacs had been fighting to defend democracy and freedom became commonplace in political speeches, in the media and in classrooms. “It is about the celebration of some wonderful values of courage, of valor, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost,” Howard said on Anzac Day in 2003, two months after Australia had joined the Iraq War. “They went in our name, in a just cause, to do good things to liberate a people.”

Anzac Day is now Australia’s de-facto national day. Politicians of both major parties, the right-wing Liberals and the center-left Labor, give speeches — often at the sites of overseas battles like Villers-Bretonneux — about how Anzac values of courage, camaraderie and sacrifice helped “forge” the young Australian nation. Anzac-themed football games draw large crowds. Pubs host parties involving the wartime betting game “two-up.” Throughout, the word Anzac has come to mean not just Australians who served in WWI but also, by association, that wartime generation and Aussie soldiering generally. And a specific set of images and stories about WWI — those battlefield values, red poppies and muddy trenches, the melancholy silhouette of a lone mourning infantryman — have coalesced into a quasi-mythological national narrative that Australians refer to as “the Anzac legend.”

Any critical voices are accused of disrespecting the suffering soldiers and, by extension, Australia itself. The sports journalist Scott McIntyre was fired from his public broadcaster job after tweeting critically about Anzac’s role in public life. The Sudanese-Australian media presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being harassed by right-wing media and politicians for making a Facebook post one Anzac Day that referred — using the standard Anzac commemorative phrase “lest we forget” — to armed conflicts in Syria and Palestine and to Australia’s scandal-ridden offshore refugee detention centers.

According to Frank Bongiorno, the president of the Australian Historical Association, the 21st century resurgence of interest in WWI history was not a revival of earlier Anzac narratives but rather a total reinvention of them. By the 1960s, Bongiorno explained, Anzac had come to seem “irredeemably identified with conservative values of the old imperial white Australia” but has, in recent decades, been reinvigorated to emphasize the involvement in WWI of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians. To Bongiorno, however, this newfound inclusiveness is only superficial, eliding the real diversity of Australian wartime experience while insisting on the privileged status of British (and occasionally Irish) Australians.

The new variation on Anzac has become a robust point of political consensus. Successive Liberal and Labor governments have continued to bolster Anzac’s profile by committing huge sums to commemoration activities. By 2015, it was estimated that over 500 million Australian dollars (about $336 million) of taxpayer money had gone towards the centenary, including over $67 million for the Monash Centre. “It’s said that Australia’s spending on the WWI centenary was greater than all the other countries combined,” Bongiorno said. “And since then, we’ve seen further spending.”

All in the family

I walk across the cemetery toward the Australian National Memorial, which lists the names of roughly 10,700 graveless Australian soldiers who died in France. My phone buzzes with a notification from the Monash Centre app, which I was instructed to download upon arrival. Brief stories about dead soldiers have been loaded into the app and geotagged, with an actor’s reading designed to begin as users approach the relevant grave. The app invites me to try looking up a name on the walls, perhaps that of an ancestor. I decline.

At the entrance to the memorial, I encounter a series of wreaths and one laminated card:

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

The geographer Shanti Sumartojo, who has researched Australian commemoration sites in Western Europe, describes Villers-Bretonneux as the “jewel in the crown” of a curated set of experiences marketed together as the Australian Remembrance Trail. To her, the emotional impact of the memorial lies in how it combines personal and collective elements, making individual visitors feel physically humbled by the monumental architecture and the massive accumulation of soldiers’ names. It is no coincidence that Villers-Bretonneux and other Remembrance Trail sites are advertised using explicitly Christian language: Visitors are called “pilgrims,” cemeteries are referred to as “hallowed ground” and “sacred sites.”

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Anzac: It's this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it's so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend's own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick "should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

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The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as "deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country." Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

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