Law

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-18 14:09:54
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    [post_content] => Women are seeing their basic rights rolled back in the era of rising authoritarianism exacerbated by the global pandemic.

For the past several decades, the world maintained a shallow consensus, propped up by international human rights law, that women and girl's rights matter, that it was important to educate them, protect them from violence, and give them the means and opportunities to make a living outside the home.

Although global mainstream discourse and rhetoric around women was nominally positive, even liberatory, women and girl's material realities still suffered. Among the 1.5 billion people living on one dollar or less a day, the majority are women and children, a phenomenon the sociologist Diana Pierce calls the feminization of poverty. Women and girls make up 70 percent of trafficking victims, according to a 2016 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report. As the #MeToo movement has shown, even in allegedly egalitarian countries, women and girls still commonly experience sexual assault and discrimination. Just this morning, Amy Dorris accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, making her the 26th woman to level allegations against him.

Women and girls are perpetually gaslit about the glaring disconnect between the dignity they are told they possess from birth, and its continuous violation. Far too many women and girls aren't afforded basic rights to begin with. Is it any wonder that a new wave of grassroots, intersectional feminism is growing all over the world, particularly among younger generations of women who broadcast and amplify their activism on social media. The Chilean protest song, Un Violador en tu Camino, A Rapist in Your Path, became a viral feminist anthem against rape culture and personal, state, and institutional complicity.  

Now amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, women are bearing the brunt of the impact. They are losing their jobs at a rate disproportionate to that of men; globally, domestic violence has risen to crisis levels, even as women are forced to shoulder the burden and stress of caregiving and child rearing. Now, with so many school districts having opted to go online, women have had to take on homeschooling as well. 

Many states have overtly regressed on women's rights.  This week major U.S. media outlets published shocking allegations of mass hysterectomies having been performed without informed consent on detained migrant women in a privately run ICE concentration camp in Georgia. The allegations emerged after Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the camp, filed a whistleblower complaint. As one detainee said, "I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies." Reports of women being raped in the camps are widespread and ongoing. In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2020, a Mexican woman said she was sexually assaulted and impregnated at an immigrant detention facility in Houston hours before she was deported to Mexico.

Last year, the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women narrowed its definition of domestic violence to felonies or misdemeanors, in a move similar to Russia's decriminalization of most non-lethal forms of domestic violence in 2017. In recent months Turkey and Poland have been threatening to leave the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty on domestic violence. 

We're in an era of chest-thumping authoritarians, (Trump, Duterte, Modi, Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, MBS, Kim Jong-Un) who, despite their diverse religions, ideologies, and geopolitical backgrounds, are universally patriarchal. Women's subordination is a given, and deviations are punishable with cruelty. Fundamentalist religions, men's rights movements, and incels have fueled misogynist terror and aggrieved men's reactionary backlash against women's empowerment. Their growing political success is costing women their lives. 

Misogyny is key to understanding the male entitlement powering the global trend away from feminine-coded social democracy and toward toxic masculine authoritarianism. 

I use the definitions of feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who, in her books Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled, makes an important distinction between sexism and misogyny. Sexism, she writes, is the "theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority." 

Misogyny, she says, "should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors."

The focus is thus flipped from perpetrator to victim. Rather than concern ourselves with men's intentions, which are easily denied and impossible to prove, misogyny is the hostile treatment women and girls experience when they step outside gender roles or are perceived to. 

Separating sexism from misogyny is necessary to understanding the current attacks on women's rights. As Manne noted in a recent  interview with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker, "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure." 

Misogynists who happily exploit women's talents while still maintaining patriarchal order are everywhere. Look at Trump and Ivanka, or Erdogan and his daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar. Their idea of women's rights is a bouquet of flowers, a refrigerator, and a demand to have more babies, but only if you're of their preferred ethnic or religious group. 

At the same time, women, once empowered, never forget what power and respect look and feel like. Absent sexism, misogyny grates more harshly, and brutish patriarchal power plays become more transparent. Women are organizing locally and sharing their struggles online. They're speaking out like never before, whether it's the women who brought down Harvey Weinstein, or the Turkish feminists sharing black and white photos on Instagram. 

What exactly is being rolled back, and how do we fight it? 

For decades, women have been fighting for recognition and protections in international laws. 

The first major international treaty on women's rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979. In 1995, Hillary Clinton famously said, "women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. In 2014, education activist Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after the Taliban shot her in the head as punishment for advocating the right to education for Pakistani girls.

In 2012, the Council of Europe passed a groundbreakingly progressive treaty on gender violence, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, commonly known as the Istanbul Convention. 

The Istanbul Convention was held in response to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 2009 ruling in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her ex-husband's years-long abuse, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother. Turkey hosted the convention, and became the first country to sign and ratify the treaty on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. 

Two sections of the treaty stand out:

    
 	
  • Article 12.1 of the Istanbul Convention says, "Parties shall take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men." 

      
 	
    • This article commits parties to undoing patriarchy in their respective cultural traditions, social norms, and interpersonal behaviors, which the treaty identifies as the root cause of domestic violence. 
      • 

    

    • 
 	
  • Article 12.5 says, "Parties shall ensure that culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called “honour” shall not be considered as justification for any acts of violence covered by the scope of this Convention."
    • 


Another direct shot at patriarchy and organized religion. At the root of toxic male entitlement is the idea that male honor is more valuable than a woman's life. Look at Trump directing Bill Barr's Department of Justice to take over the defamation case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that the President sexually assaulted her and then called her a liar.  

It is these attacks on patriarchy that have triggered the misogynists. Turkish feminist Feride Eralp, who recently was interviewed for The Conversationalist about the anti-femicide protests in her country, calls this the anti-gender movement. 

Erdogan’s government, said Eralp, had established a pattern of announcing extremely controversial policies regarding women's freedoms and equality in order to “gauge public reaction.” If the reaction is overwhelmingly negative, the government postpones until public memory fades, only to re-introduce it. “It's an incredibly frustrating government tactic, because it [makes it] impossible to achieve lasting gains." 

In 2016, for example, the government tried to pass a law that would give amnesty to male sex offenders if they agreed to marry their underage female victims. Widespread public outrage led to the tabling of the legislation, but the government continues periodically to reintroduce it with slight changes. "It's the same with the Istanbul Convention," Eralp said. 

Turkish women have been protesting rising rates of femicide for well over a decade, demanding that the government  implement the Istanbul Convention—and that it enforce the law that specifically protects women from domestic violence. Recently, Polish and Turkish women protested in solidarity with one another against their respective governments, and the ultra-conservative Catholics and Islamists who are lobbying to preserve "traditional family structures," aka free labor, at the expense of women's lives. 

Eralp argues, however, that unlike grassroots women's movements, the Turkish men importing these new formulations aren't seeking solidarity with other men, but rather want to adopt effective tactics to keep women in their place. This is a cynical move by ultraconservative men who are taking advantage of Erdoğan's weakening political position to backtrack on women's rights, she argued. Turkish ultra-conservatives have adopted "pro-family" anti-LGBTQ tactics from their Catholic neighbors that Americans will be familiar with: white Evangelicals have long stoked moral panic among conservatives about feminists, single mothers, abortion, and gay and trans rights.

Gains for women in America are being erased in law, too. Decades of legal advocacy efforts brought about a series of legal breakthroughs in recognizing domestic violence as a basis for protection in asylum law in the United States, only to have them dashed in 2018 by Jeff Sessions. Betsy DeVos's Department of Education's new rule undoing protections for campus assault victims under Title IX went into effect last month, to the delight of men's rights groups. 

Abortion rights are perpetually under attack, as conservatives gain seats in federal courts, and acts of misogynist terror, whether its intimate partner violence or mass shootings, are increasingly common. Anti-semitic QANON supporters are obsessed with human trafficking conspiracies, while the President is trafficking thousands of children across the border in front of our eyes.

The picture is bleak, and the struggle will be hard. But as we have reported—and will continue to report, here at The Conversationalist—women everywhere are strengthening their own sense of entitlement - their right to life, to bodily autonomy, to political opinions -- to being a full human being independent of men. Women and their allies are motivated, organized, and pushing back in new, creative ways at the grassroots and institutional level. 
    [post_title] => Revenge of the patriarchs
    [post_excerpt] => "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure."  — Kate Manne
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Revenge of the patriarchs

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-17 16:30:03
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    [post_content] => The curious case of the Russian grassroots movement that borrows racist and alt-right language from America to advocate for the rights of white anti-Putin protesters.

As a Black woman who is an historian of the Soviet Union and Russia, the Black Lives Matter movement has put me in an interesting position. The ongoing demonstrations taking place across the United States illuminate the depths of the physical, spiritual, and emotional violence that African Americans and ethnic minorities experience. The Trump administration’s response is callous and includes the use federal power to violate the protestors’ first amendment rights. In Russia, meanwhile, while responses to the protests have ranged from empathy to victim-blaming, one hashtag caught my attention: it is called “Russian Lives Matter.”

Despite its name, RLM does not seek solidarity with BLM. The Russian version calls out police violence committed against anti-government protestors. To be clear: police also target ethnic minorities, such as migrants from Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan, but RLM advocates specifically for ethnic (i.e., white) Russian citizens. The largely overlooked element in the Russian Lives Matter movement is its “borrowing” of American racist and alt-right language.

While a Twitter search for the hashtag Russian Lives Matter brings up a few responses in support of the demonstrations in America, many more regurgitate the Kremlin’s messaging, which mirrors the right-wing American response—i.e., that protestors are criminals and looters, and that the demonstrations are contrary to the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The latter is a popular argument in both the United States and Russia, with the right using it to dismiss the validity of the contemporary struggle for civil rights—not realizing that Dr. King was murdered for his perceived radicalism.

In the United States, the right describes Black Lives Matter protests as riots, planned violence, and “poison.” This language is meant to portray the movement as anything but what it is—i.e., one that demands accountability and reform of the public institutions that maintain the racist status quo.

Many Russians deny that racism exists in their country. Alina Polyanskikh, a Russian television presenter who is Black, described her experiences with overt racism, and with those who deny its existence, in a recent blog post. When Afro-Russian blogger Maria Tunkara posted on her social media accounts about her experiences with racism, she was threatened and even investigated by the prosecutor in St. Petersburg. Popular Russian memes about the American protests compare African Americans to apes and call them thugs; the vilest make fun of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of American police.

My first reaction to these images was disgust, then sadness. They reminded me of my first experience with racism in Eastern Europe, when in spring 2011, I spent a couple of weeks in Varna, Bulgaria, volunteering at an orphanage for Roma children. On one of our first visits, the children (a range of elementary-aged kids) encircled me and called me a “n----r” and “monkey” to the tune of “Ring Around the Rosie.” I was mortified and deeply hurt; seeing my reaction, one of the kids ran off to tell the orphanage director, who made the other children apologize. I did not understand how children in Bulgaria knew the racist slurs that whites had directed against me when I was growing up in southeast Texas in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, almost ten years after my experience at the orphanage in Bulgaria, I see the people who inhabit the corners of the Russian-language internet using the same slurs.

American ideas of racism and the racist undercurrent of conservative populism have a transnational impact that is now felt in Russia. As Natalia Antonova wrote in the early months of the Trump administration, many American racists see Russia as a “white man’s paradise” where there is no political correctness, no vocal ethnic minority demanding rights, and no legal protections for the LGBTQ community. An exploration of the connections between American and Russian white supremacist groups provides further insight into this phenomenon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Hatewatch initiative has documented the close relationship between white supremacist groups in Russia and the United States. In 2018, members of League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist group, launched a Russian-language version of their organization’s website. Michael Hill, the League’s leader, said that Russians and American white supremacists have in common “real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion.” This idea of a shared culture or blood is a dog whistle for a shared white race.

The SPLC also examined the “strange alliance” between Russian Orthodox monarchists and radical white Evangelicals in the annual meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF). The WCF is an ultra-conservative religious group; its goals include promoting anti-LGBTQ legislation. Participants in the group include far-right and nationalist groups across the United States, Europe, and Eastern Europe, all committed to white supremacism. In this case, Russia reflects American racist ideology.

Claims of a shared culture and religion notwithstanding, the image of a “white paradise” is belied by the numbers that illustrate its ethnic diversity. Russia is home to hundreds of ethnic minorities that speak over 100 languages. It has not seen the mass protests against racism that spread across Western Europe since the murder of George Floyd, but Afro-Russians, Africans, and Central Asians who live in Russia have spoken out and led discussions about their experiences of racism and prejudice.

These discussions can complicate our understandings of how racism assimilates into the relatively unique context of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Russia does not have a history of institutionalized racism against people of color (POC) like those of the United States and the former imperial states of Europe. This is not to erase the treatment of Jews, and people from the Caucasus and Central Asia who had long been targets of institutional racism and oppression in the Russian empire. In fact, the Soviet Union did not track race in its censuses. People were classified by their nationality; thus, their race was not even a possibility of official identification. This fact lends itself to current understandings of racism and prejudice in Russia.

In contemporary Russia, POC are called racial slurs, denied housing, violently beaten, and sometimes killed. Acquaintances from Russia and Ukraine have posited that these documented cases of racism are manifestations of xenophobia—i.e., that POC are not trusted or are not treated as equals because they are outsiders. But this logic illustrates the greater issue. It shows that people who have dark skin, even if they were born in Russia or are permanent residents, are still excluded from the dominant concept of who is Russian.

There is a Janus-like dichotomy when it comes to Western media portrayals of Russia. Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From my own relatively unique position, I see in Russia a mirror of the United States.

The language and logic of racism in Russia, particularly toward Black people, is not an organic development. Throughout the Soviet period, African American and African people visited, studied, and lived in a country with relatively few incidents of race-based violence (although one African student was murdered in 1963). Even the use of racist language was different. Central Asians were called “chornyi” (black) as a slur, but Blacks were called “negr” (similar to “negro,” but without the negative connotations the word carried in the U.S..)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian lexicon of racism has absorbed elements from America. If Americans and Russians can take away any lessons from this development, it is that anti-racist forces in both countries need to engage with one another and build alliances. Because the forces of white supremacy certainly have.
    [post_title] => Russia as a mirror of American racism
    [post_excerpt] => Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From her own relatively unique position as a Black American who studies Russia, the author sees in Russia a mirror of the United States.
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Russia as a mirror of American racism

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-11 00:18:50
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    [post_content] => Even as femicide rates rise, conservatives in the ruling party want to roll back legislation designed to protect women.

For the last five years Turkish feminist movements have faced one backlash after another and are perpetually braced for the next one. “There is always this… feeling of insecurity, uncertainty, and inability to see the future,” activist Feride Eralp told The Conversationalist. “Your most basic rights are constantly under threat.”

Eralp has been advocating for women’s rights since she was 15; her mother was active in the founding women’s movements in the 1980’s. In recent weeks, thousands of women have been demonstrating on the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, and 35 additional cities across Turkey to demand their civil rights and to protest a shocking rise in rates of femicide.

The catalyst for this latest round of protests occurred in July, when police found the mutilated corpse of Pınar Gültekin, a 27 year-old student, in a rural area of southwestern Turkey. They arrested her ex-boyfriend, Cemal Metin Avci, who confessed to having beaten and strangled Gültekin, before burning her body and stuffing it into a barrel, which he buried in the woods. The horrific incident was heavily covered by Turkish media, eliciting widespread revulsion; the murder became a rallying cry for feminist groups, which had already been protesting for months the failure of government authorities to protect women from domestic violence and femicide.

The government’s obligation to protect women is enshrined in the Istanbul Convention, a groundbreaking human rights treaty against domestic violence that is aimed at preventing violence against women. It is formally called the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Turkey was the first country to ratify the treaty, signed on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. No country has ever withdrawn from it.

Recently, President Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) suggested they would withdraw Turkey from the treaty.

The impetus for the Istanbul Convention was the 2009 decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her violently abusive ex-husband, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother.

So far this year, 285 women have been murdered in Turkey. That’s more than one woman murdered per day, the majority at the hands of their estranged spouses.

Despite these numbers, lobbying groups for political Islamists, composed mostly of conservative men, have been pressuring the government to withdraw from the Convention on the basis that it undermines ‘family structure.’ In fact, the Istanbul Convention truly aims to protect the most vulnerable members of the family from domestic violence.

Preservation of the traditional family structure has long been a foundation of values instilled by the Turkish ruling party, explained Sinem Adar, an Associate at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies in the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “I think the current government definitely has a very particular, rigid understanding of the family,” Adar told The Conversationalist.

Erdoğan has said numerous times throughout the years that women should have at least three children. The President has also referred to women who do not wish to have children as “unnatural” and “incomplete.” The deputy chair of AKP, Numan Kurtulmus, once described single women as “hedonistic,” and asserted that they put “dynamite in the foundations of the family.”

When Erdoğan, who was then prime minister rather than president, made his 2013 statement about woman having to bear three children, he played into this capitalistic driver of women’s oppression. As Eralp said, the family becomes a unit to keep women producing labor, inside and outside the home. Turkey does not have a strong social welfare system and it is on the brink of a financial crisis; under these circumstances, women become primary caregivers for children and the elderly. “With an economic crisis of this degree, you don’t want to lose free labor,” Eralp explained. As Erdoğan said in his speech: “One or two children mean bankruptcy. Three children mean we are not improving but not receding either. So, I repeat, at least three children are necessary in each family, because our population risks aging."

Turkish society invests the family with tremendous value and importance; the average Turkish citizen is inculcated from childhood with a strong sense of responsibility for relatives. But when the issue of gender is contextualized within the family, individual rights are undermined. “It’s almost like not seeing the woman as an individual but seeing them as part of a family,” Adar said. In other words, a woman’s safety, security and freedoms cannot be seen as intrinsic, but instead debatable within traditional family structures.

The government’s rhetoric and policy can be seen as systematic pressure to suppress individual liberties when it comes to family, sex, gender relations; they leave very little space for women to seek change. “It’s like making the voice of the women who need the help the most, less and less heard, because again everyone is packaged in the context of the family,” Adar said. “If they decide to abolish [the Istanbul Convention], it would definitely have an influence on individual liberties.”

Canan Güllüm, the president of the Federation of Women's Associations in Turkey, said during a phone interview that the Islamist lobbying groups have long advocated for the “protection of the holy family.” She agreed that this contributed to a culture that threatened women’s safety and freedom. “Family, where the violence is reproduced as it is happening now in the society, is not a safe place for women,” Güllü said.

The composition of the protests belies conservative claims that Turkish feminists are primarily secular. Practicing Muslim women wearing the traditional headscarf are as visible at demonstrations as their secular sisters; they are all willing to hold picket signs reading “We don’t want to die!”; the phrase recalls the last words of Emine Bulut, whose husband stabbed her to death last year in a café—in front of her 10-year-old daughter. Women who represent a broad swathe of political and religious views have come together in these protests to advocate for their right to life. As Güllü pointed out, they “do not feel comfortable in today's patriarchal and unequal family structure where their rights are not protected.”

Whether they are religious or secular, there is only one set of laws, and one path of recourse for all people in the country. “Women are aware of these rights and they’re not willing to give them up for any ideological or political reasons,” Eralp said. “I can’t imagine a woman who would push that away under her own free will.”

The debate around the Istanbul Convention in Turkey has also divided the ruling AKP’s base. Erdoğan’s own daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar has come out in support of the Convention. Bayraktar is the deputy chair of the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), which is conservative on issues such as LGBT rights; it advocates for ‘woman’s human dignity’ and is often engaged in lobbying the government.

There is something religiously conservative in the family value model the government is trying to “preserve,” but it isn’t predicated on a secular vs religious binary. A more accurate analysis would emphasize the ongoing inequality between men and women, and how the impunity and lack of justice demonstrated in Turkey promotes it. In recent years, a more moralistic, conservative discourse has become salient in the public realm. At the same time, there has been an increasing intensity of violence by the state and break down of the justice system in order to consolidate power.  As Adar put it; “it has to do with the institutional deterioration [and] the deterioration of the primary rule of law.” To a certain extent, the increase in violence now prominent in the public eye, reflects the socio economic situation of the country.

The rate of femicide has more than doubled in Turkey since the signing of the Istanbul Convention, which means that its legal and protective measures are not being implemented. Rarely is there justice for women who are murdered or abused, particularly if the perpetrators are well connected. For Turkish women, their rights, as Eralp observed, are transactional.

Güllü added that while the framework to protect women and promote equality is already in place, it hasn’t been prioritized. The government, she believes, has not upheld the values of civil and gender equality in the last 20 years.

The rhetoric employed by Erdogan’s conservative government further conveys to the public an implicit understanding that this type of discourse and behavior is acceptable; this acts as a legitimizing power. In general, there is an acceptance and understanding of men’s motives to commit violence towards women, which ends up being passed from one generation to the next. Amnesty International went so far as to say in an August statement on the rise of femicides that “even the discussion of a possible withdrawal [from the Convention] is having a huge adverse impact on the safety of women and girls.”

At the same time, women in Turkey are clearly going through a period of consciousness raising and are becoming much more politically assertive. But unless the value of gender equality is internalized throughout all levels of government and civil society, the task of protecting individual rights in Turkey will continue to be challenging. What’s needed is a widespread understanding that no one “deserves” to be subjected to violence.

Turkey’s feminist activists are hopeful, given the increasing numbers of women coming out to protest and stand up for their rights. “The women's movement in Turkey is very strong and consolidated, and we will not give up fighting,” Güllü said, emphatically.

 
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    [post_excerpt] => Women who represent a broad swathe of political and religious views have come together in mass demonstrations to advocate for their right to life in a deeply patriarchal society, under a government that has failed to implement the laws that should protect them.
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“We don’t want to die!” Turkish women demand government action to end femicide

by Tessa Fox

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-03 19:43:41
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    [post_content] => Being able to vote is rarely the reason people choose to become citizens.

It’s an election year, the most momentous of this century, possibly for the U.S., in the last 50 or 60 years. Eager to vote, many residents are rushing to apply for and win citizenship, with 126,000 ready to take the oath that will offer them a plethora of new privileges.

Millions more are not.

The process is neither simple nor quick, as Amy Zhang recently wrote in The New York Times: “filling out a 20-page application, paying almost a thousand dollars, organizing piles of supporting documents, planning my life around five years of residency requirements and waiting another two — as well as F.B.I. background checks, InfoPass appointments and a civics test.”

Other obstacles prevent some long-time residents from making this move. If a naturalized foreigner, (even the word “naturalized” being one that some find abhorrent), repatriates or permanently leaves the U.S., they’ll still owe income tax to the U.S. government until or unless they renounce their American citizenship or even their green card.

But being able to vote is in fact rarely the reason people choose to become citizens, said Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She’s an expert on immigration and author of 19 books on the subject. “They mostly want citizenship for instrumental reasons,” Foner said. “They don’t want to get deported. If they’re citizens, they can sponsor their parents and minor children. Very few people become citizens because they want to vote.”

Having full citizenship does offer important protections, she said, like losing anxiety over “a change in laws. There’s a fear about that.”

The very high cost of acquiring U.S. citizenship – which has risen 83 percent lately — is an inhibiting factor, she adds. “The expense is very high! [rising to $1,170 as of October 2.] And some people are unsure of their English and the test they have to take.”

Thanks to current policies under Trump, “citizenship rates are not that high,” Foner said. “They’re higher in Canada which encourages citizenship and offers classes while the Trump administration is actively discouraging it.”

No matter how long they live in the U.S., often married to an American, maybe raising their American-born children, some remain determinedly faithful to their original roots and passport. Fiona Young-Brown, 47, a writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her American husband, grew up in England, her accent still strong after 22 years in the U.S. A global traveler who met her husband when both were teaching English for three years in remote areas of Japan, Young-Brown first came to the U.S,  in 1993 as an exchange student at the University of Iowa. Coming to live in the U.S. has offered her professional opportunities and social freedom she knew she couldn’t have found in class-conscious England, she said.

“I grew up in a working-class town and we were always working class, living paycheck to paycheck. I’m the first college graduate in my family.” Watching American TV in the 70s and 80s “it always seemed so glamorous and exciting, just this place where you make your own future, a blank slate where you were free to re-invent yourself,” she adds. Even at 13, she wrote to the U.S. embassy in London about how to obtain a visa.

She had attended a local prep school in England as a child on full scholarship, but the inevitable class differences reminded her daily how inescapable they were. “America was going to be a place where that wasn’t an issue,” Young-Brown said. That proved to be true, but her initial optimism has faded.

Today, even after decades in the U.S., and a thriving writing career, she’s still not interested in citizenship. “America is definitely not the same as when I got here,” she said. “It’s become a much crueler country, much meaner, with more delight in kicking people who are down. It’s not a place to dream but a place you’ll struggle, and you’ll never make it anyway. To take citizenship at this point feels like an endorsement of all this shit that’s going on. To wave a little flag would feel hypocritical and completely tasteless.”

If she were single, she said, “I would have left a long time ago,” but her husband has deep roots in Kentucky, parents in poor health and, now with Brexit, she faces a much more complicated path to repatriation.

For Kevin McGilly, a 55-year-old gay married Canadian in Washington, D.C., there’s a powerful attachment to the U.S. in the form of the Black teenager he and his husband are adopting. Although he’s lived in the U.S. for many years, he still takes “existential pleasure in being Canadian. The two countries look similar, but underneath things are very very different.” Now at a point in their careers they enjoy more mobility, he and his husband have seriously discussed whether or not to return to Canada. “If Trump’s re-elected, it’s a very serious prospect,” he said.

Taking citizenship, as anyone considering it quickly learns–even if you can retain dual citizenship—means literally formally renouncing allegiance to your country of origin. “I love this country and am grateful,” he said of the U.S., but he doesn’t want to take a further step “because of what you do to become a citizen – stand in front of a magistrate and take an oath to abjure your former country. That stopped me cold. I’m not going to say I’m no longer Canadian, even if it’s pro forma.”

Other requirements were off-putting as well, he said, like having to list all the groups you’ve ever belonged to and every country you’ve visited and when. “It’s ridiculous!” And you have to swear that you’re not a Communist, a “1950s language” McGilly calls silly in today’s era.

And yet, he wishes he could vote, as he calls himself “a political animal” – instead channeling his energies into canvassing and registering voters for the candidates he believes in.

The first time Inge de Vries Harding, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, came to the U.S. she was only three-and-a-half, when her Dutch father got a job in San Diego, and she has spent most of her life living in the U.S. But at 16 she also spent three years living in the Netherlands because her brothers were then 18 and 19, and her mother said, “there was no way her boys were going to fight in Vietnam.” Living in Holland was difficult after being so accustomed to American freedoms, she said, and she was relieved to return to the U.S., where she trained as a pediatric nurse, married an American and had two sons in the U.S. In 2015 and 2016 she “very seriously considered” moving to Vancouver, Canada, thanks to its “very different mindset” but there were too many practical obstacles.

Now, still refusing to take U.S. citizenship, Harding remains rooted by family in the country. “For me it’s very simple,  I have children and grandchildren here. I’m not  going anywhere.” The few times she considered becoming a U.S. citizen she was put off by  “too much pomp and circumstance.” She has since been inhibited again by the “fairly large expense. I sometimes wish I could vote, but not enough to take that step. You actually have to denounce your country. I can’t do that! I’m proud of my Dutch heritage.”

For immigration attorney David H. Nachman, managing partner of the New Jersey firm Nachman, Phulwani, Zimovcak (NPZ) Law Group, P.C., people who cling to their cultural roots — even after decades living in the U.S. —form a large part of his practice.

“It’s related to how people feel about their cultures. None of my Japanese clients want to become citizens because it goes against their culture. Japanese are fiercely nationalistic and the French are the same way. Even getting a green card is seen as giving something up of their heritage so they don’t want to do that,” he said.

To help these clients, Nachman can offer options like an E-1 or E-2 visa, which allows permanent residence to those who can produce a solid business plan, show sufficient capital to invest in it and eventually grow their business enough to hire Americans.

“The vast majority who don’t want citizenship plan to work here temporarily and then go home,” he said.
    [post_title] => To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump
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To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => Three illiberal leaders cooked up a backroom deal to benefit the political careers of two and the geopolitical power of the third.

When the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced on August 13 that it would normalize relations with Israel, under a U.S.-sponsored agreement, many were taken by surprise, including Netanyahu's coalition partners. But from the perspective of the parties involved, the deal makes perfect sense. It serves the respective interests of three illiberal leaders—Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Zayed, the powerful Emirati crown prince widely known as MBZ. Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 in a spirit of optimism for regional peace and an end to Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians; the current deal, by contrast, is driven by a shared perception of regional threats—most notably a fear of Iran, of political Islam and of popular mobilization. Both Netanyahu and the Emirati leadership see these as inherently destabilizing agents.

The deal is a win for all three actors. For Netanyahu, the UAE’s willingness to normalize relations without demanding territorial concessions— i.e., an end to Israel’s 53-year-old occupation of the West Bank and a lifting of its closure on Gaza—is a vindication of the political right’s long-held narrative, according to which if Israel maintained its military strength and refused to compromise, the international community and the Arab world would ultimately accept Israel on its own terms. The Israeli left has been saying for more than five decades that failure to end the occupation would lead to the country’s isolation on the international stage, to economic sanctions and political violence; now, Netanyahu can say they were wrong—and that he was right.

Netanyahu did not have to make any concessions in exchange for normalization. He is a deeply risk-averse politician, which is why he almost certainly had no intention of following through on his campaign promise—a bone to the far right—to annex the West Bank. The consequences of annexation would have been a freeze in the burgeoning and mutually beneficial—though as-yet unofficial—relationship with the Gulf Arab regimes, deterioration in relations with Jordan, and possibly another uprising in the Palestinian territories. Netanyahu’s policy for years has been to pursue creeping annexation of the West Bank, without making it official, so as to preclude the establishment of a Palestinian state, while at the same time avoiding international opprobrium and a Palestinian backlash; the latter would have interrupted almost two decades of relative calm in the occupied West Bank, since the Israeli Army crushed the Second Intifada in 2002.

But annexation was off the table, it appears, even before the normalization deal with the UAE was announced. The White House had made it clear that Netanyahu would have to make concessions to the Palestinians; but this is something the prime minister was unwilling to do, lest he bolster far right parties, such as Naftali Bennett’s Yamina and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which are courting voters who traditionally supported Netanyahu’s Likud. With its offer of normalization, the UAE. threw Netanyahu a lifeline: instead of fulfilling his campaign promise to annex swathes of the West Bank, the embattled prime minister could wave the trophy of peace in our time. By presenting the normalization agreement as a shining diplomatic success, he could deflect attention from his poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused widespread outrage, a slump in the polls, and ongoing demonstrations outside his official residence. At the same time, to appease his base, Netanyahu rushed to clarify that annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank was not canceled but rather postponed.

For Trump, the deal is a rare foreign policy success, as he continues to mismanage the national response to COVID-19 and to trail the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by wide margins. Trump claimed the deal was particularly popular among the Christian right, who are his most unswervingly loyal supporters and a crucial segment of his base. Conservative Evangelical Christians are ultra-hawkish supporters of Israel for theological reasons.

While most Americans would struggle to find the UAE on a map, the deal does represent a major break in Israel’s official isolation in the Middle East. The negative externalities of annexation, if Israel were to face widespread condemnation or outbreaks of violence, would likely have been blamed on Trump as well, given the inclusion of annexation in his “deal of the century” peace plan. With the UAE-Israel deal, both Netanyahu and Trump can avoid the accusation that they made Israel less safe and more isolated.

[caption id="attachment_1954" align="alignnone" width="799"] Trump on the phone with Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Zayed to discuss the Israel-UAE deal on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020.[/caption]

For the UAE, the deal guarantees that it will have access to advanced military technology from the United States. It will also facilitate trade in surveillance technologies, which the UAE has used to track dissidents. Israeli technology firms, which until now had to create European shell companies in order to work in Gulf countries, will be free to close deals with Emirati clients. In addition to technologies used to police their population, Abu Dhabi needs information technologies: While the wealthy U.A.E. can afford these products, Emirati university graduates still prefer to work for the stagnant, bloated but stable public sector, rather than launch technology start-ups.

The UAE also seeks to curry favor with Washington, where, in a rare show of bi-partisan agreement, the deal was supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Regardless of who wins the November elections, in Washington, the perception that one is close to Israel, and that one has Israel’s powerful lobby on one’s side, is immensely beneficial for the UAE. Israel’s allies get lobbying services for free. For example, AIPAC has for years lobbied Congress to increase financial aid to Jordan. While the UAE is hardly in need of financial aid, it could benefit from the support of one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington in seeking to justify its bloody interventions in Yemen and Libya, or for serving as a money-laundering hub for cronies linked to the Iranian and Syrian regimes.

Taking annexation off the table also justifies, in hindsight, the UAE’s budding relationship with Israel. This was illustrated when Yousef al Otaiba, the country’s influential ambassador to Washington, wrote an unprecedented op-ed that was published in Hebrew by Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s most widely read daily newspapers. Al Otaiba warned his Israeli readers that annexation would destabilize the region, undermine existing peace agreements with neighboring states, and lead to a freeze in normalization of ties with the Gulf states; the ambassador followed up with a video for The National, an English-language newspaper in the UAE., in which he said that he had written the op-ed for the good of the region and of the Palestinian people. If Israel had annexed part of the West Bank, particularly after this appeal, the UAE would have been unable to offer a convincing justification for its Israel strategy to the broader Arab public, which is deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

[caption id="attachment_1955" align="alignnone" width="800"] Mike Pompeo with Yousef al Otaiba at the State Department on March 29, 2019.[/caption]

The timing of the deal is linked to Netanyahu’s efforts to remain in power. Netanyahu needs any success to bolster his standing in the polls. His political survival and even his personal freedom are at stake. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister has been charged with several counts of criminal corruption, which is why he called no fewer than three elections over the past year, in increasingly desperate attempts to form a governing coalition that would pass a law to make him immune from prosecution while in office. Ahead of the second round of elections in April 2019, in an attempt to win the support of voters on the far right, he suddenly declared he would annex large parts of the West Bank, thus pushing the idea from the political fringe to the mainstream, making it seem like a real possibility. By offering Netanyahu diplomatic recognition in exchange for backing away from annexation, and possibly using the opportunity to make the long-standing unofficial ties between the two countries public, the UAE presented both the Israeli prime minister and Trump with some political capital as both leaders lose popular support due to mishandling of the COVID-19 response. Circumstances, in other words, probably precipitated the announcement of a deal that was already in the making.

The ramifications will be quite extensive. The UAE broke a long-held taboo among the Arab states by agreeing to formalize diplomatic relations with Israel without extracting any territorial concessions (as Egypt did with the Camp David Accords in 1978) or even lip-service regarding a future Palestinian state (as Jordan did in 1994). With this initiative, the UAE. is paving the way for other countries that have maintained semi-public relations with Israel—such as Bahrain, Sudan and Oman—to follow suit. The Palestinians are left to watch Israel further entrench its control over the occupied territories, while the little leverage they had dissipates.

In 2002 leaders of Arab states that had once rejected Israel’s existence met in Beirut and, following an initiative from Saudi Arabia, made Israel an unprecedented offer: full normalization in exchange for complete withdrawal from the occupied territories and a “just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee issue. At the time, the international community thought the offer was almost too good to be true; Israel, then embroiled in the Second Intifada, rejected it outright, claiming it was a ruse to destroy the Hebrew state with an influx of Palestinian refugees.  Eighteen years later, Netanyahu can claim credit for having shown that Israel can have its cake and eat it too.

The deal also crystalizes and hardens the new dividing lines of the Middle East. No longer are Middle Eastern countries categorized according to their position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue or closeness to the West, but rather according to their position on Iran and political Islam. Israel is comfortably situated within the axis that sees both Iran and political Islam as a threat, alongside the UAE., Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Netanyahu is right at home among these authoritarian rulers, who openly express disdain for liberal principles and incite against internal enemies supposedly plotting against them. In one fell swoop, the UAE-Israel deal boosts Israel's political right, helps cement Israel's military rule over the Palestinians, and solidifies Israel's alliance with monarchical and undemocratic rulers. Illiberalism was victorious this week.
    [post_title] => The Israel-UAE deal is a triumph for authoritarianism
    [post_excerpt] => For decades, Middle Eastern countries were categorized to their positions on Israel-Palestinian issue or closeness to the West. Now, the issues are Iran and political Islam. Israel is comfortably situated within the axis that sees both Iran and political Islam as a threat, alongside the UAE., Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Netanyahu is right at home among these authoritarian rulers
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The Israel-UAE deal is a triumph for authoritarianism

by Elizabeth Tsurkov

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    [post_date] => 2020-08-13 23:11:48
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    [post_content] => From Belarus to America: a lesson in how an authoritarian responds to those who threaten his power.

Six masked police officers in black uniforms and helmets were filmed beating one unarmed man, who can be heard moaning in pain. A woman runs up, screaming, and the cops turn on her, one of them explicitly threatening her, the other pushing her away. “Don’t touch him, that’s my husband!” she screams, flailing at them with her arms. The officers haul her husband up off the ground, presumably to be detained. It was just another day of violent crackdowns in Belarus, a country that has been ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko, who is often called Europe’s last dictator. 

We don’t know for certain where police took the man, but another video provides some clues. 



The women narrating the clip are clearly horrified at what they are seeing through the window. They fear the detained people lying face down in the walled yard of the police precinct will be murdered by police. One of the women wants to go out on the balcony to film, but then both decide it’s unsafe. The scene has a Children of Men vibe — dystopian and horrifyingly banal at the same time. Subsequent videos published on Twitter show protesters gathered outside a detention center in Minsk while chanting encouragement to the detainees who are being beaten inside, and weeping as large police vehicles arrive with yet more detained protesters inside. 

Reports of horrific torture in detention have begun to leak out. Here is just one video featuring the sounds of detainees screaming. Here is a video of a woman behind barbed wire, screaming “Don’t! Please stop! I can’t see anything!” A friend of mine who lives in Minsk has likened the situation to a war being waged by the state against its own populace. 

An independent Russian journalist, freed with the aid of his diplomats, was able to recount the scenes he saw after being essentially kidnapped by police (as they told him themselves, “You are not detained”), including minors being savagely beaten, people forced to lie face down in pools of blood for hours, police jumping on protesters’ backs until bones are broken, threats of rape, and much more. 

Four days into the anti-Lukashenko demonstrations, Belarusian state television broadcast a horrifying video report that shows young protesters at a detention center, obviously beaten and terrified, confirming to an off camera police officer that they will not engage in any more protests.

The mass arrests are part of a violent state crackdown on opposition demonstrators, who poured into the streets on August 9 to protest  an election that the president claimed he had “won” with 80% of the vote. Protests have sprung up all over the country, not just in the capital, Minsk. While exact numbers of protesters are hard to come by, official statistics say that at least 6,000 have been detained in just a few days. 

 

While media organizations have been careful to stress that vote rigging has been “alleged” in Belarus, I can state confidently that the election was stolen; the evidence is there for all to see. 

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the 37 year-old woman who ran against Lukashenko after her husband, a well-known opposition blogger, was jailed in May, has been forced into exile in neighboring Lithuania. Security officials threatened to make orphans of her children, whom she sent abroad before the election; they later arrested her campaign manager, Maria Moroz. 

They detained Moroz as a hostage, to be released in exchange for Tikhanovskaya’s departure from Belarus. 

Before she was allowed to leave the country, Tikhanovskaya recorded what amounts to a hostage video, in which she reads from a script while sitting in what seems to be the office of a Belarusan Central Elections Commission chairperson. In a personal video, which she recorded shortly after arriving in Lithuania, Tikhanovskaya speaks emotionally; she calls herself a “weak woman” — a chilling reference to Lukashenko having mocked her as a “poor little girl” ahead of the election. “Children,” she said in that video, “are our everything”—a  clear indication that she was told her children would not be safe. She added: “God forbid you should ever have to face the choice I had to face.”

Even with her children safely abroad, Tikhanovskaya had every reason to be terrified for them. Her husband, who was originally supposed to run instead of her before Lukashenko had him thrown in jail, remains behind bars, another hostage. 

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is young, passionate, and charismatic in a way that galvanizes voters. She has a wholesome image — an independent candidate who declared her love for her activist husband, Sergei, after he was locked up, and ran on a platform of freeing political prisoners, weakening ties with Russia, and democratic reforms. Her courage invested her with instant appeal.

The threats against Tikhanovskaya and her family are not the actions of a confident leader who easily won the majority of the polls. They are the actions of a dictator who feels his throne wobbling underneath him. Although the election was not monitored — already a major red flag — the machinations witnessed by ordinary citizens at the polls were giving the game away, Tikhanovskaya was clearly getting too many votes for comfort. Demands for “all votes to be counted” are no longer relevant at this point; to get to the bottom of what happened, one would need to hold a whole new, transparent election, which is impossible at the moment.

Look at this graph if you want to understand the generational span of Lukashenko’s rule:



Add to that stagnation and growing inequality, as well as a history of repressions and crackdowns. Now add the fear, uncertainty, and crisis that 2020 brought — a spectacle that has included Lukashenko mocking the coronavirus and hosting a parade as infections surged. 

Lukashenko’s response to the protests has included not just threats and violent crackdowns; he also cut off the internet in an attempt to stifle dissent. The people, however, appear furious and determined in their defiance. Bypassing restrictions, some have even created a Telegram channel dedicated to unmasking and doxxing Lukashenko’s security services — a situation that could escalate dramatically on top of all of the other escalations. 

It is not clear if Lukashenko will be toppled. Certainly, the savagery with which the protesters are being treated shows us that he fears as much. Some regional analysts believe that the regime is nearing collapse, but the question is — at what cost?

Americans should be paying close attention to events in Belarus. Lukashenko’s response to the opposition shows how a cornered rat behaves — with mass arrests, death threats, and attempts to shut down or limit access to the internet. Donald J. Trump is just a wannabe authoritarian, but like Lukashenko he can be dangerous when under duress. We have observed Trump’s increasing petulance — everything from the constant revenge-firings of officials and blasting his own intelligence community on Twitter — and see how it can easily turn into a rage. 

We can see how that rage finds an outlet via unidentified paramilitary police grabbing protesters  in places like Portland. We can see it in how peaceful protesters were tear-gassed in D.C. for a bizarre photo op. One of the functions of authoritarianism is to bulldoze the safeguards that a democratic system places between the individual and the state — as craven officials continue to help Trump, more and more of the American public is exposed to both his anger and his incompetence.

Americans are lucky to have a system that still provides many protections from Trump’s rage, but that system has its vulnerabilities. With the pandemic out of control in the States, voting by mail has become more important — but our Postal Service is being sabotaged, to name one obvious example. Republicans have been going after the USPS for years, but their efforts now present Trump with a potential opportunity to cast the upcoming presidential election as seriously flawed, especially if it’s a close one. When a crucial part of the societal infrastructure that is propping up our democracy is weakened, we stray further toward unpredictable scenarios. 

Keith Kahn-Harris, a London based sociologist and prolific author, explains in an excellent Twitter thread that Western ideological zealots who support foreign dictators and cast them as fighters of Western imperialism (Kahn-Harris he refers to them as “Tankies” — the term originated with British people who supported Soviet tanks rolling across Europe, but has since broadened to include different groups, united by a disdain for the Western countries they call home) have succumbed to delusion by treating Lukashenko’s state propaganda as though it were meant to be believed. 

Rather, explains Kahn-Harris, “In dictatorships the absurdity of the lie is precisely the point—it is an expression of dominance.” People who have grown up in authoritarian regimes know that official statements are lies. The trick is to understand the subtext of the lie. People who have grown up in democracies are not equipped with the necessary cynicism to combat a leader who lies axiomatically, which is why the U.S. media has failed to cover the Trump presidency with adequate insight. 

There is a very good parallel to be drawn between Trump’s base — as they do everything from cheering on our own examples of horrific police violence to ignoring or dismissing the president’s inaction on the pandemic — and Lukashenko’s Western fanboys as they seek to discredit protesters in Belarus. 

Both groups are operating in a state of unreality. As we have seen over the past few months,  2020 has shown all too well, unreality is both seductive and deadly. 
    [post_title] => Why you should care about what's happening in Belarus
    [post_excerpt] => Americans should be facing close attention to events in Belarus. Lukashenko’s response to the opposition shows how a cornered rat behaves — with mass arrests, death threats, and attempts to shut down or limit access to the internet. Donald J. Trump is just a wannabe authoritarian, but like Lukashenko he can be dangerous when under duress.
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Why you should care about what’s happening in Belarus

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => With just 89 days left before the presidential election, we need more grassroots community-led political spectacle grounded in culture and pluralism.

The morning before July 4th, a group of artists and activists working together under the banner of the project “XMAP: In Plain Sight” sent flights throughout various parts of the United States to skytype messages in defense of immigrants incarcerated in detention facilities. These multicultural, multilingual messages -- such as “Care Not Cages,” “Azadi” (“Freedom,” Urdu/Hindi)  “Lespwa Ak Libete” (“Hope and Freedom,” Haitian Creole)  “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“All Are Related,” Lakota) and “Nos Vemos Libres” (“We Will See Each Other Free,” Spanish) — conveyed hope, resistance, and solidarity. They also received significant attention from legacy media outlets like the New York Times, L.A. Times, and CNN—and on social media. 

That same night, at Mount Rushmore (on stolen Lakota Sioux land), the president of the United States threw a populist pageant. Each detail of the event, from his nativist and racist speech to the grandiose setting, was designed to inflame his base’s desire to pull the country deeper into white nationalism and isolationism. While Native American activists protested outside the event, he ignored people lost to the raging coronavirus pandemic and those suffering under impending economic collapse, and explicitly denigrated people fighting for racial justice. The spectacle was aimed to bolster his failing popularity by stoking fears of a culture war created and driven by his own administration.  

The two events were bipolar political spectacles. The Mount Rushmore event was fascist propaganda grounded in populism and nativism; XMAP:IPS was community-led mobilization grounded in culture and pluralism.

With just 89 days left before the presidential election, we need more of the latter. 

The world is in a fragile state, as its peoples confront multiple catastrophes simultaneously— the coronavirus pandemic, mass political uprisings, forced displacement caused by climate change and war, and massive inequality. In the United States, these interlocking crises are exacerbated by a government fast descending into fascism, sacrificing lives for cheap political points as the GDP craters and millions hover near poverty. 

Past administrations weakened the immigration system, the issue XMAP:IPS addresses. But the Trump administration, with its short-sighted and cruel policies, has caused it to degrade almost completely into brutality. As of May 2020 there are over 25,000 immigrants in detention, all denied protections against COVID-19. The current government has eroded protections for asylum seekers; it has also attempted to ban certain minority populations, roll back the protections offered to recipients of DACA (children of undocumented immigrants), and deport foreign students—all while continuing to threaten immigrant families with forced separation of children from their parents. 

And then there are persistent calls to build a wall: Trump’s “big, beautiful” wall, which serves as a billboard for the administration’s xenophobia.

And that’s the key. So much of what emanates from the White House is bluster and stunt. As election season heats up, the administration is ramping up the political theater. In the month since the July 4th weekend, he and his daughter Ivanka posed with cans of Goya beans to indicate their support for the company’s CEO, whose controversial pro-Trump remarks led to calls from Latinos to boycott the company’s products. He held what could only be called a campaign rally in the Rose Garden, despite the long-observed norm by which incumbent presidents refrained from electioneering at the White House. Later the same week, there were pickup trucks on the South Lawn held up by a crane emblazoned with “Trump Administration.” Even his use of social media is a sort of ongoing digital spectacle. Trump’s recent tweets — which range from claiming the election should be postponed to attempting to ban Tiktok — fix the attention of the media, which chases them like a kitten with a ball of yarn and amplifies them in an endless cycle. 

But just because these are stunts doesn’t mean they can be ignored. The administration is turning violations of basic rights into a series of antics to push the window of acceptability while manipulating our gaze away from the next violation. And as the tide appears to be turning, their tools against falling poll numbers will be voter suppression, attempts at election invalidation, and dialing up their culture war rhetoric. The stakes around the elections—which, despite the U.S.’s declining stature in the international arena, will be one of the most consequential global political events in recent history—couldn’t be higher. 

We need to fight it all, in the courts, on our airwaves, in the press — and also in the streets and in the public imagination. For this last one, we need to mount spectacles of our own. 

There is a long-standing tradition, domestically and internationally, of community-led cultural intervention — a “social relation amongst people, mediated by images”  — crafted in the language of aesthetic political resistance and radical community. It is an essential tool of nonviolent action. ACT UP, the grassroots movement to find a cure for AIDS, is particularly well known in the United States. More recent examples can be seen in South Korea, Armenia and Argentina, where culture-based demonstrations have been instrumental in pushing movements towards their goals.

I haven’t always supported political spectacle as practiced in the United States. Too often it is generated from outside an affected community, such as last decade’s Kony 2012. When imposed on a community’s needs and demands, grand gestures can be paternalistic, whitewashed, corporate stunts, such as Paving for Pizzas, or Refugee Nation, mounted by the same advertising firm that refused to stop working with Customs and Border Patrol, the US agency responsible for menacing immigrants. These types of actions suck time and energy away from the actual work that leads to positive social change. And as with the president, authoritarians and fascists have historically relied on it as a means of delineating and manifesting ideology and to distract a populace from larger social ills. 

But when the purpose of political theater is to get people to engage with grassroots movements for change, it can be an effective tool for strengthening coalitions. When grounded in participatory democracy and cultural expression, the planning and implementation process of these events are an effective means of connecting people. This is what my team at XMAP:IPS had in mind when we created the strategy for our action in immigration. 

We built the project predicated on three commitments: First, to amplify the voices of immigrants. Second, to be intersectional in the makeup of the production team and the invited contributors. Third, to partner with a network of national and local activists and organizations working directly with affected communities, and provide a new way for them to collaborate with each other. Highlighting their calls to action helped attract attention and resources for their work. This is how we captured the public square.

Ours was one of several interventions that captured media attention this summer. Black Lives Matter protesters have peacefully claimed the streets: they turned Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and 125th Street in Harlem into outdoor dance parties; in Washington, DC they created an outdoor yoga studio. In Minnesota an Aztec dance group paid tribute to George Floyd with performance, and a group in Atlanta honored John Lewis with dance. Artists turned slogans of resistance into public art. K-Pop stans — Korean pop music fans, many of whom have turned to activism -- were joined by American TikTok teens in culture jamming the president’s June 20th Tulsa rally. In a signal they are watching and using the tools they have at their disposal to activate on current political events, they rapidly spread messages over social media channels to reserve seats in the stadium. The president’s campaign staff claimed a million people would attend. Instead, only 6,200 showed up. The president was despondent -- and the culture jam achieved its goal. 

Each of these actions is a statement. It is a reminder that none of this is okay -- but that we might be able to come together to fight it. 

In a time of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by grand visions of change. 

These actions are fuel to our organizing power. They can be even more effective in firing up the collective imagination if they are connected, networked, and sustainably resourced. Driven by urgency and a political philosophy of interconnectedness, artists and activists too often fight without income or safety nets. Currently, legacy media outlets are giving far more coverage to the spectacle of the Trump administration and the GOP, than they are to the spectacles mounted by grassroots movements for social justice. 

And yet, despite the lack of attention paid by the legacy media, those very movements — for Black Lives, for the climate, for the displaced and detained — are currently fighting to turn the public gaze to calls for justice. In the tradition of past cultural activations stretching from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom through to the establishment of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington DC and painting the sky with messages of solidarity, our movements are using culture and community to hold the public square. 

We are at a critical moment in history. It requires us to continue using art as a foundation of social change and community building. We need support to allow people to stand up in a different way and create the space to do so, to use public dialogue to reignite compassion and build a collective vision for the country. Our interventions leading up to November can apply a different kind of pressure and allow us to dream beyond the election. Imagine the community engagement over the coming months if we were able to mount a coordinated series of local and national cultural activations.

With 89 days left until the election, we could lead the country through song, dance, art, and flight into a just future. Let’s give it to them. In the words of the late John Lewis, let’s find a way to get in the way. Let’s go big. 

 
    [post_title] => Radical community is the way to counter the Trumpian populist spectacle
    [post_excerpt] => We are at a critical moment in history. It requires us to continue using art as a foundation of social change and community building. We need support to allow people to stand up in a different way and create the space to do so, to use public dialogue to reignite compassion and build a collective vision for the country.
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Radical community is the way to counter the Trumpian populist spectacle

by Lina Srivastava

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    [post_content] => Despite the father's documented history of abusive behavior, the judge presiding over a shared parenting dispute saw no urgent need to re-evaluate the arrangements.

On February 9, 2020, Robin Brown took his four-year-old daughter Keira hiking at Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area in Milton, Ontario. Later that day, police found their bodies at the bottom of a cliff; they suspect that Brown took the little girl in his arms and jumped off a bridge.

Keira’s mother, Jennifer Kagan, and her husband Philip Viater, are convinced it was a murder-suicide, triggered, in part, by a court ruling that retracted her former husband’s right to unsupervised visits with his daughter. Kagan had recently requested an emergency hearing on January 28 to suspend access; they were due in court on February 20.

Keira, who leaves behind a mother, stepfather, and baby brother, was at the centre of a long and contentious three-year shared parenting dispute for most of her short life. There was a long-standing and well-documented history of domestic abuse, including a horrifying incident with Brown trying to force a dead mouse into his then-wife’s mouth. There were also numerous examples of bullying, constant lying, and escalating erratic behaviour. While every judge warned Brown that he risked a ruling that would curtail his access to Keira, none made good on the threat. Even when a motion was brought on to suspend his access, the judge presiding over the case did not see the urgency. He said the abuse Brown had perpetrated against his former wife “was not relevant” to the visitation arrangements, and that he was “going to ignore it.” He added that he did not believe Keira’s safety was at risk.

Justice Douglas Gray had not practiced family law, but rather employment law. As strange as that might sound, this is not an anomaly in the justice system. Many judges hearing family law cases have no background at all in the field. Lacking experience and training, they often fail to recognize the warning signs.

Years of abuse and manipulation

Jennifer Kagan is a palliative care physician in Brampton, Ontario, a suburban town just outside Toronto. She fell in love with and married Robin Brown, an engineer, in 2013. Like all abuse cases, theirs did not begin as one.

“Robin could be extremely charming and agreeable if he wanted to be,” Kagan said. “It was only after we were married that the veil came off. By the time I was pregnant with Keira I was very afraid.”

Brown was prone to unpredictable and angry outbursts; Kagan found herself walking on eggshells around him.

“There was a real scariness in him that I had never seen before,” she said. “He was very controlling, very misogynistic. It wasn’t run-of-the-mill abuse. This man was a psychopath. I feel stupid in retrospect because I was so duped.”

Kagan was able to escape the abusive relationship and avoid becoming one more domestic violence statistic, but she was not able to escape her ex-husband’s control. Nor was she able to save her daughter. She followed all the appropriate legal channels and had the financial resources that many domestic abuse survivors do not, but she still hit a wall when it came to family law proceedings. Despite Brown’s well-documented pattern of abuse and lies, the courts awarded him shared parenting and thus the means to continue making Kagan’s life miserable. Brown had Keira on alternating weekends, including the weekend she was murdered.

When co-parenting becomes a way to extend the abuse

“Co-parenting was a way for him to continue to control me,” said Kagan. She said that he continually brought frivolous motions to court, forcing Kagan to pay for lawyers to appear before a judge, even as Brown was “constantly disobeying court orders or caught lying.”

Brown abducted Keira when she was just one year old, refusing to return her to Kagan unless she agreed to sign an agreement to rotate custody between their homes every 48 hours. Kagan was still breastfeeding Keira at the time; she refused to sign the agreement. The court stated that Brown's having abducted Keira was not an urgent matter, but eventually returned her to Kagan's care. At trial, Justice Gray ignored the abduction incident; he chastised Kagan for refusing to sign the 48-hour rotating custody agreement. If Kagan had withheld access to Keira from her ex-husband, she would have been subject to legal repercussions for failing to comply with their shared parenting arrangement.

Deeply worried about her daughter’s safety and increasingly desperate, Kagan brought forward an urgent motion on January 28, seeking a court order to suspend Brown’s access to Keira or limit him to supervised access. That, along with a review by the Jewish Family and Child Services that raised serious concerns about Brown, was apparently what triggered him to commit murder-suicide.

Shared parenting is prioritized over safety of women and children

Pamela Cross, a lawyer and expert on violence against women and the law, knows Jennifer Kagan’s case well. “Co-parenting and joint custody often just become another way for an abuser to control the abused,” she said, adding: “Exchanges of children can become extremely dangerous for abused women.”

Many of the issues stem from the fact that the family court system is premised on “friendly parenting.” It does not consider the prevalence of post-separation violence and tries to prioritize shared parenting over the safety of women and children.

“The system really failed Keira,” said Kagan. “She needed a voice and she didn’t get it. We need family law reform where the children’s needs are put first, and where they don’t end up as pawns in the system. Their rights should always supersede the parents’ rights.”

Understanding post-separation violence 

Cross believes that lawyers, mediators, clerks and judges need to be trained in the dynamics of domestic violence. Right now, few understand that it continues after the divorce is finalized; nor do they realize the impact it has on the safety of both children and mothers. As a result, lawyers and judges in custody cases often label serious family violence “high-conflict”—instead of a dynamic that presented a serious power imbalance, with a highly elevated risk of harm.

Canada's federal government is not currently considering mandatory training for judges. The government's position is that since judges are independent, they have the the right to decide if they want to participate in training. The government has put forward a bill that would allow judges to consider domestic violence, including coercive control, as one factor in considering custody and access, but the wording of the suggested legislation does not offer the courts any guidance regarding the definition of domestic violence; nor does it require judges to undergo training that would help them understand the issue.

"Basically they have words on a piece of paper but no teeth behind it because if a judge does not understand the words, then they will ignore it like Gray," says Philip Viater, Kagan's husband, who is also a lawyer.

The bill would be an important first step, but Cross said it’s not enough. Because domestic violence cuts across many areas, such as criminal law, family law, wills and estates, and real estate law, lawyers and judges need to be trained in the entire range of resolution processes available for family disputes, as well as the dynamics of separation and divorce, particularly as they affect children and including issues of power and family violence.

Repeated history of coercive control is a red flag

“Many of the decisions I see reflect a lack of understanding of the complexities of family violence,” Cross says. “I don’t believe that a parent who has been abusive to their partner should never see their children again, but it needs to be acknowledged that co-parenting may not be possible if persistent abuse was documented.”

Cross wants people to understand there is an enormous difference between a high-conflict divorce where both parties are angry, hurt, and perhaps not on their best behaviour, and a divorce with an abusive partner where there is significant fear and no balance of power. In the latter, she said, “One person has been victimized and there is a long pattern of coercive control that often attempts to manifest itself through child arrangements or baseless accusations of parental alienation.”

A legal system that continues to minimize domestic violence

Melpa Kamateros is the Executive Director of Shield of Athena, a Montreal-based non-profit organization for victims of family violence that offers emergency shelter and professional services to women and their children.

“Custody cases can often become an extension of abuse through legal means,” said Kamateros, echoing Pamela Cross. The justice system is long and complicated for abused women, she added—particularly for those who are from ethnic minority backgrounds or recent immigrants; and for those who lack the money, social power, support, and education to fight back.

“Conjugal violence should be treated as a top priority, yet it rarely is. The onus is so often put on victims, which, essentially re-victimizes them, and parental alienation is used repeatedly as a tool by abusers.” Judges, Kamateros said, tend to view domestic violence “as an aggravated factor in divorce cases,” rather than violence per se.

Making the legal system work more effectively for victims

The legal system, which is instrumental in shaping social policy, has been slow to recognize the impact of domestic violence on children.  Changes to legislation in criminal, civil, and federal law can often face resistance because they challenge patriarchal structures, touching on issues of marriage, family, and gender norms that are deeply embedded in political and legal institutions.

The legal system has often failed to examine the effects of domestic violence on children when it comes to child custody and visitation, restraining orders, protecting a child from harm, and termination of parental rights.

Kamateros said the legal system also needs to ensure that legal aids and lawyers are trained in conjugal violence, since women without financial resources cannot afford to hire a lawyer who specializes in family law. Legal aid practitioners, she said, “are often not trained or sensitive to the realities of conjugal violence.”

Kagan’s case, of course, demonstrates that even for women who do have the resources to pay a lawyer who specializes in family law, there are no guarantees of a positive outcome. The judge trying the case might not have any specialized knowledge or awareness of domestic violence.

A domestic abuse bill is needed 

Britain is leading the way in overhauling its family court system with the Domestic Abuse Bill. The government initiated the bill following the publication of an expert-led review, which showed that between 2014-19 four children had been killed by a parent who had a history of abuse, and to whom access had been awarded by a court.

The reforms will allocate more powers for judges to prevent abusers repeatedly dragging former partners back to court and re-traumatizing victims. It will also push through more education and training for family court professionals, with the goal of prioritizing the safety of the victim and the child. The bill is now at the report stage and being debated in the House of Commons. It’s an important step for the U.K. and one that is desperately needed in Canada.

“I have no doubt that Keira’s death could have been prevented,” said Kagan. “There was no justice for her. She deserved so much and got so little. It makes me so angry and I don’t know where to go with this anger. At this point there’s nothing left for me to do but honour her legacy by helping enact desperately needed change. I know there are other Keiras out there.”
    [post_title] => A four year-old is dead because the legal system failed to protect her from her abusive father
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A four year-old is dead because the legal system failed to protect her from her abusive father

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => When Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Christian Right celebrated. Now they're wondering if they've been betrayed.

On June 15 the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “on the basis of sex,” extends to sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a young Trump appointee with a solid conservative background, wrote the 6-3 decision—leaving many right-wing Christians feeling betrayed and outraged.

“Bostock is as bad as you think,” reads the headline of one take published on June 19 in conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today. The New York Times reported that Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called June 15 “a sad day” and worried that the decision would “make it harder to defend our religious freedom, as far as being able to hire people of like mind.”

Readers will remember that Gorsuch filled the vacancy left by arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died toward the end of Obama’s second term. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the unprecedented move of refusing to hold senate confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, the candidate named by President Obama. McConnell insisted instead on leaving the seat vacant until after the 2016 presidential election. The dubious Gorsuch appointment, in other words, was seen as a major victory for conservative Christians and Republicans.

What are we to make of Gorsuch’s seeming “defection,” and what are the implications of the SCOTUS decision for the 2020 election?

The U.S. Christian Right’s primary strategy to gain and maintain theocratic control over other Americans is to weaponize the concept of religious freedom. Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who is Director of Strategic Response at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, explained that "the end goal is to make conservative Christians and Christian nationalists a special, favored class.”

In other words, the Christian Right wants the "right" to discriminate against anyone whose lifestyle or professed views conflict with white evangelical Christian thought. According to this view, a pastry chef can refuse a commission to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because gay marriage conflicts with his religious beliefs; or an employer can refuse to cover contraception in their health coverage. Similarly, a pharmacist can refuse to sell a woman the morning after pill because his religious belief holds that life begins at conception.

In a sort of bait and switch, evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, and Mormons have, with significant success, attempted to replace a pluralistic understanding of religious liberty that is essentially in keeping with the vision of America’s founders, with a revisionist, Christian nationalist definition of religious freedom as the “right” of conservative Christians to dominate in the public square. This push has come along with the ascendance of a hypermasculine, patriarchal strain of evangelicalism that culminated in white evangelicals’ embrace of, and enduring loyalty to, President Donald Trump.

The point is neatly illustrated in another recent article from Christianity Today, in which evangelical political scientist Daniel Bennett argues in the wake of Bostock that all is not in fact lost for religious liberty, while positing a fundamental “conflict between LGBT rights and religious freedom rights." Bennett’s conservative Christian framing shows that he (like most of his coreligionists) thinks of religious freedom as a zero-sum game. In the context of pluralistic democracy, however, religious freedom should be understood as a fundamental area in which to ensure equal accommodation in the public square. Bennett, of course, ignores the existence of LGBTQ Christians and straight Christian allies. To approach religious freedom democratically means to see it as intertwined with, and complementary to, LGBTQ rights, rather than pitting the two against each other.

There is legal precedent for a pluralistic conception of religious liberty. Frederick Clarkson, a vocal advocate for the liberal reclamation of religious freedom, points to the 2014 case General Synod of the United Church of Christ v. Cooper in arguing the point. In that case, a federal judge ruled in favor of progressive Christian clergy who had been barred by North Carolina state law from solemnizing same-sex marriages—despite their religious conviction that they should do so.

There are other legal precedents that could be used by right-wing Christians to support their definition of religious freedom. The 2012 Supreme Court case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Employment Opportunity Division exempts religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws if the employee affected can be considered a religious minister. However, the case left much ambiguity around the definition of “minister,” and thus the “ministerial exception” is likely to be the site of future litigation.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right has managed to expand religious exemptions in other recent cases: in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a closely held corporation could be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage requirement if adhering to that requirement would constitute a violation of the owners’ sincerely held religious beliefs.

These precedents in favor of religious exemptions did not stop arch-reactionary Rod Dreher, an adult convert to the Orthodox Church in America and senior editor at The American Conservative, from tweeting his alarm about the supposed threat posed by Bostock to churches’ tax exempt status. “Thanks to two GOP appointees—Roberts and Gorsuch,” Dreher tweeted, “churches and schools that discriminate against LGBTs stand at risk of losing tax-exempt status, per the Bob Jones ruling. Hard to overstate the magnitude of this loss for religious conservatives.”



But GOP operative Ralph Reed, an evangelical political organizer and lobbyist with a long history of fighting for socially conservative causes, sought to downplay the significance of LGBTQ rights victories to the Christian Right. Per the Washington Post, he said: "Religious freedom and abortion just rise far higher in the hierarchy of concerns of faith-based voters.” He even went so far as to state, “Ultimately seeing a reckoning on Roe vs. Wade looms so much larger in the psyche of the right that I don’t know that this is a de-motivator.”

We need not take either man’s claims at face value, as both are heavily interested parties and old hands at spin. But the overturning of Roe, which would do immense harm to women’s rights and public health, is well within the realm of possibility. Given the importance white evangelicals place on ending legal access to abortion, Democrats should assume high white evangelical turnout to vote for Trump in 2020. Nor can we be sure that Bostock means LGBTQ protections will be safe from further court challenges by right-wing Christians.

Imani Gandy, Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire.News, dismissed Dreher’s alarmist handwringing, saying she did not believe conservatives had “anything to worry about when it comes to losing tax exempt status.” She added, “Roberts expressly left open the question of whether or not the First Amendment or RFRA would permit discrimination against LGBT people if that discrimination is couched as a religious belief.”

Seidel agreed with Gandy, adding that we can expect to see further attempts to undermine the separation of church and state via legal battles over religious exemptions.

“That fight is coming to the court very soon, and I doubt we’ll be able to rely on Gorsuch and Roberts to do the right thing. In fact, I think that inevitable future question is part of the reason Gorsuch wrote such a clear opinion. No doubt that the text of the Civil Rights Act demanded this decision, but misguided and weaponized notions of religious freedom will allow the conservatives to walk back some of these gains later.”

Andrew L. Whitehead, coauthor with Samuel L. Perry of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, suggested that there is some truth to Ralph Reed’s claim that LGBTQ rights are not as urgent a concern for the Christian Right as they used to be. Public opinion has shifted on the issue, he said, pointing out that even “those Americans who most strongly embrace Christian nationalism have liberalized significantly. In 2007, 7 percent [of them] supported same sex marriage. In 2017, 25 percent did.”

Seidel was not so sanguine. As authoritarian Christians have framed it, “religious freedom” entails the “right” to discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community in as many areas as possible. “If they are able to convince this Supreme Court that the First Amendment guarantees a right for a religious believer to act on their belief, regardless of the law, they will have won,” said Seidel. He added: “It’s no wonder Reed cares more about that fight than the others. If they can redefine religious freedom—weaponize religious freedom—they will have a right that guarantees them substantial wins in every other fight.”

If America is to achieve a functional democratic future, the public must embrace a liberal vision of pluralism and reject the idea that religious freedom, properly understood, could ever be in conflict with the promise of equal rights for all.

 
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The Christian Right, the Bostock decision, and the struggle to define religious freedom

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities.

I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no.

As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal.

In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.


Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.


Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.

In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 


Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades.

Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?”

I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City.

Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict.

The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction.

Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel.

I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million.

I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare.

I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others.

It’s a moral thorn.

Stay?

Go?

I still don’t know.
    [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?
    [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.
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America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism.

The Trump-Russia scandal has created an entire cottage industry of disinformation experts in the United States and beyond, but not all of those purported experts are reputable. I know the pandemic is depleting much of our energy, but I am going to ask you to dig deep and find a bit more, because disinformation is a very serious problem; and if we are going to save our democracy, we need to understand how it works.

The definition of “disinformation” is false information that is deliberately introduced into the discourse in order to create doubt and chaos. This is different from misinformation, which refers to false information spread out of ignorance. But do these distinctions actually matter when the man sitting in the highest office in the land picks up and spreads false information? 

The president of the United States uses his very powerful position to disseminate information that is unverified at best—and deliberately false at worst. He recommends dangerously false “cures” for COVID-19, most notoriously when he suggested that people try injecting bleach. His goal is to calm the populace and shore up his base. His motive is to be re-elected in November. Whether he believes the lies he spins is beside the point. 

As CNN reported, Trump got the idea for injecting bleach from a Florida-based ultra-fringe church group, called the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which has for years advocated using potentially lethal chemical “sacraments” to cure illnesses. All Trump did was change the disinformation vector: he amplified a marginal idea advocated by a fringe group, and suddenly it was broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans. 

While we Americans think of ourselves as exceptional, the truth is that what Trump is doing to us is something that the Kremlin has been doing for years — except that Trump does it in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. The Kremlin is much more strategic by comparison; that’s not a compliment to the Kremlin, but an expression of horror at just how badly Trump is bungling the disinformation game.

When I was working in Moscow, in 2014, I witnessed firsthand how false narratives about the shootdown of flight MH17 over Ukraine  were created and disseminated. I filed this article for the Guardian in the immediate aftermath of the shootdown, showing that there was no coherent narrative coming out of Moscow. Days later, the official propaganda machine deflecting blame from Russia was already in full swing, and as my colleagues over at the award-winning investigative platform Bellingcat note, it continues to churn to this day, even as we find more evidence linking Russian officials to the tragedy. Russian officials, of course, are not particularly happy with us.



If the tone seems familiar — it should. As should the disdainful little nickname that Russia’s second diplomat to the UN just made up for us at Bellingcat.

Trump loves making up little nicknames for his opponents— think “Sleepy Joe,” for Joe Biden, or “Crooked Hillary.”  The power of nicknames, as explained in this Columbia Journalism Review analysis, is derived from the linguistic trick in old fairy tales; they stick in your head and appeal to your inner child—and that child’s desire to see cartoonishly evil villains in the world. Trump has a predator’s instincts for wielding power, and they are working for him here. 

The idea of elite convergence, the idea that a society’s powerful people will come to resemble each other even if they hail from different political camps and or preach different ideologies, is not exclusive to American domestic politics. Trump ingratiates himself with so many foreign authoritarians, Putin included, because he sees them all as part of the same club he is in — the international club of rich, powerful, and ruthless (or, in the case of Trump, hysterically reactionary) men. 

Capitalism has made sure that these men all love the same luxury products and enjoy similar lifestyles, whether covertly or overtly. Trump’s overriding allegiance is to status, and authoritarians display their status unabashedly. You can’t shame someone like Trump into abandoning his tactics,because  they are part of a package he finds immensely attractive. 

Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism. They are no less vulnerable than Russians, who have been imbibing state-generated disinformation for more than a century. Russians swallow lies because they’re too busy surviving/navigating a treacherous political and social landscape to care, while Americans who are privileged enough to drive policy have largely been shielded and insulated from the effects of corrupt power. Think, for example, of which ethnic and racial subcultures of the U.S. population are more likely to be targeted by dirty cops — and then think about the people who actually lead us today. There is a gulf between these groups.

Trump and the pandemic are nevertheless tearing away the insulation that privileged middle class white people have taken for granted. Whether the president is babbling about fake “cures” or undermining Democratric governors with calls to reopen based on shoddy science—or, for that matter, having the feds simply snatch supplies and then staying mum about it, his lies and obfuscations, and the lies and obfuscations of all officials who enable him, have become a matter of life and death. 

The first step to fighting back is understanding that there is no such thing as “harmless” disinformation. Especially during a public health crisis. And if you think that Republican officials aren’t following Trump’s lead and spinning this disaster in whatever way is more beneficial to them — you are wrong. Trump’s shamelessness is infectious and destructive, but the bills will come due. After all, you can’t reason with a virus. Neither can you bully it into submission.
    [post_title] => If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation
    [post_excerpt] => Americans like to believe they are exceptional, but the truth is that the Kremlin has for years been doing to Russians what Trump is now doing to Americans.
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If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic?

The World Health Organization worries, in a February 2 report about the spread of the COVID-19 virus, that an “infodemic,” i.e., “an over-abundance of information—some accurate, and some not,” is making the public feel that it’s difficult to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance. The authors of the report seem to assume that most people want objectively reliable information. Unfortunately, far too many are looking not for objectively reliable information, but rather for “guidance” that corresponds with their political loyalties and ideological preconceptions.

In the United States, there are fundamentalist Christians who see institutions like the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of a “godless liberal” plot. Tony Spell, the Apostolic Pastor of Tabernacle Life Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said: “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.” He made this statement during a church service reportedly attended by 350 people on the evening of Tuesday, March 17, in defiance of a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people issued by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.

Governor Edwards is a Democrat.

While CBS News reported that police told Spell the National Guard would break up any future gatherings at his church, a FOX News report quotes Louisiana National Guard Colonel Ed Bush denying that any such order has been issued. In any case, Life Tabernacle Church doubled down, bragging that it planned to bring 27 buses’ worth of area children to church on Sunday, March 22;  and, according to a public Facebook post by Tony Spell’s father Timothy, that they planned to host a blood drive on the same day. And the church followed through.

In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.” Anti-intellectualism and pseudo-intellectualism are hallmarks of authoritarianism, and in the United States in particular, opposition to much modern science has come to define the mostly white, mostly Christian Republican Party. The problem, however, is global.

Independent Apostolic Christians like Spell are extremists even among extremists, but similar radical charismatic Christians are attaining ever more power and influence in a number of countries, including Uganda and Brazil, where these far-right Protestants represent strong-man President Jair Bolsonaro’s base. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has emerged as the global standard bearer for international efforts to oppose women’s and LGBTQ Rights. Russia, too, is one of the countries in which authoritarian Christians have undermined efforts to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus threat has dominated the news cycle, and quite a few stories about the reactions of churches—both responsible and irresponsible—have appeared. In the Orthodox Christian World, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—traditionally considered “first among equals” among the world’s Eastern Orthodox Churches—initially sent mixed messages; now, however, in a tacit rebuke to Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians’ insistence that “coronavirus cannot be transmitted by communion,” it has announced the cancellation of all services for laity within its jurisdiction. Here geopolitical tensions are in play, as the Putinist Russian Orthodox Church has increasingly defied the more moderate Constantinople in recent years.

Meanwhile, after calling the virus, or at least Democrats’ responses to it, a “hoax,” President Trump seemed to feel compelled to address COVID-19 in a more serious (if still dubious) manner, and, for a moment his white evangelical supporters seemed to be shifting with him, at least in some cases. Jerry Falwell, Jr., who at first declared that he would not shut down Liberty University, changed his mind. Pastor Robert Jeffress, leader of the influential megachurch First Baptist Dallas, has canceled physical church services, even going so far as to state that “every pastor and every church ought to follow the guidance to not assemble during this crisis.” But then President Trump oafishly declared that he wanted America’s economy reopened by Easter (April 12 this year for Protestants and Catholics), and Falwell called for Liberty students to return to campus after all, in sharp contrast to most universities essentially shutting down in order to slow the spread of the virus. Liberty University’s residential enrollment is around 13,500 students.

What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic? I turned to several experts on aspects of the crisis for their assessments of Christian defiance of public health measures.

Sarah Kendzior, an expert in authoritarianism, notes in fairness that “there’s a rational component” to the fear of government malfeasance and overreach, which underlays the paranoia of American far-right actors. She sees “a combination of defiance and obedience” in right-wing Christians’ reactions to the pandemic, and is spot-on in describing Trump’s style of demagoguery as “much more similar to a televangelist than to any previous president.” Kendzior’s observation goes some way toward illustrating why white evangelicals tend to be Trump supporters.

Obedience to authority is certainly emphasized as a virtue among authoritarians, and the Christian Right is no different in this regard. However, the authority in question must conform to their white supremacist patriarchal social hierarchy in order for them to consider it legitimate. Hence the “defiance of what they think of as evil liberal officials telling them what they can’t do,” as seen, for example, in former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore calling the inclusion of restrictions on church services in public health responses to the pandemic “tyranny.” When asked about the parallels between right-wing American Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church with respect to coronavirus, Kendzior found them unsurprising.

André Gagné, a former charismatic pastor and current Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, offered some insights into why charismatic believers are so vocal in defying the imposition of public health measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. He maintains that we must understand charismatic Christians’ defiance in terms of their theology of “spiritual warfare” and the “victorious eschatology” espoused by some charistmatics, i.e., “the idea that the church will be victorious before the second coming of Christ.”

According to Gagné, “Some neo-charismatics believe that ‘end-time’ Christians will be able to heal people from plagues, diseases, or any other physical conditions, and even take dominion over entire hospitals, healing every patient in them by laying hands on the building.” Such theology is, of course, not benign. “When people die, these ministers will find a way to rationalize the consequences, saying that the Church is also called to go through a time of tribulation and persecution, and that God is somehow sifting his Church for the Second Coming of Christ.”

Also in play is Christian nationalism, a phenomenon that sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry have found to be predictive of Trump support. Whitehead was kind enough to speak with me about the issue and about his forthcoming research with Perry and Joseph O. Baker, which shows how anti-science views in the United States are intimately intertwined with Christian nationalism. Noting that “Christian nationalism is a threat to a pluralistic democratic society,” an issue I have also written about for both The Conversationalist and Religion Dispatches, Whitehead observes that Christian nationalists “legitimate their desires for the country in the will of the Christian God. This severely inhibits any chance or even desire for compromise.”

But how is this related to the kind of science denial we find in right-wing Christian responses to the coronavirus pandemic? Whitehead summarizes some of the key findings from his forthcoming paper with Perry and Baker as follows:

We find consistent evidence that Christian nationalism—a desire to see a particularistic and exclusive version of Christian symbols, values, and policies privileged and enshrined in US civil society—is a strong predictor about Americans’ attitudes toward science. In fact, the effect of political conservatism on skepticism about the moral authority of science is mediated through Christian nationalism, meaning that political conservatives are more likely to be skeptical of science because they are more likely to be Christian nationalists.

The conclusion of the new paper puts it more simply: “Christian nationalism is many things, but above all it is an effort to (re)assert the dominant moral and cultural authority of a white, native-born, straight, masculine, and Christian social order. Likewise, disputes about ‘science and religion’ are primarily conflicts over moral and cultural order.”

We can only hope that the empirical demonstration of such connections will prove useful in the struggle for a more equitable democratic future for reasonable believers and non-believers alike. Charismatic and evangelical Christians represent, after all, varieties of Christian fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is a constant source of disinformation. Indeed, fundamentalism is incompatible with democracy, yet for the most part the American press remains deferential to authoritarian Christians. That needs to change if we have any hope of stemming the influence of the radical right-wing Christians Trump has surrounded himself with. As has become clear, they threaten not only our human rights, but also our public health.
    [post_title] => Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus
    [post_excerpt] => In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.”
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Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus

by Chrissy Stroop

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