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.

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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.

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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.

The post When sameness becomes a colonial tool of oppression appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop sideburn-laden populist President Javier Milei, who took office at the end of 2023. Milei’s rapid rise was fueled in part by his relative outsider status in a moment of economic crisis caused by what Milei calls the failed political “caste.” Argentina is grappling with inflation rates of more than 200%, a 40% poverty rate, plummeting foreign currency reserves and massive sovereign debt.

Milei, who defeated his institutional political opponents in a run-off, cited the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees in his inauguration speech in December, describing the Jewish warriors’ successful revolt against the ruling class in the 2nd century B.C. as a “symbol of the victory of the weak over the powerful.” This was no coincidence. Alongside his transgressive public presence and radical policy decrees, Milei emphatically embraces Judaism.

Born and raised Catholic, like the majority of Argentines, Milei has in recent years studied the Torah with great intrigue. He claims that he is seriously considering converting to Orthodox Judaism, but says he would do this only after his term in office, given the strict lifestyle requirements of orthodoxy. And he has voiced full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

At his inauguration, Milei hosted conservative populist Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, who is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has drawn harsh critiques for his attempts to downplay the Hungarian role in the persecution of Jewish people during World War II and for his demonization of American-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish. Also at the inauguration and invited to light the Hanukkah menorah was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose dependence on Western powers to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion has made him a symbol of liberal internationalism — one that the isolationist populist right has grown to loathe. After the ceremony, Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, was seen confronting Orbán over the Hungarian prime minister’s obstruction of efforts to get European Union aid to Ukraine.

Shortly before his inauguration, Milei received blessings from the famed Kabbalistic rabbi David Hanania Pinto. After his inauguration, Milei flew to New York to visit the tomb of “the Rebbe,” as the influential Hasidic spiritual leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994, is known; his burial place was also famously visited before Election Day 2016 by Ivanka Trump, herself a convert. After the gravesite visit, Milei dined with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and Gerardo Werthein, a close personal friend of Clinton’s, who will soon become Argentina’s ambassador to the U.S. Werthein too is Jewish.

On the outside at least, Milei holds many contradictions. His embrace of a nationalist populist like Orbán suggests one set of priorities, while his kinship with Zelenskyy, a Jewish leader raising money globally for the war with Russia, suggests another. The same could be said of his visit to a religiously conservative spiritual site followed by lunch with a neoliberal Democrat who famously scandalized the White House by having an affair with an intern. Politically, religiously and stylistically, Milei is difficult to categorize.

Like other populists, his perceived authenticity is his biggest political asset. But who is the authentic Milei? Venezuelan journalist Moises Naim wrote in El País that there are two Mileis: One is the bespectacled libertarian economist who may actually break an economic gridlock for Argentina. The other is the tantric sex expert with an Austin Powers hairdo who famously hired a medium to speak with his deceased dog and dead people who told him he would win the presidency.

In a similar vein, there seem to be two Mileis with Judaism: One who has a sincere calling to the faith and all its intricate pluralisms, and one who dialogues with a global right that has used Israel as a symbol of conservative ethnonationalism while also engaging in antisemitic rhetorical tropes that have galvanized and won the support of disaffected, largely white Christian voters in both the U.S. and Europe.

Argentina itself is a place of contradictions in recent Jewish history. It has given safety to Jews fleeing persecution throughout the 20th century — they now compose about 0.5% of the population and represent Latin America’s largest Jewish community. But it also gave refuge to Nazis escaping war crimes tribunals after the Holocaust. A Spanish judiciary commission found that during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Jews were disproportionately targeted for torture and disappearance. 

Milei has downplayed the “dirty war” carried out by that anti-communist military regime, which investigators later estimated to have ordered the extrajudicial killings of more than 20,000 people. His vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has pushed what the Buenos Aires Times called a “denialist discourse” about the history of the dictatorship. Families of victims have expressed fear that whitewashing Argentina’s darkest chapter of the 20th century could pave the way for history to repeat itself. 

In more recent decades, Argentina has become the site of proxy attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions carried out by Iranian-aligned extremist groups. A 1992 suicide bombing on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people and a similar attack on a Jewish community center two years later killed 85. Decades later, investigations into the bombings were marred by allegations that sitting government officials, including the left-wing president at the time, Cristina de Kirchner, had orchestrated a cover-up and committed. Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor investigating these allegations, was found dead in his apartment in 2015, shortly before he was scheduled to present his findings.

And despite Milei’s embrace of Judaism, his own administration is not immune to antisemitic allegiances. His attorney general, Rodolfo Barra, was once forced to resign from a government job when it was discovered he had been part of neo-Nazi group Tacuara.

The Israel-Hamas war has of course ratcheted up tensions around these cases, and in Jewish and Arab communities across the country.

“For most people, his Judaism is another eccentricity,” says writer Tamara Tenenbaum, whose father was killed in the 1994 Jewish community center bombing. Tenenbaum was part of a diverse group of Argentine Jewish intellectuals and leaders who signed a letter, “Milei does not represent us,” noting how Milei had been embraced by right-wing political projects around the world that champion Israel while simultaneously leaning into antisemitic tropes — through the vilification of concepts like “globalism” or “cultural marxism”— and supporting other forms of racism and discrimination. All this comes against a backdrop of a rising evangelical population in Argentina that supports both Milei and Israel, but may resist more progressive visions held by some segments of the Jewish community. 

“I got a lot of antisemitic hate online from supporters of Milei,” Tenenbaum told me. “Your surname speaks for you,” one person wrote her. Another message read: “Of course you are a leftist whore with that name.”

Since taking office, Milei has announced pro-Israel policies, like declaring Hamas a terrorist organization, installing his personal rabbi, Axel Wahnish, as ambassador to Israel, and declaring intentions to move Argentina’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The moves have inspired what Buenos Aires-based rabbi Fabián Skolnik calls “two opposing sentiments” among Argentine Jews who support Milei. On the one hand, “the community feels pride and happiness to have a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel president. He participates in community activities, in Hanukkah, in Jewish life.” Yet on the other hand, having a president visibly associated with Judaism inspires worry. “If things don’t go well and issues start to emerge, a lot of folks in the Jewish community are afraid that will awaken antisemitism.”

Not simply in style or words, Milei has networked himself with a posse of populist right-wing politicians worldwide, many members of which have embraced Israel, sometimes in spite of their own antisemitic leanings, in a fight against Islamic extremism or the fabled brand of communism they say is threatening to traditional family values. Right-wing populist leaders who celebrated Milei’s victory have in recent years also specifically embraced Netanyahu, Israel and “Judeo-Christian” conservative values — be they former U.S. President Donald Trump or former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who also proposed moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem after the U.S. did as much in 2018.

Milei appears to be interested in aligning himself with other figures who may support his vision for austerity. “He happens to be in the same box as nationalist populist figures,” said Juan Soto, who has organized right-wing leaders including Milei in his work with the Disenso Foundation, a think-tank arm of Spain’s far right Vox Party. To wit, Milei signed onto the 2020 Carta de Madrid, a brief manifesto penned by the Disenso Foundation that denounced the supposedly encroaching specter of communism in Spain, Latin America and the United States.

But, Soto told me, “economic protectionism is where the New Right can be divided.” He described Milei as an outlier, in that he is “a free marketeer, a classical liberal, who needs international help.” In this sense too, Milei embodies contradictions. He is a libertarian who wants to dollarize the Argentine economy, who will also deeply rely on the International Monetary Fund — which Argentina owes $32 billion — to course correct his country’s economy. This is a far cry from other populist parties who embrace economic nationalism or alternative transnational cooperation with some of the U.S.’s rivals, such as BRICS — which Milei has refused to join — whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India and China. 

Milei may align with Vox’s Carta de Madrid, but he doesn’t align with Old World conservatism that sometimes veers into Putin fetishism, as in the case of Hungary’s Orbán. In this sense, we have to understand Milei’s as a distinctly New World brand. He welcomes Yankee internationalism and displays a unique mash-up of embracing libertine social preferences mixed with conservative religious guidance. He has supporters with antisemitic leanings, but he himself loves Judaism. Milei may be more like Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador with Palestinian ancestry, who staunchly supports Israel, decries Hamas and has taken extreme measures to enact change in El Salvador — much akin to Milei’s campaign spirit of waving a chainsaw as a symbol of drastic change coming. In a battle to eradicate the country’s drug cartels, Bukele has taken a “state of exception” to extremes, overseeing the arrests of nearly 60,000 people alongside enforced disappearances, torture of detainees and an overall dissolution of due process. These measures have drastically reduced El Salvador’s once record-high homicide rate, but at a tremendous cost to its democracy and to the tens of thousands affected by Bukele’s scorched-earth approach.

Perhaps part of Milei’s interest in aligning with traditionalist or religious factions of the global right on issues like abortion, which he firmly opposes, is to distinguish himself from “social-marxist” opponents and civil rights detractors. “If you have an important figure in the global right like Milei who is so strongly interested in Judaism, it is an important building block in the ‘Judeo-Christian’ coalition,” says Rabbi Slomo Koves, a leader of the Hungarian Chabad, a highly networked sect of Judaism known for encouraging more religious observance among Jews. The global right’s embrace of the “Judeo” within the “Judeo-Christian” coalition could mitigate antisemitism within some rank-and-file. Or it could just help to cover it up. 

While holding all of these contradictions on the global stage and at home, Milei is already bringing shock therapy to Argentina’s bedraggled economy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year – the nationalist’s symbol of greedy globalists –  Milei addressed business leaders saying they were “social benefactors” and that free markets, not socialism, would save Argentina. He is a populist stradling the “globalist” and the “nationalist” divide. He is a potential Jewish convert navigating support for two different Jewish leaders, supporting two very different wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. At home, he is alternately donning his economist glasses and his chainsaw. How will all this impact Argentina’s economy, Jewish population and national fabric? We’ll soon find out.

The post Who is the real Javier Milei? appeared first on Coda Story.

The latest flare-up occurred in mid-April, when the American streaming giant scrambled to remove the first episode of the docuseries “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” from its service in Vietnam. The Vietnamese authorities excoriated the three-episode show over what they characterized as “inaccurate and unsubstantiated” information about Vietnam’s search-and-rescue operation to locate flight MH370, the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished in 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.

This wasn’t the first show to go. Before that, it was “Little Women,” a K-drama about three sisters living in modern day South Korea. The show was axed by Netflix in Vietnam last October after the authorities claimed it distorted Vietnam War history. And in 2021, Vietnam ordered Netflix to stop showing the Australian spy drama “Pine Gap,” which included footage of a map showing Beijing’s unilaterally declared “nine-dash line” that defines its expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea.  

The removals followed an eerily similar pattern: To justify their censorship demands, Vietnamese censors invoked the “hurting the feelings of the people” narrative either in their own statements or by way of reports in state-controlled media.

But to what extent does this “hurt feelings” rhetoric actually reflect popular opinion on the ground?

Public opinion and state actions — which drives which? 

The rationale of the Vietnamese authorities for flagging the MH370 docuseries could be boiled down to a just single line in the first episode, which featured a family member of a missing Chinese passenger desperately urging her country to step in: "We hope the Chinese government can quickly send a search-and-rescue team, as the Vietnamese [government] doesn't seem to have much ability." 

The government claims that the show caused “an uproar among the populace.” But it is hard to fathom why the Vietnamese public would get riled up about a single line quoting a plea made by an ordinary citizen. Lam Nguyen, a 22-year-old student in Ho Chi Minh City who managed to watch the series before it was flagged by the authorities, told me that she was “a little surprised, but not frustrated” by the scene. The bottom line, Lam said, is that people in her social circle — herself included — feel that the Vietnamese government’s response to that line was an “overreaction.”  

“While some believe that the Vietnamese government put a lot of effort in the search, it is unfair to criticize the docuseries that captured the anger and fear of family members who were desperate to find their loved ones,” Lam said. 

The online backlash against the MH370 docuseries also played out primarily inside a bubble of pro-government Facebook groups and state-aligned media coverage. This means that, at best, the justification by the Vietnamese authorities stands on empirically thin ice. At worst, such nationalist sentiments were likely manufactured to rationalize censorship demands.

In asking Netflix to remove “Pine Gap” in 2021, the Vietnamese authorities claimed that the show “angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam.” Few moves risk stirring up a hornet’s nest in Vietnam more than one that validates China’s maritime claims — the Vietnamese public likely would have objected to the display of the nine-dash line if they had seen the drama. But it’s unlikely that many ordinary Vietnamese, let alone the “entire” population, had a chance to take in the mini-series before it disappeared.

And in the case of “Little Women,” while ordinary internet users did join the chorus of criticism about the show, this only happened after pro-government groups lit the flames.

It all comes at a time when Vietnam’s state-sponsored cyber troops are growing more and more adept at manufacturing public sentiment online. “Astroturfing” — state-orchestrated efforts to manipulate online discourse — likely had some role in what played out online. In a country where the public at large increasingly balks at the chance to express political opinions, what might have looked like grassroots public opinion may have been shaped or even dictated by online propagandists. 

These reactions — whether genuine or not — gave the Vietnamese authorities the right pretext to ask Netflix to remove the content they deemed harmful and helped drive home their demands through the mainstream media. The streaming platform quickly accommodated the censorship orders.

Vietnam’s growing leverage over Big Tech

While the authorities were explicit in asking that Netflix remove “Pine Gap” and “Little Women” in their entirety, they were less specific when it came to the MH370 docuseries. In fact, they only requested the rectification and removal of “inaccurate information” related to the country’s search efforts in the show. But Netflix gutted the entire episode instead, in what looked like a bid to get on the good side of the officials who regulate it.  

This underlines Vietnam’s growing leverage over western tech companies, many of which are making a lot of money in Vietnam. Facebook is especially dominant. Vietnam ranks seventh among the ten countries boasting the highest number of Facebook users worldwide, an estimated 70 million. The company reportedly generates annual local revenue of more than $1 billion. But others aren’t far behind. DataReportal estimates that YouTube has 63 million users in Vietnam and TikTok has around 50 million. 

State-orchestrated efforts aimed at reining in public discussion have bred increasingly subservient responses from the industry. The state has wielded the stick of shutting down disobedient social media platforms altogether — it threatened to block Facebook in 2020 over political posts. And it has dangled the carrot of access to a lucrative market of 97 million people. In recent years, Big Tech firms — chief among them Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok — have shown increasing willingness to honor content removal demands. Hanoi now openly brags about high compliance rates among those platforms, which all exceed 90%.

So Netflix is straddling a treacherous line. As content removal has remained a key tactic in Vietnam’s online censorship dragnet, resisting the government’s takedown requests does not seem to bode well for Netflix’s future. But placating such requests has proved equally daunting in a country where an arbitrary censorship regime makes it impossible to pinpoint precisely what kind of content will be seen as crossing a line.

Nationalism, weaponized

The need to safeguard national prestige online has dictated Vietnam’s internet controls. But this kind of censorship overdrive, compounded by the apparent manufacturing of public opinion to buttress their rationale, only lays bare the insecurity of the Vietnamese authorities when faced with inconvenient narratives.

Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asian politics and security issues at the National War College in Washington, D.C., told me he was “puzzled by the hypersensitivity” of the government over the MH370 show. “When the planes came down, I was quite impressed with how quickly Vietnam responded and how well coordinated their efforts appeared,” Abuza said of Vietnam’s search efforts. “To be fair, Vietnam has very limited numbers of aircraft that are suitable for maritime search and rescue but responded in remarkable speed to a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said. 

The facade of toughness in axing “Little Women” appears to be a politically expedient ploy to paper over a reality in which the Vietnamese government has never publicly pushed for an official apology, much less reparations, from South Korea for its atrocities during the Vietnam War. This could invite public criticism that the Vietnamese authorities are preaching nationalism while at the same time drinking foreign Kool-Aid, given the economic leverage South Korea has established in Vietnam. 

There have been times when the Vietnamese government has genuinely needed to appeal to nationalism to justify its foreign policy decisions. Case in point: In registering its indignation with Beijing’s muscle-flexing moves in the South China Sea, Hanoi has more than once tapped into anti-China sentiments to rally the public behind the flag. This dynamic manifests most often in cyberspace and sometimes in mainstream media. On a few occasions, Vietnam has even green-lit anti-China protests.  

But moving forward, the more the manufacturing of public opinion becomes a pattern, the more likely foreign observers are to accuse the Vietnamese government of crying wolf about the need to protect nationalist sentiments. China may be especially equipped to do so, given the parallels between the regimes and their respective playbooks.

Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese leaders are probably well aware that in addition to the country’s rising standard of living, nationalism remains a crucial tool for maintaining the regime’s legitimacy. But exploiting nationalism for authoritarian control could eventually end up chipping away at the very legitimacy the Vietnamese state is craving. The public’s eyes are discerning.

The post Vietnam censors Netflix shows for ‘hurting the feelings of the people’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The sound of a siren broke the stillness of the second night of the new year. A city surveillance helicopter operated by the National Police hovered over the foothills of western Medellín, raking a beam of light over rooftops. Were they after someone? Was there an emergency? The media reported nothing about it. Perhaps it was just a security drill.

The Hawk, as authorities call it, is a U.S.-made Bell 407 and has been flying over Medellín since May 2017. Replete with high-tech features, the helicopter is worth close to $2 million. It is meant to monitor the city from the air, to bring people a sense of security. Residents of the valley where Medellín is nestled greet the Hawk with good humor.

At night, as it passes over areas where hundreds of people congregate to enjoy themselves, the reaction to the Hawk is almost festive: people raise glasses of beer, cigarettes and joints in mock salute. They poke fun at the ineffectiveness of the machine. “From so high up, it’s hard to control what happens on the streets,” some say.

The people who actually watch what happens on the streets also make fun of the Hawk. It is these watchers, not the cops, who are effectively in charge of urban surveillance. With dozens of “eyes” placed in strategic locations, they scrutinize the crowds, particularly around the city center. Their goal is to stop their enemies and the government from harming the businesses they defend, especially the illegal ones.

How many of these watchers are there? It is hard to say. Those who study the phenomenon suspect that hundreds of people, some as young as fifteen, are hired to be the eyes and ears of the organized crime and illegal trade networks that dominate Medellín. Their commanders run lucrative operations: Many sell cocaine, synthetic substances and marijuana. Some smuggle alcohol, clothing, toys, jewelry and household appliances. Others run prostitution rings, even selling sex with underage girls and boys.

Day and night, these youthful eyes observe every person who passes through the areas under gang control. Standing on street corners and protecting their faces with wide-brimmed hats, they watch for suspicious movements and make sure that no one disturbs the order they have imposed. The tension in the air is unmistakable. A simple whistle to get the attention of a friend who has just arrived is cause for reproach.

The police stand idly by, perfectly aware of what is going on under their noses. Many of these officers are bribed to keep mum.

Armed gangs patrol dozens of outlying city neighborhoods, as they have for decades. A culture of organized crime has imposed this order. It has disciplined citizens into tolerating a fairly coercive surveillance system. This even involves restrictions on the movement of people and vehicles when necessary. People moving in and out of these areas are regularly made to pay a small sum to ensure their safety.

“Young people on motorcycles control the area,” says an older resident. "Their justification is that they are protecting us." They monitor people’s movements to ascertain who enters the area and whether they have family or friends. If nobody knows who you are, you can be confronted, thrown out of the neighborhood entirely or even beaten up.

Trucks and vans that supply food to small neighborhood stores are viewed with suspicion. They are seen as a point of vulnerability, a vehicle for possible infiltration by police, or by rival gangs. When trucks come into the neighborhood, the watchers approach and make drivers explain what they’re doing. They too must pay a fee to transit through their streets. Commonly known as a “vacuna” (vaccine), this type of extortion escapes police surveillance. It is rarely reported.

Cell phones have become the main working tool for these armed gangs. Gang leaders lure young men into their criminal enterprise by offering them a motorcycle and a cell phone, often high end, alongside regular pay. Many succumb easily to these offers, seeing no other way to afford such desirable commodities.

Aside from preventing other gangs from taking over their streets, the watchers also protect the areas where they sell illicit substances, their other source of income. Violence erupts when these controls are breached. One such incident last year in the Robledo area, west of the city, left at least seven people dead.

"Do you know why that happened? Because of a dispute over plazas de vicio (illegal drug dealing places),” says a cab driver who lives nearby. Police personnel and representatives of the Medellín mayor's office echoed this account in statements to the media. Such turf wars are beyond the control of the authorities and are rarely captured by the city’s surveillance cameras. 

It begs the question: what about all the cameras in this heavily surveilled city and why do they so rarely record its many deadly gangland battles?

The surveillance cameras that the mayor’s office and the National Police have mounted in various locations around the city are also mocked, much like the Hawk when it makes its nightly rounds over the city. Medellín has more than 2,800 different video devices that are managed through closed-circuit television from a command center. 

The majority of Medellín’s security cameras are situated in the city's bustling commercial center, where more than a million people pass through each day.

"Here they charge vacunas to all of us,” says a street vendor. “They charge them to those who sell coffee, to those who sell clothes and to those who sell food."

Another vendor steps in to clarify: "The extortions are considerably more skilled and well-planned now. They even give us bank accounts to pay the money into, which the cameras fail to notice.” He gestures to one of these cameras, next to where he sells cell phone accessories on a wooden cart designed for moving the goods through congested city center streets.

Public space is highly coveted in downtown Medellín. Official figures from the mayor’s office say there are 26,000 street vendors, but the real number is closer to 50,000, all of whom must coexist alongside formal businesses. Street vendors and business owners alike must pay for protection, which generates a high income for criminal groups.

But these “security” fees make up only a small portion of the profits earned by gangs in this congested urban area. The monitoring of the entry of illegal goods coming in from around the world is what fuels a major portion of this illicit economy. Unauthorized imports of toys, cell phones, jewelry, apparel, sneakers, televisions, stereos, cigarettes and alcohol pour into Medellín and are distributed to vendors in the city center. “These commodities arrive in trucks between Thursday and Sunday night, are unloaded in under 15 minutes, and are housed in various facilities,” says a person familiar with the routine. Criminal organizations have put in place a robust security system to guard against their seizure or theft. 

Some say that the police surveillance cameras nearest to the loading sites are either “broken or deliberately switched off.” There is much in Medellín that the cameras do not see — the activities in the so-called “Barrio Antioquía,” for instance, on any given night. The neighborhood is one of the most surveilled in the city and located less than three miles from the city center.

A tourist from Madrid approaches a cab on the edge of a park in El Poblado, the commercial heart of Medellín’s upper class. “Can you take me to the neighborhood?” he asks. The driver briefly assesses the situation and then, with a nod, signals to the tourist to get into the back of the car.

After a roughly ten-minute journey, the vehicle reaches Barrio Antioquía, where, for more than forty years, large volumes of drugs have been distributed and sold. Here, there are eyes everywhere. The cab turns into the neighborhood and then down a winding street with dilapidated homes on either side before coming to a corner where a group of young people are huddled together. They wear baggy jeans, Oakley t-shirts, brand-name sneakers, hats and dark sunglasses. Fanny packs are strapped around their chests. This is where the merchandise is stored. They talk casually among each other and occasionally scan the streets for anyone who might be looking for what they have to offer. One of them spots the taxi. Without hesitation, he walks up to the car. “What’s up man, what are you looking for?” Without getting out of the cab, the tourist asks for 50,000 COP (about $11) worth of cocaine. This buys him about five grams of “escama de pez” (fish scale), one of the purest forms of cocaine in the streets. The dealer looks in his fanny pack, locates the little baggies of white powder and hands them through the car window, in exchange for the money. The cab pulls away and rolls back to El Poblado.

This type of business is conducted day and night. A source tells me that 72 people, most of them quite young, are employed as campaneros (vigilante watchmen) to keep a 24-hour vigil, to make sure that nothing interrupts or affects the brisk sales. The campaneros are why tourists, and local residents, can hop into a cab, buy illegal drugs without getting out of the vehicle, and leave the neighborhood as quickly as they came.

Barrio Antioquía emerged in the mid-twentieth century to house mainly local industrial workers. By the 1960s, it became the main market for contraband cigarettes. Later, the sale of marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs began with the backing of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel. Over the years, it consolidated as an area controlled by gangsters.

The neighborhood is not blighted or bleak. It has good access roads, strong commercial and industrial activity and is next to the Enrique Olaya Herrera airport. And it has an international reputation among drug users. The authorities can do little.

Surveillance cameras once promised a brave new world of policing neighborhoods like Barrio Antioquía. If surveillance footage is used to arrest a dealer, police boast about the effectiveness of cameras. But the gangs operating in the barrio have destroyed and replaced official surveillance networks with their own CCTV cameras. “Barrio Antioquía is the most protected place in Medellín,” says an insider in the area. “For criminals, it is the city’s crown jewel.”

But they couldn’t have taken over the neighborhood without cooperation from police. This was always suspected, but then it was proven, when 22 police officers were detained in December 2020 for their links with drug traffickers operating across Barrio Antioquía.

For several years, two illegal activities have been ring fenced from scrutiny and investigation. The first was the storage of illegal substances in warehouses and houses with armored doors. The second was the crystallization of coca base into cocaine hydrochloride. In addition to the laboratories installed in rural areas near the city, for at least six years there have been laboratories operating in urban areas. An expert told me that one of these labs was located just outside of Barrio Antioquía.

Local authorities say they want to put an end to these problems that have persisted for decades. The city has invested $2.6 million dollars in the construction of a modern police station in Barrio Antioquía. Construction began in January 2021, and is nearing completion on a four-story building sitting on 43,100 square feet of land. The objective is to strengthen security and counteract micro-trafficking in the neighborhood.

Police, with or without imposing new buildings, have their work cut out for them in Medellín. It is a city in which the illegal economy has been consecrated in the blood and fire of generations of criminals.

The system is vast and sophisticated. And its footsoldiers, its building blocks are the watchers on the streets who keep tabs on everything so that the flow of business, in drugs, prostitution and contraband, is unhindered. The constant surveillance is also key to the control criminal gangs exert over the general population. In each of Medellíns 249 neighborhoods, there are 72 people hired by gangs to keep watch, not counting those monitoring the illegal CCTV cameras.

Despite large investments in technology, the authorities have not yet managed to dismantle these criminal organizations or disrupt their influence. Although there are flurries of police activity from time to time and arrests made, eventually and inevitably it’s not long before the gangs are back and doing business as usual. 

Local authorities boast of having a modern digital security apparatus with hundreds of surveillance cameras and the Hawk up in the sky as a noisy reminder that the city is being watched. But the gangs’ eyes on the streets see more than cameras, drones and helicopters do.

These watchers are closer to reality and are more agile in how they respond. As one expert sardonically told me, surveillance networks see only what those who control the networks want to see. “When the pay is good,” he says, referring to corruption, “everyone looks the same way.”

The post Watching the streets of Medellín appeared first on Coda Story.

To mark the occasion, European Union flags are flying above all government buildings in the capital Tbilisi — the Georgian government, although criticized for its meek response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, did apply for EU membership two years ahead of schedule — and the city spent much of the week preparing for annual festivities. 

But away from all the usual fanfare, a small, privately organized exhibition in one of Tbilisi’s hip venues reflected the lack of historic reckoning that makes Georgia’s independence ever so fragile.

The idea for the exhibition was hatched after a group of Ukrainian journalists contacted their colleagues at Tabula magazine in Tbilisi. The Ukrainians asked them for evidence of atrocities committed by Russians in the early 1990s during the internecine conflict in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, when Georgian troops and paramilitaries, Abkhaz forces, local civilians, as well as fighters from the Russian Federation fought a brutal war strafed by massive human rights abuses on all sides.

“It took the massacre in Bucha for us to dig into our own past,” says Tamara Chergoleishvili, founder of Tabula and the organizer of the exhibition called “Before Bucha there was Abkhazia.” “I was shocked by what we found, but even more so by how little we know and understand.”

Chergoleishvili discovered that in 1994, Georgia had set up a national investigative commission to look into whether atrocities committed against the Georgians amounted to a genocide. The commission interviewed nearly 25,000 victims of the war and identified 800 people, including members of the Russian military, who participated in human rights violations in Abkhazia. Tabula obtained and shared with me a summary of the findings that detail many of the horrific atrocities that took place. In 1999, the Georgian prosecutors office, using the commission’s report, launched an investigation into the war and sent the report’s summary to the UN in Geneva. But nothing came out of either.

Several people featured in the exhibition testify to what happened in 1993 in a village called Akhaldaba, where 300 ethnic-Georgian residents were held hostage in a local school. Militiamen separated men from women and children. Many of the men have never been seen since, while women and girls were tortured and raped.

“I felt ashamed. These people, the refugees from that war, still live among us, with enormous trauma of what they have been through, and yet, we never acknowledge it, never ask them whether they are okay,” Chergoleishvili said. 

The war in Georgia’s Black Sea province of Abkhazia flared up in the wake of the Soviet collapse: ethnic Abkhaz did not want to be part of an independent Georgia, while the province's predominantly Georgian population did. In villages like Akhalba, situated in the Abkhazia region but inhabited mostly by ethnic Georgians, this brought violent confrontations of the worst kind.

Moscow promoted this rivalry, fanned the flames of ethnic tensions and — once the fighting began — provided weapons, military personnel and propaganda support to the Abkhaz side.  

In years to come, the Kremlin’s role in Abkhazia would become a blueprint for Russia’s approach to conflicts from Moldova’s Transnistria to Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Donbas in Ukraine. “Remember the little green men in Crimea?” asks Malkhaz Pataraia, a refugee still living in Tbilisi who co-founded “Abkhaz Council,” an umbrella platform for many organizations that represent victims of the war. “I have met them in Abkhazia.”

The “little green men” were Russian soldiers Vladimir Putin sent to Crimea without insignia so that he could unofficially establish (and lie about) Russian military presence in the peninsula. Moscow has always denied their soldiers fought in that war, but unlike Ukraine, Russian disinformation about Abkhazia went unchecked and unchallenged for years.

By the time most international organizations arrived in Abkhazia at the end of 1993, Georgian forces and nearly 250,000 Georgian residents had been driven out and nearly 10,000 people had been killed on both sides. Numerous UN fact-finding missions and international investigations like this one by Human Rights Watch all came to similar conclusions: horrible atrocities were committed by both sides, including bombardment of civilian targets by the Russian air force. In subsequent years, the ethnic cleansing and massacres of Georgians were officially recognized by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conventions during the Budapest, Lisbon and Istanbul summits. 

But unlike the war in Ukraine, which has been meticulously documented and full of compelling human stories delivered straight to our feeds, the narrative around Abkhazia is still weaved with the mind-numbing language of international organization reports.  

The geopolitical mood was also radically different. Until very recently, Western policies towards Russia were underpinned by a belief in a possibility of a democratic, Western-friendly Kremlin. Reluctance to undermine that possibility meant that slagging off Moscow was frowned upon. 

“No one wanted to hear about things Russians were doing to us,” said Pataraia, the refugee from Abkhazia. But his definition of “nobody” includes Georgians — both the government and citizens. While it is today a widely accepted truism that Georgians have not been able to face the terrible atrocities that their side committed in Abkhazia, the war in Ukraine suggests that Georgians also have been unable to face their own trauma. 

Pataraia believes that inertia and Russia both played a role in ensuring that stories of suffering and questions of responsibility remained buried. And today, it is clear how this lack of historic reckoning backfired and played into the Kremlin’s hand. Sweeping the stories of victims under a proverbial carpet and locking memories into the furthest corners of consciousness created a vacuum, an ambiguity that the Kremlin masterfully exploited.

For both Abkhaz and Georgians, the conflict became a wound that oozed instability, crime and violence. As politicians failed, survivors suffered. Many of their stories had been collected but never properly told.

Venera Mishveliani, a Georgian refugee from Akhaldaba, told Tabula that some of those who held her hostage in the school were Russian. In a 2009 documentary called “Russian Lessons” filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov featured both victims from the school and a Russian who claims to have been there. 

In the film, Naira Kalandia, a doctor, describes being stopped by “blonde men” speaking Russian “with no accent” who emptied their magazine into her 17-year-old son. She was taken hostage and held, for nine days, along with others, in a building of a local kindergarten. “They used an electrical wire to hang me upside down from the ceiling in a library room, and underneath they burned children’s books,” she tells the camera. The scenes she describes are horrific: one day, she says, soldiers forced her to swallow an eye removed from one of the corpses. Another, she was forced to watch how militia threw hostages into a deep well.

“We were mostly Russian and Armenian, maybe 20% of us in the unit were Abkhaz,” says a man who describes himself as a Russian soldier, who volunteered to join a unit of “ground troops” because he wanted to “help the small Abkhaz nation.” He says he was quickly disillusioned.

“Seeing people thrown into a well was really unpleasant,” he says “I did not like it. I did not like how naked girls, ages 12, 15 would be brought to our base.”

Akhaldaba is next to a town where I spent much of my childhood. My grandmother was among 250,000 Georgian refugees who eventually fled the war in Abkhazia. To her very last days, she talked about her dreams of returning to her house by the sea, or visiting my grandfather’s grave in the hills above it. But we never spoke about the horrors that took place in villages we both considered home. There was an awareness of them, but never a conversation — not in my family and not in the larger society. “Everyone deals with trauma differently, we buried it,” Chergoleishvili said. 

This burial, Pataraia told me, brought the horrors of the war back in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, slicing away more territory both in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Georgia has pushed for justice for the victims of the 2008 war, filing and winning a case in the International Criminal Court. They also fought and won a case in Strasbourg Court of Human Rights over forcible deportations of Georgians from Moscow in 2006. But the search for justice for the victims of the Abkhazia war has not even begun. 

Could the war in Ukraine jumpstart the process? Pataraia’s organization is campaigning for the Georgian parliament to adopt a declaration deeming abuses against Georgians in Abkhazia a “genocide” just like Ukrainians have done. He also wants the prosecutors office to resume an investigation into the war crimes committed in Abkhazia and then, eventually to push for international justice.

 “We owe it to the victims,” he says.

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This was not part of the Russian Federation’s renewed assault on the Donbas and eastern Ukraine, but rather the extensive rehearsals for the May 9 Victory Day parades. This year the Russian state has invested its annual commemoration of Soviet victory in the Second World War — its statement of military might — with additional significance. Video clips of the rehearsals in Moscow and St. Petersburg circulated on social media. Spectators posed for photographs and videos, Russian press agencies circulated videos and details of the rehearsals on their telegram channels, western news outlets shared footage. Preparations for Moscow’s parade began much earlier. By April 19 soldiers were already pounding the parade ground in Albino, a small rural town outside Moscow.

In the late Soviet era details of Victory Day parades were closely guarded secrets. But in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Defense released detailed plans of the parade order, including the units, weapons, and aircraft involved. Victory Day preparations can be followed more closely than ever before.

The centrality of May 9 in the Russian national calendar and consciousness seems well established, an almost inviolable moment in Russian public life. In April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, preparations for the 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s end continued. The rehearsals of nearly 15,000 soldiers tightly packed on the Albino military proving ground were memorably captured in a video, featuring some expressive Russian swearing, which went viral on social media. The parade was not canceled but rather postponed for two months.

It is testimony to the power of the public ritual and its propaganda value that they have been understood as a sacred element of national war memory with deep historical roots. May 9 and Victory Day commemorations, however, were at heart an invented tradition, a carefully choreographed statement of memory politics with a long and complicated history. It might seem, at least superficially, that Putin’s regime continued a Soviet tradition, but the reality as many historians have demonstrated was more complicated. Victory Day parades invoke history and exploit historical symbols, but they have also shaped history and its meaning.

According to the Ministry of Defense, 11,000 soldiers, 131 units of military hardware, and 77 aircraft have been involved in and will participate in Moscow’s parade. The RIA Novosti press agency has reported that a group of MiG-29 fighter jets will overfly Red Square in a Z formation, “in support of members of the special operation in Ukraine.”

There has been speculation for weeks that Vladimir Putin required decisive military breakthroughs and tangible victories to present before the people at the May 9 parades; that Putin will formally declare war on Ukraine in a May 9 speech on Red Square, dismantling the notion of his “special military operation” and issue a general mobilization; and even more recently that Russia will include 500 Ukrainian Prisoners of War, a clear contravention of the Geneva convention. These predictions may turn out to be true, but they all attest to the enduring importance of Victory Day in the Russian, and indeed to the western, political imagination.

Whereas Europe marked Victory Day on May 8, 1945, the Soviet Union’s announcement of victory came one day later, on May 9. It became the date on which the anniversary of the war’s end in Europe was marked, overshadowing the end of the war in the Soviet East in September 1945. The celebrations in 1945 that marked May 9 were spontaneous and unscripted. People gathered on the streets to sing, dance, and drink, celebrations independent of the Stalinist party-state. The first Victory Parade took weeks of planning and was scheduled for June 24, 1945. 40,000 soldiers from specially selected regiments marched across Red Square, as Stalin and other party leaders watched from Lenin’s mausoleum.

As befitted a closely choreographed propaganda spectacle, it was filmed and photographed for posterity. It signaled a return to a more regimented post-war politics, society, and culture, reinforcing the Stalin cult. All subsequent victory parades were in dialogue with this occasion. It is no coincidence that the website giving details of the units participating in the 2022 parade also publishes documents from Ministry of Defense archives detailing preparations for the first victory parade.

The June 24, 1945 parade was a dramatic moment in Stalinist public culture, but this effort was not sustained. On May 9 of the following year, in 1946, the day was not marked by a military parade. Indeed, May 9 was recategorized as a normal working day in late 1946, with the result that victory day in May 1947 was afforded less attention. This is often understood as the beginning of a more repressive phase of memory politics. It was not that the state encouraged forgetting; much about the war was too painful and divisive to be confronted. For nearly two decades Victory Day was marked by informal get-togethers of old comrades, political meetings, and firework displays, not grandiose military parades.

It was not until 1965 and the 20^th anniversary of the war’s end, that another parade was organized. They were reserved for landmark anniversaries in 1985, 1990, and only becoming an annual fixture after the 50^th anniversary in 1995. What seems like a deeply rooted historical ritual is relatively new.

Common elements, for example the prominence of the Victory Banner, remain. Yet throughout the post-Soviet period the dynamics of memory on display were in flux. The commemorations of the 1990s were more modest than Soviet parades, a product of economic crises, restricted budgets, and the collapse of the Soviet symbolic repertoire.

Under Vladimir Putin, however, a slicker presentation has signaled a more assertive Russia, trumpeting its military might and great power ambitions to domestic and international audiences. Putin’s first parade in 2000 was just two days after his first presidential inauguration. Since 2005 the media management of victory parades has become increasingly sophisticated. Clever camera shots and polished productions have turned the parade into a media event, choreographed for viewers at home. 

It has become the most important holiday in the civic calendar, commemorating a moment in the national past that all citizens are told they can proudly celebrate. There was a time when foreign politicians, statesmen, and diplomats attended Victory Day parades. In May 1995, for example, Bill Clinton and John Major both attended. But, since 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, foreign, particularly western leaders, have ceased attending.

As the number of remaining veterans of and eyewitnesses to the Second World War dwindles, Russian war memory has ossified, becoming as clunky as the T-34 tanks that have become a commemorative prop. Approaching war memory through the prism of a sacred victory has long served to justify the sacrifice and loss of life in war but creates difficulty with the multiple stands of the Soviet and Russian war experience that sit uncomfortably with this framework. So much of the horror of war, the pain, suffering and human costs are excluded from this sanitizing celebration of victory and heroism.

The set-piece parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg frame Victory Day through the priorities and objectives of the state. War memory has long been harnessed for political purposes. But people do not always operate within the official structures of memory. Since 2011, when its popularity grew, some Russians have participated in Immortal Regiment parades, where citizens carry photographs of deceased relatives who participated in the Second World War. 

Others might watch a Soviet war film on television, visit a relative’s grave, or finish a bottle. Beyond the Red Square pomp, local war memories and commemorative practices abound. A recent volume of essays has examined how Victory Day celebrations are marked in cities, locales, and spaces across Russia, in formerly Soviet occupied territories in eastern Europe, and beyond. It demonstrates how commemorative activity can be local and regional, how these have changed over time and frequently depart from official scripts.

Outside Russia, diasporic communities have long structured their own Victory Day commemorations around Soviet war memorials in their cities and communities. In 2015 Immortal Regiment parades were organized in over forty countries, many of these with significant Russian communities.

On May 9, 2022, eyes will be focused on Red Square, ears on Vladimir Putin’s words.  However, a better indication of changing memory politics and the importance of the cult of the Great Patriotic War to Russian political culture may be apparent in how Victory Day is marked in Russian occupied Ukraine.

Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Victory Day in 2014. And since 2015, Victory Day parades were unfurled in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s republics, which frequently featured military equipment in contravention of the 2015 Minsk agreements. What happens in Kherson, Melitopol, and Berdyansk, all Russian occupied cities, may be as instructive as the ceremony on Red Square.

Regardless of where Victory Day is marked, the use and abuse of history and war memory is likely to be intermingled with Russian nationalism, militarism, and wider geopolitics. It will be a toxic combination.

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The post The Russian May 9 holiday points to the toxicity of the country’s politics of memory appeared first on Coda Story.

In a movement associated with the far-right, where its leaders liken vaccine passports to full-blown totalitarianism, and at a demonstration where the mostly white speakers declared themselves “not woke but awake,” the organizers had clearly gone out of their way to also try to present a welcoming, inclusive context. In posters and in speeches, they co-opted the language of diversity to give the impression of appealing to a wide audience and the appearance of embracing mainstream values. 

It was hardly the sole instance of cognitive dissonance at the demonstration. Conservative YouTube comedian JP Sears got the ball rolling, telling the thousands of protesters –“We didn’t come here to agree with each other.”

The crowd roared in agreement. The short, balding man in front of me turned to the tall, balding man next to him and said, “Exactly.”

There to denounce government vaccination mandates (and Big Pharma, the medical establishment, school closures, Bill Gates, fascism, CNN and surveillance) and champion truth and freedom (and vitamin D supplements, ivermectin, dissident doctors, parental choice and Joe Rogan), Sears and subsequent speakers repeatedly cited Martin Luther King Jr. as inspiration. Reminding the protestors that he had given his “I have a dream” speech on the same steps 58 years ago, King, said Sears, “wasn’t a mandate kind of guy. He knew you can’t comply your way out of tyranny.”

But behind their abuse of language and their warping of science in support of their unscientific arguments, the organizers had identified correct currents of concern: authoritarianism, surveillance, loss of privacy, digital tools of social control, experts selling the public a false bill of goods. These are legitimate sources of dread, potential threats to everybody’s liberty and freedoms. They are topics deserving scrutiny. 

But by putting these issues in service of their right-wing populism and viral disinformation, it begs the question whether any of the anti-mandate crowd –speakers and protesters– actually care about these things in the first place. Hours into the event, when all the soaring language of liberty and freedom faded and muted by repetition, what was left were true motives: influence, power, attention, and profits from selling useless medical remedies. 

Organizers had been adamant that this was a demonstration against government vaccination mandates, not an anti-vax event. That party line fell away when the speakers took to the podium but it had been a crucial messaging tactic. Instead of getting deplatformed by social media companies for propagating vaccine disinformation, organizers quickly amassed tens of thousands of followers on their “anti-mandate” Facebook pages, galvanizing people to travel to DC from across the country. 

But from the start of the demonstration –or the “show,” as JP Sears described the rally– vaccination hostility shared center stage with an anti-mandate agenda. The event headliner, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (son of Senator Robert Kennedy), warned of a coming apocalypse stemming from vaccinations and mandates. Even under the Nazis, he said, his voice shaking, Anne Frank was able to hide. But those seeking relief from vaccine tyranny will have nowhere to go. Another key figure behind the march, Robert Malone, a virologist and immunologist, peddled misinformation, fake cures, and compared the United States to a psychotic society similar to Nazi Germany. 

At the March: Anti-mandate firefighters –local media reported 200 DC firefighters attended– around a giant flag they had carried horizontally from the Washington Monument; different groups of protestors giving interviews in Spanish; the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, mingling in the crowd.

Demonstrators and reporters lined up to take photos of a man with a white, wispy chin-beard, dressed head-to-toe as Uncle Sam with a giant syringe around his head. One man in his early 20s wore a Guy Fawkes mask; another man stood on stilts in a grim reaper costume, his sign warning of the deadly consequences of “In Pfizer we trust.” 

While the crowd thronged the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, around the edges, small groups held placards and commented on the proceedings with bullhorns, like an unhinged Greek chorus. One gaggle of people stood on the sidewalk, incessantly correcting the speakers that Christ is who matters here. “We need to remember what Lincoln stood for,” said a speaker. “You need to remember what Jesus stood for,” a member of the sidewalk group answered. This went on for about 30 minutes when, as three Hasidic Jews walked toward the Lincoln Monument, the group told them through the bullhorn to “get right with Jesus you dirty Jews.” 

Another scraggly group on the sidelines chanted “Darwin wins” as protesters passed. At first, I took them as counter-protesters, an anti-anti-mandate carve-out. But apparently, no: they were anti-vax and anti-mandate, and felt Darwin was on their side. The data shows otherwise: Although Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness decreased with emergence of the Delta variant and waning of vaccine-induced immunity, protection against hospitalization and death has remained high. 

Many of the protesters had drawn similar conclusions. Science is on their side. Speakers invoked Albert Einstein and Saint Augustine. While one particularly intricately drawn sign proclaimed “I trust and follow my intuition & instincts - discerning what is fight & true for me,” most of the others begged the world to follow the data. Echoing the ‘science is real’ lawn signs in front of progressive U.S. households, the rally signs urged people to believe in credentialed experts, but only the vanishingly small minority of medical experts who condemned vaccines and are unfairly persecuted by their colleagues, and realize, as one sign read, Galileo also was accused of spreading “misinformation.” 

The pre-rally messaging of a solely anti-mandate agenda, instead of anti-vaccination, allowed organizers to focus on what they argued is the true peril facing the world: the loss of liberty and freedom to digital vaccine passports, coerced vaccine shots, and medical surveillance. Speakers cited the Chinese social credit tracking system, surveillance phone apps, and China’s one child policy, which was rescinded in 2015. Protesters’ signs echoed the same concerns.

Much of that isn’t viewed as over the top by millions of Americans, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. While about 75% of Americans eligible for the vaccine have taken at least one shot, conspiracies centering vaccinations, government mandates, and disinformation are on the rise. Since January 2020, the 153 most influential anti-vaccine social media accounts have gained 2.9 million new followers.

The number of protesters who showed up for the demonstration was far less than the 20,000 promised by the organizers. But in promoting the message of diversity and multiculturalism while simultaneously denouncing ‘woke culture’, in claiming to defend science while simultaneously contradicting it, in condemning authoritarianism, surveillance, and the theft of privacy while promoting right-wing populism and a conspiracy worldview that allows for these things to prosper, the organizers have struck a chord. It’s dissonant, but it works. The next march will be bigger.  

The post At the Washington anti-mandate rally, global concerns get infected with the anti-vax treatment appeared first on Coda Story.

The 1852 novel, written by Harriett Beecher-Stowe, for which the station is named occupies a fraught place in the annals of American literature, recognized both for galvanizing public opinion against the brutality of slavery and for reinforcing reductive racial stereotypes with the servile depiction of its main character. 

Pölking, whose parents are German and Cameroonian, spoke of his discomfort passing the station. “It woke up a lot of bad emotions,” he told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, arguing that it is way past time for it and a nearby street to be renamed.

So far, Pölking’s petition has not succeeded. The station’s name greets visitors on a large sign outside, emblazoned in white letters against a bright blue background. 

A few minutes down the road lie Onkel Toms Hütte stable and horseback riding school, a restaurant called Uncle Tom’s Burger and the Onkel Toms Hütte kindergarten. In fact, the entire area pays homage to a book once described by the Black American writer James Baldwin as a “catalogue of violence.” 

The existence of this neighborhood in modern-day, multicultural Berlin can be traced back to a surprisingly durable national fascination with America’s antebellum South, which first took hold in the mid-19th century. 

Soon after publication, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” became a global sensation and the only book in the 19th century to outsell the Bible. It made Beecher-Stowe Germany’s most beloved American author and had a profound effect on popular culture, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed beer gardens and campgrounds springing up across the country. Berlin’s Onkel Toms Hutte subway station opened in 1929, near an Uncle Tom’s pub and a sprawling housing development of the same name. 

These literary-themed homages tapped into a fantasy with the American South that sanitized the brutality of chattel slavery and characterized plantation life as bucolic, simple and comfortable for thousands of “loyal and happy” slaves. 

Heike Paul, is an American Studies professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg who has written extensively about Germany’s obsession with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She describes this inaccurate interpretation of a brutal and shameful period of American history as the “pastoralization of slavery” and a “total disconnect” from Beecher-Stowe’s text, which was written to expose the horrors of the practice.

Similar ideas are also central to the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist account of America’s past that surfaced after the defeat of Confederate forces in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Romanticizing plantation life and depicting slaves as the faithful servants of benevolent owners, the mythology of the Lost Cause also insists that the war was fought over state’s rights, not whether or not white people had the right to own and place other human beings in chains. 

While Beecher-Stowe was a staunch abolitionist, the unquestioning subservience of her central character reinforced stereotypes and a variety of racist ideas. According to Sanders Isaac Bernstein, a Berlin-based PhD student at the University of Southern California, whose work has included analysis of German nostalgia for the Confederate South, this archetype “was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization.”

Bernstein holds up as an example the introduction of a 1911 German translation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which states that “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

While living in the South, I encountered ideas rooted in the Lost Cause repeatedly. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Civil War casually referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or the myriad revisionist narratives I came across while covering North Carolina’s debate to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. Most people who opposed the idea argued that taking down or altering the monuments amounted to historical erasure, advancing the falsehood that the war was fought in response to northern “tyranny.” In reality, however, the defense of these symbols, included, at its core, a glorification of the Confederate cause and antebellum life.

Coming across these ideas in the contemporary South may be unpleasant, but it is not surprising. I did not expect to find traces of them in Berlin, though. Wanting to understand how this contentious American myth gained such a following in Germany, I asked Bernstein to meet me at Onkel Toms Hütte. He arrived, dressed in black. We both took photographs of the station’s sign and then moved to a nearby bench. 

Outside of the neighborhood of Onkel Toms Hütte, most of Germany’s homages to Beecher-Stowe’s book are no longer visible. The nearby tavern shut down in 1978 and the campgrounds disappeared decades ago. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not the only example of Southern storytelling that resonated in Germany. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” became an immediate bestseller under the Third Reich and its 1939 movie adaptation, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is said to have been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Revisionist interpretations of the Confederacy persisted under the Nazi regime, which had developed its own Lost Cause narrative to cope with the national humiliation that resulted from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. According to an account by the ex-Nazi leader Hermann Rauschnin, Hitler believed that the “American people themselves were conquered” when the South lost the Civil War. Since then, he argued, the United States had slid into a state of political and racial “decay.” 

You can still see clear signs of this strange love affair lingering in the Germany of today: Civil War reenactments in which the majority of participants want to take the losing side; Confederate flags flying at anti-lockdown protests, at country music festivals, or hung in the back of Berlin drinking establishments. In many instances, the Stars and Bars can be seen as a convenient alternative to the Nazi swastika, the display of which has been banned under German law since 1945. 

The cultural resonance of the Confederate war manifests itself in subtler ways, too. Bernstein, who is American, said: “Sometimes I’m surprised by the way in which one can still encounter people being like, ‘You know, the real America is in the South.' I think it comes back to a particular idea of the city being somehow part of the world capitalist system, but the country is where a nation’s cultural life truly exists. I can’t help but think that part of that is the remaining power of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’”

Of course, Germany is not the only country in which Confederate iconography can be seen. In recent years, the Stars and Bars has become a common touchstone for the far right from Ireland to Brazil. However, it is especially jarring in a nation that has, for decades, made rigorous efforts to confront the violence and prejudice of its past. 

Germany’s long and painful process of reckoning with the Holocaust, known within the country as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, is often hailed as a global model of historical reconciliation. According to Bernstein, it includes a deep suspicion of wistful longing for an imagined past, an emotion fostered and exploited by the Nazis to advance their ideas of antisemitism and volkisch nationalism. 

However such messaging remains powerful to this day. In a recent campaign, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland called for a return to a “normal” Germany. While, at least on the surface, about the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, one video juxtaposes grainily nostalgic cinefilm of a white family with contemporary footage of burning barricades, anti-fascist protesters and lockdown signs. At one point a garden gnome makes an appearance in a neat suburban garden, presumably owned by a clean-cut white, middle-class family — a bizarre symbol of the party’s cozy, quaint and culturally homogenous vision for the nation.

That these ideas still have a following in Germany may explain why Pölking’s campaign to rename Onkel Toms Hütte has, as yet, not been acted upon. After all, preserving the name allows people to cling to a German identity rooted in an illusory version of the past, far away from the complexities and tensions that exist in today’s world.

For Bernstein, that raises a worrying question: “Shouldn’t Germany, of all places, be aware of the trap of nostalgia?”

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington, DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

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The post Letter from Germany: A strange and enduring love affair with the antebellum South appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

A connected narrative breaks apart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s Letter from London illustrates the friction between rumor and reality on an extremely hyperlocal scale, so please bear with me. On the morning of Saturday, August 7, I woke at my usual time of around 6.30am and made myself a cup of coffee. After a 15-month-long pandemic, which has seen gyms and group sports largely locked down, I had begun retraining for ParkRun, a free, weekly series of timed events held across the world and organized by a U.K. charity. 

I was almost certainly going to leave my house around 7.30 a.m. for a run around the local Finsbury Park, which would end with another coffee overlooking a nearby nature reserve. That might sound like a healthy way to begin the weekend, but unfortunately, I was also scrolling through my Twitter feed. #FinsburyPark was trending — a rare phenomenon — and I decided to have a look. I now wish I hadn’t. 

The hashtag’s top tweets were a mixture of chaos, rumors and rebuttals. In a nutshell, something major had happened or not happened overnight. Getting to the bottom of it took some time, but a toxic mixture of facts and lies eventually emerged. At around 7.45 p.m. the previous evening, dozens of police were dispatched to an address around the corner, to investigate a tip-off that that as many as 70 venomous snakes had escaped a residential address. Officers shut down a road close to my home at around 8 p.m. and carried out a series of searches for just over an hour, before declaring the incident to be the result of a hoax call. 

One reason why the rumor went viral was because a Twitter account with over 100,000 followers named @CrimeLdn had posted footage, ostensibly from the scene, showing a large police presence, with the caption: “Estimated 70 poisonous snakes have escaped from a flat (according to the police) on the road between Manor House and Finsbury Park.” The footage can be viewed here. 

While @CrimeLdn, an account that usually shares reports of knife crime in the U.K., later confirmed that a member of the public had sent in false information, dozens of Twitter users were still sharing news of the allegedly escaped reptiles the following morning. @CrimeLdn’s correction also prompted criticism from other Twitter users about the importance of verification, using second sources, and the dangers of spreading fake news. 

By the time I had fixed myself a second coffee on Saturday morning to continue reading through the hashtag, I was half wondering whether running through my local park would be safe. I didn’t actually believe that 70 venomous snakes were on the loose in the area. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what to believe. I mean, venomous snakes have escaped residential buildings in other parts of the world. One actually made a break for freedom from a Cologne apartment in February. Coverage of the incident had also leaked to other parts of the internet. I saw the story published on several London news sites. Debunking of the hoax appeared throughout the day on national tabloid websites, including The Mirror and Metro. 

I did go for a run and, eventually, continued with the rest of my day, but the whole fiasco has reminded me of how the hollowing out of local news sources has left a void in our digital spaces. As much of Coda Story’s work demonstrates, a tsunami of fake news is an ongoing and persistent menace in countries around the world, including the U.S., Spain and Pakistan. Much of it is unleashed by political, religious, anti-science or business interests. Some of the most disturbing violence around the world has also been caused by the dissemination of fake news in hyperlocal situations. My experience seemed worthy of inquiry. 

I recently messaged @CrimeLdn to ask about the incident, in an attempt to find out how this kind of misinformation can spread across digital platforms and affect the lives of ordinary people. After several requests, an account administrator agreed to a short interview via Twitter Messages. I asked if moderators felt bad about posting the original material. “We got a little bit of criticism but at the same time I think people know it was a hoax call and it did make us feel a bit bad,” read the reply. 

I also asked the media team at Twitter. The response I received wasn’t particularly informative about this specific incident, but here’s an extract: “We use a combination of technology and human review to identify misleading information on the service. This includes Tweets that contain content that violates our synthetic and manipulated media policy, our civic integrity policy, and our Covid-19 medical misinformation policy. As a uniquely open, public service, the clarification of falsehoods happens in seconds on Twitter.” 

I felt like I needed to speak with an expert, so arranged an interview with Professor Shakuntala Banaji, professor of media culture and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I wanted to find out why so many people would share false information, even after it had been fact checked, eventually leading to the deployment of police at taxpayers’ expense. 

“People have come to believe that passing on information of whatever kind, whether you have checked it out or not, is a civic duty,” she said. “So, a lot of people who unwittingly get caught up in these kinds of both hyperlocal and national chains of misinformation are not necessarily fools or violent people or inclined towards prejudice. They have thought of themselves in this context as being a good citizen. They have a belief in their own integrity and have a belief in the person from whom they found the information.”

Later the same day, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and related the story to some guests who live in other parts of London. A couple said they had also experienced their own examples of hyperlocal fake news. There was also some light relief. I looked at Twitter again in the evening and one user had posted about Finsbury Park. The story had obviously moved on. He was paraphrasing actor Samuel L. Jackson’s soliloquy from “Snakes on a Plane.”

The post Letter From London: Snake news is fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

Other phone numbers include those of the Dalai Lama’s long term envoy to India and the head of the cricket association of the state of Bihar; the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in India and the leader of India’s opposition party. A relatively unknown bureaucrat was briefly on the list; he’s now India’s new minister for information and technology. The personal secretary of a once powerful, now sidelined, member of India’s ruling party was on the list too.

The hundreds of Indian phone numbers feature on a database of over 50,000 from around the world that were targeted for surveillance by clients of the NSO Group, a secretive Israeli spyware maker. Prominent international targets include French President Emmanuel Macron and the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. The database was obtained by the French journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories and shared with 17 media organizations around the world, including TheWire in India.

This week, as India celebrates its 75th year of Independence, the country continues to be rocked by a massive snooping scandal revealing an unprecedented, and potentially unlawful, assault on individual liberty and personal privacy.

The NSO group says it only sells its software to government clients for legitimate investigations into terrorism or crime, does not operate the spyware licensed to its clients and has no insight into what its clients do with the tool. So does the Indian government use NSO spyware? Officials are yet to offer a straight answer. 

When the story first broke in early July, the government told the Washington Post that “any interception, monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource is done as per due process of law.” This week India’s junior Defense Ministry told Parliament that the Defense Ministry “has not had any transaction with NSO Group Technologies”. News reports were quick to note that snooping on Indian citizens would likely come under the Ministry of Home Affairs rather than the MoD. 

Amnesty International has analyzed the phones of some of the Indians on the list and found traces of NSO’s notorious Pegasus software on their devices. Once installed, the software unlocks a target’s phones and essentially turns it into a listening device capable of recording keystrokes, reading all messages and emails and even activating the device’s microphone and camera. The Guardian has a good rundown of the software’s capabilities.

To be sure, the nature of NSO spyware and the company’s refusal to reveal its clients makes it impossible to conclusively identify exactly who is to blame for all this snooping; but the names on the list and the timing of when they were flagged suggests the Indian government has rolled out a digital dragnet in which anyone who catches the attention of the regime is quickly put under surveillance. 

For instance, in April 2019, a young woman accused the Chief Justice of India of sexually harassing her. Days later, 11 phone numbers associated with her and her family were put on the NSO list – illustrating a clear correlation between her being flagged as a person of interest to the government, and her getting swept up in the dragnet, according to a report in TheWire. The Chief Justice was cleared of sexual harassment in May 2019; six months after he retired, the Union government nominated him to India’s upper house of Parliament. 

On the surface, the Pegasus revelations seem to be the latest evidence of the steep decline of democracy in India under the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Dig a little deeper, critics say, and the sheer breadth of those targeted by Pegasus reveals a regime that sees all opposition as an existential threat while also keeping tabs on those it considers its friends.

“To be honest it was not surprising at all, with the kind of paranoia this government has been showing,” Anirban Bhattacharya, one of the people on the list, told me this week. Bhattacharya is a researcher at the Centre for Financial Accountability, an independent platform that works on development finance.

“All states surveil,” Bhattacharya said, “but there is a difference between security-centric surveillance, whether we agree with it or not, and it is different when you are driven by distrust and paranoia.”

This was the latter case, Bhattacharya said, “where you are going after people whose lives are very public.”

In February 2016, Bhattarcharya was a student at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University when he and his friend Umar Khalid were arrested and charged with sedition for organizing a seminar on Kashmir. (Yes, it is hard to believe that people can be charged with sedition for putting on an academic talk, but these things happen in India).

Bhattacharya and Khalid were subsequently released on bail. Over the next four years, Khalid rose to prominence as a political activist and a fierce critic of the Modi government. He was arrested again last summer for his alleged role in deadly riots in Delhi in an investigation that has been condemned as politically motivated. Incidentally, Khalid is on the list of Pegasus targets too. He’s been in prison for over 300 days now, charged under India’s draconian anti-terror laws.

The government’s crackdown on all criticism has had real costs. Many Indians believe that the country could have avoided a catastrophic second wave of Covid infections this summer if Modi had listened to experts and had not been so eager to declare victory over the virus. 

"I just wish that instead of snooping this government relied more on listening, be it to the warnings before the second wave, or the people and their demands.” Bhattacharya said.

This week, India’s opposition parties released a short video on social media platforms requesting a Parliamentary debate on the Pegasus issue — a demand the government has refused thus far.

“We have been waiting for 14 days for a discussion,” the leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house, Mallikarjun Kharge says in the video. “If you have the courage, let's have a discussion on Pegasus.”

Ironically, the video was titled “Mr. Modi, Come Listen To Us.” 

Given Pegasus’s capabilities, chances are Mr. Modi’s people have been listening to opposition leaders all along.

The post Letter from Delhi: Indians rue a government that snoops but doesn’t listen appeared first on Coda Story.

“I really rely on those payments to be able to get things for my daughter,” she told me, during a telephone conversation. “We’ve got her school uniform to buy in the next couple of months. That is a large chunk of money and a bit of a worry.”

Bates is one of tens of thousands of Hackney residents — the borough is home to some 280,000 people and 10,000 businesses — who have been affected by a crippling ransomware attack on the council’s website. (In the interest of full disclosure, I live in Hackney and use the website regularly.) The breach took place in October 2020, disabling a number of vital local services, including systems that allow residents to access social security benefits, and pay rent and council tax.

Over the past few years, ransomware attacks on public and private institutions, including councils, utility companies and banks, have become an increasingly common form of online terrorism. In late 2020, dozens of U.S. hospitals and healthcare organizations were hit by malicious code distributed by cyber-criminals. Security analysts said the hacks were tied to a Russian gang known as UNC 1878 or Wizard Spider

Large corporations and financial institutions have the means to pay off ransomware gangs. For example, Brazil-based JBS SA, the world’s largest meat processing company, gave the equivalent of $11m to hackers who broke into its computer system in June. 

However, U.K. local authority budgets have been progressively slashed since the financial crisis of 2008, rendering most councils incapable of spending such large sums of money, even if they could get past the miles of red tape necessary to do so. Hackney has faced some of the most brutal cuts in the country: the council’s core funding from central government has been reduced by £140m ($195m) since 2010 – a reduction of 45%. 

On top of that, years of underinvestment in new technologies have left many of them more or less wide open to criminal assaults that endanger vulnerable people, who rely on the digital services they provide.

The damage done by the Hackney ransomware attack highlights both the importance of local authority services — which include public housing, garbage collection and the upkeep of roads — and the parlous financial situation of many U.K. councils. 

Put simply, councils are not lucrative targets. Hackney set aside £2m in last year’s budget for future cyber attacks, but the borough is also having to make almost £11m of savings this year after incurring additional costs during the pandemic. Affected areas will include education, children and families services and public health.

The council, which employs 4,500 people, refuses to pay off the attackers and has not disclosed their identity or the amount demanded. Describing the incident as a “significant threat to the organization,” Hackney Council’s head of digital and data, Matthew Cain, detailed the chaos it has caused. 

“Ten years-plus of significant investment in technology was removed overnight,” he told me. “From that point, the question was not which systems were available, but what data could we find and how could we rebuild that from the ground up? We have had the best part of 200 people working on it solidly since October, which represents more than our total investment in IT in a typical year.”

To make matters worse, Hackney’s ransomware attack was quickly followed by a data leak. In January, a criminal group published the personal details of council staff and residents on the dark web. While experts said that the stolen data was “limited” and “not visible through search engines,” nine months on, digital services continue to be affected, including changes to existing benefits and council tax claims and payments.

The audacity of ransomware gangs has pushed the issue into the international spotlight. During a June summit in Geneva, U.S. President Joe Biden urged President Vladimir Putin to crack down on hackers operating in Russia. Biden warned of consequences should such activities continue unchecked. 

But it isn’t just criminal gangs who are targeting government institutions. In July, U.S. and Britain announced that Russian spies accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have spent most of the past two years attempting to breach the digital security of hundreds of organizations worldwide. The announcement did not identify any of the targets by name, but said they included government offices, political parties, law firms and media organizations in the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.K., a number of other government institutions have been hit. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency was hit in December 2020. Repair work to its systems is still ongoing. Since 2019, Hull City Council, in the north of England, has suffered at least 10 serious incidents and thousands of phishing attempts by criminals seeking to steal login details. Ireland’s public healthcare system is also rebuilding its digital infrastructure after a May attack. 

Meanwhile, council workers and residents are left counting the costs. In Hackney, this will doubtless mean less money for already strained local services, which could deepen financial instability for those most in need. “This is going to be an 18-month recovery,” said Cain. “We will do that rather than doing all sorts of other things.”

The post Letter from London: Ransomware is wreaking havoc in Hackney appeared first on Coda Story.

On January 27, government minister Anurag Thakur was addressing one such event in the capital, where he was filmed urging a mob to shoot “the country’s traitors.” A month later, the city was shaken by anti-Muslim riots that claimed at least 53 lives. The majority of victims were working class Muslims. But, when reporters pressed Thakur for comment, he accused them of “lying” — despite widely available video footage to the contrary.

Now, Thakur has the power to take down news reports that run against his ambiguous grasp of the truth. 

Over the weekend, he was made India’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting. The appointment came a month after the nation passed a new and draconian media censorship law that — if implemented in the way many fear it will be — will throttle India’s already embattled press. 

The legislation forms a comprehensive attack on freedom of speech and expression. The first part of the law is directed at platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp; the second at streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime; the third deals with online news organizations. 

The regulations are ostensibly only for digital publishing, but will likely be applicable to all media outlets that have an online presence. India now takes 142nd place out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders — a ranking so low that the Modi government set up a special committee to look into it. This new law is likely to push the country even further down the table.

If, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every censorship-happy regime is censorious in its own way. India’s new media laws offer a telling insight into Modi’s authoritarian interpretation of astroturf populism.

The last time a regime attempted such overt control of the Indian press was during the Emergency of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi effectively suspended the constitution against a backdrop of rising political unrest and disaffection with her government. Gandhi relied on a more top-down model of censorship, in which government officials visited printing presses and newspaper offices, and excised offending articles from newspapers before they made it to print. The following days papers often carried white spaces where there should have been news articles.

Modi’s laws are tailor-made for the modern age of permanent outrage and his ministers’ preference to let mobs — both online and offline — do their dirty work for them. The heart of the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 lies in a seemingly innocuous “grievance redressal mechanism,” via which anyone offended by any piece of online news can lodge a complaint with the relevant news organization.

The publication must acknowledge the complaint within 24 hours and respond within 15 days. If the complainant isn’t happy with the response, they can escalate the matter to an industry body, and if the response of the industry body still doesn’t satisfy them, they can — within about a month of their first complaint — approach a central government committee, set up by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. This government-administered body can order that the content be taken down, demand that stories be changed, or — to quote from the law — warn, censure, admonish or reprimand the publisher. The ministry can also directly ask the committee to evaluate any story it finds objectionable. 

The government also retains “emergency powers” to direct any publisher to take down content in the interest of protecting the sovereignty of India, the security of the state or the maintenance of public order. In such cases, it can unilaterally ask for content to be taken down.

To understand how this works, I called Siddharth Varadarajan, founder of The Wire, one of the few Indian publications still standing up to Modi’s government. Varadarajan and his colleagues are routinely harassed by state police forces acting at the behest of their political masters, and rank-and-file members of the Hindu nationalist BJP, who file cases against them, on frivolous pretexts, with far-flung police stations.

“In effect, this gives the government the power to take down pretty much anything that isn’t a cooking recipe,” Varadarajan told me. “These rules are basically weaponizing troll armies to flood publications with thousands of complaints that the publication will have to log and answer. And, if the trolls aren’t happy, they can escalate it to the government, which can order that the article be taken down.”

When I was editor-in-chief of HuffPost India, we found that Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had set up a secretive propaganda company called the Association of Billion Minds to run sophisticated online misinformation campaigns. The BJP also helms a network of thousands of paid and unpaid supporters to influence online conversations and target anyone who criticizes the prime minister or his government. 

In such a scenario, it is all too easy for Modi’s online army to swamp small digital newsrooms with thousands of complaints in a matter of minutes and quickly escalate them to Thakur’s ministry. “And of course this power is completely discretionary,” Varadarajan said. “So, if someone complains against a government-friendly publication, the government can simply look the other way.”

This allows for a curious arm’s-length transaction in which the government outsources censorship duties to the public under the guise of personal empowerment, then censors the press under the guise of “grievance redressal." It also relies on an old trick of populist regimes around the world: creating the belief that citizens and the state are both on the same side, battling the excesses of an out-of-control press, controlled by dangerous and self-interested elites.

Given his track record, Thakur is the perfect man for such a task.  

When the Election Commission of India asked him to explain his hateful sloganeering in Delhi, he said that he was innocent. He only admitted to shouting, “Traitors of the country...” It was, he explained, his supporters who chanted, “Shoot them.”

The post Letter from Delhi: Trolls will enforce India’s new media censorship laws appeared first on Coda Story.

On Sunday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus used a military jet to intercept a commercial airliner and bring home the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich. 

The Ryanair flight was carrying 122 passengers from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Witnesses say no one panicked, except for one young man, who grabbed his head and “began shaking.” 

It is chilling to imagine what went through the mind of 26-year-old Protasevich when he realized that the plane that was supposed to carry him from the safety of one European country to another was, instead, taking him straight to the nation where he stands accused of terrorism — a crime punishable by death in Belarus. 

Protasevich is the founder and former editor of Nexta and Nexta Live, two Telegram channels that played an important role in broadcasting huge opposition protests against the Lukashenko regime. As the president cracked down on the demonstrations with increasing brutality, Protasevich continued his work from the presumed safety of exile in Europe. 

Belarusian state media reported that Lukashenko himself ordered that the plane carrying Protasevich be stopped, so that he could be apprehended. It appears that the country’s authorities used a fake bomb threat and sent a fighter jet to intercept the plane and force it down.

After seven hours grounded in Minsk, the rest of the passengers were allowed to reboard and fly to Vilnius. They watched as Protasevich was taken away. “I will be executed,” were his last words to one of them. 

U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer has described the situation as “dangerous and abhorrent,” while European officials have slammed the Belarusian authorities and threatened “serious consequences.”  It is clear that Lukashenko’s decision to completely abandon international norms has created a new reality for hundreds of dissidents around the world, for whom even crossing the airspace of their countries could now pose a grave threat. 

What lessons other authoritarian leaders will draw from this episode depends on whether Lukashenko is allowed to get away with it.  And Russia appears to be playing a key role in making sure that he does. 

Russia has an uneasy relationship with Belarus, but over the past year, as both governments have faced waves of popular protest, the two nations have stuck by each other. Protasevich’s arrest, which placed 122 other passengers at risk, immediately raised questions about Moscow’s possible involvement. 

The question is important: if Lukashenko acted alone, the arrest of Protasevich could be a sign of desperation. If he acted with Moscow’s blessing, or even support, then this could be a much more serious geopolitical provocation, designed to test the willingness of the West to stand up to Russia ahead of the planned, though not yet scheduled, Putin-Biden summit.  

Russian journalists are investigating a theory that Russian operatives followed Protasevich in Athens, were on the plane and helped to carry out the operation. But there is a simpler, yet insightful barometer of the Kremlin's thinking: its own messaging. 

When things don’t go according to the Kremlin’s plans, Russian media tends to go quiet. Over the past five years, international scandals involving the Russian government — be they hacking revelations, the poisoning of opponents or the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — have been characterized by an almost trademark few days of silence, during which the nation’s propaganda machine takes a deep breath to formulate its response, and only then launches into a full offensive.

But, this time, while European and U.S. politicians voiced their outrage and talked about new sanctions against Lukashenko, Russian state television was immediately on the case, spinning the narrative in the opposite direction. 

On Sunday night, Dmitry Kiselyov, President Vladimir Putin’s “propaganda tsar,” dedicated a 10-minute segment of his flagship show Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) to Belarus.    

Kiselyov set the tone with two main messages about Protasevich’s arrest: first, that the West’s reaction revealed its hypocrisy, particularly in the case of the European Union; second, that there was nothing unusual about what Lukashenko did.

“The Americans arrest anyone they don’t like, anywhere they want,” Kiselyov said, bringing up a gallery of images of Russians who have been detained around the world. At the top of the list was Victor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in Thailand and extradited  to the United States in 2010, where he was convicted on several charges, including weapons trafficking and conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials. 

Kiselyov’s second argument was based entirely on the 2013 case of Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, whose jet was forced to land in Austria after several European countries — pressured by the U.S. — closed their airspace to the plane, which was taking Morales home after a summit in Moscow, following a tip-off that Edward Snowden was on board. 

The story resonated. Within minutes, Twitter lit up with variations on the argument. From trolls to Russian diplomats around the world, a link to the Morales incident was ready to undermine every disapproving tweet about Protasevich.   

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded an international investigation into the “brazen and shocking act,” Dmitry Polyansky, a senior Russian diplomat in the U.S, replied with  #doublestandards and a demand for an investigation into the 2013 “hijacking” of Evo Morales plane.

The message quickly spread beyond the Russian bubble. “Why does the West pretend to be outraged when a nation imitates its gangsterism like the air piracy Belarus engaged in? Belarus didn't forget when the U.S. forced the plane of a head of state, Evo Morales, to land in order to arrest Edward Snowden & got away with it.” tweeted American activist Ajamu Baraka to his 90,000 followers, echoing the thoughts of a number of other influencers. 

Russia uses this kind of whataboutery because it has worked ever since the Cold War. In the words of Peter Pomeranzev, one of the world’s leading disinformation experts, the Kremlin exploits systemic weak spots and inconsistencies in the Western system by “providing a sort of X-ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.” 

The Morales example, is in fact, pertinent, and there would be nothing wrong with pointing out the West’s double standards, were doing so not based on the assumption that two wrongs somehow make a right. Meanwhile, the West has remained tight-lipped regarding its own mistakes. 

Without an appropriate response from the West, the Kremlin is able to use this reliable and familiar strategy to muddy narratives, dampen outrage and plant seeds of doubt. As leaders in the West scramble over the penalties they want to impose on Belarus, Russia’s line is already making moral clarity and decisive action just a bit more elusive and Protasevich’s story easier to shrug off.

The post Opinion: Can Alexander Lukashenko get away with the dramatic arrest of a dissident Belarusian journalist? The answer lies with the West appeared first on Coda Story.

Just a short distance away from the cameras lay barbed-wire-fenced camps, where thousands of people were being held simply for belonging to majority-Muslim ethnic groups. The film’s credits include the Public Security Office of Turpan, a city that operates several such facilities. Calls for an international boycott from activists and advocacy groups followed the film’s release in March.

Despite the public outrage, Beijing’s efforts to maintain an appearance of normality in Xinjiang continue. Recently, a number of Chinese films have been produced in the region, promoting a rigid nationalist ideology and presenting state-sanctioned images of the region and its people.

Among them is “The Wings of Songs,” a lavish musical that premiered in 2019 in China’s capital to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The movie was partly shot in Tacheng, on the border of China and Kazakhstan, an area where at least seven internment camps have been located by satellite imaging. The film promotes national, pan-ethnic unity by showing friendships between young Kazakhs, Uyghurs and people from the nation’s Han majority traveling across a vibrant and colorful region to share their passion for music and dance. 

Commissioned by the Xinjiang regional propaganda department, “The Wings of Songs” was directed by the Uyghur comedian Abdukerim Abliz. That same year, Abliz also co-directed of “Kunlun Brothers”, shot in the region’s south to promote the “pair-up campaign” — an initiative that mandated one million Han civil servants sent to live in Uyghur households, with the aim of encouraging host families to embrace non-traditional, secular lifestyles. 

Both films were produced by the Tianshan film studio. Established in 1959, this state-owned company built a reputation for producing a range of Chinese and Uyghur-language films and employing a diverse staff. However, since the 1980s, it has employed only a handful of Uyghur filmmakers. Now, the overwhelming majority of its employees are Han. The studio’s output perfectly illustrates the compliant role envisioned by the Chinese state for Uyghurs within its nation-building project. It also plays a significant part in shaping national perceptions of Han-Uyghur relations.

The Tianshan studio was primarily created to produce “ethnic minority-themed films,” a cinematic category used to promote national unity within China. 

Its first production, “Two Generations” (1960), depicts Han and Uyghurs united against a common enemy in the Sino-Japanese war, which ran from 1937-1945. Using traditional song and dance to keep audiences entertained, “Analkhan” (1962) promotes the liberation of Uyghur women from feudal life by Han officials from Beijing. 

During the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and aimed to purge all remaining elements of capitalism from Chinese society, most studios were shuttered. Tianshan’s activities resumed in 1979 with “The Guide,” another production venerating Uyghur and Han solidarity against foreign adversaries. 

In these films, all of which are shot in the Mandarin language, the Uyghur region is depicted as unstable, underdeveloped and its people too weak to free themselves from a backward-looking culture dominated by oppressive religious leaders. Only the Han can bring peace, prosperity, and usher them into modernity. 

Uyghurs are portrayed as either uncivilized and violent, or vulnerable and helpless victims. In contrast to characters from the Han majority, considered as the norm or the ordinary, Uyghurs are the “exotic Other” in extravagant outfits. In that sense, Chinese representations of Uyghurs are akin to orientalist images of “natives” in colonial contexts. They also display stereotypes that maintain a racial hierarchy, similar to Hollywood depictions of African-Americans, or Australian depictions of aborigines.

Chinese cinema goes global

In the late 1990s, sweeping economic reforms transformed Chinese cinema into a commercial industry. The Chinese film industry started to engage with Hollywood productions, releasing competitive blockbusters on the international market such as “Hero” or “The House of Flying Daggers” in the early 2000s. Although new regulations led to a diversification of genres and filmmakers, studios were still tasked with upholding the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.

In this new era, movies concerning ethnic minorities shifted focus to ecological and cultural concerns. “Turpan Love Song” (2006), directed by Jin Lini and Shirzat Yaqüp, alternates between Bollywood-style sequences shot in scenic spots and praise of the CCP’s economic and environmental achievements in the region. Cameras repeatedly focus on wind turbines as a symbol of green development.

The film also highlights the preservation of cultural heritage in several heavily exoticized song and dance scenes, performed by actors in traditional dress. Uyghurs are portrayed as benefiting from Beijing’s development policies and warmly welcoming Han soldiers. The last scene shows a newlywed couple traveling on a modern coach, past a vista of wind farms, the CCP’s emblem shining on the groom’s military cap.

“Maimaiti’s 2008,” directed by Yaqüp, was shot in the same area. In the film, a soccer coach starts a local youth team and convinces parents to help their children to “pursue their dream” and attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. 

Uyghur villagers are portrayed as ignorant and uneducated, living in a barren landscape and traveling by horse-drawn carriages. At first, they do not understand what either soccer or the Olympics are, but eventually embrace the importance of the event and the game as an aspirational, international sport.

Their children, on the other hand, represent not only hope for a better future, they are also ideal citizens. While there are no significant Han characters, the coach functions as a link between the Uyghur village and the state, reminding his charges that “they are all Chinese.” 

The members of his team take the names of Han soccer stars and look forward to futures as bakers or traditional drum makers. Their ambitions show that carefully selected elements of Uyghur culture, such as food and music, are tolerated within a Han-dominated nation. Islam, however, is rarely mentioned in contemporary cinematic depictions of Uyghurs.

In the same vein, “Shewket’s Summer” (2012), directed by Pan Yu, follows a young Han singer, Luobin, who longs to escape from a hectic life in the capital. In Xinjiang, he meets young Shewket and his father, Tahir, a Uyghur folk musician who helps him recapture his creative muse and collect songs to be recorded for his Beijing-based label.

The film appears to be loosely based on the real-life story of composer Wang Luobin, who, until his death in 1996, was renowned for his Mandarin-language interpretations of Xinjiang-style music. Wang was accused of appropriating folk songs from the region and selling them for his own benefit. 

Although “Shewket’s Summer,” like other films of its kind, seeks to promote the Chinese state's vision of pan-ethnic and peaceful coexistence, it actually underscores a reality in which representations of Uyghurs rest almost exclusively in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The post Chinese cinema’s push to produce the ideal Uyghur citizen appeared first on Coda Story.

Remarkably, Russia is a glaring exception to this wave of self-scrutiny. 

On television and online, there has been a near total absence of public conversation around endemic and pervasive discrimination against minorities. This silence is especially conspicuous among Russia’s most prominent political liberals — people who many in the West hope will one day replace Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime and who are no strangers to state oppression and police violence. They have responded to the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States with ridicule and rancor, a reflection of the unchecked racism pervasive within Russia’s chattering classes. 

Among Russia’s intelligentia, public figures have expressed disdain for the protests, concern over property damage, anger against Black people, and have seemed to welcome a harsh police crackdown. At best, a lot of liberal Russians have sounded like far-right American commentators who have attacked George Floyd’s character and accused the Black Lives Matter movement of hypocrisy, over-reaction, and insincerity. At worst, their op-eds and public posts have been overtly racist and have cheered-on police aggression. 

Russians have decades of experience of police brutality, but they have shown very little solidarity with scenes of violence unleashed against those demonstrating for civil liberty and social justice. Americans, of course, have emphatically not resolved their widespread and systemic racism. However, Russians have never even tried to significantly address the deeply ingrained racism towards ethnic and religious minorities in their own country. The consequence is currently on display on Russian TV and Russian social media: a ferocious hostility to a mass movement against police violence and for social equity. 

Citing racist posts on Instagram, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has reported that the carmaker Audi has fired Ksenia Sobchak, its high-profile advertising ambassador in Russia. A 2018 Russian presidential candidate (and rumored to the goddaughter of Vladimir Putin), Sobchak is one of the most famous people in Russia. She all but shed tears over the broken windows of a Hermès boutique in New York. Sobchak attended the Moscow street protests of 2011-2012 and was a vocal part of the opposition. Now, however, she has responded to the BLM protests by announcing that she resents affirmative action as a “quota” system that takes university admissions from “talented white guys” in favor of black recipients.

Sobchak has also cited successful African-Americans such as Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey as evidence that there is no systemic racism in the U.S., adding that lazy, unsuccessful people, who go to protests “would always find someone to blame” for their misery.

To be sure, the country’s liberals are not monolithic, and on social media many Russians have expressed their disgust with the racism coming from some of the country’s leading commentariat — who are not representative of the full breadth of Russia’s opinion writers. Furthermore, Russian people are not expected to be experts on the complicated relationships in American society. American history is taught at Russian schools only in passing, and Russians, with a mature media and entertainment industry, don’t consume a lot of English-language media. 

But what Russians do know very well is state-sanctioned rights abuses, including the dispersing of peaceful protests. In Russia, it’s the political opposition and liberals who suffer from that most often, precisely because the Russian government publicly targets and discriminates against them — condemning them as second-class citizens and “the enemy of the state.”

While so far at least, very few Russian liberals have spoken up against police brutality and racism, an exception has been the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. 

Navalny has fully supported “the acts of civil disobedience” by Americans standing up against rights violations — noting, however, that police abuse in the U.S. is “a million times lighter” than what the police do in Russia. But Navalny also has a documented history of using racist epithets against Muslims and other minorities in Russia and has associated with Russian ethno-nationalists. 

Russia is a country where racial difference routinely matters more than liberal ideals. Russian authorities often mete out abuse to people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Russians frequently discriminate against people who look like they come from those regions. In Russia, where intolerance against the “other” is almost never rebuked by people in authority, the Black Lives Matter movement has catalyzed little in the way of self-reflection.

Instead, in Russia’s leading independent newspaper, prominent journalist Yulia Latynina mocked the New York protests as a supposed “rebellion against the system” and that they are a pretext for robbing TVs and Gucci products. While the economist and a frequent commentator on English-language media Vladislav Inozemtsev wrote that George Floyd’s past somehow helps to justify his murder and reproached those “who condemn racism” while omitting his old arrest record. Inozemtsev, who resides in Maryland, denounced rioting and looting and claimed that protests aimed to assert “the supremacy of ethnic minorities over the majority.”

Well-known writer and satirist Viktor Shenderovich declared the grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement unimportant when compared to the Holocaust. “Black people are not being burned in chambers,” said Shenderovich, who is a frequent visitor to the United States. He has gone on to announce that if there is racism in the U.S., it is not systemic.

Putin’s response, meanwhile, has been to tout the Soviet Union’s history of support for Black people. During the Cold War the Kremlin capitalized on America’s treatment of its Black citizens to highlight U.S. hypocrisy on civil liberties. But Putin, who has long felt a deep unease over any street-level protest, has also characterized the Black Lives Matter movement as an expression of “radical nationalism and extremism.”

Some prominent Russians have dissented from the liberal anti-BLM orthodoxy, and have searched for explanations. For example, Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago, has said it is that Russians are ignorant of the realities of structural racism in the United States.

But parochialism alone does not explain liberal Russians’ vehement reaction to America’s racial reckoning. Race is central to understanding how Russians understand themselves. Ethnic Russians make up about 80% of the population, yet almost 200 ethnicities live in a country that places little value on tolerance, pluralism, and other democratic niceties, a country where even the liberal elite is horrified by a global movement for racial equity and justice. 

Russian liberals’ condemnation of the Black Lives Matter movement is especially tragic because the movement offers a vision of how to reorder a society centered on universal values of equality and anti-racism. For a country whose aggression toward its neighbors is often grounded in intolerance toward ethnic, racial, and religious difference, the BLM movement is a door into an alternative reality, a glimpse of how to build a country that will not harass the rest of the world, for once.

Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Epsilon/Getty Images. Graphic by Anastasia Gviniashvili

The post Putin’s liberal foes reject Black Lives Matter appeared first on Coda Story.

Explaining its decision, the State Department cited a global surge in far-right terrorism since 2015, including last year’s mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a string of similar attacks on Muslims, Jews and people of immigrant backgrounds within the U.S. itself. Nathan A Sales, the department’s counter-terrorism coordinator, praised Donald Trump’s leadership on the issue — a claim likely to raise eyebrows, given that the U.S. president frequently uses far-right rhetoric and has sought to downplay the severity of white supremacist violence on American soil. 

Like other similar groups elsewhere, the RIM combines real-world violence — it has reportedly recruited volunteers to fight alongside Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine — with heavy use of social media to broaden its reach. According to U.S.-based think tank the Soufan Center, the group distributed propaganda videos in Russian and English via YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, in order to spread racist material about Jews and Ukrainians, promote the use of weapons and encourage followers to see the West as an enemy. Immediately after April 6, the RIM tried to use its new-found notoriety as an online recruiting tool, but most of its social media accounts have since been removed. 

It is questionable how far the group’s reach ever extended. Its page on the popular Russian social network Vkontakte, which was still active as of April 14, lists a relatively low 14,000 followers. Although the RIM does not appear to have gathered a large following, it has apparently made connections with like-minded individuals and groups elsewhere. According to the State Department, two Swedish neo-Nazis who visited RIM’s St Petersburg training camp went on to commit several attacks in their home country, including the bombing of a migrant center in Gothenburg. 

What seems more important to the U.S. is the organization’s geopolitical significance. It is telling that the country’s first international move against far-right extremism targets a group that has intervened in the war against Ukraine, one of its allies. Reports in U.S. media have suggested that one aim of the new policy is to pressure the Russian government into cracking down on the RIM.

It is less clear, however, how this helps address the global problem of mass killings by right-wing extremists — which is what the State Department said it aims to do. In the past decade, a range of far-right activists have exploited patchy regulation and freedom-of-speech concerns to spread racist and anti-democratic material on social media and other online platforms. Some have formed groups that directly advocate violence or seek to carry out attacks: this month, police in Estonia arrested a suspect they believe to be the ringleader of Feuerkrieg Division, the local branch of an international neo-Nazi network coordinated through encrypted online forums. They discovered he was a 13-year-old boy. 

On the internet and on social media, the relationship between ideology and violence can be pronounced. Many of the most devastating far-right attacks have been carried out by individuals who have immersed themselves in a broader, transnational online ecosystem and hope that their actions will inspire others to commit similar crimes. This model was established by Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011. 

Recent technology gives this a new intensity, with a number of perpetrators — in Christchurch, or at the synagogue shooting in Halle, Germany, last year — adopting the aesthetics of video gamers as they livestream their attacks. The researcher Julia Ebner describes this as the “gamification” of terrorism. Elsewhere, individuals without a previous history of far-right activity have been radicalized by material found online. Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of people outside a Muslim cultural center in London in 2017, killing one person, spent three weeks before the attack seeking out anti-Muslim propaganda on the internet. 

Owing to differences in local laws and regulations, it is difficult for governments to tackle the international proliferation of such material. The long-running U.S.-based neo-Nazi website Stormfront, for instance, has in the past benefited from free speech protections under the country’s First Amendment. Germany, by contrast, recently passed legislation restricting online hate speech, with large fines for tech companies that fail to promptly remove harmful content. And when one route to the public is closed off, far-right activists frequently find another. A joint investigation by The Atlantic and ProPublica recently found that white supremacists banned from other platforms have turned to Amazon Kindle’s self-publishing service to disseminate their ideas.

In the long run, this ongoing process of identifying and blocking outlets where far-right propaganda is spread may prove to be the most effective way of limiting the damage it causes. The British anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate talks of digital deplatforming: pressuring social media companies to enforce existing laws, or revise their community standards, so that extremist voices can be marginalized, if not shut down entirely. A more convincing effort by the U.S. to tackle far-right violence would address these issues — not least because most of the dominant global social media companies are based there. 

But regulating tech and enforcing the law, however justified, will not be sufficient. Far-right ideology feeds on the prejudices and the fears of wider society. We are witnessing its resurgence because politics in many countries has become dominated by individuals who seek to mobilize those same fears. A report last year by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based counter-extremism think tank, found that Trump himself had helped spread the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, an idea said to have motivated several mass shooters in the U.S. and elsewhere. This wider problem can ultimately only be addressed through a democratic political challenge to right-wing nationalism.

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I am a neurologist and I have studied phenomena like this all over the world. I visited El Carmen de Bolivar to try to understand why the girls weren’t getting better. What I discovered shocked me. It turned out that the town had fallen prey to self-proclaimed “experts,” many from overseas, who had contacted the affected families after hearing about the case in the media. Many had no medical expertise, and each brought their own theories and diagnoses — often based on bad science. Through my research I learned that these supposed experts had convinced the girls that they had been poisoned. But the appropriate medical tests showed no such thing. 

The families in El Carmen de Bolivar were mirroring a wider trend in Colombia, where decades of institutional failings, drug-related corruption and violence have eroded trust in traditional authority figures, including even doctors. By contrast, they were open to the advice of strangers and welcomed their cures as a Godsend. It is an amplified version of the same phenomenon worldwide — where so many people now prefer to hear the views of opinionated amateurs or ill-informed do-gooders rather than those with genuine expertise. I encounter the result all the time in my work as a neurologist. At least once a week, I have a patient who dismisses my opinion in favor of something they have read on the internet or in a magazine. 

I am terrified of the Covid-19 pandemic. But I am also hoping something good can come of it — that it could make people trust scientists and other experts once again. It is telling that even President Trump has had to turn to experts as the pandemic has spread, after initially trying to play down the threat to Americans.  

Thanks to the internet, there has been a huge shift in how people learn about health issues. Not so long ago, advice on how to react to a pandemic would have come from a small range of mainstream media outlets. Now we can look things up for ourselves. If we face serious illness, being able to research symptoms and possible diagnoses and treatments online can offer a feeling of control. But there are so many sources of information it can be hard to pick out the good advice from the chaff — and so it can also exacerbate fear. 

Similarly, the Colombian families I talked to felt empowered with the advice they received from outsiders, but have ended up discounting the diagnosis of the real experts who could actually help the girls.

We live in a world overloaded with information, which also favors the loudest voices over the most knowledgeable. And with a little technical language, it is easier than ever to make fake or questionable science sound plausible. Commercial interests are withheld. One “doctor” or “scientist” might seem very like another to those not in the field. Most of the advisers who went to El Carmen de Bolivar called themselves doctors, but their doctorates were not in medicine. Many people may not know the difference.

It is easy to understand this loss of trust. In Colombia, the political instability of its recent past has given people good reason to doubt authority figures. The same problem can be seen elsewhere around the world. The British doctor Andrew Wakefield had a disastrous effect worldwide spreading dangerous misinformation about the supposed risk of the MMR vaccine causing autism — discrediting the profession in the process. America’s opioid drug crisis has cratered trust in pharmaceutical companies. And we have given up being surprised by populist politicians getting away with half-truths and lies. Who can blame people for being cynical?

It is also that much harder for real experts to maintain people’s confidence. Whether they specialize in viral outbreaks or other matters, they are held to an impossible standard. Inevitably, they will be wrong sometimes. But when they are, this is often used against them, to argue that they can’t be trusted. There is no such risk for the naysayer shouting from their social media soapbox, stirring a vortex of disinformation. Once they are proven wrong, they can simply move on to the next campaign. And the Covid-19 outbreak has proved fertile ground for such behavior, with many trying to dismiss the reaction as mass hysteria.

Some have raised concerns that the economic consequences will end up doing more harm than the virus itself, with businesses worldwide reeling under the impact. In my work I have seen many lives ruined by fear of the effects of disease rather than by the disease itself, so I am mindful of the risk. But the hard truth is that there is a legitimate reason to fear the Covid-19 pandemic.

To those who have tried to claim that the media have needlessly stoked anxiety with their coverage of the outbreak – in some cases even saying it has been a conspiracy to undermine Trump — I would say some anxiety is absolutely essential right now. I too have done an oversized grocery shop — because I can see the trends mean the situation could still get a lot worse. It is precisely because of people’s instinctive suspicions that they have taken so long to take the threat seriously. When news of an imminent lockdown in Northern Italy leaked out, some people fled the region before anybody could stop them. That was a selfish act that almost certainly heightened the risk both to themselves and others — and probably led to even more deaths. 

The same kind of sentiments are at work in the Colombian town of El Carmen de Bolivar. Faux experts have convinced the children that they have some mystery disease. But this hasn’t helped the girls — and the families have yet to recognize it.

The post Knowledge is the vaccine for coronavirus hysteria appeared first on Coda Story.

Were we too late? This was our first question at Coda when we began thinking about tracking down the remaining Gulag survivors. Why were we doing this now?

From the very beginning our goal was not to create another oral history project about the Gulag. A library of documentary and nonfiction work on the Gulag already exists, though by no means extensive enough weighted against the scale of Soviet repressions. I was interested in a story happening now, in this era: I wanted to hear from the eyewitnesses of Soviet authoritarianism on what it is like to see their past being rewritten today. No one has ever been held accountable for running the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps integral to Soviet economic planning that imprisoned or exiled over 28 million people from 1918 to 1987. Instead, the Russian government is now airbrushing and glorifying its Soviet past.

This is a time of democratic backsliding around the world. A new generation of authoritarian leaders are interested in re-defining national identity and making sure history books serve their new political narratives. In China, the government campaigns to erase Uyghur people and their culture. In India, a punitive populist movement recasts India as a Hindu, rather than a secular, nation. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan eulogizes the country’s Ottoman history as he deploys troops to former Ottoman provinces like Libya and northern Syria. 

In fact, no country is immune to instrumentalizing its history. In the UK, the legacy of the British empire is linked with Brexit politics. In the U.S., the violent attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia stoked fears that old Confederate monuments could become new flashpoints for violence, with some removing statues in the dead of night under emergency orders.

As a newsroom we’ve tracking rewriting history stories around the world to better understand how distorting the past is serving regimes today as part of our disinformation coverage.

That’s what brought us to Irina Verblovskaya’s living room. As we set up the lights and cameras, Irina told us what Gulag survivors would repeat to our team during shoots across Russia and Crimea, Belarus, and Latvia. They described the intense interest in their Gulag stories in the eighties and early nineties when the Soviet Union fell. Many documents from the defunct KGB were made available to the public almost overnight. Publishers were printing camp manuscripts and new textbooks were selling out.

But then state police forces began reassembling into a new agency, the FSB, in the mid-nineties. As its influence grew, archives closed and interest waned. Vladimir Putin, elected in 2000 after heading the FSB, brought along a cadre of security officials propelled into senior cabinet positions. Today, many are still in government or have transitioned to powerful positions in finance and industry.

Putin’s government wasn’t interested in reckoning with Soviet-era crimes or setting up Nuremberg-style courts.

“They want it to become part of the tapestry of the past that has no special significance, no special meaning and no special lessons,” Anne Applebaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag: A History,” said to me.

“And they certainly don't want anyone drawing lessons from history or looking at the past and saying, ‘We don't want to repeat that so how do we avoid it in the present?’ They don't want people thinking like that.”

In Russia there’s strong evidence this campaign has succeeded: close to half of young Russians say they have never heard of the Stalin-era purges, known as the Great Terror. And Stalin himself has never been more popular: in 2019 70% of Russians responded that they approve of Stalin’s role in history — a record high.

One of Russia’s only museums located at a former Gulag camp — Perm-36, the last camp Gorbachev closed down in 1987 — was labeled a “foreign agent” and taken over by local government officials in 2015. The museum’s new head curated an updated exhibition focusing on the prisoners’ contribution to timber production in the WWII war effort rather than on the horrific camp conditions or absurd charges which landed people there.

The process of rewriting Gulag history most often takes the form of de-emphasizing the horrors of Soviet authoritarianism, and deflecting with patriotic WWII stories. It’s happening at the highest levels of the Russian government: such as Putin’s complaint of  “excessive demonization” of Stalin as “an attack on the Soviet Union and Russia.”

It’s also happening on the local level, such as the bizarre case of police officers dressing up in KGB uniforms for a photoshoot in southern Russia last year celebrating local “heroes.” There are more sinister incidents, such as Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev, aged 63, held in police custody for over three years on what human rights activists say are trumped up charges of child abuse being used to terminate his tireless work uncovering mass grave sites.

Applebaum, who met with Dmitriev while researching her book, called his arrest “appalling” and a “profound reversal” in attitudes towards Gulag history. “This is somebody who should be a local community hero,” she told me.

The silencing of voices who call for a closer examination of the Soviet past is happening in parallel with a broad crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Russia. As our team filmed and edited the episodes in Generation Gulag, Coda was also covering stories of journalists, activists and peaceful protestors arrested in Russia last year. Moscow saw some of the largest protests in a decade against fraudulent local elections and the mass arrests of protestors. These were the events forming the context of this series for our Moscow-based production team. They intentionally chose a different series name for our Russian-language audiences, which translates to “The Repressions Don’t End.”

Oksana Baulina, Coda’s journalist who interviewed the majority of the survivors for the series, told me that she directly links the “unraveling of democracy and return to authoritarianism in Russia” to the lack of “national realization and repentance” for Soviet crimes.

Irina was only kidding about our tardiness. As we set up the equipment she quietly chuckled to herself at her own joke, adding how she would have been far more attractive on camera ten years ago. But she understood very well why we were there, speaking to her now:

“Human individuality isn’t valued here. Human life isn’t valued here. We’re counted in numbers and in masses and not as individuals.”

During our interview for the episode “Love at first sight,” survivor Galina Nelidova was emotional when describing her disgust at watching the legacy of the Soviet Union rehabilitated today on Russian state television: “I find it shameful that people still don’t know the whole truth,” she told us. “Even when I hear [a Russian politician] saying, ‘What can you do, a few thousand people were arrested back then.’ But we know that it was millions.”

She also specifically referenced one of Moscow’s most notorious prisons called Butyrka which is still in use and holds a number of political prisoners arrested during the 2019 protests. “To this day in Butyrka there are unmarked mass graves of people killed by firing squads,” she reminds viewers.

Another survivor, Olga Shirokaya from “An officer’s daughter,” spoke to Coda’s Oksana about the challenges of holding people accountable decades later for crimes committed under Soviet rule. How does a nation organize trials if there were also “millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards,” asked Shirokaya. “These millions were also our people.”

Latvia is a perfect example of what that process could look like, though on a smaller scale. Last year the government suddenly declassified KGB documents listing 4,141 people as Cold War-era informants. This sent shock waves across the country of just under two million as prominent figures and relatives were publicly outed. A number denied their involvement on social media, others threatened to file defamation suits, some accepted that this was simply a time when people faced terrible choices.

From my childhood memories visiting relatives in St. Petersburg, there were always stories. I remember the gossip about a neighbor who was a former camp guard, stories told about a family friend who worked as a conductor on a train which offloaded prisoners in Siberia at a stop simply named “Winter.” 

But even after months of work on this series, I still struggle to wrap my head around the sheer magnitude of the Gulag experience. While researching and traveling in the region for Generation Gulag I was struck again and again by how many lives were touched by the system.

In one way or another, “we all have the Gulag in our homes” my colleague Semen Kvasha would tell me. It’s not uncommon for families to be split between relatives who did time in the Gulag and those who helped administer the massive camps. Over seven decades of communist rule the perpetrators also became the victims and vice versa. 

Gulag survivor Azari Plisetsky, featured in the episode “The Dancer,” spoke directly to this: “Everyone must know the truth about these terrifying repressions, about the genocide of our own people which happened during our lifetime, especially the younger generation.”

Over the course of several months, our team interviewed more than twenty survivors. We felt a sense of urgency to find people and speak to them before their stories slipped away. Sometimes, we didn’t make it in time: two of our interview subjects, Vladimir Rodionov and Petr Meshkov, passed away just days before we were scheduled to film with them. “When I was searching for people to interview, I constantly felt that we were running behind,” our reporter Oksana Baulina said. “I feel guilty about the two of them: that their stories remain untold; that we were too late.”

The survivors we managed to interview for Generation Gulag — Irina, Galina, Azari, Olga, all of them — understand why especially now their stories matter.

The post Generation Gulag: The Kremlin is airbrushing away one of the darkest chapters of the Russian past appeared first on Coda Story.

His 22 students sat in rows discussing the text. Then, a male, conservative-leaning student began to speak.

“I don’t trust the media,” Samet remembers him saying. “You’ve shown me, right here in this text, how it is that facts get manipulated. I don’t believe now what I’m seeing in the New York Times.”

Another student, a progressive, agreed.

Samet was floored. “What the heck just happened?” he thought. He was trying to help students understand how journalists deliver facts and present reality. Now his teaching methods have revealed that students consider mainstream outlets like the Times as propaganda.

“That’s not the response I was expecting,” Samet said. Then he added: “But it makes perfect sense.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of humanities and social science scholarship punctured the idea of objective truth. Scholars like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway traced the ways that the truth wasn’t “out there,” but manufactured by researchers, academics, and journalists. The idea was known as “social constructivism,” or simply postmodernism. It took humanities disciplines like literature, anthropology and some social sciences by storm.

But in the past decade, and more notably since 2016, American political conservatives have unsheathed a bastardized form of social constructivism. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway defended “alternative facts,” while his lawyer Rudy Giuliani has claimed that “truth isn’t truth.” Outraged commentators say we now live in a “post-truth” age, and some have found a culprit for the upheaval: academics. Two recent books, Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth and Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth both blame “post-modern” academics for helping erode the idea of shared reality. Kakutani writes that the constructivists “paved the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers.” Meanwhile, in The New Yorker alt-right troll Mike Cernovich cited postmodernist theory to defend his online misinformation campaigns.

Academics in the humanities dismiss the idea that they somehow caused global post-truth disruptions. Yet a growing number of them worry about how to teach constructivism in an era where “alternative facts” have become partisan talking points and disbelief in data about climate change and public health is hastening global catastrophe.

The idea that knowledge is shaped by people and politics is likely obvious to most people. What sets social constructivism apart is its focus on how “truth” is related to power. Constructivism is a subtle, rigorous set of ideas. But it has been hard to teach. Students haven’t always absorbed the subtlety, and instead digested a distorted summary: “there is no truth.”

Professor Latour, who helped invent social constructivism in the late 20th century, vocalized these qualms in a famous 2004 essay. “Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth,” he wrote. “While dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.”

Recovering from his shock of his students’ views of The New York Times, Samet had a similar thought.

“We’re letting students into the world with a worldview that can become deeply cynical very, very quickly,” he said. “I think most of our students just get to that point. And that’s where we abandon them.”

Colten White, 22, a senior studying English and Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a similar experience with cynicism. When he first began studying social-constructivist literature, his interpretation echoed Samet’s students.

“I certainly had overly simplistic views of critiquing realism,” he said. “I had perhaps overly pessimistic views about our ability to know empirical reality.”

He says it took time and deeper study to recognize empirical reality more strongly.  While White doesn’t blame constructivist professors for the “post-truth” moment, he does agree that some academics have been careless with constructivist language. And that carelessness may have had an impact.

“Before the last couple of years, I think [academics would] say ‘there’s no real impact to someone misconstruing what I’m saying.’ I think the last couple of years has shown that there is,” White said.

There are signs that professors are beginning to take their role in the “post-truth” environment more seriously.

Natalia Roudakova is an anthropologist who studies the decline of truth in modern Russia. Just a few years ago, she said, this made her an outsider among her colleagues because she treated “truth” as a positive thing, something to be defended. When she would tell colleagues about her research, they used to immediately default to constructivist talking points.

“Colleagues would say, ‘Well, what do you mean by truth? What kind of truth? Whose truth?’ ” Roudakova said. But once the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign got underway, and “fake news” became a household term, Roudakova said her colleagues began to understand her research. The idea of “truth” as something to take seriously began to make sense to them.

Professor Latour, one of the founding fathers of constructivism, sees its study as a tool to help society move beyond the post-truth era. In a new book, Down to Earth, he writes that “truth” appears broken because most citizens have lost touch with the institutions that produce facts. To repair trust, he says, it’s not enough to tell people they are wrong. “It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes,” he wrote.

Back in the classroom, Samet is busy revising his teaching methods to cope with a cynical mindset among students.

He’s added material from Roudakova’s new book, Losing Pravda, as a way for them to see how Russians dealt with their own social meltdowns in the last decade.

He’s now teaching with a new goal in mind: “To steer students away from that kind of cynical reading of media and of the world around them.”

The post Can we make Truth great again? appeared first on Coda Story.

A Kremlin spokesperson swiftly dismissed the protesters’ concerns as a “misconception,” and claimed internet freedom was safe. But then, this week, President Putin signed two laws restricting online speech: one imposed fines on fake news and the other prohibited “disrespect for authorities and state symbols.” Both are seen as censorious.

In other words, Russia’s government is tightening its control over the internet. And in this push, Russia is not alone.

Russia and a set of less-than-democratic countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have certain aspirations for the internet. Domestically, these countries want control and think governments should get to decide what information flows across their borders. Globally, they want governments, not companies and NGOs, to be in charge of the internet.

Taken together, these goals are an attempt to align cyberspace with national borders, so they are sometimes dubbed the “cyber sovereignty” doctrine. The term comes from China, whose internet censorship system, called the Great Firewall, is the vanguard of the global cyber-sovereignty push. In 2014, Chinese internet czar Lu Wei wrote an op-ed titled “Cyber Sovereignty Must Rule Global Internet.” Under Lu’s leadership, China’s cyberspace agency released a much-ridiculed musical ode to cybersecurity, which included the line: “A cyberpower: Where the Internet is, so is the glorious dream.”

The vision of effective cyber-sovereignty is expanding to new horizons. A November report from Freedom House examined 65 countries and found since the previous year that internet freedom declined in 26 of them. Chinese-style “digital authoritarianism,” meanwhile, is growing in influence as China exports both its surveillance known-how and technology.

And even Western democracies, once more-or-less committed to the open internet, are increasingly mirroring cyber-sovereignty talking points.

Early Setback

The Chinese model wasn’t always on the rise. Just six years ago, cyber-sovereignty was dealt a major setback when China and its allies tried to stage a “takeover of the internet.” At a 2012 meeting of the International Telecommunications Union, Russia, China, and a group of countries tried to pass a mostly symbolic resolution, one that would have endorsed certain cyber-sovereignty principles and given the United Nations greater power over the internet. But large tech companies and the U.S. Congress made strong statements condemning the move, and the U.S. and European countries refused to sign.

Without their signatures, the effort failed to move the needle in favor of cyber-sovereignty. Had it succeeded, China and its digital policy allies would have helped resolve a longtime problem for authoritarian regimes, which is that nobody is quite in charge of the internet. In its allocation of power, the web pays no particular respect to the nation-state; governments administer the internet together with companies, NGOs, academics, and other parties, an arrangement that severely curtails the influence of states.

For example, the Chinese government has taken its embarrassing cybersecurity anthem off the internet, but copies remain online. These copies are stored on websites registered by ICANN, the international organization of domain names. If governments like China had power over this organization, they could make these websites disappear entirely. For advocates of internet freedom, this is the nightmare scenario.

“If [governments] are in charge of this organization, then they would definitely think about 'How can I regulate content at the global level and take websites down?’” said Ferzaneh Badiei, an internet governance researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For cyber-sovereignty advocates, on the other hand, giving governments final say over the global internet is the ultimate goal.

Grassroots Sovereignty

After the 2012 effort to bring the internet under U.N. control seemed to go nowhere, the cyber-sovereignty debate has shifted to domestic politics. A recent report from New America, a non-partisan think tank, concluded that nations have realized that “the battle today is over how states should model their internets domestically."

Accordingly, rather than relying on international treaties, China has begun exporting its internet censorship regime to other countries, changing the internet from the bottom up. According to Freedom House, at least 36 governments have received closed-door Chinese trainings on “new media and information management.” These include Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. The content of these trainings is unknown, but after Vietnamese officials were trained in 2017, Vietnam passed Chinese-style cyber legislation, in 2018. There is also evidence that some countries, like Uganda, have used Chinese-made software to monitor their local internets, ostensibly to fight crime.

This evangelism helps legitimize China’s authoritarian internet approach, solidifying its approach to governance.

“The new international ideological battle is authoritarianism versus liberal democracy,” said New America cybersecurity analyst Robert Morgus, framing China’s cyber-evangelism as a matter of soft power. “Spreading an authoritarian model for the internet will help spread authoritarian approaches.”

Just as China has largely been training and equipping developing countries, there are growing signs that liberal Western democracies are warming to internet control. The New America report contained data showing that the cluster of countries with open internets and less government intervention has begun moving just in the past several years “towards a more statist and closed approach to the internet.”

This puts numbers on something analysts had already suggested: Chinese- and Russian-style paranoia about unrestricted online discourse is beginning to resonate in the West.

“Cyber 9/11”

In his 2017 book The Darkening Web, cyber policy expert Alexander Klimburg writes that “the ability to define information as a weapon is the ultimate goal” of cyber-sovereignty advocates. Because if information is a weapon, censorship is a legitimate matter of national security.

As a side effect of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, this effort has mostly succeeded. Digital information warfare is now a hot topic, and a legible threat, among Western elites. This was evident when Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking in 2016 as a “cyber 9/11,” or when Robert Mueller began to indict Russian citizens for crimes adjacent to internet trolling.

In this atmosphere, some Western democracies are, like their authoritarian peers, seeking  more control. In a speech at 2018’s Inter-Governmental Forum for internet governance in Paris, an institution that has generally respected the limited role of governments in the internet, French President Emmanuel Macron, who faced an email hack in the final days of his presidential campaign, painted cyberspace as a dangerous realm.

“Today, when I look at our democracies, the Internet is much better used by those on the extremes,” Macron said to a packed room. “It is used more for hate speech or dissemination of terrorist content than by many others.” He then appeared to call for a government-led crackdown on the internet’s worst tendencies.

Badiei, the internet governance expert, attended the Paris conference and said many in the room were shocked by Macron’s language. “If this speech was made by an oppressive regime leader, people would have walked out,” she said. It is “concerning when the president of a democratic country insists that the internet should be regulated providing similar reasons to that of oppressive regimes.”

Hans Klein, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, attended both the French conference and a state-sponsored internet conference in China. He observed that both meetings echoed the “same concerns” about “the need for greater state involvement.”

This is not to say that Macron has been won over by Chinese propaganda. Kieron O’Hara, a computer science professor and expert on internet governance, says Western democracies are merely converging with China and Russia on common fears. This leads to a shared affinity for something like an “authoritarian internet” model.

“In fact, maybe ‘authoritarian internet’ wasn't even the best name for it,” O’Hara said. “Maybe ‘paternalistic internet’ might be a better name. And of course, paternalism appeals to everybody.”

The post The global rise of Internet sovereignty appeared first on Coda Story.

Coda Story shares their outrage and calls for the end of her persecution and a halt of government attacks on press freedom in the Philippines. We stand with Ressa as she confronts a clearly ludicrous allegation of trespassing “cyber-libel” laws that were enacted and applied to her retroactively.

Government harassment of Ressa and the journalists at Rappler has been building for years, apparently as retaliation for the new site's relentless coverage of the thousands of extrajudicial killings rampant in President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign against the country’s illegal drug trade. Ressa has been targeted for financial crime prosecutions and her editors have long endured vicious verbal attacks, the revocation of press credentials, and acts of intimidation such as the leaving of a black funeral wreath on an editor’s front door.

None of this has halted Ressa's courageous work building a crusading, first-rate news organization or her team’s ardor for their defense of a free press. Ressa has been justifiably recognized recently with a number of honors. She won the 2018 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award given by the Committee to Protect Journalists and was named last year a Time Magazine person of the year. The acclaim comes after spending decades holding the powerful to account in the Philippines.

Recently, Coda has partnered with Rappler to launch coverage of ‘authoritarian tech’ –stories about the people, companies, policies and technologies enabling the world’s creeping authoritarianism, especially focused on countries like the Philippines in the Global South.

During this partnership, working with Coda on our editorial collaboration, Ressa and her team were under intense legal pressure from the Philippine government. Yet throughout, they have been singularly dedicated to their journalism mission. “In every conversation we’ve had recently, Maria would rush through answers to questions about her situation as though it’s some irritating minutia she had to get through to talk about what really mattered to her – stories, investigations, and trying to figure out the dynamics of what she described to me as 'the global assault on truth,'” said Natalia Antelava, Coda’s editor in chief. 

We call on the end of persecution against Ressa, the attempts to muzzle the journalism generated at Rappler, and the attacks on press freedoms in the Philippines and around the world. Violence against journalists, censorship, Kafkaesque legal proceedings against media executives, and press repression are on the rise globally, from murders of investigative journalists in Slovakia and Malta, mass imprisonment of journalists in Turkey, to severe media repression in China and Russia and a stark erosion of the media freedom environment in the United States.

Denied immediate bail, Ressa spent at least one night in jail. It should be her last.

The post The Deplorable Arrest of Maria Ressa appeared first on Coda Story.

“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.”

I had joined a guided tour of the Nazis’ largest extermination camp, and by this point the horror of the place was crushing.

On either side of me were the ruins of the two largest gas chambers with their attached crematoria, and the pits where they dumped the ashes. Auschwitz-Birkenau is actually two separate camps, and the tour began with several hours in the claustrophobic barracks and dungeons of the original concentration camp. Some of the barrack rooms have been turned into shrine-like exhibits of the belongings the Nazis stole from each family once they had stepped off the trains. Most disturbing of all is a room filled with mounds of human hair, cropped from each victim for use in stuffing mattresses and pillows. Here and there, little girls’ ponytails poke out from the mass.

As I stood in front of the memorial plaques, silent like everyone else, I thought of the arguments about the details of the Holocaust and why so many still doubt what happened here. And I thought that Auschwitz is not only a warning to humanity. It’s also a monument to facts, and the sanctity of the truth.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here, in accordance with the evidence they have gathered.

The plaques you see today, inscribed with the figure of “about one and a half million” murdered, haven’t always been there. If I had visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in the 1980s, I would have seen another set of plaques, saying that "four million" people had died here — describing them simply as the “victims” of Nazi genocide, with no mention of their identities.

That figure of four million was conjured up by Poland’s then-communist rulers. Auschwitz is in southern Poland, and they wanted to emphasize Nazi atrocities against communists, particularly their own people. The Jews were edited out of this narrative, even though it was clear even then that the Birkenau death camp had been set up to exterminate them, as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” This attempt to rewrite history has echoes even today, in Russia’s efforts to ignore Nazi atrocities against Jews on its own soil.

There’s no question that Poland suffered grievously under German occupation during World War II: as many as three million Poles may have died. And because the Nazis initially set up Auschwitz — which is in southern Poland — as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, it became one of the focal points of communist efforts to memorialize the country’s suffering. But most of the Poles who perished at the hands of the Nazis died elsewhere, not in this death camp.

By 1989, when communism collapsed in Poland, Auschwitz and Jewish historians had already worked out a more accurate estimate, based on the Nazis’ own transport records of who they rounded up and put on the trains from across Europe.

That is where the figure of 1.5 million on today’s plaques comes from, including at least 1.1 million Jews, as well as Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and some 5,000 nationals of other countries. And in the early 1990s, Poland’s first post-communist prime minister agreed to install new plaques at the memorial.

Despite this strict adherence to fact and evidence, the lies keep coming. And as the annual day of Holocaust remembrance approaches — on 27 January, the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army — anti-Semitic attacks are rising worldwide.

The day before my visit I had been at a conference in Warsaw, listening to warnings about the corrosive effect of the tide of propaganda and division sweeping the world. A journalist from Hungary reported how the label “traitor” was now being slapped on anyone who tried to counter the falsehoods of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Who can forget that among Orban’s favorite invented enemies is a Holocaust survivor, George Soros. But when the leader of the free world can be so free with the truth, it is contagious. The tide keeps rising.

The story of Auschwitz-Birkenau is also a parable of what happens when lying becomes institutionalized. When the Nazis rounded up Jewish and Gypsy communities across Europe to be transported to the death camps, they told them they were being resettled (they made them pay for the journey). That’s how they kept them calm as they packed them into the cattle-wagons.

That’s why the Auschwitz museum is now so full of pots, kettles and other cooking utensils that Jewish families packed into their suitcases, the basics for a new life.

In the grainy photos on display, you can see the new arrivals look exhausted and bewildered, but not yet terrified. They were starting to realize something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers. But no one yet knew their fate.

They realized something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers.

But even as Hitler was trying to create a new truth, that the Aryans were a master race, and that the Jews and others barely deserved the term at all, his underlings knew the truth of what they were doing — and it scared them.

As the Red Army closed in, the SS guards tried to carry out a giant cover-up, by dynamiting the gas chambers, burning paper records and destroying the belongings they had harvested from their victims. But they left it too late. When Soviet troops rolled in, troves of evidence remained — including tons of human hair and stacks of paperwork that had been spirited from the flames.

The Nazis were famous for their record-keeping, but they never wrote down the real cause of death. People in Auschwitz died of coronary heart failure, severe gastric infections or pneumonia, never by being gassed, shot or injected with poison.

As we walked back towards the Birkenau gatehouse, now infamous from so many films, one of the people in my group asked our guide why there were so many solitary chimney stacks where prisoners’ barracks had once stood.

Some were destroyed by the SS, but many of the barracks were dismantled in the years after the war for building materials, Zuzanna explained, before anyone had thought of turning the camp into a memorial. And, she added, with the same dispassionate voice she had employed throughout the tour, “the chimneys were just propaganda anyway.”

Propaganda aimed at who, I asked? The Nazis controlled the camp. The prisoners were destined for death. To whom did they need to lie?

They were worried about visits from the Red Cross, she explained. The Nazis always told Red Cross staff that this was a regular prisoner of war camp, never letting them get too far inside. So they needed to make it look as though all the prisoners had heating.

Zuzanna has been doing her job for more than a decade. “Sometimes, I have to take a break,” she admitted. I thanked her for the way she had told the story of this place. She nodded in acknowledgement, then said: “Everyone should come here.”

The post Postcard from Auschwitz appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosopher Tim Wu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As tributes began pouring in, his fellow journalists across the world wrote up their obituaries about the third critic of the Russian leader to be killed in the Ukrainian capital in the last 18 months alone.

Reportedly shot in the back at home, Babchenko’s murder, as Ukraine’s prime minister was quick to point out, appeared to have had all the hallmarks of another Kremlin-ordered contract killing.

The Russian government and the many media outlets it controls looked like they were on script too — circling the wagons in a familiarly defensive ring against the accusations that Moscow was responsible.

But then, to the sound of ringing phones at a hastily organized news conference in Kiev, the script was ripped up. Babchenko walked into the room, very much alive. His death was fake news.

Standing next to Ukraine’s top security officials, Babchenko explained that he had just taken part in a sting operation aimed at catching real assassins who had been sent by Moscow to kill him and others.

As the Ukrainian officials revealed the very undead journalist turned special service agent, they looked pleased. But it was, arguably, the Russian government that could not believe its luck.

In the words of “Moskovsky Komsomolec,” one of Russia’s biggest tabloids, the fake death of Babchenko was “a gift for the Kremlin.”

Since Babchenko’s stunning comeback, the Russian state-controlled media has gone into overdrive to exploit this unexpected propaganda present. After so long on the back foot, they now have the high ground. “The unfortunate reality is that the next time a real tragedy strikes, we will all pause to question whether the news reports are true.” Former U.S. Defense official, Michael Carpenter

Many outlets were also quick to make a link with the survival of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, after they were poisoned in the British town of Salisbury in March with what the U.K. government says was a Russian nerve agent.

It is a “continuation in a series of miraculous resurrections,” was how the main evening bulletin of Russia’s Channel 1 described it, adding “the so-called child victims” of the “alleged chemical attacks” in Syria to the list as well.

“Copying the British” read the headline of the government-run Rossiskaya Gazeta. “Back then in London, just like now in Ukraine, they blamed Russia for everything before the case was even closed,” the newspaper said.

“A bad parody of Skripal,” read the headline on RIA-Novosti.

The conservative pro-Kremlin Tsargrad took a slightly different tack, calling Babchenko’s staged death a “low quality Skripal.” It claimed the Western security services had helped the Ukrainians to carry out the operation, but they had failed to give it a “flare of professionalism we saw in Salisbury.”

The Ukrainian authorities are now under pressure to justify the way they handled the operation, with many asking whether lying about his death so publicly was necessary. But in some ways, that part of the story is already being obscured by concerns over the impact on public trust.

For the Russian government and its media machine, what has just happened in Ukraine is proof, as they see it, for what they have been saying all along. Moscow is the victim, not the perpetrator, in the disinformation war with the West.

“Regardless how the plot twists, the finale will be the same,” read an editorial on Vesti.ru, part of the Rossiya-24 network. “Everyone thought that Babchenko was dead and Moscow is to blame. We learn that Babchenko is alive, but it’s still the Russians who are to blame.”

The more independent business daily Vedomosti said the Babchenko affair takes the concept of “fake news” to a whole new level. “After the ‘murder’ of Babchenko it will be much harder to believe not only the media, but also official announcements.”

It ran a well reported piece describing how other governments have used fake assassinations as a tactic in the past. But the Ukrainian case was different, it argued, because of the way it had so openly manipulated the public.

And Russian state-controlled media was suddenly able to turn to voices they normally choose to ignore: media-rights organizations and Western analysts.

Many reports enthusiastically quoted the Committee to Protect Journalists, which called the operation “extreme” or Reporters Without Borders which condemned “the manipulation of the Ukrainian secret services,” adding that “it is always very dangerous for a government to play with the facts.”

The “Moskovsky Komsomolets” tabloid even ran a long quote from the former U.S. deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter who said, “Russia will exploit this fake murder to accuse Ukraine of spreading fake news and to cast doubt on future attacks on dissidents and journalists inside and outside of Russia. The unfortunate reality is that the next time a real tragedy strikes, we will all pause to question whether the news reports are true.”

That’s a trust problem the Ukrainian authorities will face sooner, if and when they present evidence of why they needed to stage the journalist’s death for their sting.

The case has created a rare moment of agreement between Russia’s few independent media outlets and state-controlled newspapers and channels. For different reasons, they see this as a game changer for the Kremlin.

Meduza, an influential independent Russian publication, quoted the concerns of one of Babchenko’s friends, reporter Pavel Kanygin.

“Of course I felt a sense of gigantic relief, as if a weight fell off me,” said Kanygin, describing how he felt when he heard he was alive. “But these are complex feelings. I don’t understand why it was necessary to do it like this.”

Could it be then, that the strange non-death of Arkady Babchenko will end up having more far-reaching consequences than if he had really been killed?

Additional reporting by Grigory Vorontsov.

The post Why Russia is celebrating a journalist’s fake death in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

For many Russians reading about the story, it was a case of “welcome to our world.”

Data harvesting is a booming and highly competitive business here, with a host of companies offering ways of “scraping” up details on your likes, shares and comments for commercial gain, with barely any regulatory or legislative control.

There are now companies offering advertisers—and anyone else who can pay—the ability to target almost any group imaginable.

For instance, one Russian online giant, Mail.ru, allows companies to target offers at married men who have a child aged 1-3, or—according to its database—the 6.5 million Russians who are “introverted.” And just like the online leverage Facebook enjoys from owning services such as Instagram and WhatsApp, Mail.ru has similar power in Russia as the owner of the two biggest domestic social media networks—Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

You can hire one of the many Russian firms specializing in “parsing” — the automated collection of social media data by bots. These bots will scour accounts across several social media networks and collect every piece of publicly available online activity, from likes, shares and comments to location “check-ins”.

One such firm is Moscow-based “Social Data Hub.” It proudly lists the Russian government as a client and boasts that it has a copy of the activity on every Russian social media network going back for the past seven years.

But their online hoovering also includes all the traffic generated by Russian-based users of U.S. and other international online giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The company also covers sites such as the Tinder dating app, and the Airbnb accommodation service. What this means in practice, for example, is that some swipes on Tinder profiles could actually have been made by bots.

Codaru.com tried out the “parsing” capabilities of one of these companies, to find out just how much they know about Russians. And it’s surprisingly cheap. For one ruble (slightly more than one U.S. cent), you get a complete copy of someone’s online profile (including their name, home region, phone number and date of birth), with a minimum order of 1000 accounts.

Tracking services also play a big role in following Russian internet users around. An estimated 80 per cent of all websites worldwide employ some kind of tracking software—tiny pieces of code embedded in the site — to monitor their visitors’ activities. The most common is Google Analytics, estimated to be present on around 50 per cent of all the websites in the world.

But Russian equivalents have a powerful hold on the domestic sphere. Yandex.Metrika, run by the country’s number 1 search engine, has a 52 per cent market share. Mail.ru’s tracking software is ranked second.

So if you search for a flight to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, say, an ad for a local hotel may pop up on your Vkontakte profile, because of the embedded tracker passing on details of your plans to other sites.

Ghostery, a browser extension that allows you to block data harvesting, reveals the true extent of online surveillance. As you read the London Observer’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica, no fewer than a dozen different trackers from three separate ad companies are watching your every click and scroll — and reporting back to their owners.

But Russians have learned recently that even if they log off social media, their online activity is still being constantly monitored— through public Wi-Fi spots.

Muscovites discovered last month that the Wi-Fi provider on the city’s huge public transport system—used by 12 million people a day—was collecting data from anyone using its routers. It could then be harvested by anyone savvy enough with the technology, according to a researcher who looked into it.

And it is taken as a given that Russia’s intelligence services have access to all online activity from any network. As one source in Russia’s data mining industry said, it’s “practically impossible” to evade mass-scale commercial surveillance.

The post Why the Facebook data harvesting scandal is nothing new for Russians appeared first on Coda Story.