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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this week, I filed entries from November 28 on, as the scale and fury of the protests against Georgian Dream mounted. On that day, Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister, said he was putting Georgia’s bid to join the European Union on ice for the next four years. Georgian Dream, in other words, is pushing Europe away to bring us closer to Russia.

But our country’s constitution promises to attempt full integration with the EU, a promise that Georgian Dream appears to want to break, despite its claims to the contrary. If you read my entries from November 28 chronologically, you will see that I felt motivated and enthused, thrilled that Georgians, after post-election protests seemed to peter out, were out on the streets in greater numbers, determined to assert their rights and protect their aspirations.

Since I filed those entries though, the government has adopted darker, even more repressive tactics. After arresting and beating hundreds of young protestors, the police are now using the same brutal tactics on opposition politicians. Footage of Nika Gvaramia, a prominent opposition leader, being dragged unconscious down the street by a gang of masked policemen has been seen around the world.

The violence is vicious and unrelenting. But Georgians will not be intimidated. We’re not going anywhere any time soon, so watch this space.

It’s 7.30 and I’ve just woken up. Later today, Georgian Dream politicians will open a new session of parliament, a month after a tainted election, and begin a new four-year term as the governing party of Georgia.

I head straight towards the protests outside the parliament building. Protestors have been camping outside since the previous night, even though protests in front of parliament now carry the threat of a prison sentence.

As we wait for Georgian Dream deputies (‘our’ members of parliament) to show up, we ask ourselves if there are enough of us to overwhelm the police if necessary. And will the police wait until it’s dark to take action or attack us during the day? Already, we’ve learned that we can’t impede or block the entrance to parliament and that we cannot prevent deputies entering or exiting the building.

But even this early in the morning, the police are guarding the parliament in heavy numbers. All the gates are reinforced, with metal walls erected behind them. The security measures are so extreme that even the Georgian Dream deputies - traitors - might struggle to get into the building.

Arriving outside parliament, I see the swelling crowds of protesters and feel encouraged that Georgians understand that taking to the streets in significant numbers is our only weapon. There are more of us here today than anytime in the weeks following the election. We need more, though, to join us. We want the people who sold our country to hear our anger through the walls. 

Around noon, Georgian Dream deputies arrived to bluster their way into parliament and declare the session open, even though the opposition parties had staged a boycott. As our legitimate president, Salome Zourabichvili, said, the “Georgian parliament exists no more,” since it “tore up the Constitution.”

By 1.30 pm, someone started banging on a metal wall in front of the parliament building. People rushed to join in. The noise the drumming made swallowed up all the other noises. Then some others threw firecrackers over the gate, causing loud explosions. The Georgian Dream deputies inside sure can hear us now.

Georgian Dream nominates Mikheil Kavelashvili, a 53-year-old former professional soccer player, as its presidential candidate. The current president, who has described the parliamentary elections as illegitimate, has already said she intends to stay in office until the inauguration of a “legitimately elected president by a legitimately elected parliament.” The pro-Russian Kavelashvili was not allowed to become the president of the Georgian football federation because of his lack of a university education. Yet here he is, the pick to become president of Georgia. I think it is safe to say that people expected anyone but him, a man notable nowadays for swearing at the opposition in parliament. It does make a warped kind of sense. He is the perfect puppet for a regime in which ethics and human decency are considered nuisances, a “yes man” placed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Russian-made oligarch who controls Georgian Dream, to obey Putin's every grim order.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, just announced that Georgia will be halting European Union accession talks until 2028. This comes right after the European Parliament announced that elections in Georgia should be rerun and that top Georgian Dream officials, including the prime minister, should face EU sanctions, a sanctions package aimed at the top of the Georgian Dream leadership, including the prime minister. 

No more Europe! That’s basically what he is telling us. I thought they would just ghost the EU, as they have for so long, and let the relationship wear out, just so they could pretend that they were at least trying. I didn’t imagine this! I didn’t imagine that they would literally change their narrative overnight. If this is not enough to make even the most passive Georgians come out onto the streets, I don't know what will. 

I turn on my TV and see that, in fact, there are protests in front of parliament. There were none scheduled for today. But thousands are out there, more than at any of the recent protests including the one in front of Tbilisi State University in which the police arrested dozens of young people, including 21-year-old Mate Devidze, who faces seven years in prison if he is convicted on trumped up charges of assaulting a police officer.

Today, in contrast, this gathering is not organised by political leaders, it is completely improvised. People just feel compelled to come out, like we used to, until the elections made everyone hopeless. Even the president Salome Zourabichvili is on the streets, asking the riot police who they are working for – Georgia or Russia? She gets no answer. And when she asks why they won’t answer her, their commander in chief, they remain silent. 

Many Georgians have been asking whether we still had any fight left. We’ve criticised the opposition and showed contempt at their inaction. When, we asked, would the people reach their boiling point? From what I was seeing on TV, maybe we were getting there, despite the scary amounts of police and special forces with their shields and tear gas.  

I head out to the protests. The atmosphere is tense but in a good way. Undeniably, there are more people out on the streets than we’ve seen in recent weeks. And, if the police action is excessive, more will come out. That’s what everyone is saying.

Sure enough, around midnight it starts.

The police, advancing from the streets adjacent to parliament, turned water cannons on the protestors. From the very first blast it became apparent that the water was laced with something. People described feeling a burning sensation on their bodies. Many felt they couldn’t breathe. Still, soaking wet in the freezing air, their skin stinging and struggling for breath, the protestors stood in front of the jets of ‘water’. They were not afraid.

But the police were thuggish. They kept advancing, pushing us back down Rustaveli Avenue, beating up and arresting anyone they could lay their hands on. The police formed a line in front of the Tbilisi Marriott, the same location where protestors were gathered back in May, a night on which I, alongside many others, was arrested.

Tonight, I discovered that a friend of mine, Dachi, had been arrested. The police beat him as they dragged him to a police car. I called my lawyer. She was already awake, fielding dozens of calls from people who knew someone who had been arrested.  

As morning broke, the police continued to chase and beat people, to hunt down those who had taken refuge in the shops nearby. The police were brutal, in keeping with what Georgian Dream has to offer to the country.

I managed to get five hours of sleep and then went to the prison, taking food and cigarettes for my friend Dachi. His lawyer told me the police beat everyone who they arrested, some of them so badly that the prison officials refused to accept them, insisting that they be taken to hospital. On cue, an ambulance sped, sirens blaring, out of the prison gates.

After the night’s violence, as I expected, there were even more people out on the street. The police are still brutal. But the sheer number of people makes it hard for them to control the crowds. Fireworks were being thrown. And the police, under the barrage of sparks and lights, were finding it difficult to hold that line in front of the Marriott.

So many people are coming out onto the streets, it was as if the post-election lull, the inertia that took hold of the protests, had never happened. There is an incredible feeling of unity. This is our moment.

By six AM though, the police advanced once more, this time firing rubber bullets at protestors. A group of masked men were walking down Besiki Street, perpendicular to Rustaveli Avenue. Protestors were being penned in, unable to escape ‘police’ intent on violence. There were people on the ground, being stomped on by multiple officers. No mercy was shown. Women were beaten. Old people. Journalists. Children. The police were swearing at people, humiliating protestors as they beat them, seeming to enjoy their work. They seemed to believe Georgian Dream propaganda that we are all anti-national agitators backed by some nefarious combination of the EU, CIA and George Soros.

They are arresting fewer people though. Our prisons are full to the brim with protestors. On November 30, schools, businesses, and organizations around the country said they were going on strike. Videos made the rounds that showed the extent of police brutality. Georgians throughout the country are outraged. In the evening, protestors gather around the offices of TV Pirveli, the public broadcaster, demanding that the media do its job. The protestors will be given airtime, the channel’s executives promise. Later that night, I hear that my friend Dachi is being brought in front of a judge. They want to make space for new prisoners. 

The police have become instruments of state oppression, using pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, and excessive violence to suppress peaceful protesters. Twenty eight journalists have been injured in just two days and all international human rights norms have been violated.

Still, despite all the horror, I feel positive. Georgians are refusing to be intimidated. Everyone I know who has been arrested and/or beaten, is back out on the streets.

Police violence has had no effect. Even more people take to the streets on the weekend. People are still being arrested. But there are far too many now for the arrests to make a dent. There are fewer beatings, now that so many videos of police brutality are circulating. Firework use has become more targeted and tactical. One legend even managed to rig up a homemade Gatling gun, pushing back a swarm of riot police with a dazzling burst.

Once again, though, at six am, the police make their customary advance. This time though there are fewer men in masks alongside. And as we walk away, the police aren’t engaging, aren’t looking for protestors to beat and bully. Many are speculating about this apparent softening. I just think we’re facing the B-squad, while the thugs rest.

Right now though we take advantage and walk towards Tbilisi State University, managing to occupy and block off one of the most important arteries of the city. Tonight was a win. And we’ll take it, knowing there are many more battles to be fought.

Tonight was historic. It finally felt like we were a properly organized resistance. There were more people on the streets. More medics. More people prepared for teargas. More intelligence. More fireworks. And not least, more courage.

The police, as if acknowledging new realities, became aggressive earlier than usual. Almost as soon as the protestors arrived, the police turned on the water cannons, from inside the parliament premises. At midnight, the water was replaced with tear gas. Protestors were pushed down Rustaveli Avenue, the usual tactic. As they force protestors back, more police like to emerge from side streets, beating and arresting protesters. But this time we were ready, shooting fireworks at the police and neutralizing tear gas canisters as fast as we could. There were seasoned veterans on the front lines, looking out for the injured and coordinating the crowd’s movements.

Exhausted and stretched thin, the police were less effective and on edge. They knew they were in a battle, that we were, for once, returning fire. We even used drones to help us keep tabs on police movement and organize ourselves. We understood that by being mobile, we made life more difficult for the police.

By six AM, as they have every day since the protests began on November 28, the police began to indiscriminately round up and arrest protestors. Many of those arrested, as acknowledged by global human rights organizations, have been severely beaten, their faces rearranged by the vicious riot police. 

I went home. But there were still protestors out there. On TV, I saw a miracle: police circling a group of protestors shrouded in smoke, but when the smoke cleared, the protestors had disappeared. The police, stretching down the avenue, looked confused. I almost felt sorry for them – no sleep, no arrests, and punked in view of the whole country by a bunch of kids they were trying to bully.

The protests are growing in size and scale. We need to keep this momentum, to show the authorities that we have staying power, that we will fight for our rights.

Last night, I found myself on the river bank with about 300 other people. The police have started to crack down harder. They have been arresting opposition politicians as well as continuing to beat and arrest protestors on the street. I was on the periphery of the crowd when I saw a brand new white Skoda with tinted windows, a car normally favored by high ranking police officers, being driven directly at protestors. More and more people across Georgia are coming to understand just how extreme the police violence has been. Protestors who have been released from prison have been talking about being beaten to near death, about being taken to a van far from the cameras and journalists and being tortured. Many have said that the police threatened to sexually assault them with truncheons, others have described in graphic detail the severity of unprovoked beatings. On TV, a protestor said the police put a gun to his head, threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t unlock his phone.

Since November 28, the protests have been completely spontaneous. People feel they are in an existential struggle. That Georgia is being dragged back into the Russian orbit, even as the majority of people, especially young people, link their future to Europe and think of the European Union as a form of protection against Russian expansionism.

For obvious reasons, Georgian Dream would rather pretend the protests are organized by opposition parties and activists funded by and beholden to Western interests. So now the next phase of the crackdown has begun. The offices of opposition parties and civil society organizations are being raided without warrants. Police are going on fishing expeditions, seizing every electronic device they can. Opposition leader Niko Gvaramia was beaten unconscious and dragged into an unmarked police car. And in a bid to stop the use of fireworks, which protestors have used to defend themselves and embarrass riot police, the revenue service has reportedly closed fireworks shops and is even looking at shops that sell helmets and masks.

This government is revealing its true self and every day it’s turning more people into resistance fighters.

Luka’s diary from last month

With everyone anxiously monitoring the results of the US elections as they came in, it felt today as if I lived in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. When it became clear Donald Trump was the winner, some celebrated, while others felt even more hopeless. Like many, I worry that Trump’s stand on negotiating with Putin could weaken the US’s position in the region, giving Russia even more of a hold over Georgia than it already has. I really hope I’m wrong.

This is an account of the last couple of days on the street in Tbilisi, as we protest the sham election of October 26. Understandably, the world’s eyes are elsewhere right now, but our battle for our democracy continues.

I'm heading to a protest organized by the opposition where they say they will show us proof of election fraud and present us with a plan of action. I'm so anxious I’m actually shivering. I really hope the opposition realizes that they need to show a united front. The doubts are growing by the day and this is probably their last chance to show us why we voted for them.  Now is the time for them to  honor the trust we put in them.

After just a couple of hours, I’m already back home. To say that the protest was a disappointment would be an understatement. Greta Thunberg might have been there, reportedly wearing a keffiyeh and expressing her solidarity with protestors at this “outrageous development,” this “authoritarian development,” but the turnout was below par. The lack of people protesting, compared to the numbers who hit the street in the wake of the stolen election, was noticeable. Morale, it seemed, was low and people were looking to opposition leaders for answers. 

Instead we got platitudes. “The plan is you.”  “The plan is to fight.” “The plan is to not let Georgian Dream steal our voices.” “The plan is to be out on the streets.” “The plan is to have real democracy.” 

These are not plans! And if the plan is to “fight,” you need a plan, a strategy, for the fight, no? For the young people out on the street, whose blood is boiling, the opposition’s words were demoralizing. Still, I’m going to show up for the protests that are being planned every day. Our protests are going to drag on longer than we would have hoped but we have to find a way to stay the course.

Honestly I feel exhausted. I'm afraid that like many others I'm going to grow cold to the situation and stop feeling anger, stop feeling anything. Already, it feels like life has been sucked out of these beautiful, bright young people, who were once so energetic and vocal. Dead inside, would be the best way to describe how we are starting to feel.

What a difference a day makes. This morning, I woke up to the news that the district court judge in Tetritskaro had ruled that the rights of voters to keep ballots secret had been violated, thus annulling results from 31 polling stations in two constituencies. The lawsuit is one of many filed by the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association and Vladimir Khuchua is the first judge to rule in their favor. He upheld their complaint that the ballot paper was so thin it was possible to read people’s votes through the paper. If the Young Lawyers Association can force enough annulments, the process would require snap elections. After Judge Khuchua’s verdict, Georgian Dream has decided to bundle all legal complaints about voters’ secrecy rights into a single trial to be heard by one judge.

Just as I was heading out to the protest, I learned that the venue had changed. The opposition wanted people to gather in front of the Court of Appeals in Tbilisi. I turned on the TV to see if we had anyone reporting from the courthouse. Sure enough, a crew from TV Formula was there, waiting for protestors to show up. But guess who had got there before them? Half the cops in the city. They surrounded the courthouse and even put a lock on the gate. A gate that is never closed. What a symbolic image that was – Georgian Dream literally locking down our courts.

On my way to the Court of Appeals, I feel much more hopeful than I did last night. Seeing our young lawyers working to overturn the election and seeing that there are judges who will put the law and their principles first gave me some energy and belief. Though it’s still a far cry from how I felt during the protests on election day. Outside the courthouse, most of the protestors were my parents' age. There were some young people, but for once we were not the majority. The atmosphere was calm. Even with hundreds of police officers walking around trying to listen in on conversations. 

At some point, we started a march from the courthouse. Where we were going, though, was unclear. I asked around and no one knew. We were just following, like perfect soldiers. I guess we were tired of thinking for ourselves. Eventually,  I managed to flag down one of the organizers who answered my question. We were going nowhere in particular. We were going to march on Tsereteli Avenue to disrupt traffic. 

To my surprise the people stuck in traffic because of us were not complaining. You could even sense support from them. What became clear to me at the end of the day was that we may have lost the critical mass, but the protests are still alive. We just need a push. We need sanctions. We need our visas revoked, and some bans on our banking system for starters. The only way to bring people back out on the streets is to make them feel uncomfortable and shatter Georgian Dream’s lies about prosperity, economic growth, and euro integration. Everyone needs to understand that over the last 12 years Georgian Dream made more money than we can wrap our heads around. The money it now uses to buy this country.

The fact that western leaders are threatening us with sanctions but are issuing none only helps to push Georgian Dream’s false narrative that they are taking the country into Europe. Sanctions might be the last hope we have left if we want to build up a wave of civil disobedience. Before, that is, they start arresting everyone who dares to speak up, and induce such fear that any change in the future will be impossible.

Luka’s diary from last month

My country officially became a satellite state of Russia. Twelve years of fighting has come to this; a Russian puppet government managed to yet again get “elected.”
These elections have seen unprecedented voter turnouts not only in the country but also abroad. And now it looks like there was some unprecedented voter fraud too.

Waking up this morning I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Months of sleepless nights spent in the streets protesting, that constant paralyzing stress you feel, seeing your country lose a war it has been fighting for over 200 years, all gone! Today, I thought, is the final battle.

While still in bed I immediately checked my phone to get the  morning news. I couldn't wait to vote! It was around  7am when I came across the first video of Georgian immigrants in the U.S driving to the voting location. The image of a U.S highway filled with cars bearing Georgian flags will live in my head for years to come. I felt so proud of my people I started tearing up. Video after video of immigrants voting abroad were coming in by the minute. Lines of Georgian voters stretching for blocks on end in major cities around the world. We were mobilized, we were together, we were going to win! Everyone in the city was excited to fulfill their civic duty and once and for all end Russian rule over our country. 

I came across the first video depicting a fight at one of the voting stations. An observer who was supposed to make sure there was no fraud at his station was getting beaten up by multiple thugs sent there to derail the peaceful processions of elections. These thugs are nothing new. For months the government has been using them to scare journalists, activists and political figures by means of violent physical attacks.

It became apparent straight away that the Georgian Dream was going to try everything not to lose their grip on power. Throughout the day more videos of voter fraud and intimidation started to surface. In one of them you could see a man dumping two handfuls of ballots into the ballot box even though observers were trying to prevent him. That voting location was shut down within the hour. Preventing hundreds from casting their vote. These were far from being the only incidents. Fraud and violation reports were coming in so fast it was hard to keep up. 

But still, everyone kept their spirits high, and remained unshaken. People believed. Restlessly waiting for the exit polls. 
Seeing how mobilized the whole population was despite all the violence and electoral fraud kept our hopes up. The fact that Georgian immigrants traveled over 2000 km to vote at their own expense because the Georgian government did not organize facilities close enough to everyone proved to us that no matter what hurdles you put in our way, we would overcome them.

When the exit polls came in, and we saw that the opposition received  the majority of votes–it felt like a turning point. Some people started celebrating preemptively. The Georgian Dream exit poll on the other hand showed a 10 percent difference more or less in their favor. Next thing we knew, Bidzina Ivanishvili had come on TV to congratulate his party on their victory. So the first images we saw on TV were both sides celebrating based on the results from their own exit polls. Imagine how insane of a sight that was, after a whole day of sitting on pins and needles, we still don’t know who won. 

The only thing left to do is wait for the count. The count comes in with 53% in favor of Georgian  Dream. Which we all know is a scam. So tonight, as of writing this we are still waiting for the ballots to be recounted manually. But we already know that Georgian Dream made it possible for individuals to vote at multiple voting stations so the manual count will still give them the advantage. 

Our elections were stolen, and we know it. A day that started full of hope, quickly turned into despair. What do we do next? Will the opposition present a plan? Do we look to the west? The west, that debated sanctions for so long that now they will hardly affect anything. Do we organize a revolution?

I guess I'll have to wake up tomorrow to see. Today, what I learned is that this was far from our final battle.

It is now day two after the election. Literally! I wrote the top part last night, feeling powerless about the situation trying to feel even for a tiny bit that I was doing something proactive. Today, I don't even know how I feel. My only thought is ’oh shit here we go again.’ Gerogians in New York, are still in line to vote, even though their voices will not be counted. Imagine traveling thousands of kilometers to cast one ballot, only to find out that in Georgia the Georgian Dream gave multiple ballots to its sham electors. It destroys your trust in democracy and in our western partners who we believed in so much. 

I'm watching TV now, eager to see a solution. And all I see is foreign diplomats condemning the Georgian Dream without actually proposing a solution. They are still talking about how a government should not act in this way and that the Georgian Dream needs to take back the results. Moscow doesn't care when you wave a finger. And of course a government should not act this way, but telling them will not change anything. They need to be punished and we need your help to punish them. But still, the only thing we hear from our partners is their shock and outrage. 

Georgia should be an example and a warning to the western leaders, diplomats and policymakers. And hopefully make them realize how little they understand about the power dynamics within the post Soviet space. The balance you once knew is now on the tipping point. You in the west need to listen to your Ukrainian and Georgian counterparts when it comes to Russia because who knows it better than us? You, who live thousands of kilometers away or us the people Russia has tried to subdue for over 200 years? You take time to discuss every single move while Russia acts! That's why sanctions now are 100 times less effective than they would have been 6 months ago. It is time for new diplomacy. A more firm diplomacy. A more active and understanding one. One adapted to the ever-changing modern geopolitical space. Because you can't continue looking at the post Soviet space with the same optics you use to look at your actually democratic countries. When western diplomats talk about Georgia the only point they are conveying is how shocked they are that democracy is not working here. You have to understand that the fight we are leading is for our society to function as democratically as yours. This is something many westerners take for granted. But we have to fight for it. And your inadequacy to act helps further propagation of the Russian narrative about the powerlessness of the west. In hindsight the west should have realized this with their semi useful sanctions against Russia at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.

Please realize that you are actually gambling with real peoples lives that believe in you, and have given you their trust, in Ukraine and in Georgia. You need to prove that the west still holds the power of change. The same power that has been the cornerstone of democracy around the world since WW2. Time for debates, promises and threats is over. It is time for action!

We are back in front of the parliament. Why? Because our elections were rigged and we came out to see what the opposition leaders had to say. I got to the protest at 19:30 and immediately felt something was off. All the previous protests had some kind of electricity in the air, but this time it was different. An unusual mix of fatigue, anger and silent despair. I have never felt anything like this before. All the Gen-Zs who previously were all about peace now wanted to “fuck shit up” even though they all knew that today was not that kind of protest. The closest they got was when they heckled Viktor Orban the Hungarian Prime Minister on his exit from the Marriott Hotel on Rustaveli Avenue by calling him a dick in his own language. He was on an official visit to congratulate the ruling party on their win in the elections.

The first speaker of the night was our president Salome Zourabichvili who was then followed by all the members of different opposition parties. Her speech gave very little hope to our constantly growing desperation.

The post Stolen Dreams: A Diary From Tbilisi appeared first on Coda Story.

But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

The post From the Margins to Power: Georgia’s Elections and the Kremlin’s Empire appeared first on Coda Story.

PB: Haiti, which is just 700 miles from the coast of Florida, is the United States’ ultimate other. Americans know very little about it. When I tell people that I lived in Haiti for a while, a few would say, “Oh, I've always wanted to go to Polynesia!” And I'd say, no, not Tahiti, Haiti. This is the same Haiti that is a four hour flight from JFK. I think that geographical proximity stands in sharp contrast to the wild American ignorance about Haiti, and I don't think that ignorance is unintentional. We'd rather not think about it as Americans. We would rather not know the manner in which the United States, our country, has subverted Haiti from the very get go.

Haiti is the only successful slave rebellion in history and what they managed to do was kick out Napoleon's own army. They were the first republic in the entire world to abolish slavery. And this was at a time when Thomas Jefferson was president in the United States, and the US had 60 more years until its Emancipation Proclamation. Haiti was way ahead of the United States on these issues, and it posed a terrible threat to these white imperial powers. These imperial powers built enormous wealth on ideologies of white supremacy — you saw this with England and India, France and Haiti and the United States with plenty of its own enslaved people. In that moment, the moment of its birth, Haiti was a pariah to the white imperial powers.

A lot of times there's a kind of obsession with the things that threaten us. I'm no psychologist, but the neuroses and the racism of the United States says a lot more about the United States than it does about Haiti; about the ways in which we remain threatened more than 200 years after the founding of the first black Republic. We remain threatened by the idea of black people governing themselves. You can see this in the ways that over the past 35 years, and even over the past 15 years, the United States has really done quite a lot of meddling with Haiti’s democracy, to put it mildly, which is what has led to its current state of violence and insecurity, and the complete dismantling of the state.

NJ: We see the same stereotypes and rhetoric each time this happens — foreigners and immigrants eat strange foods, they want your jobs, they are violent. Yet the American economy needs immigrant workers. When those workers express their cultural identity, or need health care, then immigration becomes an easy target for resentment. It’s like saying: come here, work in our factories, but don't be visible or have needs. Is that a correct characterization?

 PB: There's this wonderful Haitian saying: If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies. That's what JD Vance is doing. What he's really doing is trying to foment fear among Americans, right? Foment fear of change, of black people, of the other and galvanize that fear. And so a great way to do it is to say that Haitians, they're diseased or they eat pets. These tropes have a very long history, of the third world being a place of diseases, or the savages.

NJ: “Savages” who are devoid of compassion for animals unlike civilized people, and only know how to hunt and kill. 
PB: Exactly! And this idea of eating pets is also interesting coming from the Republicans, who pride themselves on eating meat. Like Vance who received some flak for adapting to his wife's vegetarian diet. I think for a lot of Haitians have felt, like, what the fuck do I need to say? Should Haiti’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and all the Haitian pet lovers need to now come out and say, actually, we don't eat cats and dogs?

I know what you mean about the critical mass, it’s like saying — go ahead, you can be different in America as long as you act the same. But I have a feeling that a lot of the anti immigrant sentiment does not come from the people in towns like Springfield. It seems like the farther you are from actually knowing immigrants, the easier it is to scare you. These terrible lies are a great disservice to Haitians and immigrants, of course, but also to the people in towns like Springfield, even to those who might have voted Republican. Many people do try really hard to welcome immigrants, to make room, make resources available, and try to do the right thing.

I’m thinking of the incredible grace of the family of the boy who was killed in a vehicular accident in Ohio last year, by a person from Haiti. His death was a terrible and tragic accident, and even now, his family is showing up to city council meetings and asking for his death not to be used as a political tool.

The post Why is Trump obsessed with Haiti? He’s not the only one appeared first on Coda Story.

This story was made possible by the Pulitzer Center. It was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

The post As the war drags on, Ukrainian refugees wonder: should we go home? appeared first on Coda Story.

The post The New Aztecs appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

Mother tongues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

English arrives in India

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

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

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

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

Establishing national languages (or not)

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

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

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

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

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

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

English's next challenge and challengers

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

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

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

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

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

A global context to anti-globalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lingua franca, lingua future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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As early as the afternoon of October 7th, when word first broke of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Abu-Jamei had a troubling sense of what might follow. His house sits not far from the Israeli border, and he and his family fled on that very day with little more than the clothes they were wearing. After a short stay in a school in Rafah, they went in search of a better place to live. They ended up dropping their belongings on a piece of empty land near a bit of running water. Under the circumstances, this amounted to a luxury.

Despite Israel’s monthslong attacks on Gaza, the house that Abu-Jamei and his family left behind remained untouched all through the long months they stayed in the tents. The home was still standing the day they arrived safely in Egypt, the war far behind them.

But as Abu-Jamei knows better than most people, one cannot simply leave a war behind, and attempting to will away its psychic effects is an illusory trick. He has spent his career studying trauma, war, and the psychological damage caused by violence. As a psychiatrist, he began working with patients scarred by Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza. For the past decade, he has been the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a mental health service provider in Palestine that affords counseling and resources to countless patients in the region.

During his first night in Cairo, sleeping quietly in a bed far from the cold night air and the flapping of the tent, the fact that he was safe provided only so much comfort. He could not help but think of his uncles and cousins who were still in tents. “I could not split both feelings,” he said. “I felt ashamed that I was out. I still feel guilty. There is survivor guilt. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling, you know?”

Abu-Jamei’s own work taught him not to be surprised by the intrusion of such thoughts. Over the years of conflict in Palestine, he’d spent many hours working with children and adults who were traumatized. Adults, he explained, could talk through their feelings and thoughts, but children often didn’t have the language or understanding for such conversations, even if they had the very real need. So, he and his colleagues would use puppets for them to act out their emotions. When words failed, they used toy planes and tanks to allow the children to construct physical scenarios. At times, however,  during the most recent bombings it was almost impossible to find toys for this work.

Abu-Jamei explained how, paradoxically, it was often when the worst bombing was over that people began reacting to the trauma. In moments like this, there was time to reflect rather than simply revert to survival instincts. That is when Abu-Jamei’s work was most important and most sought. Now that he is in Egypt, he plans to implement a telephone help line that his center has run for years but was routinely rendered useless during the war by a lack of electricity and Wi-Fi. The hope is to establish a secure phone line to psychiatrists outside of Gaza who can answer calls and work with patients stuck in the war zone.

Most people in Gaza have not been as fortunate as Abu-Jamei in finding the means to flee the war. He is the first person to recognize his privilege in being able to pay the steep price to leave, and although he is better off than many, it was still a considerable burden for him. During the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, the Rafah border crossing has emerged as the sole route out of the country. But only the fortunate few with money, foreign passports, or approved medical reasons have managed to cross this border into Egypt. The fees to cross are roughly $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child—a sum that is out of reach for most. The “travel bureau” tasked with facilitating crossing is Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company with reputed ties to the Egyptian security services. Once the fee is paid, a name is added to a list. Every night, those who have paid check the list on Facebook pages and Telegram channels to see who will be able to cross into Egypt the following day. If you’re lucky, you’ll be among the hundreds that cross the border every morning at Rafah.

It wasn’t until he arrived in Cairo that Abu-Jamei learned that his house had, in fact, just recently been destroyed. He and his wife spent 17 years carefully building and decorating their home. Whenever they had a bit of extra money, they put it toward a new improvement on the building—a second bathroom, a new sofa, a special refrigerator. Like many other Gazans, he kept tabs on his neighborhood during the war by looking at videos that Israeli soldiers posted on TikTok. He pulled out his phone as we talked and showed me a TikTok posted by a member of the Israel Defense Forces. It shows a truck barreling down a dirt road, empty lots and homes on either side. “See, there,” he says, pausing the video. “That’s our house.” On that day, at least, he knew because of the timestamp of the video that his home was still standing.

But the next series of photos he shows me are of rubble. His cousins can be seen walking across a pile of cinder blocks that had once been his house. “They went to search to see if they could find anything worth salvaging,” he said. But all they were able to find were one or two mismatched earrings and a brooch—“presents I’d bought for my daughters over the years” when he’d traveled abroad to give a lecture or attend a conference. “I traveled often for a Gazan, maybe twice a year, and I always brought them back gifts.”

It’s late, and Abu-Jamei and I have been speaking for several hours. The café had filled with young people clustered around tables, talking animatedly. Downtown Cairo was full of life: strolling shoppers, fashionable women walking next to young religious scholars, exuberant soccer fans watching the latest match at packed sidewalk cafes. We stepped outside to say our goodbyes on the street. Abu-Jamei stood still as the traffic of Cairo swerved by and the florescent lights of downtown shops blinked behind him. A calm man amid the noise. He stayed there on the sidewalk, talking as if he were in no hurry to say goodbye, even though I imagine he had a hundred obligations, a thousand things to do. Among them were things to buy: basic household items and new clothing for his wife and children, who were still wearing  clothes from the tents. And there were people back in Gaza relying on him for assistance. Finally, he shrugged, smiled gently and stepped out into the street to walk home. Or, what serves as home for now.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Yasser Abu-Jamei as told to Kira Brunner Don

Most of the population is severely affected psychologically and have physical ailments, but their main concerns at the moment are their basic needs. It’s reported now that in the Gaza Strip one third of the population faces level three famine—this means that there is an urgent need for food support. No one can sleep without food, but now everyone in the north of Gaza—600,000 people—are basically starving. 

I lived in a shelter for three weeks, and then moved to a tent, where I stayed with my children and my family for about three months. Tents do not have privacy. Whenever you talk, everyone listens. We were in a place with tents for my uncles and my cousins, we were all next to each other—maybe 15 families together. There is no variety of food; no fruit, for example, and vegetables are very rare and expensive. In December and January we managed to buy chicken only once; fruit only once. One chicken was about 70 shekels or $20. Who can afford that? Since there was no variety of food items, I saw that my kids were losing weight. The whole Gaza Strip was losing weight. You could see it in your friends when you meet them after two or three weeks. And it was a problem, especially for the kids.

During war time, people rarely get mental health services, unless there is a clear instance of trauma. Everyone is preoccupied with safety and finding food. But a couple of weeks after a ceasefire takes place, people notice something is wrong with their kids or themselves, and then they would start to seek mental health intervention. That’s why we usually see an influx of patients or clients two or three weeks after a ceasefire. 

I’ll give you a very clear example. A lot of people are always trying to hear news about their loved ones, about their homes, their houses, their neighborhoods—whether people that are missing have been killed, whether they have been detained, whether they are in the rubble. And they hope for the best, of course. So people are between frustration and hope all the time. When a ceasefire takes place, everyone starts to move around and go back to their homes to find out what happened, then they start to face the reality. They lost their house. They lost their loved one. You end up not only homeless but also broken. There is no place to go to. Aid takes ages to come. What can you do? And then people start to show symptoms and they start to come and visit us. 

One of the main services we offer is telephone counseling. It’s a toll free line. We were not sure that our colleagues would be able to answer the phones because of the lack of power, so that’s why we have partner organizations in the West Bank we forward our telephone line to so that their psychologist can help our people. It’s a relief.

For the last two months, we sent our psychologist to provide psychological first aid. They go to the shelters, they identify the main issues. The issues that adults and children have are a little bit different—at the moment, adults show anxiety about the future; what might happen at any moment; the bombardment, tanks. They are between desperation and depression. Others feel that there is no way out or that an end is coming close. There are a lot of family quarrels and social issues because of the pressure and the stresses and the lack of resources. A lot of disputes happen in the community. And then there are also sleep difficulties.

Children have different symptoms. Their main thing is fear. They’re just afraid and they long for their normal life. They ask when are we going to go back to school, their neighborhoods, their homes. And there is no answer to that. Then there are behavioral changes. A lot of children, especially the younger ones, become more irritable, more hypervigilant. They are more worried and agitated. They can’t stand still. And they start to be disobedient. They fight more, they become more angry, they become more aggressive. And with the night terrors and nightmares, they wake up in the middle of the night screaming. 

My youngest child is two and a half. She used to scream in the middle of the night. The conditions were really terrible. But when we moved to Rafah, the bombardment was less frequent and the nights were calmer, but it was still terrible. The good thing is that there were a lot of children in the community in those fifteen tents where we stayed. So children were spending a lot of time together playing with the sand. My wife used to joke and say that during the day, the tent was like an incubator, and sometimes she called it a greenhouse. It was extremely hot so it was good the kids could stay outside. And in the night, the tents were freezing cold.

And who are the most affected? It’s the vulnerable groups—women, children, disabled people, people with chronic illnesses. As a mental health professional, my eyes are always on the most vulnerable groups because they are more impacted and the psychological implications are more apparent. My team and I try to do our best. 

If a ceasefire happens tomorrow, it will take two or three months for caravans to come. And then the authorities, whether local or national organizations—will they prioritize mental health, or are they going to prioritize housing? We are in this struggle all the time. We feel that mental health is not prioritized compared to other health issues like emergency health. 

I do think there will be a ceasefire, but look. We live in the least transparent area in the world. You never know what’s happening. You never know what’s on the table. What’s below the table? You never know what the negotiations are really about. And even when a ceasefire is reached, you don’t know what the deal is. That’s historically what I feel. I lead one of the main civil society organizations in Gaza Strip, we’re quite known locally, internationally, quite respected for our work, and we never know what’s happening. So given that, what we have is just hope. And we do have hope, sometimes it’s stupid hope, but what else is there to do? That’s the thing that keeps you running. There is no other way.

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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.

Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock: around six Eiffel Towers’ worth each night.

In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer will find themselves jolted awake, night after night.

Signs of the ground being hollowed out below are everywhere. Cracks run up the brickwork of houses and apartment buildings, and nearest to the mine, the land seems to undulate. Kiruna is breaking apart.

In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth. But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s causing deeper, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself. 

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout. The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.

It’s an old question in Kiruna, where an iron mine first laid waste to the land in the early 20th century. It forever changed the lives of the Sami people — indigenous reindeer herders, native to northern Scandinavia and northwest Russia, who have lived in these lands for millennia. But today, the question has taken on new meaning.

Across northern Sweden, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the target site for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes the region could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s an underlying sense here that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry, that it must be sacrificed at the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for local residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future. Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe, alongside the Sami, the region’s last Indigenous culture.

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it. Some politicians, like Busch, say the solutions to the climate crisis are in the ground, ready to be mined, while the Sami believe the answers have always existed in the quiet teachings of the natural world. This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet. Kiruna is, as one scholar put it, “a microcosmos, like a magnifying glass under which you see all the problems of the world.”

This past October, I went to the mine myself. From a platform three-quarters of a mile below ground, I watched as an electrified train approached, moving autonomously along the tracks and letting out a shrill whistle. Carriages passed by filled with black rocks — some like gravel, some as big as watermelons. When they reached the loading shaft, the bottom of the carriage flew open and pieces of iron ore fell into the abyss with a screech and a roar. From there, my guide explained, they would be crushed, turned into pellets and eventually melted down into steel.

Anders Lindberg, a spokesman for LKAB, Sweden’s state-owned mining company, drove me down into the Kiruna mine in a company-owned four-wheel drive vehicle. Cheerful, bespectacled and passionate about mining, he kept up a constant stream of chatter as we rolled through the unfathomable warren of underground tunnels, caverns and railways. As we approached 4,000 feet below ground, the mine’s deepest level, my ears started to pop and it got hotter — we were getting closer to the Earth’s core.

“Whatever you do in your daily life, it has started in the mine,” he said as his headlights flashed across the roughly hewn rock of the tunnel wall. “The tools you use, the chair you’re sitting on, the bike you’re riding on your way to work. The pens you’re writing with, the computer, your mobile phone. It has all started in the mine.” 

From Kiruna, the iron is taken by train to ports in Norway and Sweden, where it is refined into steel or shipped to LKAB’s clients. At least 80% of iron ore in Europe comes from LKAB’s mines. The company says its products can be found in mobile phones, bikes, strollers, electric cars, roads and buildings all over the world.

When Lindberg took me to see some of the miners, I expected pickaxes and dusty faces, but instead I found men and women sitting in state-of-the-art underground offices — with computer screens, water coolers and even a canteen. It turns out that a lot of the mining now happens remotely. I watched as one woman, Ingela, picked up piles of rock and moved them using joysticks and an Xbox controller, before a huge curved screen.

Most iron mining and steelmaking today is otherwise not very modern: The pelleting, refining and smelting processes are typically powered by fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Globally, the steel industry is responsible for about 8% of carbon emissions. But LKAB says they can transform the whole process from mine to end-product by using electricity generated by water and wind instead.

Ahead of COP 28 — the global climate conference taking place this week in Dubai — the UN warned that we’re on track for global temperatures to rise 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. The UN estimates that an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced by climate disasters each year since 2008. Without drastic changes in the way we live, we'll see more and more hellish weather events, deadly heat waves, forest fires, drastic flooding and millions more forced to leave their homes — the world as we know it will be even further transformed.

We’re already living through these consequences, but stopping the worst effects will require overhauling nearly every industry. We must reduce our carbon emissions. But the question of how to do that hangs heavily in the Arctic air.

Until the last decade, Sweden’s northernmost county — Norrbotten, home to Kiruna — wasn’t such an exciting place. Unemployment levels were among the highest in the country, and people were moving down to Stockholm in search of work. But a new chapter began when Facebook came to town.

In 2011, Meta (then Facebook) began building an enormous data center in Lulea, a small city on the Baltic coast, about four hours south of Kiruna. Run on hydropower and cooled naturally by the frigid Arctic air, the data center called attention to northern Sweden’s potential as a place with an abundance of renewable energy. More server farms began setting up shop and wind farms were erected in the vast forestland. Within a few years, industry leaders and politicians spoke of the area’s potential to help revamp age-old, carbon-heavy steel production into new eco-friendly processes. Meanwhile, Kiruna’s space center — a rocket range and satellite station — was becoming an important European hub for monitoring climate change and space weather.

Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits —  are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to “become the green transition.” Someone handed me a newspaper that proclaimed northern Sweden’s green transition will “save the world.”

The need for a change in the way we live and treat the Earth is also plain to see here. Every winter feels a little shorter than the last. The snow, once soft and easy for animals to dig through to reach food beneath, is now melting and refreezing as the temperature fluctuates unpredictably. The region’s reindeer are moving about ever more erratically, in constant search of food.

Alongside the “land of the future,” this place has another alias — “Europe’s last remaining wilderness.” There’s truth to the name: These vast boreal forests are home to the brown bear, golden eagle, Arctic fox, lynx, wolf and beaver. It’s one of the least inhabited places in Europe. But the Sami don’t like the term. For them, this isn’t a wilderness, and it isn’t empty. The land is replete with cultural heritage, with the traces of thousands of years of living alongside nature, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting and storytelling. 

“If you read a map now, you can see Sami names all over — every mountain, every lake, every river — all have Sami names. It’s our ancestors’ land,” said Anna Sarri, Carina Sarri’s cousin who runs a nature tourism business in a village outside Kiruna and comes from a long line of reindeer herders. “It’s a culture.”

In January of this year, the city of Kiruna laid out a lavish welcome for the European Commission to celebrate the start of Sweden’s six-month leadership of the Council of the European Union. Donning a blue LKAB hard hat and protective clothing, Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech inside the belly of the mine to mark the occasion.

“I don’t know what comes to mind when you think of Sweden. Some of you might think of the Swedish musical miracle like ABBA, Roxette or Swedish House Mafia. Maybe you’re thinking of Astrid Lindgren or those red-painted wooden houses. Untamed wilderness,” Busch said with a smile. “But I’d like to add another entry to that list. LKAB, the Swedish mines.”

She went on to announce that in Kiruna, just north of where LKAB is currently mining, is a second enormous underground deposit of metals, containing not only iron, but also Europe's largest quantity of rare earth metals. This second deposit, she said, would be a treasure trove of much-needed materials for making magnets that power electric car engines and help convert motion into electricity in wind turbines.

Opening up a sister mine — to dig for these valuable minerals —  would be crucial, she said, for Europe’s greener, profitable future. It would wean Europe off dependence on China’s rare earth elements and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. “Sweden is literally a goldmine,” Busch told reporters.

Anna Sarri was in her village when she first heard the news. Announcing the deposit without consulting the Sami first, and doing it on the grandest possible scale was a “dirty trick,” she said. In reality, the mining company has known about the deposit for over a century. They simply hadn’t categorized or publicly registered its geological makeup in detail until now. But the international media immediately bought the political calculus, hailing the deposit as a new “discovery.” The fanfare suddenly made it a very difficult thing for the Sami — or anyone else — to oppose the opening of a new mine. Doing so would mean being on the wrong side of the climate change debate.

“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don't, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.

The mining company says that according to geological reporting standards, it had to make a large public announcement so all parties were notified at once.

Talk of untapped treasures lying beneath the earth in northern Sweden is nothing new, especially to Indigenous people like Sarri and Labba. In the early 20th century, a eugenicist named Herman Lundborg traveled to Kiruna to meet the Sami and classify them. He measured their skulls and photographed people naked, a project that was privately backed by the founder of Kiruna’s mine and the LKAB mining company. In 1919, Lundborg wrote that there were “dormant millions” in profits underground in northern Sweden and that because the Sami — who he believed to be racially inferior — did not extract those resources, they should “give way to clean Swedish [industrial] interests.” At the time, Lundborg’s influence served as the backdrop for the state’s displacement of Sami communities during the industrialization of the north in the early 20th century. Racial ideology — and assimilation policies forced on the Sami people — painted Sami traditions and philosophy around land use as incompatible with Sweden’s prosperity.

Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land. The undeniable threats of climate change on one hand and the constant acquisition of land by mining companies on the other, feel like an existential Catch-22; they can lose their land to green development, lose it to climate change or, potentially, lose it to both.

But these rare earth metals are here. And they could help human beings keep using the tools and technologies we’ve come to depend on, without doing quite so much harm to the planet. Should the Sami have to give up their way of life to make way for these mines — when they had little to do with destroying the climate in the first place? I put the question to LKAB’s Lindberg.

“You cannot look at the Sami population and say, ‘They’re a small group that’s not part of the society,’” he said. “We have Samis working in the mine. Reindeer herders are using motorcycles, snowmobiles, helicopters, drones, mobile phones. They also need these metals. They are also using fossil fuels, being part of the climate change.”

The mineral-rich land here may contain real answers to the climate crisis. But there’s also money to be made from these rare earth metals — and a lot of it.

The state-owned mining company has not yet put a price on how much that second deposit in Kiruna’s potential sister mine — the one announced during the European Commission visit in January — might be worth. Along with 700 million tons of iron ore, LKAB believes the new deposit contains about 1.3 million tons of rare earth elements. One metric ton of neodymium, one of the elements found in the deposit used for powerful magnets and electronics, is currently priced at around $70,000. The total profits here — of iron for traditional industrial use alongside valuable mining byproducts in the form of rare earth metals that go into our phones and electric vehicles — could be astronomical.

Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, has called the newly announced Kiruna deposit as potentially fortune-changing for Sweden’s economic future as Norway’s discovery of offshore oil in the late 1960s, which led to it becoming a top global exporter of crude oil. 

But some locals are skeptical about what all this mining is really for and who really stands to gain from it. At a pub in Lulea, where locals were competing in a Swedish-style pub quiz over plates of meatballs and lingonberries, I met workers who had just flown in to lay fiber optic cable in the Baltic Sea. They chuckled when I mentioned the green transition. “Ask the companies how much electricity it will need!” one of them said.

It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.

How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

But wind farms come with issues of their own. “They talk about wind power,” said Johan Sandström, a mining expert at the Lulea Institute of Technology. “OK, some wind turbines might end up in the sea, but others must be on land. Whose land?"

For people in northern Sweden, this is the real million-dollar question. And it’s a hard one to raise in a place like Lulea — where almost everyone is somehow connected to the town’s industry and technology sectors. Sandström described an emerging “culture of silence” around challenging the new narrative of the green transition.

“As soon as you ask a question about it, you’re categorized as being against progress and sustainability,” said Sandström. “It’s like a silent consensus that we need to view this as a positive thing, period. And I think that's unfortunate.”

Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top. When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly.

“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

Mining for the green transition will bring some harm to the land and the people who live on it. But its champions carry a healthy dose of realism about what drives the global economy and how our demands for everything from ballpoint pens to laptops affect the climate. They are pushing for more sustainable ways for us to keep living as we do.

Then, there’s a more radical crowd: scientists who argue that all options must be on the table, that we may need to look beyond the Earth itself to slow down climate change. They too found their way to Kiruna.

In 2021, a group of researchers at Harvard University wanted to study whether humans could one day bring down the Earth’s rising temperatures by dimming light from the sun. They predicted that if they could send a burst of mineral dust into the atmosphere, it would act like millions of tiny mirrors high in the sky, scattering sunlight back into space and potentially lowering temperatures worldwide.

The group set their sights on Esrange, the Swedish Space Corporation’s rocket launch site and space base, a 40-minute drive east of Kiruna. The sparsely populated Arctic landscape would make it an ideal testing ground.

The first step would be to come to Esrange, where they could test out flying a special mechanical balloon about 12 miles overhead. If successful, the balloon could one day be used to sprinkle the sky with those tiny mirrors.

One of the scientists on the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short, is David Keith, who is now a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. He told me that the first goal was simply to test the balloon, but the longer-term goal was “to do some stratospheric science, with a focus on solar geoengineering.”

Dubbed “sunscreen for the Earth,” solar geoengineering is one of the most controversial types of climate science out there today. If it works, it could potentially reduce global temperatures and save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change. But there are huge, potentially catastrophic, risks involved. Scientists say a mistake in the process could disrupt our climate system — even erode the ozone layer — and severely impact global drought and flooding patterns.

Nevertheless, the stage was set for the SCoPEx team to come to Sweden. They even announced their plans to the media. But then word reached Åsa Larsson Blind, who lives northeast of Kiruna and is vice president of the nonprofit Saami Council, a cross-border rights group that spans the Sami region.

Larsson Blind was startled by what she saw as the mindset of geoengineering — the idea that humans might one day be able to tweak the Earth’s climate to suit our own ends. 

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” she told me. “Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere is to take it a step further.”

The Saami Council launched a high-profile campaign opposing the project, releasing a video that challenged not only the proposed experiment, but called for a complete global ban on geoengineering research. The video featured Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking alongside Larsson Blind, other Indigenous leaders, scientists and environmentalists who called geoengineering “pollution for a pollution problem” and a “false solution” to climate change.

In his work, Keith talks about a stark future where the effects of climate change get so bad that it could become urgent to research geoengineering as a potential solution. He argues that it is important to understand the risks while we still have time to consider them soberly, rather than in some future climate emergency. “The purpose of research,” he told me, “is to provide more information about how well these technologies might work and what their risks are.” But after the Saami Council campaign, the Swedish Space Corporation reneged on its commitment to the SCoPEx team — the balloon launch was called off. 

Keith recalled Space Corporation officials telling the group that “there were enough different disputes over mining and other topics in Sami land; that from the point of view of the Swedish government, they just didn't want one more irritation.”

“I think the Swedish government failed kind of abysmally on that score,” he said. “It is entirely legitimate for the Sami to oppose experiments or whole research in general,” Keith told me. “But their right to do so needs to be balanced against the rights of people in poor, hot countries.” He added that in his experience, people were more interested in geoengineering in the Global South.

Mattias Forsberg, a representative from the Esrange Space Center, said that it was not only opposition from the Sami that caused them to cancel the project. “Our core mission as a company, our reason for being in business, is to serve the sustainable development of humanity and our modern societies,” Forsberg said. “Since it quickly became clear that this whole topic around the SCoPEx project needed to be discussed more widely internationally before any related mission could be conducted, we took the decision to cancel our engagements with the project.”

I talked about the scuttled geoengineering project with Henrik Blind, the Sami politician in Jokkmokk. For him, the shutdown of SCoPEx’s balloon test in Kiruna — and the debate it sparked — seemed to capture the clash between nature-based solutions and techno-fixes to climate change.

“This is an example of how stupid it is, that we as one creature, among millions of creatures, think we can be larger than nature. It’s something that makes me laugh,” he said. “It isn’t the sun’s fault, and it isn’t the planet’s fault, that our climate is going where it’s going.”

We met by a frozen lake a few minutes’ drive from Blind’s office at city hall. He glided up to our meeting place in a pristine white Tesla, the tires squeaking on the snow. Dressed in a pink cashmere hat and bright red knitted mittens, he walked with a slight bounce, making quick progress around the lake.

Dusk was drawing in — it was October, and the nights were getting longer. Blind gestured at the twilight stillness around us, the sky turning the color of watery ink. “We call it the blue hour,” he said with a smile.

Jokkmokk lies just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the sun only just manages to peep over the horizon during winter. People in this part of the world have a singular relationship with the sun. It’s something that made the concept of solar geoengineering — the idea we can blunt the strength of the sun’s rays — feel particularly unsettling for Blind.

We talked about the strange reality of living mostly in the darkness for six months of the year, and with abundant light for the other six. “Of course it’s dark, but dark is also light in some way,” Blind said. “The light needs the darkness, to get the contrast.”

On the subject of contrasts, I asked Blind about the Tesla. Electric cars depend on metals and minerals often extracted in environmentally destructive conditions. “For me, it’s showing how hard it is to be a modern person. You want to do the right thing, but still, you are harming nature in one way or another,” he said. “It’s a conflict in the head. I know that an electric car has a lot of minerals in it, and it’s causing trouble in other places.”

There is trouble — plenty of trouble — in other places. In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it. Those least responsible for climate change are forced to relinquish their land — and in some places, even their lives — in the race to fix the damage. 

In Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur people are being forced to work in solar panel factories while millions more are surveilled, imprisoned and “re-educated” so China can consolidate control over the region’s vast resources of rare earth elements and precious metals. In Mexico, Indigenous communities say their lives and livelihoods are being threatened by wind farm company land grabs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mines providing 70% of the world’s supply for rechargeable batteries in cars and phones are expanding rapidly, mines run on trafficked child labor, with spartan conditions as people scrape out the metal by hand using pickaxes and shovels.

It’s a far cry from the Kiruna iron mine, which LKAB dubs the “most modern iron mine in the world.” Victoire Kabwika, a mining technician from the DRC, now works here in LKAB’s mine. I met Kabwika and his wife Angel as they came out of Sunday service at Kiruna’s church, blinking in the slanting Arctic sunlight. He too spoke of contrasts. To Kabwika, mining in Sweden is night and day compared to back home. 

“In Congo, people are working with soldiers around. And weapons. Children are working. It's not good,” he told me. Mining in the DRC to fuel the green transition is also ravaging the landscape, but there, people regularly pay for it with their lives. More than 7,000 miles south of Kiruna, the Kolwezi mine is also causing nearby houses to crack apart due to the excavation below them. But there, soldiers are forcing people to leave their homes, marking them with red Xs and burning them down. Amnesty International found they’d even torched some homes with families still inside.

All over town in Kiruna, signs proclaim that the company has “secured mineral assets that guarantee the future for ourselves and our region beyond 2060.” If the new sister mine for iron and rare earth elements — just north of the current mine — is allowed to open, “it will mean my life, because it's going to extend the time for exploration,” said Kabwika. It would mean more jobs in the region, and that he could likely stay in his job here indefinitely.

For the Sami collective that currently herds reindeer here, it would mean yet another loss of land. And for everyone in town, it could mean more earthquakes.

At 3:11 a.m. on May 18, 2020, a 4.9-magnitude earthquake shook Kiruna, triggered by ongoing mining activity. 

“I was in my bed,” said Zebastian Bohman, 51, who has lived in Kiruna for a decade. He remembers how his apartment shuddered: paintings fell off the walls and glasses tumbled from kitchen cupboards. His thoughts immediately turned to the mine: “Who’s down there? Who’s on the shift? You start to call.”

No one was killed. But the “minequake” was more evidence of how dangerously unstable the land had become — and would continue to grow if the mining company kept digging. The town is ever so slowly being pulled towards the mine, like a tablecloth dragged across a table set for breakfast. Even before “the big one,” as locals now call it, plans were made to move Kiruna for precisely this reason.

So the mining company drew a big, red line down the middle of the town. Everyone on one side, around 6,000 homes, would have to move around two miles to the east, and the mining company would pay the cost — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the “old town’s” buildings are being bulldozed, replaced by new buildings in a “new town” center. But homes built in the traditional Swedish style — with painted clapboard and sloping, copper roofs — are being moved one by one, loaded onto trailers in their entirety and relocated. Residents often walk behind the houses, keeping a sort of slow-moving vigil.

In 2025 the city will move its immense Lutheran church. Made of wood, with soaring stained glass windows that bathe the congregation in Arctic sunlight, the architect constructed its pitched triangular shape to look like a Sami tent. The town will need to widen the road and demolish a railway viaduct to finish the job.

Since summer, the old town has largely emptied out. The land that’s closest to the mine has been turned into a kind of memory park, for the next few years at least, while the ground is still stable enough to be safe. It’s a place where people can go to process the loss of Kiruna as it was

“People are grieving, mourning the old city,” Bohman told me. “I would think it will take a generation. They love their old city and the new one is not in their heart yet.” Alongside his wife Cecilia, Bohman runs a food truck just outside the mine where they serve up reindeer kebabs to miners, businessmen, Kiruna’s teenagers and anyone else passing by. In between shifts, Zebastian Bohman took me to his old apartment building, where he showed me a series of cracks, big and small, running up through the block from the basement.

Bohman and his wife moved out of the apartment last year, into their newly allotted home. They were pleased with the trade and relieved to be out of their old place, away from the booming, the juddering and constant worry about seismic activity.

But a month after their move, around the holidays last year, the Bohmans were sitting on the sofa late one evening watching television, when they felt it. That familiar, sickening jolt: a mini-earthquake. The couple looked at each other as their new house shuddered around them. When the shaking stopped, they could do nothing but laugh. “We realized we were fucked,” Zebastian Bohman said with a chuckle and a shrug. “That's what we realized. This is not the end. This is not a home forever.”

The mining company says they don’t foresee the new town having to move again. But the Bohmans believed, in that moment, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

As we imagine our future on this planet, we can all expect epic upheaval in the places we call home. But the stakes of change will be much higher for some than for others. 

For people who are already seeing the worst of the climate crisis, the costs are extraordinary: their homes, their land, their lives. For those industrialists at the top of global supply chains, the fight to kick humanity’s fossil fuel habit will force a change in the source and size of their profits.

And for the people of Kiruna, the gains and the losses are as immense as the landscape itself. The fragility of this reality is felt every night, for now and for the foreseeable future, as the earth continues to shake.

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