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    [post_content] => Collaboration between white evangelicals and the Proud Boys is another worrying development.

In late July, a close friend of mine received a series of bizarre text messages from her parents, who urged her to stockpile food as quickly as possible. Over the next couple of weeks, they said, food would become scarce as Democrats cut off the supply and shut down the internet, as they attempted to prevent the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president. This was supposed to happen on Friday, August 13. In early August, with the Delta variant of COVID-19 surging and state governments reimposing pandemic restrictions that had only recently been lifted, my friend decided to call her parents and make one last ditch effort to convince them to get vaccinated. Her parents would have none of it. The vaccine was deadly, they insisted; she had survived only because she was protected by their prayers. They also urged her again to stock up on food and prepare for the events that would lead up to August 13.

My friends’ parents were Catholic when she was born. Soon after that they converted to evangelical Protestantism and embraced the prosperity gospel—the belief that God will give Christians health and wealth if they show sufficient faith—that is now associated with many of Trump’s most loyal Christian backers. She grew up attending church and youth group, and, although there was a time after she became an adult that her parents were not regular church attenders, they now attend weekly. Much of their disinformation seems to have come from YouTube, but, as two recent studies show, their status as white, churchgoing evangelical Protestants is not incidental to their vaccine refusal or to their embrace of the GOP’s “Big Lie” about a supposedly “stolen” election.

The first study’s conclusions are written up in a report released in late July by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Interfaith Youth Core, “Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus.” While the report presents an overly rosy picture of white evangelical Protestants by stressing that the intervention of certain religious leaders had reduced their rates of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal, the raw PRRI data speak clearly enough. White evangelicals remain the religious demographic with the highest rate of vaccine refusal, at 24 percent. The data also show a clear correlation between vaccine refusal and affiliation with the Republican Party, QAnon conspiracy beliefs, and far-right so-called “news” outlets that purvey disinformation.

Meanwhile, using YouGov data, analysts at The Economist provided another piece of the puzzle by testing the hypothesis “that Americans who have no religious affiliation find themselves attracted to other causes, such as the Q craze.” What they found instead is that “Americans who attend church the least are also the least likely to have a favorable view of QAnon.” Conversely, “adults who attended church at least once a month were eight percentage points more likely than we predicted to rate QAnon favourably.” The Economist singled out white evangelicals as the most conspiratorial demographic. While white evangelicals do still have a net unfavorable view of QAnon, they are more likely than members of any other religious demographic to have a positive view of the groundless conspiracy. In addition, 31 percent of white evangelicals believe “that the American government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip Americans, versus 18% among everyone else.” And about two-thirds of them believe the lie that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election”—a rate that is 34 percent higher than the general population.

These studies provide crucial context for understanding the turbulent events that have wracked the United States this summer. To be sure, the August 13 date—promulgated by American fascists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who claims that God freed him from his crack cocaine addiction—came and went without another January 6. But the summer has been marred by anti-vaccine and anti-mask rallies; threats of civil war; culture warring against the teaching of critical race theory; new rounds of violence instigated by far-right groups in and around Portland, Oregon; and, especially with back-to-school season, angry conspiracists attempting to dominate and disrupt local school board meetings with their vocal opposition to mask mandates meant to protect children who are too young to be vaccinated against COVID.

There are reports that some of these extremists, some of whom have been charged with criminal conduct, do not even have children attending school in the districts in question (if they have children at all). Indeed, some of the same people have been documented at school board meetings not merely in different districts, but even in different states, making it highly likely that astroturfing is in play. Canadian observers have also noted that their anti-maskers sometimes travel the length of the country to participate in multiple protests; the notoriously homophobic and anti-mask Polish-Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski has also been known to stir up trouble in the United States, including in Portland, my adopted hometown.

In the meantime, Florida passed a law banning school districts from mandating masks, with Republican politicians vowing to punish districts that refused to comply. Thankfully, a court overturned Florida’s deadly anti-social law, but Governor Ron DeSantis nevertheless followed through on the threat of punishment by withholding funding from two school districts that passed mask mandates, despite the fact that Florida’s current COVID outbreak is the worst in the United States. The states of Tennessee, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, all of which are governed by Republicans, have also banned school districts from passing mask mandates. In response, the Biden Administration has opened a civil rights investigation over the apparent discrimination against students with disabilities.

At every turn, Christian symbols and rhetoric have been used by the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-democratic American extremists to support their actions, which amount to a continuation of January 6—a slow-motion insurrection. In June, for example, DeSantis told audience members at the Christofascist Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference that it was necessary “to put on the full armor of God” in order to defeat those to his political left. By using that language, DeSantis conflated Democrats, liberals, and progressives with literally demonic forces.

Charismatic evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht takes a similar approach with his “Let Us Worship” tour, which brings coronavirus germs and “spiritual warfare” to numerous cities across the United States—frequently without securing the necessary permits for his largely maskless, crowded outdoor concerts—as a protest against the reasonable expectation that churches should comply with legal public health measures. On August 8, Feucht brought his circus to Portland, Oregon, bragging on Twitter about his “security team” consisting of far right-wing street brawlers. This in itself—the increasingly open collaboration between the Proud Boys and their ilk, on the one hand, and explicitly Christian leaders on the other—is a highly concerning development. Similar dynamics have been on display in anti-vax and anti-mask rallies in California. At an August 14 rally that took place in Los Angeles, for example, one speaker openly called for violence in front of signs and banners that included slogans like “Freedom in Jesus” and “Jesus is King.” Other speakers proclaimed that “true conservatism” means “instilling Christian values back into our government,” and, quoting the New Testament book of Romans, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” One sign at the rally read “The blood of Christ is my vaccine.”

As with the January 6 insurrection itself, it concerns me that too few elite journalists and pundits are taking the Christian element of American fascism seriously (to say nothing of the fact that far too few of them are willing to call fascism by its name). There is no way to effectively counter a threat to democracy without understanding the nature of the threat, and to look the other way and pretend that Christianity is always and inherently benign in fact enables the Christofascists by reinforcing Christian normativity and hegemony.

True, the quasi-eschatological predictions for August 13 did not come to pass, despite all the extremist chatter about that date. Nevertheless, it’s been a summer of vocal and violent extremism in North America, much of it theocratic in nature. State-level voter suppression efforts might lead to entrenched minority authoritarian rule by white Christian extremists in the United States in any case, but the left’s counter-messaging should include the robust embrace of pluralism and secular society as the keys to a healthy democracy.
    [post_title] => 'The most conspiratorial demographic': White evangelicals and the QAnon connection
    [post_excerpt] => White evangelicals are more likely than members of any other religious demographic to have a positive view of QAnon.
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‘The most conspiratorial demographic’: White evangelicals and the QAnon connection

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => 'Gold is not a human right. Housing is.'

Between 2012 and 2021, Berlin’s median rent rose by over 70 percent. The cost of housing did not skyrocket because the city suddenly became a better place to live, but because investors looking for a secure place to park their money discovered the German capital. Over the past 30 years, in major cities around the world, corporations have been buying up huge swaths of domestic properties as profitable investments. As a result, habitable and affordable housing has become exponentially more difficult for ordinary people to find and keep.

In “Push,” a 2019 documentary that investigates why and how cities have become prohibitively expensive, Leilani Farha, the former U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing, says that “unbridled capitalism” has made cities unlivable for all but the rich, with affordable housing now a luxury rather than a necessity. “That’s what differentiates housing as a commodity from gold as a commodity,” Farha says: “Gold is not a human right. Housing is.”

In the film, Farha meets a number of people whose rent has increased so dramatically, essentially overnight, that they have little hope of remaining in their homes. A new management company bought a building in Harlem and raised some residents’ rent by $900 per month, making it impossible for an African-American man to stay in his home of many years unless he could suddenly find a $100,000/year job (around 58 percent of Harlem residents make $60,000 per year or less). Something similar happened to an apartment complex in Uppsala, Sweden, making it extremely difficult for older middle-class residents to stay in their homes without dramatically increasing their incomes—a nearly impossible feat for those unwilling to abandon their communities.


Housing is generally considered affordable when it costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. In the United States, nearly 11 million renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2018. That same year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that there are no U.S. counties in which a person working full time for the minimum wage could afford to rent a standard two-bedroom apartment. Some people spend so much of their income on housing that they have little left over for food.

The fact that large companies and investors now see housing as a reliable investment vehicle, rather than an essential element of social infrastructure—a phenomenon known as the “financialization of housing”—has transformed houses across the globe into shelters for money, not people. Thousands of dwellings sit vacant in major metropolises, enhancing the portfolios of the wealthy, while tens of thousands of human beings sleep on the streets.

In Berlin, housing activists are pursuing a radical solution: they want to expropriate domestic properties from Germany’s largest landlords and repurpose them as social housing. If housing is a public good, they say, then the public should control it. Among Berliners, 85 percent of whom are renters, this effort has become increasingly popular, with 56 percent saying they either support (47 percent) a proposal to expropriate the properties of large landlords or are undecided (9 percent).

A common argument against expropriation is that governments should be using their limited resources to build more affordable housing. But that solution has been on offer for decades and has yet to halt, or even significantly slow, the broader crisis. Labor and building material costs are prohibitive in many places. Building and land use regulations also pose significant barriers, especially in metro areas. It remains difficult to find both suitable places to build and communities receptive to large-scale public housing projects. Simply building more units is a flawed and partial solution, especially in the absence of significant and consistent funding.

But the Berlin campaign targets enormous, publicly traded companies that own more than 3,000 apartments, like Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, Germany’s two largest corporate residential landlords. The two companies recently negotiated an €18 billion merger that set a record for Europe’s largest real estate deal, with a combined market valuation of around €47 billion, or $56 billion. They now collectively own around 550,000 apartments throughout Germany.

Article 14 of the German constitution permits expropriation only for the common good and only in exchange for fair compensation. If Berlin’s housing activists succeed, the government won’t simply seize private units; it will transfer them to the public and compensate the owners, albeit at a rate that some shareholders might not consider sufficient (companies have the right to sue if they believe the compensation is inadequate).

According to a 2020 report prepared by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin is home to around two million apartments, about 15 percent of which are owned by financial investors and publicly traded housing companies. Globally, residential real estate accounts for $163 trillion of assets, a portion of which are held by investors and housing companies in Germany. Deutsche Wohnen reported a profit of €1.54 billion (about $1.83 billion) in fiscal year 2020. Organizers in Berlin say the company has profited handsomely from buying up properties and driving up rents, neglecting routine maintenance and dragging its feet on essential repairs until major renovations are needed, then fixing up the apartments in order to justify massive rent hikes.

Berliners are not the only ones trying to take back their city from corporate profiteers. In 2020, the city of Barcelona warned 14 companies that if they failed to rent the 194 vacant apartments they collectively held within one month, the municipality would take possession and convert the units into public housing. Since 2016 Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, has made it legal for municipalities to seize apartments left vacant for over two years and rent them to low-income tenants for four to 10 years before returning them to the owners. Catalans also approved a 2019 measure allowing cities to buy such apartments outright at half the market rate (owners would not have the option of refusing to sell). The law allows the city of Barcelona to take possession only in cases where the owners hold multiple units, while forcible purchase is allowed only when units are left vacant for at least two years.

Expropriation is unlikely to catch on any time soon in the United States, where the rights of property holders are treated as sacrosanct. During the pandemic, tenant organizers in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities pressured the government to cancel rent and mortgage payments for as long as the coronavirus was disrupting the economy, without forcing people to pay it back later. California, New York, and a few other states offered tenants modest relief in the form of temporary eviction moratoriums, in a compromise that fell far short of organizers’ demands.

Those measures in no way matched the actions proposed or taken in Berlin or Barcelona. Nevertheless Alan Beard, managing director of Interlink Capital Strategies, a financial advisory firm, penned an op-ed for The Hill entitled, “How to protect against future U.S. government expropriation,” in which he railed against governments in the U.S. for having “effectively expropriated most of the American economy” by forcing businesses to close for safety reasons and making it harder to evict people during the pandemic.

In many U.S. cities, organizers are fighting for greater control over buildings the public already owns. Last year, Philadelphia organizers obtained limited concessions from the city by setting up encampments, taking over vacant properties in North Philadelphia and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and demanding that the city transfer the properties to the people living in them. The city eventually agreed to put 50 vacant homes into a community land trust and allow 50 unhoused mothers with children to stay in 15 vacant city-owned houses—a drop in the bucket, given that thousands of Philadelphians still need permanent housing.

In an ideal world, said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, a New York State-based coalition of housing advocates, “public housing that is democratically run and controlled by its residents” would be the norm everywhere. But in the United States, where there is little trust in government or appetite for funding public services, that can feel like a distant dream. “In order for public housing to be great, we also need to rebuild faith in government as a thing that could compassionately care for all of us,” she said, “not the thing that is killing us and making us sick by defunding our homes.”

Tara Raghuveer, who directs KC Tenants, a tenants’ rights organization in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Homes Guarantee campaign at People's Action, believes one of the biggest obstacles to “a world where everyone has a home and housing is not treated as a commodity” is that “we’ve been so convinced by the profiteers” that there is no other way. “It’s this attitude of impossibility that stops us from doing things that are really quite simple and that we have models for, even in [the U.S.], going back decades,” she added.

Part of expropriation’s appeal is that it allows people to stay where they already live. Thomas McGath, an American ex-pat living in Berlin and a spokesperson for the campaign to expropriate Germany’s largest landlords, said Berliners are beginning to ask themselves, “‘How do I benefit if somebody plops down a thousand apartments in a field somewhere? It doesn’t do anything for me in my neighborhood, where the rents are rising rapidly and/or exorbitantly.’” The idea, he said, is to create a city “that meets the needs of everybody who lives here, and continues to have its unique character defined by those people.”

McGath said he moved to Berlin in 2013 in part to escape the growing unaffordability of U.S. cities. “If we own our own cities and we have more democratic control over the things that we own…it really makes it easier for us to make the city more sustainable, more affordable, more livable,” he said, rather than morphing into a “big playground for investors to build vanity projects that really don’t have a social purpose.”

If housing is a human right, it’s fair to question whether faceless for-profit corporations should be able to determine who gets it, for how long, and on what terms. A home is more than shelter; it’s where people feel a sense of comfort and belonging. Expropriation is one tool advocates are using to help restore housing to its original purpose: sustaining and enriching human life.
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To house the people, expropriate the landlords

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => The Modi government placed Kashmir under the longest internet shutdown ever imposed in a democracy. 

Two prolonged lockdowns in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir have taken a toll on the region’s children. The first began on August 5, 2019, when the Modi government unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which had guaranteed autonomy for the disputed region since 1947. To pre-empt protests, the government blocked internet access and phone connectivity, while the army deployed soldiers on the streets to implement draconian policies that included arrest and detention without charge, curfews, and mandatory home confinement. Schools and universities were closed for about six months. Two weeks after the military closure was lifted and schools reopened, the government in New Delhi announced a country-wide pandemic lockdown that closed all the schools and colleges in India—indefinitely. But while children in the rest of India were able to attend school online, the government refused to restore internet access in Kashmir.

The two million children of Kashmir missed nearly two years of formal schooling. Meanwhile, those from disadvantaged backgrounds had no means of accessing the internet even when the government restored access. The pandemic has exacerbated the digital divide between India’s rich and poor, since very few parents of children who attend public schools can afford smartphones to access online classes.

For those who live in remote areas that lack infrastructure, internet and mobile connectivity are poor even under normal circumstances. Now, with the pandemic keeping the schools closed, a recent BBC News report shows children in rural villages walking miles and even traversing mountains for an internet signal that might allow them to access their online schoolwork. But the signal is so weak that downloading tutorials can take hours. At that speed, online video classes are impossible.

[caption id="attachment_2923" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Kashmiri children walking home from school in winter.[/caption]

Mental health experts and teachers report that the lockdowns have also exacerbated pre-existing physical and mental health problems, causing trauma that could take generations to heal.

Dr. Majid Shafi, a clinical psychiatrist who treats children and adolescents in the central and southern districts of Kashmir said restrictions on children, who are confined to their homes for long periods during extended lockdowns, has adversely affected their physical, emotional, and cognitive health.

“Almost every parent of kids and teenagers in Kashmir is complaining these days about increased behavioral issues in their children,” said Dr. Shafi, adding that he had seen an “appreciable increase” in symptoms such as a feeling of hopelessness, anxiety, mood disorders, and a decline in academic performance

Isha Malik, a clinical psychologist at a government-run children’s hospital in Srinagar, said the months-long suspension of phone and internet connectivity had severely hampered delivery of mental health-care services. As a consequence, she said, many of her patients had relapsed or seen their symptoms worsen.

Ms. Malik, who also treats psychosocial and mental health problems in children and women at her own clinic in Srinagar, said that drug abuse among adolescents has increased with the lockdowns because they could not “release their pent-up emotions” by meeting up with friends. Data collected by physicians at Kashmir’s Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences (IMHANS) shows that heroin consumption in Kashmir increased an astonishing 1,500 percent between 2016-19. There are only three addiction treatment centers for the region’s population of 12.5 million.

During the same period of 2016-19, IMHANS found that the number of children hospitalized in psychiatric wards increased from 17,000-30,000. One small survey conducted by a psychologist in Srinagar showed that 72 percent of school-age children said they felt a lack of purpose in life.

But even before the current lockdowns, Kashmir suffered from high rates of mental illness due to ongoing political unrest and repeated military incursions, going back to the 1990s.

According to a 2016 report, co-authored by psychiatrists and researchers from IMHANS and ActionAid International, the mental health situation in Kashmir was already “alarming.” The researchers found that 11.3 percent of the adult population suffered from mental illness, which is significantly higher than the Indian national average of 7.3 percent.

A 2015  study—jointly prepared by Doctors Without Borders, IMHANS, and the University of Kashmir—found that Kashmir was suffering from a mental health crisis of “epidemic proportions,” with 50 percent of women and 37 percent of men suffering from depression and/or PTSD.

In 2019, shortly after the Modi government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous status, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), roughly equivalent to the ACLU in the United States, released a fact-finding report that found the suspension of internet and phone communication had “hugely hampered” the medical system in its efforts to provide mental healthcare to patients in Kashmir—which mirrors the experience of Ms. Malik, the clinical psychologist in Srinagar.

Amit Sen, a New Delhi-based child and adolescent psychiatrist who was part of the PUCL fact-finding team that visited Kashmir in 2019, described his deep concern for the welfare of the region’s children in a powerful essay for The Indian Express. The city of Srinagar had become a ghost town, he wrote, with the children he had seen playing on the street during previous visits now absent. The minority of children who could access mental healthcare were suffering from “acute anxiety, panic attacks, depressive-dissociative symptoms, post traumatic symptoms, suicidal tendencies and severe anger outbursts.” The violent aggression and abuse perpetrated by the military on civilians, wrote Dr. Sen, could take “generations” to heal.

History of school closures 

School closures are a familiar aspect of life in Kashmir. Students have called for academic strikes in response to political unrest—particularly after the army and government forces killed civilians. In 2016 there was a student strike to protest the military’s killing of Burhan Wani, a popular 21-year-old militant commander in southern Kashmir. In March 2018, the government closed academic institutions for 32 days, when protests erupted after military shelling resulted in the deaths of five members of a single family, along with two militants. In other words, the more recent lockdowns have only exacerbated long-simmering political tensions.

Digital divide, unequal access     

Access Now, an international advocacy group that tracks internet shutdowns across the world, reported in March that the government’s seven-month suspension of Kashmir’s internet access in 2019-20 was the longest in any democracy. According to the group’s analysis, the Indian government blocks internet access more than any country on earth.

The Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a prominent civil rights group, called the government’s communications blackout “digital apartheid.” Only in February 2021 did the government finally restore 4G mobile data service.

Umar Rashid Bhat, a public school teacher in Chandoosa, a village in northern Kashmir, says that 60 percent of his students are from households living below the poverty line, and thus cannot afford smartphones that would allow them to access online tutorials—or to participate in online classes via conference calls, which some private schools offered during the internet shutdown.

About one in five children attended private schools before the pandemic, but enrolment is dropping because the pandemic has put so many parents out of work and has thus made them unable to pay tuition. Meanwhile, 175,000 children have dropped out of public schools. Sharif Bhat, who heads the Jammu and Kashmir office of Save the Children, said the organization believes many of those children left school in order to find odd jobs that would help support their families during the precipitous economic downturn caused by the long lockdowns.

Shah Fozia Hussain, a government middle school teacher in Seer Shaksaz, a village about 37 miles from Srinagar, noticed that one of her eighth-grade pupils joined her online class after an absence of more than a month. The student told her privately that he had been out working with his father, who had been unable to earn a living for months due to the lockdowns. After saving for several months, the son had been able to buy a smartphone that enabled him to rejoin his class. “I was in tears when I heard his story,” said Ms. Hussain. For the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri children who are suffering under the government’s decision to place nationalism over their welfare and the ongoing ravages of the global pandemic, owning a smartphone that allows them to access their basic right to an education has become a privilege.
    [post_title] => Kashmir's lost generation of children
    [post_excerpt] => Deprived of internet and phone access, cooped up at home under military lockdown and then a pandemic lockdown, Kashmiri children are under severe mental stress that is putting them in psychiatric words and causing them to turn to heroin. 
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Kashmir’s lost generation of children

by Majid Maqbool

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    [post_content] => The disappearance of privacy in the digital age is irreversible. Now we have to figure out how to protect ourselves.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Technology and social media are frequently manipulated by bad actors. As a digital investigator, I see the effects of this firsthand. Often, my  prospective clients want me to utilize my knowledge of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) to stalk and harass someone they don’t like. Recently, a man contacted me to ask how much I would charge to cyberstalk his adult daughter and “expose [her] as a slut.” Of course I declined the commission, but I know there are plenty of less-than-scrupulous OSINT experts who will do the job for him. 

OSINT is a methodology by which one collects and analyzes online data that is in the public domain. OSINT can and does include leaks, and it can also involve information that was never meant to be shared widely—which is why a good investigator should always seek to protect a potentially vulnerable source, even if that source shared something publicly. 

On the micro level, OSINT can be manipulated to stalk an individual—a good example of this is people poring over clues in the photos you post to your social media accounts in order to figure out where you live and/or hang out. On the macro level, governments can and do utilize OSINT— as well as more traditional spying methods—in order to spy on their citizens.

The combination of both OSINT and other new sophisticated technologies means that none of us are truly safe from those who want to pry into our personal lives. Sometimes, this can lead to truly terrifying outcomes. If you saw “The Dissident,” the documentary film about the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, you know how easy it is to hack a phone, for example. The film shows how the Saudi regime used Israeli spyware to read communications between Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz and Jamal Khashoggi, who was then a columnist for The Washington Post. There is convincing circumstantial evidence in the film to support the theory, shared by Turkish Intelligence and the University of Toronto’s City Lab, that Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful Saudi crown prince, ordered his henchmen to murder Khashoggi at his country’s consulate in Istanbul—based on information he obtained from using Pegasus spyware to take over both men’s phones.

Or, consider the case of model Ines Helene, whose stalker geolocated her apartment building using the reflections of the buildings in the selfies she posted online.



Ines Helene’s stalker didn’t need to employ sophisticated spyware to find her address. All he needed was to be obsessive and pay attention to detail. 

If all of this scares you—well, it should. We live in a world where anyone can find out vital information about you and use it for malevolent reasons. This genie is out of the bottle in many respects, but there are ways in which legislation can catch up to our worst privacy concerns: legislation against revenge porn, which 48 states and the District of Columbia have passed, is a good example here.

There are also ways in which an environment where nothing stays secret for long is a good thing. For example, investigators can use data breaches and leaks to expose crimes that individuals or governments are trying to hide. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its four-part series on the detention and long-term incarceration of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region; to prove the existence of concentration camps the Chinese government was trying to hide, BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan collaborated with architect Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek, a programmer and digital security trainer in using open source technology to locate and identify the mass prison camps in which over 1 million Uyghurs are being held and, according to first person accounts, tortured. The importance of this type of work is in its clarity and effectiveness: by identifying and documenting irrefutable facts on the ground, it cuts through a well-funded and cynical propaganda machine to expose the truth. 

That’s not all, of course. Many of you reading this have undoubtedly experienced what it’s like to be lied to or conned. In this digital age we can expose liars and con artists before it’s too late. Worried about that guy you’re going on a date with? You can find out if he has a criminal record, or if he’s married. Concerned that a scam artist may be targeting a loved one? You can investigate the person to see what is really going on. 

Stolen valor has traditionally been a popular way for grifters to scam people—faking military service has a long, ignoble, and sadly profitable tradition—but today, there are enough tools at our disposal to figure out if someone is lying or not. 

Our social mores will eventually catch up to our changing understanding of public versus private. In fact, our comparative lack of privacy is beginning to change our very culture — making certain aspects of our past and present irrelevant. 

Consider the #infosecbikini Twitter storm. It started when a female Twitter user who works in information security was shamed for posting a relatively tame bikini photo; this led to a backlash against random sexism and harassment in cybersecurity. 

The more frequently people are “shamed” and “exposed,” it would seem, the less weight such harassment will carry in our lives. 

Simply put, we might soon reach a critical mass of “embarrassing” content, revenge porn, and other content routinely used to harass or denigrate people. So much so that a lot of this content will  become just another form of internet white noise. 

Oh, your emails were leaked? Well, so were a bunch of other people’s emails. Not only will many people have some kind of “scandal” or another in their past, there will simply be too much data to sift through. 

Similarly, the enormous amount of data out there presents a challenge for prying governments too. Russia is one example of a mass surveillance state. The scope of Russia’s surveillance system, SORM, is so great, however, that it creates logistical challenges. Nobody has time to watch everyone all the time, and unless the government is actually zeroing in on you because you stand out to them, you can still manage to fly under the radar. 

I understand that none of this is particularly reassuring for dissidents. In fact, it becomes less reassuring when we consider how evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to tap into mass surveillance systems over time—gradually reducing the human component and watching us all with renewed vigor and precision. 

Again, we have a window of opportunity to enact better legislation on AI now. Instead of being defeatist, we can think about ways in which AI can be regulated so as to reduce the potentially harmful impact of this data mining on private citizens. 

Perhaps, eventually, a healthy balance between constant hypervigilance online and going completely off-the-grid to raise chickens in a remote part of Montana will even be possible for those of us—most of us—who are trying to stay safe while also living our lives and doing our work. 

Of course, this healthy balance will not be available to private citizens of authoritarian regimes for as long as they remain authoritarian. But for those of us who still have democratic institutions to fall back on, creating the legal blueprints for how our digital rights can work better for all of us is possible. With smart activism, it is also attainable.
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We wish to inform you that privacy is dead

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => Government inquiries have exposed Canada's systemic racism toward Indigenous people.

In September 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman from Quebec’s Manawan community, livestreamed a Facebook video that showed her screaming in pain while hospital healthcare workers openly mocked her. “You’re a fucking idiot,” “only good for sleeping around,” and “you are better off dead,” were just some of the comments recorded. Joyce passed away shortly after posting the video, which was shared widely online; the collective shock and shame at her death galvanized a movement to force Canadians to come to terms with the racism and colonialism in their medical system.

During the public inquiry that followed, witnesses and hospital staff testified to long-standing prejudice from healthcare workers and hospital administrators who neither knew nor cared that Indigenous patients were receiving inadequate care. Advocates for First Nations communities pointed to this incident not as an isolated tragedy, but as one more example of a medical system that continues to see Indigenous peoples as less deserving of equal treatment and respect.

A culture of anti-Indigenous racism

Among those testifying at the inquiry was Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and a Montreal pediatric emergency physician, who spoke about medical colonialism as "a culture or ideology, rooted in systemic anti-Indigenous racism, that uses medical practices and policies to establish, maintain or advance a genocidal colonial project.”

While not many people are familiar with the term, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain has written a book on the subject. Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (2020, McGill-Queens University Press) shines a light on the decades-long cruel practice of separating children from their families during emergency medevacs from northern and remote regions of Quebec.



Working as a pediatric emergency physician, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain saw the cruel consequences of the non-accompaniment practice first-hand in 2017, when he treated two young patients who were undergoing stressful medical procedures without their loved ones by their side. Quebec pediatricians had been demanding the end of this heartless practice for decades, but successive governments refused to change the policy, making Quebec an outlier in Canada. When a citizen confronted him about the matter at a public event in 2018 , Quebec’s then-Health Minister, Gaétan Barrette, made comments that basically amounted to propagating “drunken Indian” and “freeloader” tropes. Calls for his resignation went unheeded, but the practice of preventing parents from accompanying their children on medevac flights was finally discontinued later that year, on the back of a campaign called #aHand2Hold.

Confronting the truth of past horrors

The same week that Dr. Shaheen-Hussain testified at the Quebec inquiry on Echaquan’s death a grim discovery on the other side of the country, in Kamloops, British Columbia, stopped Canadians in their tracks. A mass grave containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of a former residential school provided physical confirmation of what thousands of survivors of these forced-assimilation centres had been saying for years.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a nationwide commission on the evils of these government-sponsored, church-run schools that operated between 1831 and 1996, concluded that thousands of children had been mistreated, physically and sexually abused, and knowingly left vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, resulting in thousands of deaths.

[caption id="attachment_2749" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1937.[/caption]

In addition, highly unethical nutrition experiments under the care of two physicians (one of them was a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three inventors of Pablum infant cereal) working for the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada had been conducted on many of these children without their knowledge or consent. They were purposefully denied adequate nutrition or dental care, as part of these experiments, eerily reminiscent of the Syphilis Study conducted on Black men by the U.S. Public Health Service at Tuskegee and the medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on concentration camp survivors during World War II. Even when children died, the experiments continued.

[caption id="attachment_2741" align="alignleft" width="300"] A Black man is tested during the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.[/caption]

The TRC commission made a number of recommendations, among them a request for the federal government to “acknowledge that the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools” and to “establish measurable goals to identify and close the health outcomes between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal communities […] via efforts [that] would focus on indicators such as: infant mortality, maternal health, suicide, mental health, addictions, life expectancy, birth rates, infant and child health issues, chronic diseases, illness and injury incidence, and the availability of appropriate health services.” Out of a total of 94 recommendations or calls to action made in 2105, only eight have since been implemented.

A lack of compassion and respect

Dr. Arlene Laliberté, a psychologist  who is Algonquin from the Timiskaming First Nation, completed her PhD on suicide in Indigenous communities. She sees the effects of medical colonialism and the intergenerational and multigenerational trauma caused by the residential school and child welfare systems (often manifesting as structural violence and self harm) daily in her work. She also sees the indifference to it.

“Collaboration and communication are always difficult with hospitals and healthcare institutions,” she says. “When I accompany patients of mine who are going through crises or mental health issues, I often observe a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to follow up with the patient or the patients’ family. They aren’t taken seriously or believed when they disclose symptoms, and their pain is minimized or dismissed.”

Dr. Laliberté says that Indigenous patients are often treated as second-class citizens, with no respect for their own traditional healing methods, not being seen beyond the stigma or cliches of being “a bunch of drunks” and “savages.” As a result they tend to mistrust the system or delay treatment for serious physical or mental health issues, often until it’s too late.

Attempting to bridge this ignorance gap, the TRC commission called upon medical and nursing schools in Canada to require all students take a course dealing with Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. According to the commission, this would require “skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.”

“As far as I know, this still isn’t part of the curriculum,” says Dr. Laliberté. “While I was teaching at the university, I thought of how overrepresented Indigenous children are in the foster care system (a whopping 52.2 per cent of children in foster care in Canada are Indigenous, although they account for only 7.7 percent of the child population), and I took it upon myself to educate future psycho-educators who will be working in the DPJ (Quebec’s Youth Protection system). Some of my peers voiced strong opposition to this and weren’t interested in anything that wasn’t part of the status quo.”

Forced sterilization of Indigenous women

Unwanted medical procedures are not only part of our colonial history –they continue to be part of the present. This past May, a local Métis (person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry) lawyer in British Columbia alleged that he knew of Indigenous girls— some younger than 10 years old—who had been forced by social workers to have IUDs inserted by doctors because they were at risk of being raped in foster care.

These disturbing allegations came on the heels of the final report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), which included a section on the forced sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada. It reminds us that commonplace medical procedures are often used without consent to decrease or limit the Indigenous population.

There are parallels here with similar coercive sterilization tactics implemented in the United States. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 enabled the mass sterilization (some say more than 25 percent) of Native American women of child-bearing age. Back in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from women alleging they were coerced into getting tubal ligation as recently as 2014. A similar lawsuit has since been launched in Alberta.

“Medical colonialism killed Joyce”

This colonial mindset and the systemic discrimination that deeply affects issues regarding standards of care, ethics, caregiver policies and practices is often a straight line from the past to today’s medical system, with healthcare staff often making fast and damaging assumptions about Indigenous patients and why they’re seeking medical help. During the inquiry for Echaquan, who died of pulmonary edema, witnesses testified that healthcare staff mistook her debilitating pain and severe myocardiopathy for drug withdrawal symptoms. As a result, they disregarded her cries of pain and left her unmonitored, which was against healthcare protocol. According to the testimony of Dr. Alain Vadeboncoeur, an emergency physician at the Montreal Heart Institute, who examined her autopsy report, the 37-year-old mother of seven “could have been saved with proper care.”

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain shared similar conclusions at the inquiry, stating categorically that “medical colonialism killed Joyce Echaquan and that her death was avoidable.”

Medicine isn’t always healing

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book is a powerful condemnation of medical colonialism, which continues to affect Indigenous communities. The descriptions of forced sterilization, skin grafting, Indian Hospitals (sanatoriums), medical nutritional experiments, and medical disappearances speak loudly to deeply embedded racism in medical culture. No wonder Indigenous communities are suspicious of the Canadian healthcare system and the people who work within it.

“How the government responded to the #AHand2Hold campaign is telling, because if denial stems from the top, one can only imagine what it’s often like on the frontlines,” says Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “Medical colonialism is rooted in the long-held belief that medicine is benevolent and neutral, but it’s often not, and we need to come to terms with that reality.”

Unconscious bias also manifests in how Indigenous health professionals are perceived by the medical establishment. “We are often seen as less competent,” Dr. Laliberté says. “I didn’t get my PhD in a cracker box, and yet, despite my credentials, I am often seen as less respectable. I have also seen the services offered on a reserve deemed less valuable, even though the registered professionals working there have the same education as everyone else.” The Indian Act and the infantilization of Indigenous peoples as “wards of the state” still unconsciously resonates today with many who should know better.

Joyce’s Principle

After Echaquan’s tragic death, the Atikamekw community drafted Joyce’s Principle, which aims to guarantee all Indigenous people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services, as well as the right to enjoy the best possible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The brief constitutes a reminder and a formal request for a commitment by the governments of Quebec and Canada (and their institutions) to respect and protect Indigenous rights relative to healthcare and social services rights that are recognized internationally. The federal government adopted Joyce’s Principle, but the Quebec government refused because the document makes explicit mention of systemic racism, which the provincial government insists does not exist.

Indigenous academics, advocates, physicians, and the Quebec Nurses' Association (QNA) immediately blasted the government for its stubborn refusal. In a published statement, the QNA said, “Without explicit confirmation of the presence of such problems, little changes or actions will lead to positive results.”

The government’s refusal to adopt Joyce’s Principle is, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain, “a slap in the face, unconscionable, insulting, and destructive to Indigenous communities’ idea of working together for a better future.”

He finds the government’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge systemic racism “jarring.” “It’s like trying to provide treatment for a diagnosis you refuse to name,” he says. “This refusal is so perplexing to me, because, contrary to accusations that it puts ‘all Quebecers on trial,’ if you accept systemic racism, you’re actually doing the exact opposite. You’re in fact acknowledging that you’ve inherited a system that you’re simply part of and should be actively working to dismantle.”

Gaslighting government

The minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs in Quebec insists he doesn’t want to get tangled up in semantic debates and prefers to take concrete action. But advocates insist that a government denying precisely what those it seeks to re-establish trust with are asking for is, once again, gaslighting their concerns.

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain makes it clear this isn’t a semantic debate to those affected. “Systemic racism and medical colonialism are why infant mortality is four times higher for Inuit children than average childhood mortality rates in Quebec. It’s why it’s twice as high for Indigenous children ages 10-19 than the Canadian average and five times as high for Indigenous teenage girls living on a reserve. It’s because of an entire system, not because of a few racist people.”

He insists that throwing money at a problem the government isn’t even willing to recognize in any meaningful way is pointless. “There’s no tangible commitment to eradicate systemic racism at its root.”

Quebec’s response is to casually point to the federal government and blame the Indian Act of 1876 for all the ills that have befallen Indigenous communities over the years. This is convenient deflection and denial, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “There is a fair amount of historical proof that proves the contrary,” he says. “Quebec is complicit in systemic racism and colonialism too.”

First Nations and their best interests are often caught in the middle of a power struggle between both of Canada’s colonizing forces (the English and the French) as the Quebec and federal governments often engage in a push and pull over jurisdictions and territory. When much-needed federal legislation was finally adopted in 2019, allowing Indigenous groups to take over their own child welfare systems, which would prioritize the placement of Indigenous children within their own communities, the Quebec government challenged it because it saw the new legislation as a threat to its provincial jurisdiction. The move understandably angered the Indigenous community, which called it “shameful.”

A complicit medical system

Chronic underfunding of health services and social services and the unwillingness to relinquish power as a way of redressing social inequities is also medical colonialism. Canadian medical anthropologist John O’Neil, who’s briefly mentioned in Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book, writes that “the system of medicine that we now rely on not only assisted that [colonial] expansion, but it was assisted in its development and domination by the colonial process of subjugation and resource exploitation.”

In the book’s afterword, Kanesatake activist Ellen Gabriel reveals that in the Mohawk language, the word for “hospital” is Tsi Iakehnheiontahionàhkhwa, which equates to “the place where people go to die.” It’s quite telling that the medical institutions most of us think of as sources of healing and help are seen as a place of death by those who have suffered—and continue to suffer—under them.

For her part, Dr. Laliberté defines medical colonialism as “living in fear and frustration.” She witnesses the daily struggle by Indigenous communities across Canada for respect and empathy, engaged in reclaiming traditional measures that support their peoples' mental health and wellness, being challenged by a colonial mindset that presumes to know better.

“Living my life as a First Nations professional woman, I am livid most of the time,” she says.
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‘A lack of compassion’: Canada’s shameful history of medical colonialism

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => A powerful argument that fat people should be accorded the same dignity that social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter demand.

Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a book about being trapped. It is rooted in trauma and designed, at turns, to break your heart and open your eyes to the humanity of a scorned and maligned demographic. It is also another volume in the generally shouty, scolding, so-called “woke” rhetoric that has shot through the public discourse like a never-ending Reddit thread. 

The path to inclusion, apparently, is balling out strangers on the internet and hosting a podcast. Gordon excels at both. She first came to fame as the author of Your Fat Friend, which she wrote anonymously and subtitled “Essays on life as a very fat person.” As the title of her undertaking implies, Gordon has set herself apart from a default confrontational stance. Her tone is direct, earnest, informative—uninterested in trauma porn. The same cannot be said of her voice on Twitter, but such is life when expressed in a maximum of 280 characters. 

I first became acquainted with Gordon through a hilarious, often brilliant limited episode podcast about the dieting industry, which she co-hosts with Huffington Post journalist Michael Hobbes. Called Maintenance Phase, its tagline is “wellness & weight loss, debunked & decoded.” Much like Your Fat Friend, the tone of the podcast conveys to the listener that she is implicitly on the same team as the co-hosts: away we go, together, to laugh at the sick standards and twisted marketing schemes that warp our view of the world and threaten our psychic wellbeing! The duo’s takedown of Moon Juice (“What the fuck is an adaptogen?”) is one of the funniest things I listened to in the past year; the episode on the Twinkie Defense, exploring the moral panic behind the legal defense that exculpated Harvey Milk’s killer, is moving and especially well researched. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is not a memoir but rather “a mix of memoir, research, and cultural criticism all focused on unearthing our social and cultural attitudes toward fat people.” The aim is to accord fat people the same dignity and steps toward harm reduction that other social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, demand. 

First things first: I was almost giddy to read a book published in 2021 that tells public health experts—and pretty much everyone else—that they are dead wrong and can fuck off. After this pandemic year of public health obsession, shaming (e.g., for wearing or not wearing a mask), and broadly asking to speak to the manager, it is refreshing to see a woman stand her ground and explain fat shaming and the diet industry to me.

 
Gordon trashes BMI (Body Mass Index) as a racist, meaningless marker; she deftly explains how blaming fat people for being fat allows us to avoid taking collective responsibility for a widespread problem, to indulge our biases, and isolate fat people from equal pay, housing, and medical care. Her arguments bear the hard won credibility of a woman who has been mocked, menaced, and bullied online and off throughout her life and presently wears a size 26. Biography is Gordon’s chief credential, and her stories of discrimination and humiliation at the hands of anyone from landlords to flight attendants will make you shake with rage. On her podcast, she speaks of “the shitty economy of trauma” and how she needs to be “vivisected” for anyone to buy into her arguments. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is very much a book written by a woman. To be sure, we are all trapped in these flesh suits. To be alive as a woman, in particular, is to experience being judged on your looks before all else. Describing viral videos that shame fat people, Gordon writes, “It was surreal to watch it all unfold, this litigation of my body, a voiceless inconvenience, an inanimate obstacle.” As a woman in America, I must confess it was surreal to read that sentence. I understand my role is to be a reader, and not to place myself in Gordon’s lived and often excruciating narrative, but at several points in this book I felt lectured to about my own lived experiences as a woman in a way that baffled me. 

For instance: Gordon is at pains to define a difference between fatcalling and catcalling: “Catcallers do not consider themselves to be wooing me, concocting faux romances in their minds. I do not face the inconveniences of chivalry...Instead, I face...unsolicited disclosures of men’s rape fantasies.” As I read that paragraph, I couldn’t help but think, #MeToo, Aubrey! That’s exactly what it’s like! And, even if details differ, why spend pages denigrating the trauma of catcalling in favor of the paramount trauma of fatcalling? Why must we rank trauma? Why is it all a contest? Both things suck. 

Gordon indulges in moments of intersectionality, but male aggression on an empty street is also familiar in the forms of gay bashing or bigotry—as well as straight-up catcalling. We can (and should) create room for fat women in feminism without invalidating someone else’s narrative. And, while we are at it, I’d like to point out that dating apps are humiliating for everyone. 

No one wants to be pathologized; this is something the gay rights community has been teaching us for decades. Knowing Gordon is a fierce advocate both in the queer space and for reproductive freedoms, the following sentiment left me gobsmacked: 

“The world of straight-size people is a reliable one. In their world, services are procured. Healthcare offered is accessed. Conflict arises primarily from active decisions to provoke and is rarely—if ever—prompted by the simple sight of a stranger’s body. The biggest challenges with anyone’s individual body are their attitude toward their own skin, not issues of security, dignity, or safety from bodily harm.” 

This simply isn’t true. Americans are denied access to healthcare for a plethora of reasons that include race, income, sexuality, gender identification, and immigration status.  

Gordon is at her strongest writing about how cultural conditioning yields a cruel smugness: 

“Media messages about revenge bodies and baby weight and beach bodies abound, conditioning our feelings about our own bodies the ways that we treat those who are fatter than us," she writes. She references a damning Wharton study about how “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence,” and compellingly links this attitude to legalized weight discrimination in many states. 

“Anti-fatness,” Gordon asserts, “is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character.” 

This line of thought is redolent of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic—it’s as American as it gets. In this vein, I am troubled by an underlying assumption that crops up again and again in this book: that we are empowered and enabled to participate in public discourse once we are consumers. Surely our humanity is not tied to our ability to participate in capitalism. Personally, I think people should aspire to a lot more than earning more money and being able to buy clothes in their size. I would like to see us dream bigger than a shopping spree. What else are we gunning for here? More invidiously, what industry will co-opt these upper tiers of obesity? Each June, the Gay Pride Parade boasts multiple floats from big banks and corporations: does fat acceptance look like a TD Bank ad? Can someone chart a course out of this capitalist trap?  

The book also contains the seeds of some serious fatalism, and, as it goes, a serious paradox.  

On the one hand, Gordon argues passionately against BMI as a valid metric and size as an indicator of health. At one point, she even lauds a few anti-diet dieticians. She writes of studies that point to vile and widespread medical bias against fat people, even in medical schools. Yet, she also insists that the prevalence of fat Americans is a consequence of substandard nutrition, processed food and poor education—deficits she traces back to New Deal agricultural policy and the Reagan Era’s war on obesity. 

So, we hold both of these truths to be self-evident: being fat is okay and not a threat to one’s health, but having a fat society is a problem we must collectively solve. 

Gordon also claims that 97 million Americans diet and it’s a $66 billion-industry. But, she says 98 percent of dieters fail. This made me wonder: what constitutes a failure? What constitutes a diet? Success metrics are strange, and their definition is often slippery to the point of slime. When my own father was dying of cancer, I learned that “success” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is defined as living for another five years. If it doesn’t look like you’ll make it that long, they don’t treat you for fear of sullying their numbers. 

So: who is in these diet studies? What did they want to achieve? Where did they start? When I dove into the footnotes to learn the rationale behind the numbers, I was led to a Psychology Today author promo listicle: “6 Reasons Smart People Don’t Diet.” The statistical improbability of “success” pinned to these numbers allows for an ugly tendency to flay any follower engaged in weight loss. On her podcast, Aubrey says she believes it was a fair boundary to block anyone with an Instagram bio that states an aspirational weight—although she herself doesn’t do so. 

Isn’t it possible to both understand that the diet industry is largely shambolic and also leave room for people to try and change their bodies a little if they want to? A before-and-after photo is not inherently toxic. Perhaps social media is the bigger issue, with all of its attendant lies around displays of wealth and heteronormative couplehood—while we are on the topic. 

Somewhere between being resigned to genetic predisposition and indulging in the freak show that is The Biggest Loser, I’ve got to believe there is a middle ground where we have a bit more acceptance and agency. Call me an optimist. How can a writer as smart as Gordon so sharply point out the sly complicity in Heinz buying Weight Watchers, but come down so hard on Michelle Obama for her “Let’s Move” campaign and any poor schmuck trying to lose a little weight? In hanging readers out to dry at various points, Gordon lowballs the universality of her message. Movingly, she writes, “The war on childhood obesity had given up on me, and over time, I learned to give up on myself...At eleven, I clung desperately to the idea that my body could and would change—that, somehow, I would become thin. Then, and only then, could my real life begin.” Who didn’t feel that way in some capacity as a middle schooler? 

We need to treat fat people—and everyone—with more kindness and consideration. But there is nothing wrong with trying to grant those same people a sense of autonomy and agency to decide on their own definition of defeat or victory. For Gordon, it’s having the space to be the woman she is right now; for others, it might mean shedding 20 pounds put on during a stressful, sedentary pandemic. There must be room for someone trying to figure out what works for their own highly personal wants and needs. 

It breaks my heart that the end of this book must focus on harm reduction. In her final chapter, Gordon writes, “We deserve a personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect.” We do. And if we don’t find one that we all can fit in together as a nation and as a culture, it’s not so much that we will be trapped but, rather, that we’ll know for certain that it’s been a trap all along.
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Dreaming big: the politics of preaching body acceptance in a fat phobic society

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_content] => As their home country is engulfed by a raging second wave of the pandemic, Indians living abroad feel helpless and guilty.

The live-in domestic help at my parents’ house in Mumbai got COVID-19. My neighbor’s entire family was infected. So was my husband’s elderly aunt in Ahmedabad. My friend's father was hospitalized for 12 days. Everyone in India knows someone who has been affected by the raging second wave of the pandemic.

And no wonder—as of today, India is the only country other than the U.S. to have 20 million coronavirus cases, and that is likely a vast undercount.

Crematoriums across India have so many bodies piling up that some are running out of wood to build funeral pyres. At Mumbai hospitals there are long waiting lists for beds; at one, the chief medical officer died of complications from COVID-19. She was 51 years old.

There is a thriving black market for medical supplies. In Mumbai, an oxygen concentrator is selling for Rs. 75,000 to Rs. 150,000 ($1,000 to $2,000) while in the capital city of Delhi, which has been even harder hit by the pandemic, it can cost as much as Rs. 250,000. ($3,400)—in a country where the monthly per capita income just before COVID hit was less than $150. But even at these inflated prices, demand far outpaces supply.

All over social media, people are posting their desperation, sharing shaky videos and pleading words, begging for a hospital bed, for oxygen, for someone to come and help. More than 100 Indian journalists have died of COVID, with one, Vinay Srivastava, live tweeting his declining oxygen levels until he died. Meanwhile, the Modi government ordered Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to take down posts critical of its handling of the pandemic.

We hear about the tragic stories of the sick and dying in India’s cities, but almost nothing from the rural areas, where roughly two-thirds of the population lives.

Meanwhile New York City, where I live, is opening up. It’s been opening up. Indoor dining. Theaters. Gyms. Now the CDC says the vaccinated don’t need to wear masks outdoors. After a year of living in sweats, I went shopping for sundresses last week. Awkwardly, we hug each other again.

In New York City, a return to normal

On a warm Saturday in April, Mayor Bill DeBlasio made a surprise appearance at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum where we were celebrating Holi, the Indian festival of color, with live musicians, dancers, and samosas for guests to snack on.

During the last half hour of our time slot, which was limited to comply with COVID precautions, the mayor and a dhol player led a procession to the park next door. We played Holi, flinging colorful powder in the air and smearing each other’s clothes and hair with red, green, yellow, and pink, while catchy Bollywood songs playing in the background.

But even as I laughed and shrieked with friends, grateful that the receding threat of COVID had allowed me to enjoy my favorite festival, I celebrated with a clammy feeling of guilt. How could I turn my face to the sun while my country was being battered by a vicious second surge of the virus?

How India's second wave happened

About 10 days before I celebrated Holi in Brooklyn, the Kumbh Mela took place in the northern Indian city of Haridwar. Government authorities estimate that approximately 3.5 million Hindu pilgrims traveled to the banks of the holy Ganga River for the days-long festival, despite a sharp increase in COVID cases in the country—and amid calls for the government to cancel the event.

But Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, had already declared victory over the pandemic at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Dialogue in January. While the rest of the world warned that the number of cases was set to increase precipitously, Modi boasted that India had not only looked after its own population but was also saving lives by exporting 60 million doses of domestically produced vaccines around the world.

Even as the country was making global front-page headlines for its rising infection numbers, Modi and his home minister appeared without masks at massive political rallies leading up to state elections in West Bengal, where Modi expressed admiration for the size of the crowds. (The election results were announced Monday and Modi’s party, the BJP, suffered a major loss in the state.)

Last week, the Madras High Court handed down severe criticism of the Election Commission of India (ECI) for permitting political rallies during the pandemic. In response to a claim from a spokesperson for the ECI that COVID safety protocols had been enforced at the mass rallies, the chief justice asked, "Were you on another planet when political rallies were being held?" The justice underlined his outrage by adding that the ECI was “singularly responsible” for the massive second wave of COVID-19 in India, adding that commission officials “should be booked on murder charges” for sponsoring mass political rallies that turned into super spreader events.

Living in fear

At around the same time in Mumbai, the older sister of a close friend was running ragged trying to take care of her family. Her husband works at the airport and the docks, in “import-export.” His job is essential, since he oversees the import of critical supplies into the country, including oxygen, which is in desperately short supply. A colleague in the customs division has already succumbed to COVID-19. He himself is not fully vaccinated.

“He’s endangering himself every day, he has to travel for his job, and he can’t get the second dose, because they’ve run out,” my friend said.

My friend’s sister lives in a multi-generational home with her in-laws; recently, two of her in-laws’ cousins also came to stay with them. For a time, there were four elderly people at home, with 10 human beings squeezing into the three-bedroom apartment. Last week, one of the cousins, who was in her 80s, tested positive. One of my friend’s nieces has juvenile diabetes, which puts her at increased risk from the virus; her sister asked the elderly cousin to isolate at her own house. The woman died the next day.

Karna Basu’s maternal grandmother passed away before the second surge hit. His grandmother had COVID, but it was the cancer that took her life. The COVID made it hard for her to access treatment, though. They were close, and he regrets not being able to travel from New York, where he lives, to see her before she passed.

The news from his wife’s family is worse. For the last several weeks, the WhatsApp group of her extended family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, has been bringing news of two new deaths from the virus each week.

“The family is getting depleted,” Basu says. “It’s so painful you don’t even want to think about it.”

An old classmate of mine in Mumbai is on a WhatsApp group full of wealthy professionals—the kind of people who, in India’s deeply unequal society, usually know someone in authority and thus are able to jump the queue. But even they are having trouble accessing resources.

“I’m reading their messages of desperation—they’re not able to get their hands on medicine and oxygen,” my classmate told me over the phone. “If they can’t do it, what is happening to the middle class and lower middle class in the country?”

When she had to get a hospital bed for her cousin, who tested positive a week before the state of Maharashtra went into lockdown, my friend realized just how dire the situation had become.

“We were hearing that there were no beds available, but only when I started calling hospitals did I realize how bad it was,” she said. The only reason they were able to secure a bed, she added, was because they knew someone high up in a hospital.

Even before the world had heard of COVID-19, India ranked 155 out of 167 countries in hospital bed capacity.

A New York friend spent a recent morning trying to find either medical oxygen or an oxygen concentrator, a device that take in ambient air and increases its oxygen concentration by stripping away the nitrogen, for a former employee of his in Delhi. He made 23 calls, only to be put on waitlist after waitlist. Eventually the employee found a hospital bed; she is now on a ventilator.

Aid is now coming into India now from several countries, including the United States, but President Joe Biden has been criticized for hoarding vaccines, while other wealthy countries continue to store vaccines in excess of their needs. In India, meanwhile, many states have run out.

My New York friend is angry at Modi’s government for not doing enough. “It’s all fucked up,” he says. “Not stockpiling enough vaccines is fucked up. Not having more structured lockdowns is fucked up. Silencing anyone who says anything bad about them is fucked up.”

Last year, the central government tried to force independent news outlets to submit their pandemic coverage to authorities for approval before publication. Just last month Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and a key Modi ally, directed police to confiscate the property of anyone who posted about oxygen shortages online.

Meanwhile an increasing number of countries have limited or suspended travel from India, with Australia even criminalizing its own citizens for returning home from the subcontinent. Indians who live abroad can’t go back to be with loved ones during their last days or mourn with their families.

Ann, an American woman married a South Indian man, is now barred from traveling to northern India to finalize the adoption of a teenage girl. This would have been the family’s second adoption, and fourth child. Meanwhile, the young girl they were supposed to bring back to Texas this month is having a hard time in her orphanage. She’s the oldest one there, close to aging out of care. Every time they speak on the phone, Ann says, the girl is either crying or holding back tears.

“The only thing I have to say to you is come get me,” she says on their weekly calls. “When are you coming?”

Sending money is the only thing you can do

On the WhatsApp groups that I’m a part of, we exchange the names of aid organizations on the ground. “Is it vetted?” people ask. “Can you send me a list of reputable groups?”

When you’re 9,000 miles away, sending money is about the only thing you can do.

Meanwhile, I got my second dose of the vaccine last week. In New York, the tulips are blooming. Over the weekend, I met friends for an outdoor lunch and then enjoyed the sun on my shoulders at a nearby park. Around us picnickers spread out on blankets; a guitarist riffed nearby. I felt the grass brushing my bare legs and played mock battles with my son. The shoulder where I got the jab was still sore, and I was glad for the pain.

Here is a list of 12 places you can donate to help India. 
    [post_title] => I celebrated Holi in New York while in India friends and family begged for hospital beds
    [post_excerpt] => The author's joy in celebrating the Hindu festival of Holi, which in her adopted city of New York coincided with spring weather and a recovery from the pandemic, was tempered by guilt and disquiet over the raging second wave of the pandemic in her home country. 
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I celebrated Holi in New York while in India friends and family begged for hospital beds

by Jayati Vora

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    [post_content] => A university professor, a funeral director and a pastor on how the pandemic changed them.

It’s been 14 months since we began to cope with the worst pandemic in a century, confronted daily by mortality, seeing every stranger—even our loved ones— as a potential vector of a lethal and terrifying disease.

Inevitably, we are emerging from this terrible year as changed people. Some of us have seen our lives transformed in ways we could never have imagined or predicted. Some have grown tougher and stronger while others find they have become much gentler with themselves and with others.

Kari Northey, a funeral director in Michigan, saw her life transform radically , both personally and professionally. She faced the challenge of doing her work safely, which includes embalming, though she had insufficient PPE. She had to fight for vaccines because the government did not consider her and her staff sufficiently essential, and she even struggled with a lack of available caskets.

Like many healthcare workers, she also faced the daily “moral injury” of being unable to honor her vocation and comfort her many grieving clients.

“As funeral professionals we are in a “yes” position,” she said. “Yes, we want you to see your loved one, have a funeral, celebrate their life, spend time with them, gather with friends, follow your heart to caring for your loved one, all which prepares your mind and soul to grieve and begin life without them.”

The pandemic made it impossible to gather with friends to mourn and to celebrate the life of the deceased. The bereaved could not participate in the comfort of mourning rituals.

Missing words “to say goodbye in a healthy way,” she said, adding: “The one that hurt the most to have to say was: ‘No, you cannot see your loved one again.’

“I fear how much unhealthy grief our world will be working through for the next many years.”

Home schooling her two young daughters gave Northey more time with them, but the year also brought divorce.

“It took some work to find the joys in the added time with the girls, but the longer snuggles and quiet moments were a bonus and benefit,” she said. “I was given a million more beautiful moments with my children. Those many added moments gave a solid foundation to my girls to get them ready for what was coming with their changing family.”

Until the pandemic hit, Amy Sterner Nelson spent most of her time building The Riveter, co-working sites in six states, and traveling constantly for her burgeoning business. So did her husband, a real estate developer. Their busy life was only possible because she employed two caregivers, in addition to the help her mother-in-law provided in caring for her three children, ages six, four, three and one.

“Before the pandemic started, one of us was traveling every week for work,” she said. “We lost our caretakers and schools shut. All of a sudden, our life was totally different. I was with the kids a lot more. I put them to bed, I get them up. I know their rhythms a lot more. I realized I missed part of my children’s lives. I didn’t see them play. I didn’t laugh as much or see their creativity.”

It’s been a sobering realization. “I don’t think I’ll ever travel as much [after the pandemic],” she said. “This has taught me to be present in a different way. I play with them now! I have the energy now.”

COVID-19 wreaked a special form of havoc in communities of color. Reverend-Doctor Jean Robinson-Casey, pastor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Christian Church in Reston, Virginia, presides over a 175-member congregation that is 95 percent Black.

“I think it’s changed our community because we have more than one epidemic at the same time,” she said. “Racism has been going on for years, and so for our people it’s been a double issue. What I had to do is lift my game and be creative.” She held an interfaith service last summer with Catholic, Unitarian, Baptist, Jewish and Episcopal members. “After that, we did a ‘get out the vote’ program. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been fruitful for us.”

“The leaders of the church have been galvanized as well, even though it was difficult. We were also right in the middle of back-to-back slaughters of young people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Everyone’s tired! We’ve been tired for decades.”

What keeps Reverend Robinson-Casey going? “God is with us every step of the way. He has never left us. And I have faith in those I plant around me, not just my own church.”

In the years he’s been teaching sociology at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, to undergrads and graduate students, Kevin Shafer always prided himself on being a bit of a hardass. The pandemic’s effects on his students have radically changed him and his teaching.

“I’ve totally given up on that,” he says, of his former rigidity in dealing with his students. “It has no value. As I’ve watched my students struggling with their mental health, I now try to do everything in my power to help them achieve academic success. I have the ability to help them achieve those goals and desires.”

Part of the change was his own willingness to be more open and vulnerable with his students. He wrote them a personal letter detailing his own struggles to manage the stress he felt while teaching remotely and parenting four children ages 12, 10, eight and six.

“When all hell broke loose [with COVID] I realized I have a lot of flexibility in my life and my students don’t. Their lives are much less stable than mine,” he said. Some of his students got COVID, some were hospitalized, and some are now asthmatic as a result. He also realized how intimidating and limiting standard office hours were and plans to hold them by Zoom from now on—even after a return to in-person teaching.

Shafer, who is Canadian, also admits to a deep weariness and disillusionment with how selfishly so many have behaved during the pandemic, nonchalantly infecting and possibly even killing others.

“I do think Canadians are raised with more communitarian sensibilities than Americans are. It’s our mentality of ‘we’re in this thing together’ so seeing this sort of individualism is so moronic!”

“The $64,000 question for me is in what way will I go back to what I used to be? What will I change?”

 
    [post_title] => 'No, you cannot say goodbye to your loved one': Processing the pandemic year
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‘No, you cannot say goodbye to your loved one’: Processing the pandemic year

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => There is a nuanced case for wearing a mask in certain outdoor situations, for the health and safety of all.

Last week, a number of articles in U.S. publications questioned whether outdoor mask mandates should be lifted. One such article, published by Slate, argued that mask mandates should end because “briefly passing someone on the sidewalk just isn’t risky” while another, in the Atlantic, asked if outdoor mask mandates were “still necessary.” The New York Times published a piece in the Opinion page that presented several views on the matter—including one that considered the harm of masks on acne-prone skin. Missing from all these articles was the issue of high-risk individuals.

I accept the scientific justification for loosening outdoor mask mandates for those who have received a full vaccination. What I struggle with, however, is trusting that everyone not wearing a mask has actually been vaccinated. As a person living with chronic illness, over the past year I have had to learn to negotiate trust, often in the face of outrageous and risky behavior. So while I don’t expect vaccinated people to continue wearing masks forever, it is unfortunately all too reasonable to expect that there will be unvaccinated people flaunting these new rules. 



Furthermore, we now have enough data to show that some people, particularly those with certain cancers, are at high risk of vaccine failure. Other immune-compromised people might not mount as robust a response to vaccines, including the various COVID-19 vaccines, as healthy individuals. But the debate in the United States has virtually ignored people with chronic illnesses, focusing instead on getting back to “life as normal.” 

Following the slew of articles and ensuing social media debate, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued new guidance—smart, nuanced guidance—for fully vaccinated individuals on how to operate outdoors. 

"If you are fully vaccinated and want to attend a small outdoor gathering with people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, or dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households, the science shows if you are vaccinated, you can do so safely unmasked," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a virtual White House briefing on Tuesday.

This guidance echoes that of epidemiologists and certain commentators like Zeynep Tufekci, who has long argued for a nuanced approach to outdoor masking.  Yet on social media, the discourse is still polarized, with many balking at the idea of ending mask mandates for some.

From my perch in Berlin, this debate is fascinating. While some major cities in the United States have required outdoor masks at all times, here in Berlin—and regardless of vaccine status—we are only required to wear them in certain crowded zones; they are listed online and designated with posted signs and spray painted symbols on pavement. Other European locales have taken a different approach: In the Spanish Canary Islands, for instance, masks are required while you’re in movement, but when you’re seated (whether in a park or at an outdoor restaurant), you can remove your mask.

In Germany, only 7.4 percent of the general population has been fully vaccinated (while nearly 25 percent of residents have received their first dose). In Berlin crowded spaces are unavoidable, whether indoors on public transportation or outdoors on busy urban sidewalks. So a policy that might make sense in the wide open spaces of the American Midwest would not necessarily be appropriate in Berlin. Given the global reach and influence of the U.S. media, it seems careless to hyperfocus on the question of outdoor masking, when U.S. policy is bound to have international implications. 

A nuanced approach to outdoor masking makes sense. We know that outdoor transmission is rare, and that in open spaces—such as parks are beaches—the likelihood of getting close enough to someone outside of one’s immediate bubble is low. Crowded Berlin sidewalks like those of the Kurfürstendamm are a mask zone, in order to protect all pedestrians equally.

Although the CDC’s guidance doesn’t reference high-risk individuals directly, it does feel designed to protect us. In addition to the aforementioned information, vaccinated individuals are recommended to continue wearing a mask in crowded outdoor settings where unvaccinated people may be present. 

And yet, as a U.S. citizen who intends to visit home later in the year, I remain concerned about the polarized nature of the discourse around masks, both outdoors and indoors. The positions put forth in the Atlantic and Slate make sense in a society that can see beyond binaries. But in the United States, where everything seems to be viewed in black and white terms, I’m concerned that unvaccinated people will see an end to mask mandates as a free pass, and that their insouciance will put lives at risk. 

We are already seeing numerous American commentators—like Alex Berensen, the conspiracy theorist and former New York Times reporter, and Joe Rogan, the comedian and podcaster—spew misinformation about masks and vaccines. We’ve also seen plenty of Americans simply refusing to wear masks indoors, and a lack of will in some locations to enforce the rules (the same is unfortunately true here in Germany). And so, despite the rapid rollout of vaccinations in the United States, I fear for those of us for whom vaccines are either not an option or might not provide immunity. 

What we need is to accept that rules change—and are bound to change again in response to new variants and increasing vaccination rates—and that we might need to continue to adjust our behavior. As Tufekci argues, governments need to adapt their messaging to help individuals understand why they should continue to wear masks in certain situations. And finally, governments and commentators alike need to remember to take into consideration the needs of high-risk individuals. Our lives matter as much as yours, and we shouldn’t be forced to put our lives at risk because you find masks annoying or uncomfortable. 
    [post_title] => Why you should continue to wear a mask outdoors, even after you've been vaccinated
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Why you should continue to wear a mask outdoors, even after you’ve been vaccinated

by Jillian C. York

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    [post_content] => The devastating legacy of the Bosnian War is laid bare in this dramatization of the Srebrenica massacre.

I don’t know if I have seen Quo Vadis, Aida? I know I have sat in front of a screen on four or five separate occasions and taken in portions of the film. But I don’t know whether I have “seen” the film in the way that term is typically used. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I have experienced Aida, or more truthfully still: Aida played, and I was swallowed by grief.

Quo Vadis, Aida? is the Academy Award nominated film by Sarajevo-born director Jasmila Žbanić. It documents the fall of Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), in July 1995 to the Serb nationalist forces led by convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić. The ensuing campaign of extermination—which took place between July 11 and July 22— saw the murder of 8,372 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys and the expulsion of the entire non-Serb population of the town (approximately 25,000 people, primarily women and girls).

Aida is a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that occurred in Srebrenica; it focuses on the protagonist Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić), a local schoolteacher who has obtained wartime work as a UN translator, and her increasingly untenable position as an intermediary between the incompetent Dutch peacekeepers and the frantic, besieged Bosniak population of the town. The plot is largely based on the real-life experiences of Hasan Nuhanović, as told in his 2007 book Under the UN Flag, but draws thematically on the broader Srebrenica survivors’ literature.

But the Srebrenica Genocide—officially recognized as such by the International Criminal Tribunal— is only the final, horrific culmination of what scholars, researchers, and survivors refer to as the Bosnian Genocide. That is the systematic campaign of extermination, expulsions, torture, and sexual violence carried out in BiH by the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) between 1992 and 1995. The genocide targeted primarily the country’s Bosniak community; it was directed by the leadership of the self-declared Republika Srpska (RS) and financed and supplied by their patrons in the Serbian government.



In the film, as the townspeople begin to realize that the UN and the wider international community could not or would not halt the VRS conquest of Srebrenica, panic and terror ensues. Thousands rush to the UN base, trying to find shelter and safety there, while thousands more are forced to wait outside the overcrowded facility, with no shelter or food, as they await their fate. Aida races around the base, forced to translate the lies of the Dutch officers as they instruct the Bosniaks to prepare for evacuation to a “safe place.” Aida knows the truth—that Mladić’s forces are loading the men onto trucks and taking them to be killed. She first tries to hide her teenage sons and husband in obscure corners of the base, which is a repurposed abandoned factory, while she pleads repeatedly, desperately (and ultimately vainly) with her UN employers to ensure their safe passage.

Žbanić insists that, like the UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, her audience knows what is happening—that it is genocide, and that we are responsible for bearing witness. Twice we see a Dutch junior officer who wears a Star of David pendant observe his superiors equivocate on Aida’s anguished pleas for help. His disgust with his commanders is evident. But for Bosnian viewers there is an added level of poignancy in this obvious reference to the world’s inaction during the Holocaust.

[caption id="attachment_2526" align="aligncenter" width="840"] A still from the film shows Bosniaks taking refuge at the UN Dutch peacekeeper base in Srebrenica.[/caption]

In 1993, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Elie Wiesel made an impassioned plea to President Clinton, seated only a few paces behind him, to intervene in the conflict: “Mr. President, I cannot NOT tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia, last fall. I cannot sleep since— what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying this, we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country…Something, anything must be done.”

Nor was Wiesel alone in his testimony. America’s Jewish community was at the forefront of the international effort to demand a credible response to the Bosnian Genocide. In Aida, Žbanić is the one bearing witness to those who saw what was happening in BiH and called it by its proper name.

The film is harrowing. It is an emotional ordeal to sit through for anyone. But for those from BiH, especially for those who have any direct experience or memory of the war, it is almost unbearable. This is also the film’s greatest triumph: it is a story about the Bosnian Genocide, told by Bosnians, for Bosnian audiences. That it has, rightly, won international acclaim is hugely significant, but Žbanić’s crowning achievement is in refusing to tell this story for anyone other than the Bosnian and Bosniak people themselves.

One aspect of that commitment is seen in the director’s remarkable talent for capturing the authenticity of the Bosnian people; their affect, their cadence —how our language sounds when it is whispered. Especially when it is whispered by our mothers; whispered when they, alone, were left to tell us that it would all work out, that we were safe. Knowing that it was not true.

For this Bosnian the film felt almost nauseating in its intimacy. One scarcely experiences the production as a piece of media at all. It took me nearly a week to watch the whole thing, because I could not manage more than twenty or so minutes at a time. My breathing would quicken, verging on hyperventilating; I would realize only after the fact I had been digging my fingers into my thighs, rocking in place.

Such reactions are, obviously, manifestations of being forced to relive trauma. But this too is a testament to the singularity of the work. Because the truth is that Bosnian and Srebrenica Genocide denial is perhaps more rampant today than at any time since the events themselves occurred.

In Serbia, and the RS entity in post-war BiH, denial and negationism are official government policy. Across the territory of the latter, including Srebrenica, returnees are routinely harassed, their properties, community centers, and places of worship defaced. Bosniak children are prevented from referring to and studying the Bosnian language, or learning the history of the genocide. The government in the de facto capital of the entity, Banja Luka, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, over the last two decades sponsoring the publication of a series of revisionist and negationist accounts of the Bosnian Genocide. Worse, its leadership, headed by Milorad Dodik, is explicitly attempting to engineer the entity’s secession from BiH, and thus the belated realization of a “Greater Serbia” that caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War in the first place.

Much as in the 1990s, the international response to all of this is muted at best. Indeed, the very existence of the RS—a product of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 —is an affront to the survivors of the genocide. As the war-time leadership of the RS acknowledged openly, the sole purpose of its creation was the extermination and expulsion of the Bosniak and non-Serb populations of northwestern and eastern BiH. Even the entity’s name speaks to this; it is a grammatically bizarre construction which does not easily translate to English and barely makes sense in our language. In Western media it’s often incorrectly glossed as “Serb Republic.” In terms of its intended meaning, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to it as “Serbland.” But the result is the same: it is a chauvinist term, meant to erase non-Serbs from the area’s politics, society, and history.

In this sense, the events portrayed in Aida are not history, per se. They occurred in the past, yes, but the politics that caused the horror in Srebrenica, which caused the Bosnian War, remain active and unchanged. No one who has even a passing familiarity with the daily stream of vulgar, sectarian chauvinism emanating from the ruling regimes in Belgrade and Banja Luka could seriously believe that these reactionaries regret the genocide. Or that they would pass up an opportunity to recreate the horrors of Srebrenica— or any of Bosnia’s dozens of other killing fields. One need only recall the warning issued to NATO forces by Serbia’s now President Aleksandar Vučić in the Serbian parliament on July 20, 1995, as the executions in Srebrenica were still ongoing: “Kill one Serb, and we’ll kill a hundred Muslims.”

Today Mr. Vučić presides over a one-party regime in Serbia, just like his mentor Slobodan Milošević. The regime hands out free copies of genocide denial literature to those seeking COVID-19 vaccines. BiH’s friends in Europe, meanwhile, award Nobel Prizes and seats in the House of Lords to genocide deniers like Peter Handke and Claire Fox—that is, when their governments are not busy proposing the country’s partition and dissolution.

The international community watched in real time as the killings in Srebrenica unfolded. They expended more energy trying to wash their hands of any sort of meaningful involvement in the Bosnian War, than they did on implementing the idea of humanitarian intervention. When such action finally came, it only took the deaths of fewer than 30 VRS soldiers for the genocidal regime to concede to negotiations. But by that point, nearly 100,000 other Bosnians had been killed— most of them civilians. The vast majority were Bosniaks, targeted systematically for extermination by the VRS.

Regardless of whether Quo Vadis, Aida? wins the Oscar for best foreign film, Žbanić’s work has already cemented, in searing detail, the truth of the genocide in Srebrenica and BiH. For as determined as the forces of negation and revision are, her work has projected the memory of that terrible crime to the world.

But should she win, Bosnians will weep again—this time, tears of catharsis. Our story, and our survival, will finally be seen and recognized on its own terms.
    [post_title] => Bearing witness to genocide: 'Quo Vadis, Aida?' is a shattering, essential film
    [post_excerpt] => Director Jasmila Žbanić dramatizes the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when Serb nationalist forces, led by convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, murdered more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys. 
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Bearing witness to genocide: ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ is a shattering, essential film

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => In which the writer reflects with guarded optimism on a deeply traumatic year. 

April Fools’ Day has always been an idiotic quasi-holiday, offering some people an opportunity to pull pranks and others the chance to observe them–mostly by scrolling through Twitter to see which corporations embarrassed themselves the most with misguided attempts at humor (see: Duolingo’s announcement about a new line of educational toilet paper or Budweiser’s anchovy-pizza seltzer.) But for me, the context and significance of April 1 turned in on itself this year, a house of mirrors. April Fools’ Day is now serious business, a day of joy and gratitude, hope and rebirth.

On April 1, 2020, I drove with my son to the hospital 20 minutes away to retrieve my husband. Josh had been admitted to the ICU two weeks earlier and hooked up to a ventilator before making a miraculous recovery. As AJ and I pulled up into the circular driveway, the entire staff was outside clapping and cheering for Josh, who was being pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse because he could barely walk. 



We know a lot about the coronavirus now, but back then, everybody was flying blind. Josh was the first Covid patient at this particular hospital. Misinformation, often coming from the highest levels of our government, was rampant. As Josh got sicker and sicker, the President of the United States was telling the American public to “Just stay calm. It will go away.” By the end of April, he was encouraging people to inject bleach. The pulmonologist thought there was a 70 percent chance Josh wouldn’t make it. Nobody had any idea if he would experience long-term effects following his hospitalization. So far, he hasn’t. 

If someone had told me last year that by this time in 2021 Josh and I would be fully vaccinated and starting to plan our reintegration into society, I would have sent you one of those Brady Bunch “Sure, Jan” GIFs. But look at us, two Pfizer vaccine doses in each of our arms, blessed with good health, a network of supportive friends and family and access to my parents’ house outside of New York City. We go on long nature walks and appreciate silence, the beauty of simplicity: a sunset, tall trees, birds chirping, the frenetic energy of our dog when she sees a squirrel. I try to receive every day as a gift, thinking, There but for the grace of God go I and all that (even though I’m an atheist.)  

Yet, the week leading up to this moment felt precarious, as if we were being haunted by ghosts, reliving last year’s trauma. Psychologists call this “the anniversary effect,” a phenomenon I first heard about, fittingly, while watching the horror series “Stranger Things” on Netflix. As the one-year anniversary of Josh’s recovery approached, he felt ready to revisit the notes he wrote to himself on his phone when he was in the hospital–before and after he was intubated–and showed them to me for the first time. “Rachel and AJ waving goodbye. Saying they loved me. There were a bunch of other people and vehicles on the street. Escorts?” he wrote on March 20, 2020. I vividly remembered the EMTs that day in their white hazmat gear, carrying Josh out to the ambulance as he gasped for air. The following day, Josh wrote in his notes that he was “doing what needed to be done” to give himself the best chance of seeing us again. When I read that, I felt that muscle memory of the panic, the fight-or-flight mode in which my body existed for that entire two-week period he was away from us, in his own version of the Upside Down. And we’re not out of the woods yet.  

I am one of the estimated 2.3 million women who have been pushed out of the workforce as a consequence of the pandemic—possibly permanently, but who the hell knows. That’s not to say I haven’t been working. I’ve just been doing the arduous but unpaid labor of being a housewife—cooking, cleaning, homeschooling—while my husband works full time from a makeshift home office. To be sure, some elements of our new arrangement have been delightful, like having dinner together every night, discovering the joy of cooking and embracing activities like watercolor painting, which I hadn’t done in 20 years. There are sparks of joy in the small quotidian details of our home life. At the same time, I’m acutely aware that the only reason I am able to revel in these precious moments is because I am not constantly worried that one illness will hurl me into bankruptcy. 

When Josh got out of the hospital, we received a bill for $208,000, the overwhelming majority of which was covered by his employer-backed healthcare plan. (Allegedly, the federal government would have paid for these expenses if we were uninsured, but I suspect we’d still be locked in an ongoing back-and-forth with the hospital’s billing department, like the woman who was billed $52,000 for an out-of-network emergency helicopter ride.) More alarming still is thinking about the counterfactual universe—the universe where Josh didn’t survive—in which I would have become not just a widow, but an unemployed and uninsured single mother, right at the moment I needed healthcare support the most. All because I do not have a job. Due to circumstances beyond my control. This is unacceptable, denying human dignity to people who can’t work, and of course it has always been unacceptable. The coronavirus, if nothing else, has laid bare the hypocrisy of a nation founded on the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” without considering that healthcare is a prerequisite for any of those things. 

There has been so much suffering this past year. 530,000 deaths. 20 million job losses. 8 million Americans sinking into poverty. On the same day Josh got out of the hospital last year, one of my oldest friends said goodbye to her father, who was intubated the day after Josh was. We texted each other back and forth through the horrors of those days. Her father was the first of many people I know who didn’t make it. This anniversary has been very hard for her family. 

When people check in to see how we’re doing, I don’t know what to say. I’m fine, mostly. Because of my good fortune, I sometimes don’t feel like I’m entitled to be unhappy. But I also know—thanks to my therapist who is covered by my healthcare plan—that delegitimizing suffering because others have had it worse is not a constructive way to experience the world. I’ve been thinking a lot about the distinction between privilege, which exists in relation to others, and suffering, which feels absolute, solitary, and all-consuming. The only way through it is to feel it. 

[caption id="attachment_2442" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Rachel Dodes with her husband and son.[/caption]

My seven-year-old son shook me awake early in the morning on April Fools’ Day; I was screaming in my sleep. In my dream, a swarm of live bats were flapping their wings in my face, alighting on my hands. One need not be named Sigmund Freud to decode this obvious Covid anxiety dream, reflecting a truth I’ve learned to appreciate over the course of this pandemic: how deeply interdependent we are, not just with other humans, but with the entire natural world. People, bats, pangolins–all tangled in a web of destiny. If we don’t redouble our efforts to be prepared when the next pandemic inevitably rears its head, “we are finished,” warned Jane Goodall last year, speaking at an online environmental conference. “We can’t go on very much longer like this.”

As the trees begin to bloom, and the birds fly home, I am feeling hints of optimism. We’re alive. We’re vaccinated. We should celebrate. Josh asked me if I wanted to mark our one-year milestone by dining at an actual restaurant for the first time since February 2020. Of course I did. This was a very exciting development. But the joke was on us: It was freezing cold on April 1, too cold to be outside, a symbolic reminder that things are still far from being “normal,” and in fact may never be again. 

But that’s OK. Because what we settled for before as “normal” wasn’t nearly good enough. 
    [post_title] => April Fools' Day in the year of the plague
    [post_excerpt] => On April 1, 2020, Rachel Dodes brought her husband home from the hospital. He had been in the ICU two weeks earlier with COVID-19, hooked up to a ventilator and given low odds for surviving. One year later, she takes stock and wonders if things will ever be ‘normal’ again.

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April Fools’ Day in the year of the plague

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => The recent proliferation of high end chai dhabas inspired a national conversation about freedom of movement for women.

It’s a truth widely accepted in Pakistan that drinking chai is what makes you a true native. And not just any chai, but the sweet, milky, caramel-colored brew that is served at dhabas (outdoor tea stands) and slurped noisily while sitting on a small plastic chair, waiting for the dhabay wala to bring you another cup because one is never enough.

But while street dhabas play a major role in Pakistani society, they are traditionally a male-dominated space.

Granaz Baloch, a teaching fellow at the University of Turbat in Balochistan, is a feminist academic and writer whose research focuses on the gender challenges rural women face in finding potable water. She said that while dhabas in Turbat provide “information, opportunities and networking” for men in the city, women are not welcome. But this is not a Turbat-specific issue. Until recently, it was very unusual to see a woman enjoying the simple pleasure of a leisurely cup of chai at a roadside stand anywhere in Pakistan. Now attitudes are beginning to change, partly on the back of social media driven influencer culture. 

[caption id="attachment_2404" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Granaz Baloch[/caption]

Chai Wala is a hip Karachi café (tagline: "reinventing the chai experience") that serves upscale versions of traditional dhaba snack foods and beverages. Established five years ago, it attracts young men and women who are drawn to its trendy decor and menu, which includes Nutella chai, "artisanal" teas, and “dips” like hummus. It also sells branded merchandise. Places like Chai Wala have taken the concept of the traditional working class outdoor tea stand and reinterpreted it to attract a bourgeois clientele. 

[caption id="attachment_2406" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The scene at Chai Wala.[/caption]

Shaheera Anwar, a 29 year old journalist who moved from Saudi Arabia to Karachi in 2017, got engaged at a traditional outdoor dhaba. “I was dating my now-husband and we often hung out at dhabas after work—and I am someone who hates grand, public gestures, so I got proposed to at a dhaba,” she said. Shaheera is aware that dhaba culture has since become trendy, and she is not sure this is a good thing. She sees places like Chai Wala as gathering places for the rich that erase the egalitarian culture of the traditional dhabas.

[caption id="attachment_2405" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Shaheera Anwar getting engaged at a traditional dhaba in Karachi.[/caption]

Among middle class Pakistanis there is a widely-held perception that high end dhabas are safer for women because they attract a “better crowd.” This raises the question of the role class plays in Pakistani society, and how it affects the way women are treated in the public domain. 

The emergence of high end dhabas occurred right around the time that a feminist collective founded an organization called Girls at Dhabas,  which addresses the absence of women in public spaces and strives to reclaim them. The media gave significant coverage to the group when it first launched, but while press attention has since dwindled the movement has only grown stronger and more vocal in addressing the structural problems that prevent Pakistani women from moving about freely in the public square.

“It took living in other countries to learn that I had been conforming to a clever scam my whole life, thinking the city belonged only to men,” said movement founder Sadia Khatri. Sadia speaks in poetic language about the joy that comes with finally breaking free of the restraints placed on women’s freedom of movement. “The city’s breath rising to meet mine with each step, the pleasure of placing one foot before another, unthinking, meditative. The trust that so long as I kept going, Karachi would keep expanding, opening up before me.”

Many Pakistani women are making similar discoveries about the joy found in moving about in public. Maliha, who re-entered the corporate world after a career break, said that working in an office brought a kind of freedom she had all but forgotten. By extension, sitting at dhabas no longer seemed as daunting. “You gain enough confidence that when someone tries to harass or catcall you, you don’t shy away from hitting back,” she said.  Maliha found herself easing into the spaces she wanted to be. “The more you become accustomed to an environment, the more you learn about an environment, the more confident you become in dealing with that environment,” she said. 

Shoaib is the owner of a successful traditional dhaba in Lahore that specializes in Amritsari hareesa, which the women in his family make according to an old family recipe. He cheerfully  acknowledges that his clientele, once predominantly male and working class, has expanded to include families and women; and he has noticed the increased presence of women on the streets. But while Shoaib expressed no objection to other women claiming public spaces as their own, he said he would not want the women of his own family to be seen on the street or eating a meal at a restaurant. For Shoaib the women he saw eating at his dhaba represented a different lived reality—one that was simply not his. 

Shoaib’s perception of the class divide seems accurate. Upper-class women at posh dhabas are granted the right to be there because they come with the entitlement associated with their socioeconomic class. They are accustomed to being addressed as “ma’am,” and the staff treat them accordingly. Working class women, however, do not see these cafés as their place.

But Sanam, a supervisor at Shahi Bawarchi Khana, a fashionable restaurant in Old Lahore,  banished her insecurities and discomfort about being out in public. “I no longer feel uncomfortable in public spaces, because I know I can handle myself,” she said of working in a restaurant, adding that “girls need to keep moving forward and face the world.” Unlike the women who founded the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas, Sanam is not from the educated upper class. But with her unapologetic confidence she is exactly the kind that needs to be normalized within this debate about public spaces. 

Aqib, the manager at a trendy chai dhaba style restaurant in Old Lahore, articulated his perception of how class drives the lived reality for women in Pakistan. “Women come here more than men now, especially young TikTokers who like creating a big fuss,” he said of the changing demographics among his customers. Like Shoaib, the proprietor of the traditional dhaba that specializes in Amritsari hareesa, Aqib thought that the increased presence of women in the public domain should occur within cultural limitations. 

But what Pakistani men think about gender roles is slowly becoming irrelevant to the women who are paving a path forward. In Karachi’s impoverished Lyari district, notorious for its gun battles between criminal gangs, Shazia Jameel, the manager at Lyari Girls’ Café provides a space in this very male dominated area where women can gather. At the café they can take English language classes, learn boxing, study hair styling and makeup techniques, and chat in a relaxed atmosphere without fear of molestation. Shazia leads a group of women from the café who go cycling on Sundays, stopping on the way back from their ride for breakfast at a male dominated dhaba. At first the women were uncomfortable there, but that feeling has since disappeared. Now they are regulars.

The truth is, it’s not the piercing gazes or the opinions that have really changed, especially not among the working class. What has begun to change is women’s responses to traditional mindsets. The posh dhabas are not remotely inclusive places, nor would anyone argue otherwise. But the noise around them has led women to question why they accepted the limitations placed on their freedom of movement in their own country. They now regard strolling the streets and sitting in cafés as their right. Shazia Jameel puts the onus for protecting women's safety on the authorities, calling upon them to instal CCTV cameras. She also advocates legislation to eradicate religious extremism, which she blames for the perpetration of restrictive attitudes toward women. 

Shazia is right. It’s well past time that the right of women to move about in public without fear of molestation be protected. Nor should they be held responsible for the way men behave toward them. Despite what the old guard may think, change is coming from every direction, one cup of chai at a time. 
    [post_title] => Pakistani women are claiming their right to be in public spaces—one cup of chai at a time
    [post_excerpt] => What Pakistani men think about gender roles is slowly becoming irrelevant to the women who are paving a path forward.
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Pakistani women are claiming their right to be in public spaces—one cup of chai at a time

by Anmol Irfan

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